Ads against the enemy

Some years ago I posted an essay on the war we’re engaged in and on approaches to countering enemy propaganda. I still judge the war to be a religious war, and some of the traditional VOA paradigms are useless at best, and the ubiquitous Western media tends to injure our cause more than help us.

I didn’t address the capabilities of our amazingly effective advertising propaganda industry. Surely we can, with all the psychological research and experience and tools at our disposal, out-do Daesh propaganda.

Our ad experts can’t just translate their ads into Arabic, though. We’d need people thoroughly versed in Arabic literature and poetry and history in its various flavors, who understand how people in one tribe view others just as a good ad man knows how to pitch a beer ad in Wisconsin by lightly mocking “metrosexuals.”

This isn’t the acquisition of a year’s study.

Should the goal be to make Daesh look stupid, or nasty, or hypocritical—or some combination? Given their actions any or all of these should be possible for a sophisticated team. The other side of the question is “What do you want to hold up as the proper ideal?” I don’t know that we have a lot of choice in that: you have to work with the urges you find in the population, not those you wish they had. I still think the “House of Fruit” approach would be useful. But the ads will probably tend to encourage more, not less, tribal behavior to counter the appeal of a new caliphate. And they won’t tend to increase sales of US products—might be fewer. This won’t endear them to the usual suspects in State. Nor will it tend to encourage them to become Christian—and I for one want them to.

Of course, the effort could not have any official connections whatever—it would have to appear entirely indigenous. A whiff of Western support would be the kiss of death.

Suppose there were some adults in the room, and this was actually attempted as a news source. What would it look like? To maintain its credibility it would oppose the US and Israel. It would try to maintain a reputation for accuracy. If it were regional, it would try to have local outlets tailored for different markets. Funding would be transparently local. And the overall thrust would be against centralization under would-be caliphs. Does Al Jazeera do this (in Arabic, not English)? No, I don’t believe it to be American-funded—DC can’t keep secrets.

Black propaganda anti-Daesh videos are hard to imagine—the group is so far out there that only accusations of hypocrisy would seem to work—and those would not discourage other would-be caliphs. I’d think that nominal amateur news videos could be inserted into the stream with good plausibility. Do we see anything like this? (I don’t, obviously...) There are videos out there; are they effective with the target audiences?

Wisdom is as wisdom does

Years ago my parents bought the Great Books series and the study guides for it. I ignored the guides and read those books that looked interesting (not even half of them; and what a terrible font!). I have them now—the Shakespeare volumes in tatters thanks to Youngest Daughter. (I think almost all of them can now be had for free via Project Gutenberg—a university education in your kindle for just the price of your time.)

I finally got around to reading Volume 1: The Great Conversation, The Substance of a Liberal Education by Robert M Hutchins. His thesis is that the Western liberal education consists of understanding the ongoing debate between great writers, that this was originally intended for those with leisure who would govern, and that in our wealthy and nominally self-governing society this is an appropriate education for citizens; especially for continuing education for adults.

A man must use his mind; he must feel that he is doing something that will develop his highest powers and contribute to the development of his fellow men, or he will cease to be a man.

and

Here we encounter the melancholy fact that most of the important things that human beings ought to understand cannot be comprehended in youth. … I have never known a child of any age who had much that was useful to say about the organization of human society or the ends of human life.

and

In fact my observation leads me to the horrid suspicion that these books are easier for people who have had no formal education than they are for those who have acquired that combination of misinformation, unphilosophy, and slipshod habits that is the usual result of the most elaborate and expensive institutional education in America.

(That was in 1952. I hate to think of what he’d make of the offerings today.) The last line of the book is:

The aim of education is wisdom, and each must have the chance to become as wise as he can.

That last line is key. Perhaps I read too carelessly, but I recall very little mention of wisdom in the book before that last line.

That makes a rather odd contrast with Proverbs, which the Wednesday Bible study is going through right now. It hammers away at the need for wisdom. Hebrew parallelism or semi-parallelism mates wisdom and understanding in many verses; they aren’t quite the same, and neither is the same as knowledge.

A for-example about understanding vs knowledge: When I arrived at U of Illinois I showed up at the department and found to my surprise that I could have a free-shot at the qualifier exam; typically you got two chances and if you failed both you were out on your tail. The exam was the next day, so I had virtually no study time. I didn’t have anything to lose. If I passed I was in and if I didn’t it wouldn’t count against me, so I showed up with a weary head full of leases and U-Haul. One of the oral questions was to write Gauss’ law on the board. My memory took the opportunity to step out for a walk, but I remembered the basic symmetry involved and re-derived it. The examiners looked at each other and went on with other questions. I was a little short on ready knowledge, but I had enough understanding of the subject to make up for it. Almost. (I didn’t pass that time.) On the other hand, in statistical mechanics everything seemed quite clear and logical until the quiz and its “The atomic number of copper is 29. Calculate its specific heat.”

But wisdom seems to be something different in kind from understanding; more like an applied understanding of the principles of living. I can understand that lotteries are a bad deal and that steady earning is better for long term financial security than the moral hazards that come with windfalls, but if that understanding doesn’t keep me from impulsively buying tickets it hasn’t translated into wisdom. If I don’t understand statistics but have the humility to take advice from someone who does, and refrain from buying tickets, I’m acting wisely even though I lack the understanding of the reasons.

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What’s education supposed to provide, then?

Basic knowledge: reading/writing, some math, some facts about the physical world, some facts about human society, some history, some skills. Some analysis as far as the student’s abilities take them: how things are connected in a field. Some what-ifs and whys: what the various possibilities were and what were their upsides and downsides in designing a political system. Good literature that provides a common language and a sampling of the different ways of thinking about things. (The “dead white males” have only that in common—I can’t imagine Bentham and Plato seeing eye to eye on pretty much anything.) Beautiful things and how to make them—art, music, literature.

Opportunities to exercise wisdom and virtue: We can’t compel courage or justice, but can we try to encourage them? I’m pretty sure these don’t fit very well into a K-12 curriculum sequence; real virtues need real circumstances to exercise them, not just workbook exercises. The copybook headings can remind the children of what we expect, but that’s about all. Schools try to teach approved attitudes, but these bear little resemblance to the cardinal virtues.

Our kids were all over the map as far as who was ready to understand what at which age, and for how long at a shot they could ingest information in some field.

I guess that most kids fit OK into a one-size-fits most curriculum that includes lots of review of earlier year’s work (a la Saxon math?). There’s not a lot of discussion of the great ideas, but perhaps, as Hutchins suggests, that’s not something you can expect out of most youngsters. I still think some intro to philosophy would be beneficial, but maybe only for the oldest.

I’m certain the K-12 sequence isn’t efficient for most of our children. In Wisconsin even home schoolers have to respect it, though—you must be able to document at least 875 hours of instruction. But if you can catch the child at the opportune moment they can learn a lot in a short time.

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What’s missing from the formal curriculum?

• Work—starting with chores and growing to real-world work for outsiders. That gives training in service, self-discipline, and probably fortitude and temperance as well.
• Learning how to interact with people—most kids pick that up automatically, but not all. Not all.
• Practicing living your place in the world—that sounds kind of vague, but most of us have some notion of where we will eventually wind up in the grand scheme of the world, even if we have great ambitions to the contrary. Are we ready to live the non-rock-star life we’ll probably have? Temperance, prudence, justice… humility

I’m just creeping around the big questions here. For adults I think Hutchins is more or less right about a liberal education—grab some of the books and read for yourself. If possible, find somebody with whom to argue about them, otherwise argue with the authors. (You’ll probably win most of the time when the authors are dead.)

For kids—everybody wants credentials that prove you’re not a dunce and have mastered the basics. OK, we can do that with tests. But for the real education (“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Twain), who does what, and when?

Kids

Is it fair to say that kids drive you crazy, but they're good for your mental health?

Watering the plants

The back porch has a number of plants in various types of pots, and these tend to need more water than plants in the ground--the dirt gets hotter. And when we don't get enough rain we run the hose over the gardens. (The lawn can fend for itself.)

The soil is an extremely complicated community of fungi and bacteria and tiny animals, and it only just occurred to me tonight that the tap water has chloramide (and probably some fluorine compound as well). Quick googling says yes, this can sometimes cause problems (and sometimes it doesn't make any difference) and getting the chloramide out isn't altogether trivial. People aren't terribly clear about the detailed causes of the problems when they do happen, but nobody understands soil ecology very well so that's not surprising.

I tried rotting out a tree stump using the "drill a bunch of 1" holes, with side vent holes and pour in potassium nitrate and water" method. (Other sources suggested setting the stump on fire after that mix had a chance to percolate, but I'm not interested in melting the underground cables that lace our little berm.) Yes, we finally got some mushrooms growing, but a year late, and the stump still has most of its structural integrity. Maybe the tap water I poured in killed the fungi, and the potassium nitrate didn't have much to fertilize?

Maybe I need to reroute the downspouts into rain barrels. Or call UW Extension. That sounds easier.

Followup on the library sign

Two years ago I worried about how the local library sign would be used, including the probability that the homeless would nestle behind the giant letters. I neglected to show how that was forestalled. There's a vertical bar in between the wall and the back of the letters. There's not enough free space to nestle.

Like Tolkien's elves?

Set aside for the moment the flawed assumption underlying this study: namely that one would want to eat less chocolate. They claim that "habituation" caused by imagining eating chocolates can reduce the actual hunger for them. It sounds as though replaying memories is like, maybe comparable to, experiencing something. Maybe there's an increment of pleasure we want, and the taste of the 9'th bite is linked to the memory of the first--and if so why not to the memory of last week's?

"Indeed I have heard that for them memory is more like to the waking world than to a dream. Not so for Dwarves."

Slow down

The radio show on the drive to work this morning encouraged observing sabbaths and taking time to slow down now and then. We all know that's good advice, and we don't take it any more than we take Kipling's suggestion "If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds full of distance run." Electronic media are like an itch we have to keep scratching, and we're never quite satiated or balanced.

Going slow for balance is kind of a big deal during the icy season of the frozen northlands, but somehow we don't apply the hint to the rest of our lives.

Ballard

I picked up a copy of the “Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard.” It had been a long time since I read anything by him. A couple of excellent stories, a number of pleasantly weird imaginings, a number of “that was a waste of my time,” and rounding the collection off, some stuff too chaotic to bother with (“The Atrocity Exhibition”).

If you’re not familiar with his work, he had a profound allergy to “happy endings” and a love of situations involving relics of war, disease, overpopulation, and advertising/control. And of madness, or at least a layman’s idea of madness, as either a result or cause of the mess.

In The Wind from Nowhere a wind springs up and grows until it destroys every human structure. IIRC in Passport to Eternity a man’s wife buys them tickets on a spacecraft that will travel forever with no destination. (Neither is in this collection.)

Very creative, but good only in small doses, and then only some of his work. An example of one clever idea (not really feasible, unfortunately) is to use gliders spraying silver iodide dust to create localized rain and as a result sculpt clouds. Nice idea, but the short story wasn't engaging.

I looked at the dates of the chaotic works, and remember how drab or depressing the movies were then (remember Silent Running?). I seem to recall having been infected by the mood of the era too: you felt superior if you could show how everything shiny was really dooming us. Plus: Overpopulation was going to kill us all. Pollution was going to kill us all. Nuclear winter was going to kill us all. I was into understanding things, not chaotic non-stories, so that didn't effect me much. I wasn't big into solutions; which is just as well. That path gets ugly in a hurry--you know so much better than hoi polloi that you must have the right to direct them. But I did like being more knowing, and a gotterdammerung makes a nice bang.

So now I'm 10

(in the Babylonian number system, of course. Try doing your times tables in that!)

Milestones are a bit arbitrary, of course, but they're handy sometimes. New Year's resolutions, anyone? I need to prioritize and prune a bit: There are things I won't live long enough to do.

Crime and benefits

Are Jefferson and Jackson unpersons now? I link an approving article, but I smell rank self-righteousness. If you measure worth by how much someone contributes to human well-being or good character, those who voted to disapprove of the two probably aren’t worthy to clean Jefferson’s latrines. “Our catches will be ever more numerous; but they will consist increasingly of trash — trash which we should once have thrown to Cerberus and the hellhounds as unfit for diabolical consumption.” Jefferson developed some serious problems in his attitude towards slavery, but he also did vast good in his work to institutionalize the ideals that (among other things) opposed it. God is entitled to demand absolute perfection, but it reeks when we demand it of others.

Even the well-respected hold close the secrets of their sinful hearts. (Some of us seem to succeed in hiding from even ourselves, crafting a twisted imitation of honesty.) Sometimes those secrets are merely shameful, and sometimes illegal, but all our heroes have feet of (at best) clay. If the offenses are fashionable we overlook them, and if unfashionable we tut-tut or else shift the hero to the “evil man” category.

You’re not supposed to notice things, but compare Roman Polanski with Bill Cosby. Same offenses, same Hollywood tribe, wildly different reactions by said Hollywood tribe.

Things aren’t always wonderfully obvious. François Villon is perhaps a better test case than the living entertainers above, since we have a little distance and no emotional involvement. He was a great and transformative poet, and also a robber and a member of a criminal gang. How much of the latter are you willing to forgive for the former? Up the scale a bit, you can probably think of several writers or painters who lived by mooching or who were abusive to their families. How much do you forgive, especially if you know one of the injured parties? (It is easy to forgive injuries to people you don’t know—and also easy to refuse to forgive, exactly as you please…) In an era when many considered drunkenness (especially of someone in authority) to be offensive, Lincoln replied to a claim that Grant was indulging: “Find out what brand he drinks and send some to the rest of my generals.” We snicker a bit at that one, because we don’t take drunkenness quite as seriously, unless the miscreant was driving. Fashion strikes again.

If the villain is on our side, we generally minimize his crimes. That complicates evaluation even more—are you too eager to forgive?

We’re eager to depose heroes—or anybody else--for heresy. Heresy we think worse than ordinary crime because it attacks the standard of morality; actions don’t matter as much as respect for right belief. (What God thinks of that approach remains unclear, but there’s some suggestion that He cares about actions.)

I think that to say that benefit A justifies offense B is a bit presumptuous. But we can try to recognize and be grateful for benefits: let the good that men do live after them, as much as we can. Even if we have to punish them for some heinous crime. In Ninety Three by Victor Hugo, a sailor was awarded a medal for valor for saving the ship by stopping a loose cannon whose uncontrolled sliding was smashing the ship’s frame, and then was executed for being the one who let it get loose in the first place.

Keep the names. Certainly Jefferson's, at least. (And quit trying to make out that Lee was a dishonorable man.)

Kitchen paint?

I was talking with a professor from India about cooking, and he told me that in cold climates (e.g. Wisconsin) where one couldn't always cook outdoors they found it advisable to cook in a garage or other outbuilding, because the oils and spices that smell so good at first tend to adhere to the walls and become rancid over time. I know that some apartment hallways tend to smell pretty rank, and the apartments can be even worse inside.

San Francisco is experimenting with pee-proof paints that are hydrophobic enough to bounce urine (and other water-based fluids) back from the surface. I wonder what sort of surface you would need to keep oily droplets from sticking. Tile is easy enough to clean (but not the grout!) but oil still sticks. We don't tile ceilings (and they're hard to reach to clean), and cabinets and handles get begrimed and so probably a source of odor as well. We try to keep things clean enough in our house to forestall that, so I can't be sure about the source of the odor, but the surfaces seem the most likely candidate.

If the surface was oil repellant, it would be easier to keep clean--and maybe not wind up as rancid. If oil droplets wouldn't stick to the ceiling they'd drift down. It's easier to clean the counter and the floor than the cabinets and the ceiling...

Of course the devil is in the details. Would water droplets adhere better or worse to the new surface? How do you put on a second coat of paint later?

UPDATE: Oh, and is it food safe?

Bomb bag

FlyBag is basically a kind of kevlar bag holding part of the luggage in an airplane hold, designed to contain the worst effects of an explosion. Nice idea. You can always defeat it by adding more bang, and I suspect the pressure differential on the compartment walls when at cruising altitude might make them more vulnerable, but it's a nice bit of engineering. Any volunteers to test it in flight?

Did you think mathematicians were boring?

Cassels asked him, “What have you done about a job?”

“Er, nothing,” replied Conway.

“There’s a position opening here, why don’t you apply?”

“How do I go about it?”

“You write me a letter.”

“What should I say?”

Cassels took pity. He offered to write the letter for Conway. He sat down at the side of the road on a stone wall in front of King’s College, rummaged through his briefcase, found a pen, pulled out a piece of paper, and began, “Dear Professor Cassels, I wish to apply for …”

and later

For one student, Edward Welbourne, now a software engineer in Oslo, the most memorable was Conway’s linear algebra course – specifically, a session wherein Conway proved that for two symmetric quadratic forms, both can be simultaneously diagonalised (no small feat). “Doing each takes a moderately tricky piece of computation,” said Welbourne. “To do two at the same time is thus doubly tricky, like balancing a broom by its handle on one’s chin while juggling.” This is exactly what Conway did, while concluding the proof.

Proverbs image

The group going over Proverbs 7 came up with an image to go with "Keep my commands and you will live; guard my teachings as the apple of your eye. Bind them on your fingers; write them on the tablet of your heart." Imagine you're alone in Egypt and you only know a couple of words. That small phrase book in your pocket will be at your fingertips constantly.

Harmonizing languages

One of the songs in church this morning had a phrase about peoples and languages in harmony. Thinking of Gilbert and Sullivan's trios with different songs harmonizing, I wondered how difficult it would be to write a work (e.g. a quintet) of different languages singing at the same time. Somebody has probably done something like this before with two languages, though I don't have the breadth of experience to guess who. I'm curious how this could be made beautiful(*) with more than two or three. Anybody know?

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(*) I don't find Aaron Copeland's blendings all that beautiful. Maybe that's my loss.

Iran deal

I worry about the Iran deal, but not as though it were a bad idea in itself.

What friends do we have in the area? Among the people, just the Israelis and the Kurds. The Saudi royal family is more or less friendly, but the population is hostile--when the house of Saud goes away you'll see the difference.

Among the Sunnis elite you can find a number of allies of convenience, and sometimes even of temperament, but not so much on the ground. Insofar as people care about us, they don't care for us. I described why, with suggestions, some years ago.

My takeaway is that the MidEast is full of divisions, some of which are religious and some tribal. The largest attacks against us have come from the largest religious group: the Sunnis.

It makes sense to keep in touch with all the major parties, so that you can play one against the others when possible. Iran was going to get nukes unless somebody used force--the Saudis already bought theirs via Pakistan.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to trumpet this sort of bargaining, though. You always want the biggest pressures to be applied quietly, because in a couple of years you may be trying to wheedle favors and you don't want too much public shame to get in the way.

And this kind of tribe vs tribe diplomacy isn't something the US is used to. We tend to like nice black and white conflicts and don't have a lot of patience for the Great Game. I think our leaders and administrators often suffer from the same tendency.

The real problem is that Obama is provably incompetent in international affairs; and arguably almost as dishonest as incompetent. The only thread of hope I have in this agreement is that the French signed off on it, and they've tended to have a sharp eye for French interests, which while they don't overlap with American ones, probably aren't served by nukes flying about.

Several people have claimed that this treaty guarantees war. So it does: X implies "there will be war in the MidEast" is a true statement for all values of X short of "sun goes supernova."

Unclean touch

I didn't notice until yesterday the role ritual cleanliness plays in Mark 5.

Jesus touches the dead body, which in the eyes of the Law made Him unclean. Burying the dead was a good deed, and so there were things that justified becoming unclean. And of course His touch is more powerful than death and its defiling power. But it would be rather startling to Jairus to have a stranger touch his dead.

The woman with the hemorrhage is ritually unclean. How does she dare touch Jesus' clothes--she would make them unclean, and by contagion him also? She knows He can do miracles, but that means He's holy.

When Jesus asks who touched Him, she has to admit this before everybody. Of course, instead of chewing her out He told her that her faith had made her whole and that she should go in peace. But why did He ask her to fess up? Maybe to heal her guilty conscience too? Or was He making a point about the cleansing He provided?

War train

My first question was "Have any model train enthusiasts made a working model of this?" The answer seems to be Maybe, for some definition of working. I'm not aware of any 1mm guns, which is what you'd need for HO scale.

Ice mountains

So far they say that the mountains on Pluto are probably made of ice. And yet given the lack of craters, they're estimated to be quite young.

I wonder why things should be so active. There are lots of moons around, suggesting lots more traffic in the area than my naive expectations, so maybe Pluto took a big hit not too long ago and it's still relatively warm inside. Maybe it managed to grow around a core with some heavy metals, and the thorium is keeping things moderately toasty. And maybe there's some squishy ice clathrates that can be toothpasted around a little easier than the usual rocks--though I'd expect that they'd fall down quicker too, so maybe not.

It's a shame the probe couldn't have carried the extra weight of fuel to slow down and orbit a while. I hope some of those images due back in the next year carry enough information to get some spectral analysis of the surface rocks. (Reflection only tells about the very top layer, but that's better than nothing.)

Going in-depth on the important things

The Capitol Times newspaper in Madison caters to a strongly leftwing audience, while the Wisconsin State Journal aims at a center-left audience. Several years ago the Cap Times found its subscriber base was too small to sustain it any longer, so it merged with the Journal, splitting up the editorial section on Sunday and producing its own Thursday section. And having a distinct web presence as well.

Which article on the local production of the Mikado is from which?

But Cain noted the opera “has seen some backlash in recent years for using the traditional staging,” said Cain, who also is artistic director of Madison’s Fresco Opera Theatre, a company known for staging classic opera in unconventional ways.

“For this ‘Mikado,’ I decided to use a current art form rising out of Japan — animé or manga,” a style of animation that can be hand-drawn or computer-generated, Cain said.

Or

It's a redesign rooted in more than just creativity. The change was important because, in recent years, traditional productions of "The Mikado" in Seattle and Providence, Rhode Island have drawn negative attention. The racism, use of "yellowface" and orientalism in such a staging, detractors say, make it offensive.

"The use of yellowface has been defended as loving homage or harmless parody," wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Jeff Yang, responding to the Seattle production in summer 2014.

"Each time, when Asian-Americans have pointed out that we don't find the wearing of cosmetics and wardrobe to simulate Asian appearance to be 'loving' or 'harmless,' our concerns have been dismissed. "Which is why, despite my deep personal love of musical theater, I think these 'traditional' productions — yellowface productions — of 'The Mikado' have to end," Yang wrote.

Melanie Cain, directing for the Savoyards for the first time, got the message. As a founder of the freewheeling, irreverent Fresco Opera Theatre, she was uniquely positioned to take the Savoyards in a different direction.

The first article gives a thumbnail description of the opera (which was fun, BTW--if you're local go see it) and mentions a couple of the performers.

Disbelieving authorities

I'm a physicist (albeit working in IT these days) and I keep up with a pretty broad range of science doings. So when my vocation comes up in conversations, people will often mention some new discovery they read about in the news and ask for my opinion.

If I can, I oblige, but as I've mentioned before the news reports are often extremely misleading and there's a lot of science fiction mixed with science fact in popular ideas.

When I contradict the narrative, it seems as though about 2/3 of the time people thank me for clarifying the matter, and about 1/3 of the time they disbelieve me.

I'm not sure how this 1/3 breaks down: how much is a healthy disrespect for credentialism, how much is "I trust whoever I heard first," and how much is "You're harshing my mellow."

I need to keep some notes.

Ancient knowledge

"When you look at poems such as Beowulf, they often mention these elite warriors with their amazing weapons and fine decoration.

"But there was no archaeological proof of them, so it was thought they were made up.

"But actually, the hoard is that proof."

Or there's this:

A hundred years earlier, Billy Balch, a leader of the Makah tribe, recounted a similar story. Before his own time, he said, all the water had receded from Washington State’s Neah Bay, then suddenly poured back in, inundating the entire region. Those who survived later found canoes hanging from the trees.

Please note that I didn't title this "Ancient Wisdom." There is evidence for a certain amount of modern unwisdom, though.

Microlensing a blazar

This is cool. Microlensing constraint on the size of the gamma-ray emission region in blazar B0218+357

Everybody has heard of Einstein lensing: a galaxy in between you and some bright object in back of it will bend the light from that object, sometimes into a ring shape. Note that the light you see didn’t come “straight” from the object—the path is quite a bit longer than it would have been without the intervening galaxy in the way. In the image shown at that second link the light probably took a thousand years longer than it would if the near galaxy weren’t there.

That’s one key to the story at the first link. The other key is that just as a galaxy can bend light a lot, a large star or black hole in the galaxy can bend it a little. Maybe just a day’s worth.

That’s what the authors looked for in studying blazars. There were only a couple of candidates, but as one of them flashes in different wavelengths (gamma rays, radio waves, etc) they found that there was an echo for the gamma rays, of about 10 days. This is presumably from “microlensing” by something almost in the line of sight between us and the blazar. That’s cool by itself, but from the estimated size of the “microlenser” you can estimate how big the region was that the gamma rays came from. This is impossible with normal telescopes and utterly impossible with gamma ray telescopes—they just don’t have the angular resolution. But working back from the “microlenser” size they estimate that the gamma ray creation region is of order 10^14 cm or less. If it were igger you wouldn’t get a nice “echo”.

It is a bit like the way stars seem to twinkle in the night sky but planets don’t—the planets subtend a larger solid angle than the almost point-like stars do, and so our atmospheric variations don’t change the apparent direction much. In this case the gamma rays get lensed into an echo/flicker, but the radio waves, coming from a bigger area, don’t.

This isn’t exactly a surprise, as most models predict that gamma rays would be produced near the base of the jet from a black hole, but it is a clever analysis.

An unstained escutcheon

I’m instructed that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, and that being white means being heir to a history of racism, conquest, oppression, cultural appropriation, and microaggression. If, as with Elizabeth Warren, you have a family tradition of a drop or two of the proper ancestry, you’re home free.(*)

Not much wiggle room there, since that is part of the story, and pointing out the rest of the story just makes you sound like "Nya! You're another!"

There’s another solution, proposed 136 years ago:

GENERAL: Why do I sit here? To escape from the pirates' clutches, I described myself as an orphan; and, heaven help me, I am no orphan! I come here to humble myself before the tombs of my ancestors, and to implore their pardon for having brought dishonour on the family escutcheon.

FREDERIC: But you forget, sir, you only bought the property a year ago, and the stucco on your baronial castle is scarcely dry.

GENERAL: Frederic, in this chapel are ancestors: you cannot deny that. With the estate, I bought the chapel and its contents. I don't know whose ancestors they were, but I know whose ancestors they are, and I shudder to think that their descendant by purchase (if I may so describe myself) should have brought disgrace upon what, I have no doubt, was an unstained escutcheon.

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(*) We had such a tradition ourselves until somebody spoiled it by doing a genealogical search. Irish, not Cherokee.

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Weird. The embedding video starts at the beginning, rather than the moment (?t=3801) that I quote. The link should work, though.

The child as father of the man

I was a very shy boy, and the other day I noticed that I still tend not to look people in the eye very much. Sometimes not even my children. My Better Half, yes--fortunately. Odd that the habit persist so long.

Vanity

David Warren is not a democrat, which lets him light up some corners the rest of us sometimes miss. From today's:

It is conventional, for politicians upon winning elections, to declare that they are “humbled” by the experience. There you see a fruit.

No one who felt genuinely humbled would say this. He might show it, quite subtly perhaps, in how he behaved; it does not and cannot go into words, without becoming boastful. I use this example with something approaching warmth, for I have developed an allergy or aversion — a rash of the sort that comes from passing through brambles — when men in public positions make a show of their “humility.” It is invariably pharisaic; it is a warning that one is dealing with profound arrogance, and a vanity that is out of control. He speaks with crowds, but cannot keep his virtue.

Drone attacks

I get the idea of trying to target your strikes to do the most damage and confusion. Fine and dandy. But if you use them in a steady-state "attrition" mode (almost as a standalone tool), the enemy adapts, and you have an updated version of Vietnam body counts. Probably about as valuable. Does anybody in authority have any clear idea of what we're trying to accomplish?

Winter Journey

Colleagues on IceCube circulated the link to these volumes: I only read Winter Journey. Embryology always seemed to me to be a rather quiet field, not like volcanology.

As we rested my mind went back to a dusty, dingy office in Victoria Street some fifteen months ago. "I want you to come," said Wilson to me, and then, "I want to go to Cape Crozier in the winter and work out the embryology of the Emperor penguins, but I'm not saying much about it—it might never come off." Well! this was better than Victoria Street, where the doctors had nearly refused to let me go because I could only see the people across the road as vague blobs walking. Then Bill went and had a talk with Scott about it, and they said I might come if I was prepared to take the additional risk. At that time I would have taken anything.

A little traveling later:

Then came seven shivering hours and first thing on getting out of our sleeping-bags in the morning we stuffed our personal gear into the mouth of the bag before it could freeze: this made a plug which when removed formed a frozen hole for us to push into as a start in the evening.

Litter on the park trails

My Better Half and I hiked part of Devil's Lake and Parfrey's Glen as a belated 35'th anniversary celebration. Part of the path by the lake is asphalt and wheelchair accessible, but after a very short distance there's no chance of getting a wheelchair through.

I wondered if it would make sense to rent a litter so that friends of a wheelchair-bound person could bring them along. You'd need a team of 3, more likely 4, as a minimum, and some way to retrieve people if a carrier sprains something along the way.

Wikipedia says these are used for tourists in the Huangshan Mountains, so there's some precedent--though there the pros carry people. Liability issues would preclude that here.

Some of those steps are pretty steep.

Masons and Liberia and Conspiracies

"Masonic craft must lead new Liberia".

Mr. Urey, who is a strong ally of former President Charles Taylor, indicated that the Free Masons must produce the next president that will build a new Liberian. sic

"We must build a new Liberia because there is a need to improve the Masonic craft and our country," he said.

...

He also noted that in the 2017 elections, members of the society will get involved to ensure that the right people are elected.

From the comments:

Waeyea R. Gogbeh ·( University of Liberia )
Mr. Urey don't remind Liberians of the TWP (True Whig Party) era when the government was primarily operated from "Up the Hill"! Do you want for citizens, especially children, to again see anyone in a "black car" as a "society man" and start fleeing? I'm sure you also heard that Careysburg was considered as a place not suitable to be stranded after 10:00pm those days because you would definitely disappear!

I think it was AVI who wrote that conspiracy theories are popular because conspiracies are even more popular--though most conspiracies fail.

BTW, a "society man" would have been a "Leopard Society" man, or something similar, who used body parts in ceremonies to ensure wealth or power. How many of these there ever actually were I can't guess, but rumors popped up all the time. Always from somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who saw the remains... Sometimes they made the newspapers. For what that's worth.

I'm fascinated by Urey's priorities, btw: "improve the craft" comes first.

By their fruits

One group tries to help outcasts, and another group deliberately kills them.

David Cline

I learned today that he died not long ago. He hired me after I graduated: my adviser and he were riding in the same elevator and Cline asked if he knew any candidates for a job. I've been at UW ever since.

He was not a good manager. He traveled a great deal and so his sessions for direction were rather short. In 5 minutes one day he gave me no less than 3 absolute number 1 top priority jobs. Little details like "I can't go to that conference because my wife is due then" didn't seem to register. I learned later that the proper thing to do was say "yes" and then find something related and productive to do; he sometimes forgot in between visits. (Not always!)

He was extremely ambitious, and wanted a Nobel more than anything. He was bitterly disappointed when Fermilab elected to continue fixed target work instead of trying to build a collider. His friend Carlo Rubbia shared the Nobel instead of Dave. Thomasso has another anecdote about him. When Fermilab did build a collider he was on CDF, and I was working with Atac's forward tracking chamber for Dave. The noise rates were much higher than expected and the wire crimping tool seems to have silently worn out during construction, so the detector had to be abandoned.

He also wanted to do liquid argon based astronomy; and I spent time on liquid argon time projection studies too. He wasn't happy with all of our conclusions...

I declined to follow him to UCLA--the cost of living would have been way too high. He spent some of his time there working with new accelerator technologies--plasma wake field in particular.

I eavesdropped on a conversation between him and Rubbio at lunch once. It was delightful--two brilliant and innovative people bouncing ideas off each other--most of them no good, but so many that some were...

He was enthusiastic. He often jumped the gun--once he grabbed a slide from an absent grad student's desk and wound up presenting a simulation as though it were actual results. The rule of thumb is a slide per minute: his rate was 10x that fast. And he could spot the critical features of a plot quickly too--much faster than I did. And Bob reminded me today that when Cline was still at Madison he arranged for at least one major conference a year to be held there--kept the place on the map.

He will be missed. Probably has been already--at his age he wasn't very active any more.

Dante and Pharisees

AVI posted a note including the line "Jesus never called anyone out for racism or our other popular sins. He did call people out for self-righteousness"

Dante has space for all the popular sins too, but I'm not sure where he'd stick the self-righteous. Maybe the 8'th with the liars? How would you slot them in? (Niven/Pournelle created a new area for the solipsists, and found space for polluters...)

FWIW my pet detestation is liars. This makes reading the news something of a "near occasion of sin."

I suppose Jesus didn't have to call people out for the usual sins. John the Baptist did that already, and "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."

Proverbs

The book of Proverbs is quite a mix. Some of it sounds like thumbnail analyses of the day's court cases. Some of it seems pretty obvious:

My son, if sinful men entice you, do not give in to them.

If they say, “Come along with us; let’s lie in wait for innocent blood, let’s ambush some harmless soul;

...

These men lie in wait for their own blood; they ambush only themselves!

Such are the paths of all who go after ill-gotten gain; it takes away the life of those who get it.

In fact you wonder in what sort of society that advice would be necessary.

Maybe I haven't been reading enough commentaries, but it only just occurred to me the other day that this is explicitly addressed to "my son." A king isn't likely to join a common bandit gang--he's more likely to join other kings in ganging up on a land that seems worth conquering. OK, so if I treat this as a parable of wider application than just street gangs to whom else does it apply? Somebody with some power (more of us than we like to think, but not all).

High Tide at Gettysburg

by Glen Tucker.

I asked our guide at Gettysburg if The Killer Angels was a good intro. He vehemently rejected it, saying it relied too much on (Longstreet's ? memory glitch memoirs). He recommended this instead. I concur.

Unfortunately my memory for names is a bit on the foggy side, and there were times I wished the names were color-coded so I could tell who was who, but within a couple of paragraphs I had the scene correct anyway.

FWIW Tucker concludes that the biggest contribution to the Confederate loss was Lee's microscopic staff, which left him unable to keep on top of what his subordinates were actually doing. I've heard it said that victory goes to the side that makes the fewest stupid blunders; there were plenty to go around at Gettysburg.

Pi=3

So now we have π=3. Even the Indiana legislature didn't quite manage that. Is there anything our courts can't do?

Is leftover shrimp fermenting somewhere?

Responsible Innovation: "Responsible innovation means taking care of the future through collective stewardship of science and innovation in the present." Something about the phrase "collective stewardship of science" rings wrong. Probably somebody tried to be aphoristic and misfired. But my spider sense says "Pournelle's Iron Law" would have the "workers for the organization" in the driver's seat from the get-go. If only because the scientists and engineers would be more interested in doing real work than in running the meetings--if the folks I know are any guide.

Flags

AVI has a post on how the focus fell on the flag at the state house.

Confederate flags do not inspire me. I don't want one about my house and they're too tied together with defence of slavery for me to honor them anywhere else. Despite having been born in New Orleans, I'm pretty much a Yankee in these matters.

I'm repeatedly told that I do not have standing to decide whether a school name or logo is offensive to local tribes or what they regard as sacred--fair enough. But by symmetry, that suggests that non-Southerners don't have standing to tell Southerners what they mean by the flag symbol. Hmm.

I've been reading a bit about the Civil War off and on the past few years, and it is abundantly clear that most of the Confederate volunteers were not inspired to fight by the defence of slavery. The powers-that-be had their own interests, but the average soldier (who owned no slaves) would more likely be inspired to fight by his understanding of liberty. That's what they often said, and one should consider the testimony of eyewitnesses over that of theory. I strongly suspect that a fear that the "meddling feds" would inspire an indescriminate slave revolt was an additional motive, but there's no reason to doubt that their understanding of liberty at the local level was a huge motivator. "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends..." I gather that quite a few people see Lee's battle flag as a symbol of that attitude. That attitude is well-hated in the centers of power (government, media, etc) if their vitriol is any guide--not surprisingly.

My own take on this is by anology. The swastika is a symbol estimated to be at least 5000 years old, meaning good fortune. But it has been so thoroughly tainted by Nazism that the old meaning is lost--whether the Hindus like it or not.

Design

David Warren wrote a column on design that is worth reading. Thesis: quite a few old-time building (and other) designs were more robustly efficient at managing such things as heating and cooling than the one-size-fits-all with high tech that we often use. He uses air conditioning as an example--traditional home designs in Bangkok were designed to handle hot weather well, but the boxy units that replaced them had no natural ventilation and demanded extra cooling. I think he exaggerates somewhat: I revisited a home where I used to live in Liberia, and found it considerably hotter in my late middle age than I did when a teenager. But the point is real.

Suppose we built homes with high ceilings to handle summer heat. I don't know what it is like where you are, but around here in addition to summer we also get something called winter, and it isn't nice to warm a wad of air and have it waft away above your head. So suppose your rooms had a removable lower ceiling. (Yes, with some ventilation, with one panel carrying the power, etc, etc) In winter you heat the smaller volume and in summer you take advantage of the high ceiling.

Lay out streets so you can build homes that take advantage of prevailing winds. Ours doesn't--the winds tend to blow against the garage rather than the front or back.

Homes aren't designed to be easy to expand (granted there are insulation and roofing issues that make expansion complicated). Not all of us have 2.3 children; how do you take in an ailing parent?

Dinofeathers

I've seen a number of images recently of theropods with feathers, often fairly flamboyantly colored.

Somehow or another the creature has to keep feathers clean. Try to imagine a T-Rex preening feathers with that jaw. Even with some extra "beak" there's too much that's unreachable. The forelimbs aren't much use either. What's left?

Rolling in the dust might work if the tail was flexible enough to right himself afterwards, and it would probably have to be (everybody falls down sometime).

The forelimbs might work OK for preening another T-Rex's feathers.

If the T-Rex had significant feather-ation, I suspect he'd have to roll or else groom in groups.

No need to thank me for the mental images...

---

Yes, I know that T-Rex would be too heavy to roll on feathers, exactly--thrash around would be more like it. And unless you're a pack hunter that herds prey into a trap, flamboyant colors on a predator seem like a recipe for fasting.

Homelessness again

When I was in high school we read Bartleby the Scrivener. I was in an international school--mostly Americans, but all of us were children of working and motivated families. The poor I saw in Liberia were either working, looking, or disabled. I don't know what families did behind the scenes with members who didn't want to work. There were undoubtedly some of them--they show up in stories--because of the rule that if someone has a good job he is obligated to provide for as many of his extended family as would fit. (One firm provided very tiny houses for employees to forestall this.) Even little children have tasks.

With that background, I though Bartleby was written as a kind of abstract thought experiment.

I know better now.

The question of the story--What do we owe a man who does not give?--is too general: Why matters. Cannot (physical/mental breakdown) ≠ Will not ("let him not eat") ≠ moral issues with available tasks

I don't have general answers, of course. I haven't seen "studies" on the subject, but I'm more and more convinced that while congregating the homeless is efficient, it is bad for many of them. I probably don't see those it benefits, but the descriptions of the social environments aren't pretty and I suspect congregation with other homeless helps very few. Congregation certainly forces distance between them and the rest of us.

That, if true as I think it is, leads to a conundrum. If we want to help, we must welcome at most N people, and then be unwelcoming to number N+1. To act lovingly (and protect from predation) we have to act unlovingly.

Even saying "N" homeless is oversimple. Different issues need to be dealt with differently: two addicts might be too many, assuming your team can even work with one.

The matter is one of live interest in Madison, where the "Red Mayor"'s attempt to institute sanity in the use of the City-County building was overridden by the city council.

In randomly perusing books and posts on the web about the poor in England, I get the impression that there was supposedly a change in attitudes toward the poor after the Black Death; where before they had a role in the community with religious approval, afterwards they were often blamed for idleness. This is blamed on economic pressures and laws criminalizing conduct. But looking at some of the details, I doubt the direction of causation. Even before the Black Death people distinguished between the able-bodied and needy poor, and afterward they still took care to be generous to the disabled. What looks different is the mention of migratory workers and beggars. If they were then pretty much the same as they are now (modulo different substances to be addicted to) perhaps the laws were a reaction.

Domestication

Odd question time.

I've heard of people training dogs, cats, mice, some birds, pigs, goats ... quite a list of creatures that are at least clever enough to come when called.

But I've not heard of anybody domesticating bats.

Luckily the weather has not been kind to mosquitoes so far this year, but there've been years when having a pet bat to take out the flies and mosquitoes would have been welcome. (Yes, I know there are all sorts of regulations about wildlife, but last time I checked US law didn't apply to the rest of the world.) Bat boxes outside, yes. Domestic or even semi-domestic, no. I'm not sure what they'd eat during the winter, come to think of it--but down South that wouldn't be a big issue.

Babel

Chardin's Omega Point and its poor relation The Singularity both predict a super-human future which naturally evolves. The Omega Point is pull-organized (the Omega Point pulls evolution to itself), and the Singularity evolves in a self-organizing fashion. This strikes me as like a building reaching up to heaven--not a physical thing but an intellectual/mathematical/programmed construct that grows of itself to infinite scope.

But as my office-mate mentioned about the Singularity, Godel plays a role.

A finite self-organizing system isn't going to be complete. Anything physical in our universe is going to be finite in construction and finite in the number of operations it can perform. Any finite mathematical construct which is trying to show new things can't be complete; there will be propositions within the system, really true or really false, which cannot be proven true or false from within the system. You can add more propositions, and create a larger construct, and face the same problem again. And again. But because time is also finite, the number of new propositions it can add is finite. The system will always be finite, and incomplete.

Notice something odd here. The best possible system organized in this universe, whether Omega or Singularity, is incomplete, which means that something exists which does not exist within that system. This means there are different kinds of existence, one of which--existence as an instance--can be found in our Omega/Singularity at the end of the universe (the highest form of whatever-it-is) and another of which need not.

A bottom-up tower isn't going to reach completeness.

Umami?

Archaeoblog posted some notes about garum that make it start to make a little culinary sense. Fermented fish sounds dreadful at best, but the processing cleaned out the stench, and there was enough umami to make it a versatile seasoning.

---

I've been learning a little about umami since I decided to start trying to make my own miso soup. The miso base is generally a kelp broth with some dried fish flakes, but I've been experimenting. So far most have been OK, but ... a cook has to eat his mistakes.

White and black news

Before I start commenting on the curious aspects of a "white NAACP chapter president passing as black" I think I'll wait a few days past the juicy headlines to see how much of the story is true. I declined to get outraged by the pool party video of a few days ago, and, as I expected, more of that story is coming out. The "racist" neighbors start to look a lot less racist and a lot more justified. We'll see what a few more days brings to both stories.

The Devil in a Forest by Gene Wolfe

I was up too late last night with this page turner about an apprentice and a suave highwayman.

"You see, the hag really can do things, but if you wanted to do them too, you'd have to be the way she is--not just bad part of the time but bad all the time. I've never been able to make the effort myself; I've cut a lot of throats, but every once in a while my sense of fun comes creeping in."

"If she really can"--Mark saw vistas of limitless power--"why doesn't she take charge of everything? If I were her--"

"You'd live in a crystal castle on a golden hill with fifty princesses to wait on you."

"I suppose so."

"But she wouldn't. She'd feed the princesses to the pigs, then paint the pigs with poison. Then she'd smash your castle and sink the hill in a swamp. You see, she has taken over everything she could. You don't see it because what she took over she destroyed. She was mistress of a manor farm once, with hired shepherds and drovers to care for her stock."

Whether that is a fair description of Mother Cloot or not I'll leave to you.

As someone else said of Wolfe's work, everybody has a reason for everything they do in the story.

Big Brother is Proctoring You

Did you see the story that someone--probably the Education Ministry in Luoyang-- fielded a drone to electronically spy on high school students taking the college entrance exam? It was looking for suspicious signals of unspecified type--presumably cell-phone communications.

My first reaction was "Why didn't they just line the hall walls/roof/floor with aluminum mesh and make a Faraday cage?" But on reflection, "It would get stiflingly hot in there!" And there's no doubt that drones are cooler.

I still have no official word on what the bag limit is for drones in Wisconsin. I'll keep asking.

Integration success story

I noticed in the CSM story about the pool (actually found via Yahoo) these lines:

A descent into resegregation, with white families again moving out, is not inevitable. When the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Ill., faced the same migration trends as Ferguson in the 1980s, community organizers worked with real estate agents to welcome minorities while reassuring whites, according to a report by The Atlantic’s CityLab.

“In Oak Park, the community chose to embrace diversity and more importantly to embrace integration and inclusion,” Rob Breymaier of the nonprofit Oak Park Regional Housing Center told CityLab. “As a result, Oak Park has prospered and our diversity is an asset, while Ferguson appears to be struggling.”

When I was in that area (lived in Oak Park for a few months, then Berwyn), the Weekly Reader (I think) had just revealed some of the details. Blockbusting had been a major problem in Chicago, and Oak Park determined that it wasn't going to happen there. So the powers-that-were leaned secretly and heavily on realtors and landlords to force them to rent/sell to blacks--but only in scattered areas. There was under no circumstances to be a concentration of blacks in any part of the city. That latter feature violated the letter and spirit of anti-discrimination laws, but the outcome was pretty much what the powers-that-be wanted: integration w/o panic.

But it wasn't quite as simple as Breymaier implies.

Beware the coming robot revolution

You have been warned

.

Foreign place names

See Dr. Boli on the subject. "Famous foreign places have English names—Rome (not Roma), Moscow (not Москва), Munich (not München), Athens (not Αθήνα or Ἀθῆναι), and so on. As we become more ignorant of foreign places, we lose those native English names for them one by one, and have to go back to the foreign names when we do want to talk about them."

Dr. Boli is well known for his humor, but he has some good observations too.

Castleview by Gene Wolfe

The cover blurb says this has Arthurian aspects, and so it does; but the story is not exactly parallel. As usual with Wolfe, plenty of twists and puzzles and references keep you reading. I'm reluctant to mention details (=spoilers). You'll miss a lot if you aren't fairly versed in folklore and legends.

Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

The book is pretty much what the subtitle says it is. The Comanche’s rise wasn’t recorded, but their interactions with the Spanish were, and the story goes on from there.

Spoiler Alert (given away by his picture on the cover): the Comanches lost and wound up on reservations. It was there that Quanah became officially the chief of the previously independent bands. He was not born yet for the peak of Comanche power, but was a clever and efficient leader during their decline, and afterwards as well.

The Comanches came to power when horses became available. They were like a cavalry Sparta in the plains: war and buffalo and horses were their pillars—they couldn’t exist without them. Their standard practices of war took no account of civilians or surrender—rather like the West’s most heinous practices. But with bow and arrows and amazing horsemanship they could easily outfight the Spanish musketeers, and infantry, and US cavalry. And because they could cover so much distance in a raid (eating their extra horses if they had to), they were impossible to find or stop. At least until Walker and Colt got together. Then the Texans could fire more than 3 shots to a Comanche’s 20-30 arrows.

After the Civil War the Feds eventually got around to recovering the land lost to the Comanches, and taking the war to their homelands. In one battle they were introduced to a gun that fired twice: howitzers firing explosive shells. They were driven back with losses, but promptly returned and attacked dispersed, having quickly learned not to congregate in any formation to give the howitzer any good targets.

Hard riding from childhood apparently increased both sterility and miscarriages, so they often captured young children to become members of the tribe. One was Cynthia Ann Parker: Quanah’s mother. She was rescued later, but was never content and early on often tried to escape back to her tribe and remaining two sons.

I was missing some chunks of Texas and of Plains Indian history; this helped fill the gaps. And though the US government’s duplicity and corruption is quite clear, there aren’t any Noble Savages to be found either. On the contrary: there was, in the end, only one possible way to deal with the war-loving Comanches—fight them until they gave up.

Odds and ends from the trip

I remembered Glacier, but fortunately Skyline Drive is, with a few exceptions, a pleasant drive—until thunderstorms hit. We saw them coming, and anyway only had time for a third of the distance. There are gentle overlooks every mile or less, and the views are great. We took a short hike on the Appalachian Trail, and we’ll only have to go back about 200,000 more times to complete it. Ran into a hiker who’d run out of water, gave him some of ours. My wife notices things like that better than I do.

It seems that the battleship Wisconsin, fitted with Tomahawk missiles, returned with 6 when all the other ships fired all of theirs.

Cruise control isn’t terribly useful in West Virginia.

Whose bright idea was it to brand a truck company “US Cargo?” It sounds so sluggish.

An Antique Mall is a bazaar.

A casino is a vampire that sucks the life away from a downtown. The roads around Wheeling look like a group of squids each arm wrestling all the rest.

We got off 70 at Richmond to try 40 into Indiana to see what it looked like—and hit the Highway 40 Yard Sale. Not heard of it before. We stopped off at one church sale that was fund-raising for Liberia; had a nice talk.

In Virginia the highway was lined on each side and down the median with trees--and along a couple of stretches they had everything down in the median and some giant tree pulpers shredding everything. Maybe they weren't otherwise harvestable.

Monticello

Monticello felt weird. You would have walked about in halls and garden walks and promenades with slaves literally hidden beneath your feet. Even the slave quarters on the hill would have been hard to spot from the mansion. Jefferson seems to have fallen in love with French fashions, and the only way to blend them into the American scene was to hide away the dark details.

If the Smithsonian article is accurate he seems to have reconciled himself to slavery sometime around 1790. Maybe it was economic considerations: you can't have the French style and enlightenment facilities without money, after all. Maybe it was personal interactions that soured him. UPDATE I forgot about Haiti and 1791. That might have reconciled a man to trying to hold on to the wolf's ears a little longer.

Given what I'd heard of him before, and noticing the prominence of Voltaire in his pantheon, I predicted that he would have engaged in some enlightened patriarchy like Voltaire's to ameliorate the lot of his slaves. Unless introducing a merit-based hierarchy with better trained slaves at the top (literally at the top of the hill too) counts, apparently he didn't.

In some ways Jefferson was an early version of Frank Lloyd Wright. He was a self taught and careful architect. But... The dome he designed was uninhabitably hot. The rainwater catchers on the promenades, thanks to ill-chosen cement, never provided usable water. He was pretty much always building with borrowed money. At least he didn't try to build a house with a living tree in the middle of it.

Some evil fruit and some excellent. A little more wisdom would have changed a lot, but that's true of us all.

Revisiting history

The weather in Urbana was blustery and wet as we waited in the restaurant, and there were 4 more hours to go. We decided to skip visiting our old stomping grounds and just drive straight home.

And, after all, the not-very-old apartment of 30 years ago has been filled with probably at least a dozen other families in the meantime; the Baskin Robbins nearby is gone; the church moved to a place with more space (and there are houses there now). The apartment won't look at all the same: if not maintained it will be a dump, and if maintained most stuff will have been replaced/remodeled. I still have some shelving I built to fit under the window there.

A place may be home for a while, but you leave and then it's somebody else's turn. You can start the story over and read the beginning, or look at the pictures in a scrapbook and see where you used to live, but that's somebody else's place now.

That might seem an ironic conclusion for a trip that included history in Jamestown and Williamsburg and Monticello and Gettysburg, but Jamestown was somewhere else, Williamsburg was radically modified, and Gettysburg was then and now filled with private homes and farms. When the first colonists died, their successors revised things to suit or decided the whole business was ill-conceived and re-started elsewhere. We wanted to see one "snapshot" of a place, but that's just one snapshot of many.

I don't mind at all that the reconstruction of Jamestown isn't on the site. It makes archaeology easier, of course, but since it isn't real (the urgencies and bustle are irretrievable), being exactly there doesn't matter so much.

In fact, sometimes it is better. I'd rather have a re-enactment at Oberammergau than at Golgotha.

The place of an event can be important, but usually not enough to seize the meaning from all other uses of the place.

Sing for your supper

Focus group testing (my wife and two of my daughters) suggests that this might be better as a weekend special theme and not a permanent theme.

Inspired by hearing of colonial-era taverns (an era when everyone was supposed to be able to sing for himself if he wanted music), I wondered how features of that could be brought over into modern dining.

Consider a restaurant with basic pub food. Its target is singles less than about 30-35; definitely not families.

Patrons pay for food and drink before getting it--to make it convenient prices should round to even dollars after taxes.

The central idea is to sing together with "strangers".

• The patrons fill up tables for 6--a seventh seat to be squeezed in if a couple arrives. No new tables are used until the earlier ones are full. You would likely be seated with at least one stranger. At staff discretion, large parties might be split up between tables to mix them up.
• There is no canned music of any kind, and both players and recordings are forbidden. Patrons are expected to sing. If you sing for 2 minutes for your table, a dollar is knocked off the price of your entree--$2 if all 6 join in. Repeated songs don't count.
• Staff can veto a song (no Horst Wessel or other vile stuff please--looking for good fun).
• Patrons can play piano as long as at least 3 people sing along, or if the staff agree.
• Table singing competitions are encouraged, and prizes awarded. Outstanding performance is decided by acclaim or by staff pick. Prizes could be a bowl of house specialty snack, bubble mix and wands--whatever the market might like.

There are a few details that would need to be worked out. Enforcing rules about songs might get hard, but without something in place the restaurant might get a name as a place where, for example, women aren't comfortable.

The menu should be short or it would be too taxing for the staff to sing it out...

Heisenbird

After years of pointing too late or turning my head too late too look at plumages that don't match the book with unfamiliar and irreproducible calls, I am starting to suspect there is a Heisenberg Uncertainty about birds. If you can see them nobody else can, and if you know where they are you don't know exactly what they are.

On the road

Coffee-spew of the morning: Courier-Journal headline: "KFC revives Col Sanders"

Charleston's capitol rotunda is beautiful, and the cultural center fun. I notice that there are very few lobbyist restaurants near the capitol.

Light posting

Packing is almost done. Thanks for the advice on directions!

In the details...

First sentence of the news story:

The entire delegation, with one exception, of at least 18 Liberian artists that were due to perform at this year’s Liberian Musical Awards next month in the United States of America (USA), has been denied visas by the Consular Section at the US Embassy near Monrovia, an LMA official has said.

Sounds pretty dramatic. But the devil's in the details: last year 12 artists came to the US and 10 of them jumped their visas. Most of the candidates this year didn't have enough money to sustain themselves during the duration of the trip.

cosmic rays

This is a nice intro. It gives a clear explanation of some of the outstanding puzzles.

You might wonder why there's a requirement of 5σ (standard deviations away from the expected value) for a discovery--you don't require that sort of extreme deviation in ordinary life, right? If you flip a coin 10 times and it comes up heads every time, you wonder if the coin is doctored; that's a 1 in a thousand chance, but less than 5σ. But if you're flipping a thousand coins at once and you want to know if one is doctored, you have to flip for a long time. After all, with a thousand choices, you expect at least one to show up all heads.

It's the same way with looking at the sky. You don't know where to look for a signal, so it has to be a pretty dramatic one to rise above random fluctuations. (My advisor used to say "Prior knowledge is worth 3σ.")

Measles

Perhaps you haven't seen the story about measles' effect on the immune system. If their interpretation is correct, measles not only knocks down the immune system, but partly erases "prior knowledge" of previously beaten infections, so that you are more readily re-infected with things you should be at least partly immune to.

I wonder what it does to adults. I wonder how much the immune system destroys and how much is simply suppresses (i.e. what sorts of pathogens are hiding out in odd corners inside us).

Concentration

I had only minor musical training (my own fault--I wasn't keen on piano practice, and so I never quite got what was important about key signatures), and my memory for names of songs (names of nearly anything, actually) is exceptionally mediocre.

So when I hear something like this, I know I've heard things very much like different patterns in the piece before, but I can't place them. I think part of the problem is that I tend to just absorb music, and don't listen carefully for what each instrument is doing and listen for the composer et al's names afterwards.

I'll bet that's not the only thing I only give half an ear to in my life (so to speak). My Better Half sometimes describes things that I missed in a scene; though sometimes I see things she doesn't. When we look at the back of the house we each ignore some things and focus on others. Ideally that means we rely on each other's strengths, in practice it often means we miss beauties in front of us. Or at least I do.

What brought this on was listening to the Empire Brass tonight describe "The Art of the Fugue" and then trying to hear the various parts. I had trouble--not enough practice. Or maybe my ear never was good at distinguishing. Maybe I can blame genetics?

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While we waited in the Overture Center, across State Street people were lined up to see Marilyn Manson at the Orpheum. Except that the line would have cut across a restaurant's access to its outdoor tables, so the pillars and rope were actually halfway down the block at the corner, with a long gap to reach the theater. Young Manson fans were politely lined up behind it. (There were demonstrators marching around the Capitol at the same time.)

Tax collectors and sinners

"Why do you eat with tax collectors and sinners?"

We know Jesus' reply. But the Pharisee's question seems quite reasonable. They didn't have the whole story, of course, but it isn't crazy to question the company you keep. I can think of three ways they might be viewing this.

1. Hanging out with unrepentant sinners drains away the power of shaming to bring home to them the gravity of their offenses. If their consciences are already seared by lives of sin, what other way do you have to get through to them except social sanction? We can easily see what happens when you lose those social sanctions.
2. Hanging out with unrepentant sinners sends a confused message to third parties, especially children. Is their sin really sin or not--do you approve of it? If it's OK for him to hang out with bad companions, why can't I?
3. Hanging out with unrepentant or only-just-starting-to-repent sinners immerses you in their attitudes. That will effect you. You expose yourself to temptation, and you'd better not be too proud to admit you can be tempted. Bad companions ruin good morals.

OK, Jesus is the healer, you won't successfully tempt Him to sin, and the Pharisees were making assumptions about the whether all the other guests were repentant or not (probably not without some warrant). In any event, Jesus is a special case.

Paul's pastoral rules suggest that the problem with bad companions remains for Christians. How do we reconcile the differences between the Pharisees' rules and Jesus'?

Two things strike me; one more obvious. In the stories of the sheep and the coin, the lost was something that belonged. The parable of the prodigal is about a member of the family. These tax collectors and sinners aren't supposed to be "other", they're supposed to be part of us.

The other is that Jesus' life was evidently such that no claim of sin would stick. Our lives should be too, so that we could sit down with the greedy rich and there be no suspicion that we're looking to benefit or think it a good alternative life style. I have a hint or two about how to do this, but it looks uncomfortable. Mea culpa.

Relics

There’s something solemn in an estate sale or in wandering through the home someone left behind. Everything I look at represented time and choices in someone’s life. The choice and the investment of hours had some eternal consequences. This worn saw or travel souvenir is the relic of something that judgment day will call profound.

The promise in Isaiah 65:22 was that "My chosen ones will wear out the work of their hands." Here that didn’t happen—the woman is gone but her things remain; it is backwards. We only imagine the fears and thrills in the blood that she knew; all we have left are like ghosts of her presence.

I wonder how much of that attitude comes from a sense that the person is in some way still around? If you think the person’s spirit remains behind, it is like a haunting—and people around the world hold haunted places in awe. If you think the person’s spirit is gone but that their existence meant something that you may one day discover, these are important relics. If you think the person’s spirit is gone and you’ll never know anything more, then what remains behind is free picking.

Things are a little different if these are your ancestors. That sewing machine of your grandmother’s sewed your Halloween vampire costume; these bits and pieces are part of your history.

But if they’re not. . .

The Chinese studied the culture of their ancestors, but it isn’t obvious that they invested time in recovering the history of other people. That seems to be a Western invention. I gather that Daesh was, at least in part, trying to drive up the cost of antiquities by its sledge-hammering and bulldozing, but the Taliban was quite serious about Bamiyan. I don’t know if they’d have cared as much if the West hadn’t cared so much. We wanted to, in a sense, resurrect their ancestors, and the Taliban (and to some extent Daesh) wanted to obliterate even the memory of them, to try to destroy the dead even further.

Just a new name

Most mathematicians are platonists; they typically believe they were discovering mathematics rather than creating it. Math exists whether the mathematician finds it or not. That's been my experience, anyway, and I'm told that an overwhelming fraction of mathematicians say the same.

If I mention Plato's Forms to people they generally react along the lines of "They used to believe weird stuff back then."

But ever since Emmy Noether at least, studying symmetries and invariants has been one of the keys to theoretical physics. I recently read a take-down of the purported EM drive that relied almost entirely on the equations and the symmetries.

The equations are seen as the important thing, the fundamental thing. The individual instances of atoms aren't as important as the Form behind them. Abstractions matter more to us.

That's not obviously either good or bad. Certainly it's bad if it's wrong and the Form is central to your life (an idol).

The Go-to Representatives

We're still waiting for decisions about charges in our local "policeman kills black youth" incident. We were told there'd be two days warning.

I know a few of the local black leaders by name (used to work with one lady who died a few years ago) but I noticed that a new group kept showing up in the news stories more frequently than they did: Young Gifted and Black. They were reported as saying some rather stupid things (the prisons should release 350 black prisoners), and I wondered if they were being picked for quotes just because they were noisier and more dramatic than preachers. Then I saw a headline in The Daily Cardinal saying that violence against blacks was a queer issue. I didn't read the story (busy at the time), but thought that somebody was being pretty tasteless in trying to garner support for their pet cause at the expense of Tony Robinson's legacy.

A couple of days later I picked up The Isthmus and discovered that this wasn't an aberration: the leadership of YGaB seems to be almost as heavily into homosexual politics as into black politics.

That left me wondering how they got to be picked as spokesmen so frequently. Most of the black communities I've heard of don't invest a lot of enthusiasm in homosexual issues. The local media do, though. Do I have to wonder who decides who represents who?

Baiting

Everybody has heard about the jihadi attack on the Muhammad cartoon symposium in Texas, which unfortunately resulted in an injury to a security guard.

One reaction is: Why deliberately stir up anger with what some people consider to be blasphemy? There's merit in that, and I gather the Mayor was pretty annoyed at having trouble show up on his watch. I don't generally go out of my way to provoke people. It doesn't change any minds, and generally doesn't do anything else useful either.

Another way of looking at the conference is that it was intended to be provoking, but not principally provoking Muhammadans. I haven't heard that they are particularly plentiful in that neck of the woods. The target of provocation could easily have been the powers-that-be in the USA which are widely viewed (perhaps not by coasties) as compromising American values in deference to alien sensitivities. The obvious rejoinder is that our rulers don't have the luxury of getting angry over small things; they have to keep our allies happy in order to preserve our options and interests in the world. This is a logical claim and would be believable if there were a shred of evidence to support it.

Yet another way of looking at it is that the provocation was successful in removing two enemies and helping identify others.

How does this disturb the powerful?

The Guardian wants some science to be political:

But there is a problem, revealed most clearly in the entries for the Association of British Science Writers’ (ABSW) annual awards.

Too few of them, in every category from TV programmes to news stories, tell a tale that someone in a position of power would prefer not to see published. Plenty of good science journalism is entered, but too little of it involves controversy. And while we have a “best investigative journalism” category, the entries for it have not been as strong or as many as we would wish.

This must mean that important stories are being missed, whether they relate to the content of scientific research, the behaviour of individual scientists, or the big decisions about policy and funding that set the direction of the scientific enterprise. So we have decided to do something about it.

I am trying to figure out who is supposed to be worried about whether we can identify sources for cosmogenic neutrinos. I can imagine that some drug firms might be worried if someone found that dilute infusions of Camellia sinensis were just as good as fluoxetine for treating depression. I don't have to imagine what would happen if the president of Harvard were to suggest avenues for research into why women weren't as common as men in the top tenured research positions--the powerful did not want to see that addressed.

But grab a research journal and try to imagine who, besides their competitors, would be upset about the articles published there.

We know there are systemic problems with drug research (negative results tend not to be published). That's not a conspiracy so much as a structural bias. There are fads in research direction, and that has a way of skewing things for a while, but generally the diminishing returns force people to look elsewhere. Eventually.

Gravity

I'd noticed a headline a day or two ago about "gravity changing with time" but I was a bit too busy to have a look, so I won't afflict you with the popularization. This is the paper they were talking about.

The idea is that since the measurements of the gravitational constant G haven't all been the same, perhaps one can find that G is a function of time. The plot that tells it all is below:

The first reaction should be "Ack!" As somebody pointed out today, if you take just about any set of points you can fit them with a sinusoid if you make the frequency high enough. And, of course, the points represent measurements taken over a non-trivial length of time that may not be closely related to the publication date.

But Lorenzo Iorio decided to take the question seriously. He predicted the orbit of Saturn (no, I don't know why Saturn, maybe he had the data handy) and compared what you expect if G was constant with what you should get if G varied the way the first paper intimated. With G constant he can extrapolate from older observations and predict the position of Saturn to 0.1km. If G varied as mentioned above, the displacement would be O(100,000km). Good for him. Raspberries for JD Anderson et al.

FWIW, it isn't insane to think that G might be changing, but I'd expect an exponential or an inverse power of time, not a wiggle. "Cooper has a stream which is fifty feet wide where it flows out of a lake; it presently narrows to twenty as it meanders along for no given reason, and yet when a stream acts like that it ought to be required to explain itself."

Conferences

Conferences can be a bit humiliating. You go to learn what everybody else has done, and it usually sounds so exciting. (Not always--a couple of talks were: "We found a bug and so we don't really have anything to report right now.") And sometimes the results really are impressive. A lot of the time the results aren't very dramatic, but represent a lot of necessary hard work to support said impressive results.

One's own accomplishments tend to look inconspicuous. Two aspects of my recent work are archive and backup--neither interesting at all until something goes badly wrong. (We're twiddling our thumbs on the archive plan: not sure if the delay is a NSF vs DOE thing or lower level negotiators.)

Go to collaboration meetings for a few years in a row and the patterns emerge. The great product that will ease everybody's life actually is, but it takes quite a bit longer to get into service than they estimated. The promising approach doesn't work so well as hoped, and the noise simulation still doesn't quite match the data. But it is closer.

Talk about your inconspicuous service! Estimating the noise rates accurately is critical for a number of different low energy analyses (e.g. supernova detection), but it doesn't have the same ring on the resume as "cosmological neutrinos". It probably needs a couple more man-years of work, too.

Hezekiah

Two things I hadn’t put together before, that appear in the NASB translation of Isaiah 39:8: Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, "The word of the LORD which you have spoken is good." For he thought, "For there will be peace and truth in my days."

I’ve heard peace and prosperity linked, and peace and justice, but it hadn’t occurred to me that peace and truth need each other also. Without peace truth becomes scarce, and without truth peace won't last.

A little more Isaiah

Maybe I should elaborate a little. Isaiah opens with chapters warning the proud, the corrupt, those who abandon the Lord, those who add house to house and field to field, who enact evil laws—the luxurious. In other words, the stuff of the news stories or worse—things too common to call news.

The bumper sticker “Prosperity is my birthright” speaks for people I know. “Tomorrow will be like today, only more so.” Some of them are nice enough people, but they share the assumption that they will always be the pinnacle of civilization and knowledge and wealth. Somehow, someway there will always be money and things to buy with it, people to respect our position, and freedom to do as we please. I admit that sometimes I catch that bug too. I generally get disabused quickly when I do something stupid.

You’d think 9/11 would have been a wake-up call that our military isn’t infinitely powerful. I guess not; there seems to be a feeling that we have so much surplus capacity that we can make the first priority of the military be promoting diversity.

The proud: all around. Lewis noted that pride is one of those things we can’t stomach--in other people. Corrupt: Do I have to name names? You find it down at the local level too, where regulations get adjusted for the well-connected developer or the landowner who doesn’t want company. And so on through the list; it isn’t edifying to go into detail. ('God, I thank you that I am not like other people--robbers, evildoers, adulterers--or even like this tax collector.')

We’re confident in our uniqueness and wisdom. Every other society regulates sex, but in the West we’re so wise and noble that we don’t need to. We have such infinite resources that we can afford to subdivide every group indefinitely, declare them all oppressed, and create machinery to guard each against every nano-aggression. Remember how surprised people were back in 2008 to find that the stock market could go down as well as up?

I think at the back of everyone’s mind is a cowering realization that things can’t always go on like this, and that the fear of that end and the gap between expectations and realities feed a restless search for the next-door enemies that are somehow blocking the arrival of paradise.

Reactions

When my reading cycle reaches Matthew 25 every six weeks or so, I fear for myself. When it reaches its annual visit to Isaiah, I fear for my country.

"Give me neither poverty nor riches; Feed me with the food that is my portion, That I not be full and deny You and say, “Who is the Lord?”"

Hiring bias

A study hit the news a few days ago claiming that in STEM, if a candidate was a woman she had a 2:1 advantage over a man in the probability of being hired. The direction of bias matches what a blurbs for job openings suggest; and there seems to be pressure to overcome alleged biases by hiring more women--if various statements from university committees are anything to go by. I get no pressure--an advantage of a low-level position. I was on only one hiring committee in all the years so far at UW, and of the 5 candidates that time the winner stood out--there wasn't a lot of judgment call involved. He worked out pretty well, too.

This doesn't match the preferred narrative, which is one of Ed Yong's hobbyhorses, so he triumphantly linked to a couple of reports that refuted the study, like this one which features gems like "The researchers’ own biases lead them to believe that women and men belong to two discrete groups (making genderqueer and transgender scientists invisible).". It is quite true that the final selection is based on different criteria than the test study, but it is also true that Harvard does not interview all the applicants. Or even most. If their hiring committee tells you they read CV from all 3000 applicants for a job, remind them what happens in the 8'th circle. The pre-selection biases matter, and that is where the original study really matters.

Travel advice

I've not spent much time out east (a half day in DC, half day at Harvard, a visit to colonial Williamsburg back in '74). Right now we're puzzling about what sorts of things one could stop and see along legs of a trip from Louisville to Richmond and from Richmond to Pittsburg. (We know Madison to Louisville well enough, and Pittsburg back is a long haul without stops.) Skyline Drive looks beautiful but precipices kind of weird me out. Once in Richmond we're planning to spend a day or so in Colonial Williamsburg and maybe Jamestown, so we have that part covered.

Probably stopover in Charleston on the first leg--not sure what's around there. One suggestion for the second leg was Gettysburg.

Ideas are welcome.