Portland update

I promised myself I'd check back later, and almost forgot.

In October 2017, to great fanfare, Portand announced that they'd get rid of their gang database. The database seemed to be heavily loaded with minorities, and therefore by Portland logic it had to be racist.

An audit six months later showed that the police weren't entirely gormless: they kept an informal list of who's who. The usual suspects harrumphed frowningly, of course. One difference between the old and the new was that there was a clear record of why someone went on the old list--not so much for the new one.

Police said the list is no different from fliers that narcotics enforcement officers develop identifying suspects in drug trafficking cases. It's simply a synthesis of police reports and compiled for officer safety, they said.

They distinguish it from the long-standing past practice of designating gang members, which sometimes rested on a suspect's admission of ties to a particular gang, the presence of a gang tattoo or the flashing of a gang sign in a photo.

How discriminatory can you get, that you use a lad's own admission of gang affiliation to put him in a gang-member database? Can't have that. And so he winds up on a different "suspect list" because of "mere conversations" which don't need to be recorded. Either way, everybody knows he's a gang member--probably including the usual suspects. The latter strongly remind me of "Big Tim" Sullivan, who pushed through gun control in New York to protect his street thugs from getting shot by their victims. Am I unfair? I doubt it very strongly. I read history and what I see in modern politics looks very much like ancient politics.

FWIW, homicides went up slightly in 2018 in Portland, but the increase wasn't statistically significant.

Kimchi

I'm not keen on yogurt (how can you tell when it spoils?), but apparently the same sorts of benefits can be had by eating kimchi. Don't overdo it, as the article points out--it has lots of salt and too-great an indulgence increases the risk of stomach cancer. But the magazine Health listed kimchi among the world's 5 healthiest foods. Take all such magazines with a grain of salt, of course.

It is also good to eat when you want to be alone for a while.

Head to head snake charmers

Do you recall a video game called "Snake?" It looks like it resembled an earlier arcade game called "Centipede," which I saw emulated on a terminal on a VAX. A "snake" goes back and forth across the screen, and you control it to try to achieve some goal.

Why use joysticks or keyboard arrows? Play while you play! (I never got the fingering quite right for a recorder. Piano keys are logical.)

The Three Temptations

A play for radio, by Charles Williams

CLAUDIA. Judgement. It is finished. Now all we,
all we who are here, have what we chose.
This for some of you was your last chance; now
the path is straight; now the love and the wrath
come on a straight path. Once there was a voice crying
in the wilderness, now there is only dark in the wilderness
and a dying everlastingly, a slow perishing
and less and less cherishing of comfort; at last
the stress of the glory is past; this is hell.
I am sent to say softly to anyone who hears—
you would have it; have it then; hell
is always there for the craving, and the having is easy.
For me, the peace of the sword in the heart drives me
out among other lives. Time was; time is past.
Farewell; no prophet shall ever disturb you again,
nor ever the pain of other hearts trouble you.
You wanted your own; have your own; farewell.

Walkers

Walkers started appearing in the early 1950s. The first US patent was awarded in 1953 to William Cribbes Robb.

It seems, in retrospect, like an obvious device to make. Crutches have been around nearly forever, but the idea of a light wrap-around frame is new. We could have built such things of light wood easily enough--but nobody did.

I suppose one thing that militated against their invention earlier was rutted roads and uneven ground. It helps to be able to set the gadget down and have it stay straight, so you can push down on both sides and keep your balance. We have sidewalks now. Still, even in a plowed field it would be less tiring than a pair of crutches.

Bajadasaurus

I missed hearing about this when it was first dug up. I don't know why the reconstructed spines have those ripples. One thing I'm pretty sure of--they didn't use those spines for sparring with each other--snag and tangle. Since their fronts were so spiky, I wonder what protections they had on the other end?

I love what Google translate did with the last phrase: "les épines devaient être protégées par une corne ou de la peau pour ne pas se casser." ==> "They are devaient because they are protected by a cornea or by a surgeon." (the spines were protected reinforced? by horn or skin to keep them from breaking)

Monkeys

Harry Harlow ran a famous experiment with rhesus monkeys, in which young ones were put in a cage with both a wire mesh "mother" that gave milk and a cloth "mother." The monkeys preferred to cling to the cloth mother monkey--except to eat. He drew conclusions, which are probably correct, about the need for comfort as well as food.

I have no documentation for the following story!

On my thesis experiment, the spokesman's wife had a friend (I repeat: third-hand story going on here) who had studied at UW during Harlow's work, and whose job involved cleaning his lab after hours. She thought the baby monkeys looked lonely, and she would take some of them out and cuddle them.

In my not-so-humble estimation, this wouldn't change the results significantly. But it is good to remember that experimenters don't always control the variables as tightly as they think they do.

Travel speed

The anniversary of the Concorde reminded me of arguments about it from back in the day. It got you from airport A to airport B twice as fast (provided you were flying over the ocean), but you really wanted to get from home a to meeting b, and the overhead of getting to and from and through airports (and customs) would seem to make the difference less significant.

Let's see.

• Getting to the local airport: 1/2 hour, including parking
• Getting checked in: 1/2-1 hour
• Waiting for the local flight: 1/2 -1 hour.
• Local flight to Chicago: 40 minutes
• At this point you might wonder if the bus is faster. Well: 1/2 hour to bus stop, 1/4 hour wait, 3 hour drive, 1 -1 1/2 hour checkin at Chicago. O'Hare's TSA is slower than Madison's and generally less courteous. No, unless the local plane is late, the bus is a bit slower.
• Wait for Brussels flight: 1-2 hours. Just boarding takes about 1/2 hour.
• Brussels flight: 8 hours
• Customs: varies. 1/2 - 1 hour
• Waiting for Geneva flight: 1-2 hours (you weren't planning to risk missing the next flight on a trans-Atlantic trip, were you?)
• Geneva flight: 1 1/2 hours
• Getting out of the airport and to my destination: 1 -1 1/2 hours

So about 15-18 hours, of which only 8 could have been that supersonic flight. So, joy joy! If I could have taken the Concorde, it would have only been 11-14 hours! Even with teleportation from Chicago to Brussels, it would still take 7-10 hours. It beats taking 3 months. Gotta remember to be grateful!

Now, teleportation from Madison to Geneva would be cool, and worth a premium. There are several reasons why that won't happen, so I'll sigh and pass by. Pity.

We're easily willing to invest an hour in getting to someplace interesting. An hour there, spend half the day, come back. My rule of thumb is that if I spend less time there than the trip takes, it is probably not worth it. What if everything were an hour away, though?

Sounds like old sci-fi: "Honey, let's superdrive over and see the pyramids of Egypt today!" The devil's in the details--they're all closed for the evening now; You'd have to get up at midnight to make a day of it.

Details, details. I'm not sure travel speed matters so much for long journeys anymore. The overheads are as large as the travel times. Although bullet trains would be nice. If they weren't more expensive than air travel.

Service nature

It isn’t fashionable to assert that human beings have a nature. Certainly the best circles frown on drawing the obvious conclusions about that nature from observing that we come in two sexes.

Be that as it may, suppose we take a slightly less obvious fact about our nature: we are made to serve each other. You can take a shortcut and borrow that from Christianity, or spend the time watching others and yourself to discover when people seem to be the most satisfied and joyful. It certainly seems to me to be those times when people find themselves useful and are able to help. One way of trying to make a friend in a new situation is to ask for help.

But, thanks to human cussedness, we don’t automatically learn how to be our best selves, and we’re good at doubling down on stupid.

It doesn’t seem to be quite the same when one is compelled to help—if my observations of myself and a number of children are any guide. Parents have the responsibility to compel, for a few years. The children learn, or not. In the meantime, the parents serve the children and each other—and sometimes their infirm parents at the same time.

If this is part of our nature, then it would seem that if a society wants to encourage human flourishing it should try (however incompletely) to help people make themselves useful. In an economy like ours that is usually taken to mean paying jobs.

We could naively say that an authority needs to tell people what to do to make themselves useful. You can easily find volunteers for that position, each eagerly claiming that this is the way they best serve other people. But as already noted, compulsion doesn’t encourage flourishing, and rather few of those volunteers seem plausible as servant-leaders.

Of course sometimes there needs to be compulsion—in wartime. But the habit of compulsion is hard to shake—Great Britain after World War II being a good example. The powers-that-be were addicted to managing the economy and declined to stop. The roles of master and slave are bad for both parties—even though the master may seem to have nice stuff.

We’ve got a problem with employment: higher skilled people are in demand, but there are fewer and fewer positions for low-skilled people. “Positions” aren’t the only way to serve others, but that’s the way we’ve geared things.

I can’t say what plans or policies would make it easier for people with few talents to find ways to serve. Top-down plans haven’t worked, and seem unlikely to ever work. Grassroots plans only seem to appear at very small scales, when everybody knows each other and tries to accommodate the less fortunate. And personality conflicts can wreck those plans too. Some people don’t want to cooperate—sometimes for good reasons, but usually from human cussedness.

On the other hand, a Universal Base Income not only doesn’t address the problem of finding ways for people to serve each other, it undercuts even the simplest incentives to serve.

We may not have a solution, but we can exclude some answers.

Facelessness

On BBC: "An advert designed to run on the London Underground was rejected because it contained bacon, butter, eggs and jam, an online supermarket said."

Have a look at that picture. Unless you've religious objections to pork (I'm tempted to include vegans in that category), nothing screams "unhealthy!" Just the opposite--it is a collection of foods with which to make other things. The food collection and poses of the people suggest that a home-made family dinner will soon appear.

Somebody decided that the advertisement violated a rule that "Foods found to be high in fat, sugar and salt are now not allowed to feature in advertisements on public transport." Somebody not only decided that this spread was unhealthy, somebody else had to approve it for publication.

We'll never know who. A bureaucrat.

There's good reason for protecting bureaucrats from outside pressure. If you knew who made the decisions about toy safety, you could bribe or intimidate them into going after your competitors' products. (From time to time I wonder if this does happen. The FBI hasn't proved immune to influence.)

On the other hand, some things are so egregiously stupid (I'm thinking of several school boards that got themselves in the news this last year), that some kind of unveiling or impeachment seems appropriate.

Of course such a process could be abused in its turn when something happens that the deep pocketed or well-connected don't care for.

So perhaps it is best to leave things as they are. Though the prospect of consigning the idiots (Hanlon's Razor) to a harmless post counting sand is a pleasant one.

Time wasting

Unfortunately the site seems to have lost some of its zing lately, but I ran across this today:

never wrong

opinions

snake coil

bored?

how much thought

bean juice

time passing

numbers

What am I missing?

When the top stories have to do with whether a governor appeared in blackface, and the deep significance of who got an Oscar, I suspect that somebody is blowing smoke in our eyes. There are some much more important, and much less entertaining, stories that aren't getting covered. I notice that the blackface business put the governor's dance with naked infanticide off the front page.

One example--it may be TDS or may be sleight of hand--is the Russia collusion stories. The gory details turn out to be rather dull and not terribly convincing, but the framework is kept perpetually dramatic. But go back to the basics. Russia is weaker than it was when it ran the USSR. What gives Russia the power it still has is money, and what keeps money flowing is its arms exports and fuel exports. Depressed fuel prices hit Putin hard. Fracking depresses fuel prices. Now explain to me again why Putin was going to try to get somebody elected who would significantly weaken Russia. To refresh your memory, Hillary wanted to restrict or ban fracking--higher fuel prices, stronger Russia.

Another example. Trump seems to go wild with tweets, and runs through team members like a snow blower. But at the end of the day things seem to go well enough. There's no vast centralization of control as real fascists would do. If I had a higher opinion of his skills, I'd suspect he tweets to make opponents go nuts and throw them off balance. Maybe I'm wrong about him. So far the trade negotiations haven't seemed crazy, and there's a fair chance we'll be able to get our troops out of South Korea, and maybe we can undo some of the earlier screw-ups in dealing with Syria. (There never were any "moderate" factions there. It seemed implausible from the get-go, and subsequent events proved it.)

An intellectual lightweight is getting an amazing amount of coverage for risible proposals. While we all sit around and pretend to take her seriously, what else is going on?

Never mind the magician's patter. Watch his hands.

Oscars

My memory is pretty sketchy here, but I think I watched the show once, a bit over 40 years ago. And maybe a few bits and pieces in the year or so preceding or following.

I remember no details, just my impressions. The overwhelming majority of the movies mentioned had never been on my radar or were ones I never intended to watch.

The show dragged. They spent more time congratulating each other than trying to entertain me. I gather that since that era they've spent more and more show time trying to demonstrate how socially relevant they are. And to show up in strange get-up at photo-ops disguised as parties.

The Cat in the Hat had a better plan. I'd watch that.

That little something

Basic cheese sandwich--white bread and butter and a slice of cheddar--is a "force it down for the nutrition" food for me. Separately they're fine, together blech. But... at de Gaulle airport when my flight was late and my connection long gone, I got a coupon for lunch and the only thing it would buy (without francs to supplement) was a cheese sandwich. Tiny baguette, butter, slice of cheese. It was the first time I realized that airport food could be good.

I've tried without success to duplicate sub sandwiches at home, and my attempts to duplicate the CERN cafeteria's brie and tomato sandwich were miserable failures. Something little thing was not quite right.

Not that I'm a bad cook--my (and my mother's and my wife's) red beans and rice are better than any restaurant's I've had--maybe we cook them longer and the flavors mingle better. Our lentil curry is different from but as good as the restaurant's. It's not a "sour thumb."

Several daughters can taste the mix and instantly spot the missing ingredient. I don't know the gustative language. I know the difference (usually), but not how to get there.

Defendant

I'm enjoying the book, which can be found Here or here.

Some quotes:

"There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth"

"We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circean law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to examine anything it never gets up again."

"The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists."

"The one hell which imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot scathe us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us—this is the grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom."

"The merely educated can scarcely ever be brought to believe that this world is itself an interesting place. When they look at a work of art, good or bad, they expect to be interested, but when they look at a newspaper advertisement or a group in the street, they do not, properly and literally speaking, expect to be interested."

"that feeling which should be the birthright of men—the feeling that this planet is like a new house into which we have just moved our baggage. Any detail of it has a value"

"A grocer should have a coat-of-arms worthy of his strange merchandise gathered from distant and fantastic lands; a postman should have a coat-of-arms capable of expressing the strange honour and responsibility of the man who carries men's souls in a bag; the chemist should have a coat-of-arms symbolizing something of the mysteries of the house of healing, the cavern of a merciful witchcraft."(*)

"The moment we have snapped the spell of conventional beauty, there are a million beautiful faces waiting for us everywhere, just as there are a million beautiful spirits."

"The literature of joy is infinitely more difficult, more rare and more triumphant than the black and white literature of pain."

"we all do warmly respect humility—in other people."

"The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial."

"A child has a difficulty in achieving the miracle of speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as marvellous as his accuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude towards Premiers and Chancellors of the Exchequer, if we genially encouraged their stammering and delightful attempts at human speech, we should be in a far more wise and tolerant temper."

You can easily guess the author.

---

(*) We made a coat of arms for the Better Half's birthday some years back. The motto is IVREM DILVAMVS ET OVA MISCEAMVS: Always room for one more. (I hope that's what it means, anyway: languages are not my strong suit.)

Keeping time, time, time

In the waiting room of Lord Vetinari; something to keep you off-balance:

Executive horn

When the ruler arrives, the band announces his entrance. Here we use "Hail to the Chief" performed by the Marine Band. Someplaces it is the national anthem, sometimes something else.

In Liberia, it was The Executive Horn. Gabriel Nyanti Wilson, who died this past week in an executive motorcade accident, had performed the office behind Tubman(!) and all of the leaders since then.

“This horn has message, there is a way when I blow it, people from Maryland will know the mood of the occasion. If the president is speaking during a joyous occasion, my kinsmen will understand and when someone dies and I blow it, they will also understand it is a sorrowful period,” he told FrontPageAfrica.

He said none of his three sons were interested in taking after him, calling his craft ‘old fashioned’.

“They said it’s old fashioned yet, it is the old-fashioned job sending them to school and feeding them. Since my children do not want to learn the art, I am presently training a boy from my home to take after me,” he added.

I was never at a state function, so I never heard him. Wish I had.

Language simplification and complexification

Eldest Son is interested in languages, and can tell us a lot about families of the same and how this bit or that of the language changes over time.

In almost all cases he mentions, the result has been a net simplification of the language--e.g. fewer cases.

Aside from enforced vocabulary mixing (e.g. beef/cow), can you think of instances when a language became more complex?

If not, then we have a problem.

1. Perhaps we have had a bias for observing simplifications.
   
   • Maybe linguists have been using the wrong tools to project into the past. Since these are dead languages, they have to make some assumptions.
   • Maybe languages tend to become simpler when they get recorded, either natively or when interacting with literate cultures. Pidgins do tend to have simpler structure--but the changes don't seem that dramatic.
2. If not, then we have an "expanding universe" kind of problem. Extrapolating back points to greater and greater complexity. I'm not sure how to extrapolate with any precision--it depends partly on what sorts of other cultures your test language happened to run into. The best I can do is say: "It was more complicated."
   

   The language families are different enough that you can't point back to a single ur-language--you wind up with several of them. Sort of like Babel.

Are there good examples of complexification?

Finding a need

The inventor of hot cocoa mix lives in Madison. He's 101.

Using first his five children and then elementary school students as taste-testers, Sanna perfected the recipe in his kitchen for what is now known as Swiss Miss hot cocoa mix.

Its predecessor, Brown Miss — named for a breed of cow — was similar to Swiss Miss and sold commercially to airlines and restaurants. Airline passengers and employees enjoyed it so much they would pilfer supplies because they couldn’t get it anywhere else, Sanna said.

“Business started going down because the product was quite expensive and people were taking it home,” he said, which prompted airlines to stop purchasing it. “So the sales to the airlines were falling and so we saw that as an opportunity.”

From the interview:

Did your kids like the hot cocoa mix?

Well, you kept drinking it until you didn’t like it.

...

You did a lot more throughout your career and your life. Do you have an accomplishment you’re most proud of?

The submarines that won the war practically, and building them and maintaining them.

A public benefactor.

Bang

We had an ice storm all day yesterday. Some of us were wise and some foolish--the wise ones scraped off their cars and their pre-salted sidewalks as soon as the storm let up. The temperature dropped 40 degrees (F) overnight.

Perhaps it was the sheath of ice on the roof and deck linking everything together into giant drums that amplified the sound, but in between contraction in the cold and the wind gusts, we were treated to loud bangs from the roof and the deck for half the night. (Tree branches fell silently in the driveway.) I'd not heard that sort of house-noise before.

This afternoon, the sunset over a field of ice-sheeted grass was beautiful.

Fitzgerald

Part of the crash information is available, and there's a nice description at Propublica. And some thoughts from people who know more about the Navy than I do at CDR Salamander.

A couple of other Navy Times stories here and here.

Overconfidence kills.

UPDATE: An update to the story, naming names. Yes, politics. Some national, a lot internal.

Compromises

Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about "liberty"; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man ... says, "Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education." This, clearly expressed, means, "We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children."

Chesterton, again, of course, from Heretics

I submit that one reason we don't seem to be able to compromise is because different factions don't agree on what the "good" is. The power-hungry don't help, but when the rank and file of each party think that goodness lies in radically different things, how can you satisfy everybody--or much of anybody?

As one example, it is easy to find people who think that landing an explorer on a comet is a wonderful and good thing. It turned out to be very easy to find people who thought that the important thing was to do it with a careful dress code. To create search software is a good thing--or is the good thing to attempt it with the proper mix of self-identities? (including someone who self-identifies as a dragon...)

Is the measure of the goodness of an action your subjective reaction to it?

Michener, in a scene from The Source, wrote "with different gods her husband Urbaal would have been a different man." It seems as though we worship different gods.

First things

"The very word 'superficial' is founded on a fundamental mistake about life, the idea that second thoughts are best. The superficial impression of the world is by far the deepest. What we really feel, naturally and casually, about the look of skies and trees and the face of friends, that and that alone will almost certainly remain our vital philosophy to our dying day." Twelve Types, Chesterton

Interlocking vertebrae

I had never heard of the hero shrew before tonight.

But the first known hero shrew, S. somereni, has 10 to 11 vertebrae with many more bony projections that lock together, giving it unparalleled power in the animal kingdom.

It’s so strong that, according to written accounts of DRC explorers in early 1900s, a man stood on the back of a hero shrew for five minutes, stepped off, and the animal walked away unharmed, Stanley said.

Wikipedia has a clearer picture of the spine. I have no comments beyond "Wow!" and "Why?"

Sue

I'm still trying to figure out the new Sue. Her new physique, outlined by her gastralia, looks downright chubby. And I don't quite see how the extra weight (9-10 tons vs the old estimate of 5-7) is balanced by the same old tail. Leaning forward like that seems like an invitation to faceplant in the mashed potatoes. I haven't tried to learn the biomechanics, but intuitively you'd think it would be easier to balance erect when you have so much weight above the hips.

They think the belly-bones helped with breathing. They have to be useful for something. Maybe they helped with digestion too. T-Rex wasn't the only one with such bones--diplodicus and others had them too. I'd guess if the critter got too big the extra strengtheners might be needed to keep from herniating.

Taste

A dozen years ago I asked if chefs had to consider the local flavor of the water when perfecting their recipes. I was reminded (offline) that many recipes use milk or wine, which would render the question moot.

But stock still uses water. And we all know that doesn't taste the same from place to place.

I suppose that if the local water made too big a difference in flavor (I'm thinking of water from a certain well in Picayune, Mississippi), the chef would just get water from elsewhere, and if the difference was within the margin of error the chef would just ignore it.

I'd think he could tell the difference, though.

Chesterton again

From Varied Types, Chapter 11:

He saw, that the actual crimes were not the only evils: that stolen jewels and poisoned wine and obscene pictures were merely the symptoms; that the disease was the complete dependence upon jewels and wine and pictures. ... A denunciation of harmless sports did not always mean an ignorant hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmful. Sometimes it meant an exceedingly enlightened hatred of what no one but a narrow moralist would call harmless. Ascetics are sometimes more advanced than the average man, as well as less.

and

It is strange that the most unpopular of all doctrines is the doctrine which declares the common life divine. Democracy, of which Savonarola was so fiery an exponent, is the hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so terrifies men as the decree that they are all kings. Christianity, in Savonarola’s mind, identical with democracy, is the hardest of gospels; there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as the saying that they are all the sons of God.

and

And the end of it all is the hell of no resistance, the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole nature recoils into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer merely a cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.

humanitarian to brutal

AVI has a post asking for comments about why humanitarians turn brutal in power. My comments were too long, so I'll post them instead.

He asked for comments on A Short Hop from Bleeding Heart to Mailed Fist, which presents 6 possible explanations for why humanitarian plans turn vicious.

I can think of three sources of human oppression and violence: individual and collective and accidental.

Individual is easy to understand—you know brutal and predatory people, and if you don’t you should get out more. They show up at the 1-2% level in the best environments, and much more frequently when the culture encourages them. Original sin is the one Christian doctrine you can prove from the newspaper. Or from inspecting your own heart.

Collective/tribal conflicts can congeal into laws and informal rules when one party manages to dominate. I’m thinking of India here, and not kindly. And the slightly more extreme Nuremberg Laws.

Accidental is as good a term as any to describe the side effects of compromises between tribes (We fish on our side, you fish on your side, nobody fishes in the middle—but some poor shmoe starves because nobody lets him fish in the middle during a bad season.). Alternatively, economic rules seem cruel until you look at what happens without them.

The ultimate source of all three is in the evil in each individual heart. But sometimes the connection is hard to see.

• “Bleeding hearts” often think they can solve the “accidental” easily enough—just change the rules of the system. But typically an individual doesn’t have the smarts to match the wisdom of traditional compromises, and so El Primo breaks the old system and unintended hell breaks loose. A simple example is the electoral college we use—I haven’t heard anybody’s suggested replacement that addresses the concerns that provoked the compromise in the first place. Pretty much all of them just say “Let the cities win.” Strangely enough, they are all from the cities... You can predict what the consequences would be.
  

  And plenty of B.H. seem to think that “supply and demand,” or “you can’t get something for nothing” are arbitrary rules. The results of monkeying with these are predicatably catastrophic; predictable by anybody not blinded by “empathy.”

• Collective oppression is a more promising target. At least it seems so at first, until you actually try to repeal caste laws and discover that you get violent reactions. Which, if you want to accomplish your goals, will have to be met with force. Maybe that’s best. Maybe not.
  
• Individual oppression we think we mostly agree on, but the devil is in the details: hang ‘em, rehabilitate them, lock ‘em up, try pro-active intervention (God preserve us all!)? The tools used matter, and might provoke reactions. Think about “stop and search” policies that we have now—they get quite a bit of reaction. A number of people, both of the B.H. variety and not, hold models of human behavior that are just flat wrong and are guaranteed to cause havoc if you try to implement them--but the B.H. folks are more likely to try.
  

And then the B.H. run into what I think of as Godel’s Pollitical Problem: “Every new political framework generates new problems.” The B.H. aren’t smart enough to find a perfect solution. They think they are, which is a problem and demonstrates un-wisdom as well. (A committee is usually worse.). And when the solutions don’t work, they have to fight to make the obviously holy and true solution fit despite resistance. When the world doesn’t react the way your model says it should, is that a flaw of the model? Nah, it's gotta be rebellion.

B.H. tend not to distinguish between Nuremberg Laws and accidental oppression. You can legitimately use force against some types of oppression, therefore you can use it against all types. It doesn’t help clarify matters that the power of government is force.

The article’s suggestions are

1. Politics is brutal, and the brutal wind up taking over. As the article points out, it does happen, but very often the B.H. themselves turn brutal.
2. In a wicked world, the best way to pursue good policies is with violence. It might be better to say that the only way for a government to pursue extreme changes is with force. It turns out tha the cures are usually worse than the diseases.
3. Hostile foreigners force them to be violent. On inspection, this claim generally falls apart.
4. The bleeding-heart rhetoric is propaganda, the goal is dominance. Certainly true of some people—I incline to think a majority—but others seem to actually try to help—at first.
5. Bleeding-heart rhetoric is disguised hate speech. Once again, obviously true for some B.H. Envy and hatred are problems for us all, if we’re honest, and some of us make a meal of them.
6. The policies work so poorly that only force can sustain them. Very true.
   

Neglect his case 1; it doesn’t require explanation. In a revolution, very often the most brutal rise to the top. Water is wet. Neglect his case 3; in some cases outsiders matter, but not enough to require explanation.

His cases 4 and 5 are closely related, and are quite easy to recognize in other people. The B.H. are agonized for their tribe, not everybody. I think 5 plays a major role, and 4 is lurking behind the scenes. People have mixed motives.

About 2 and 6: When the only tool you have is a hammer, and it isn’t working, use a bigger hammer. And if that doesn’t work use a bigger hammer. And if that doesn’t work, smash it into the ground with a pile driver. Because the B.H. are human too, and get as frustrated or hateful as the people they despise, especially when it starts to become clear that the B.H. were wrong. They can’t be wrong, and they have to prove it while they can.

UPDATE: The most prominent B.H. these days tend to be of the political collectivist persuasion, but Savonarola and Jim Jones also seem to have started out with a pure concern for the well-being of their fellow-man, or at least some subset of them.

Keeping warm FYI

If you are changing a battery while standing on -14F ice for an hour, while wearing regular and wool socks and "800 gram" boots, your feet get quite cold. Changing back and forth between two pairs of gloves helps your fingers, though. Don't ask me why Honda made certain design decisions, though. Nor why a certain un-named party doesn't have a decent screwdriver.

Rumor

From Arthur Machen's story The Terror

Now a censorship that is sufficiently minute and utterly remorseless can do amazing things in the way of hiding ... what it wants to hide. Before the war, one would have thought otherwise; one would have said that, censor or no censor, the fact of the murder at X or the fact of the bank robbery at Y would certainly become known; if not through the Press, at all events through rumor and the passage of the news from mouth to mouth. And this would be true—of England three hundred years ago, and of savage tribelands of to-day. But we have grown of late to such a reverence for the printed word and such a reliance on it, that the old faculty of disseminating news by word of mouth has become atrophied. Forbid the Press to mention the fact that Jones has been murdered, and it is marvelous how few people will hear of it, and of those who hear how few will credit the story that they have heard. You meet a man in the train who remarks that he has been told something about a murder in Southwark; there is all the difference in the world between the impression you receive from such a chance communication and that given by half a dozen lines of print with name, and street and date and all the facts of the case. People in trains repeat all sorts of tales, many of them false; newspapers do not print accounts of murders that have not been committed.

I can easily name people who put great trust in the newspaper and their in favorite TV news (violently disparaging the competition!). If the story wasn't hinted at in these organs, these people presume it to be fake. Rumors don't seem to take much hold on them--unless, of course, their sources report them as fact.

But rumors abound, and sometimes seem to be trusted more than any news media. You've probably heard tales of toxic jet contrails, or the anti-vac claims, or the some of the stories that circulate among poorer black communities. Suspicion of the authorities, right?

Or am I and Machen wrong? Are wild rumors and conspiracy theories just as popular among those who trust the media? And by "wild" I mean not sanctioned by hints in their favorite sources; not even mentioned. I'm generally not a very encouraging audience to that sort of thing, so I probably don't hear as much as I could.

The Old Ones. Or not.

The Scientific American has an article about long-lived microbes inside the Earth. Tuning the metabolism down to nearly nothing, a surprising quantity of living things can survive where you wouldn't expect there to be enough food. Nothing big, mind you--just microbes.

One bit that surprised me was about Lipman

Back in the late 1920s, a scientist named Charles Lipman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, began to suspect there were bacteria in rocks. Not fossil bacteria. Alive bacteria.

When placed in solutions of coal dust and sterile water, in two to three weeks he began to see what looked like bacteria.

...

Intriguingly, he found that a rehydration period of at least a few days in liquid was essential for revivification. If the crushed coal was wetted but immediately placed on food-infused gelatin-like agar in a Petri dish, nothing grew.

...

In fact, he found that heating the sample for hours at 160°C never managed to kill the bacteria inside the coal. If anything, it only seemed to encourage them. The longer they were baked – up to an incredible 50 hours – the better they seemed to grow when the coal was subsequently crushed (If his results were genuine, they may not be altogether surprising given both the conditions that create coal and the effects of heat shock proteins).

That's a pretty dramatic result, and I'd expect lots of people would check it out. But a quick googling doesn't show that anybody has reproduced his results. On the contrary:

S.K. Roy, 1937 Popular Astronomy 45:499.

Charles Lipman claimed to have found living bacteria in stony meteorites. Roy doubts this, pointing out Lipman had also "found" living bacteria in ancient terrestrial rocks and coal, but that other scientists had failed to verify this. Roy also tried to obtain living cultures from meteorites, but failed.

Did the experiments that "failed to verify this" ever get published? If not, why not? Popular Astronomy vol45 doesn't seem to be available online. I will have to see if the Astronomy library has a copy. Maybe it will have references.

The failure to reproduce ought to be as famous as the claim.

Witch hunts; can we stop them?

There were times of witch hysteria, in which an accusation meant ruin or worse. We had to read The Crucible in high school--I wonder if it is still required. Given the popularity of witch hunts now, probably not. Of course we don't use the term "witch", but the notion that subjective testimony outweighs any objective evidence is still central to convictions. Racism is a real thing, but the term gets slung around like mud. Remember the reaction to Damore's memo? Accusation=conviction, no appeal.

There's a bright spot in that link above:

Calef reports that in October 1692, a “worthy gentleman of Boston” was accused of witchcraft by a resident of Andover (the actual location of many of the “Salem” proceedings). The accused gentleman immediately responded by lodging a “thousand pound action for defamation” (a ruinous sum) and advising the accuser to get his evidence ready for trial. Not surprisingly, the gentleman’s accuser changed his mind, and shortly thereafter the accusations of witchcraft dried up altogether.

I gather that some of the Covington parents are contemplating this kind of option. Given that the reporting didn't bother with due diligence, and that there was obvious malice on the part of a number of commentators e.g. Disney producer Jack Morrissey, they might have a good case. The old saw says you shouldn't try to argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel, but I think I'll root for the underdogs.

The dangers of using averages

instead of looking at the whole histogram: The bifurcated city. The planners want "people like us--hip and affluent." I don't think this sort of "screw the peons" was deliberate (though there've been rumors that some city planners pushed blacks out of central neighborhoods intentionally); I think that large chunks of the population are just not on the planner's radar at all. That's probably one of the reasons Trump won--besides Hillary not listening to advice.

At its best, gentrification is primarily an organic process, part of the narrative of urban improvement. Its contemporary urban version, however, has too often been driven by targeted policy interventions, such as tax-increment financing, subsidized arts districts, sports stadiums, or urban-renewal projects, as in Portland, which typically depend on the exercise of eminent domain. Policies such as these can crowd out scarce public funds that could be spent more wisely elsewhere and have something to do with the high costs of housing (among other goods) that make it so hard for middle-class families to afford living in urban cores.

Bus service, critical to poor and working-class residents, has often been reduced, even as rail service, intended to serve more affluent riders, expands. (Some cities have invested in passenger rail lines in an effort to reduce auto use, but transit market share has either stagnated or declined, a fact that rarely gets mentioned in reportage.) Public infrastructure spending on rail or on urban-containment policies does succeed in driving up the price of land, increasing economic pressure on lower-income residents. Many cities have emphasized the construction of high-density housing, which is largely funded by foreign investors, who often don’t occupy their units, creating expensive housing that sits empty. Nationwide, as much as 80 percent to 90 percent of new housing product is luxury-oriented.

In my town, most new housing is lawyer-mansions. I get it that it can be more lucrative to build and sell palaces than the equivalent value of moderate-sized houses. Still, some cities tend to put their thumbs on the scale. "The average income went up!" doesn't mean a thing without the context. Zuckerberg chased everybody else out of town?

Lin Wells' memo

From April 2001. A good reminder about predictions.

UPDATE: Typo in link. What would planners have thought in 1900, 1910, etc?

Observations about political talk

Political chatter acts like crack.

When you indulge with your friends, you get a feel-good buzz as though you were actually doing something useful. You are, after all, "raising awareness," or at least just keeping each other woken, like a gaggle of night watchmen gazing into the fire.

Each bit of snark is like a dainty morsel going down into the innermost parts. It feels so good that the habit grows. More and more of your conversation involves it. You feel important—perhaps it is the only time you feel important—when you gossip your judgments on your enemies.

And you react with such shock and hatred when anyone harshes your mellow with nuance, or even—God forbid—a contradiction.

It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it

First

I read of a judge who admitted that he only paid attention to the prosecution's arguments during bench trials. He said that if he listened to the defense too, he got confused.

That seems to be pretty common elsewhere. Even though first reports are rarely complete and commonly just wrong, how many people do you know who remember the followups? First impressions trump everything.

When the matter has nothing to do with your life and you don't care, that bias seems mostly harmless. But that little weakness, exploited by the malicious, starts to loom larger when you do have to judge.

The media have reputations to uphold, and retractions that might sully their record for accuracy have always gone deep in the classifieds or the round file. We just get the first impressions faster today.

Advice

Einstein said "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." He also said something often simplified:

Found in Montana Libraries: Volumes 8-14 (1954), p. cxxx. The story is given as follows: "In the current New Mexico Library Bulletin, Elizabeth Margulis tells a story of a woman who was a personal friend of the late dean of scientists, Dr. Albert Einstein. Motivated partly by her admiration for him, she held hopes that her son might become a scientist. One day she asked Dr. Einstein's advice about the kind of reading that would best prepare the child for this career. To her surprise, the scientist recommended 'Fairy tales and more fairy tales.' The mother protested that she was really serious about this and she wanted a serious answer; but Dr. Einstein persisted, adding that creative imagination is the essential element in the intellectual equipment of the true scientist, and that fairy tales are the childhood stimulus to this quality." However, it is unclear from this description whether Margulis heard this story personally from the woman who had supposedly had this discussion with Einstein, and the relevant issue of the New Mexico Library Bulletin does not appear to be online.

Variant: "First, give him fairy tales; second, give him fairy tales, and third, give him fairy tales!" Found in The Wilson Library Bulletin, Vol. 37 from 1962, which says on p. 678 that this quote was reported by "Doris Gates, writer and children's librarian".

Be careful about taking such advice. When the grateful bird tells you how to get to the magician's castle, she may be making some automatic assumptions about how you travel. Little inconveniences like the crevasse may have escaped her notice.

Einstein was, contrary to the story about his elementary school grades, very good at math. For some of us mastery comes easily. It may not have played as great a role in his internal history as the difficulties with understanding light.

Just to get a feel for the matter, consider the papers from his Annus Mirabilis. In all of these, creativity/genius played a big role. What else would you need? How much math?

The photoelectric effect is simple and profound: light exists in chunks, with each different frequency having a different energy. In a phototube, light hits a surface with a coating of cesium or some such easily ionized atom, and knocks loose electrons that an electric field pulls away for measurement. "Einstein noted that the photoelectric effect depended on the wavelength, and hence the frequency of the light. At too low a frequency, even intense light produced no electrons. However, once a certain frequency was reached, even low intensity light produced electrons."

This is pretty easy to understand without much beyond elementary algebra. Creativity played a big role here. Score one for Einstein's Quotes.

Brownian motion isn't something you've noticed unless you spend some time looking through microscopes. Tiny particles jiggle around randomly. Einstein devised a model in which the molecules of the fluid the particles sat in bounced randomly off the sides of the speck; sometimes more on one side and sometimes more on the other. And by "devised a model" I include doing the calculations to show that this was potentially the cause of Brownian motion. That required more than just algebra--statistics and understanding limits was needed too. Score one for Oops: Solid Math Background.

On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies might give a little clue about the math required to study the matter. Maxwell's Equations use calculus and differential equations, and although the Special Theory of Relativity is easily explained using elementary algebra, getting there needed some ways of thinking about vectors that aren't entirely elementary. Score one for Oops: Solid Math Background.

E=mc^2 was explained in a separate paper working out consequences of the previous one. The math isn't terribly hairy, but it requires understanding the previous paper, so I don't think I can score this one so easily.

So: Creativity 1, Oops 2. Of course creativity alone wouldn't have gotten Einstein anywhere with the photoelectric effect unless he had some background knowledge (energy, momentum, how the experiments worked) to draw it out on. And my experience teaching freshman physics lab suggests that not everybody acquires that framework.

Feynman wrote "If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in."

Can Do

We saw The Martian a couple of days ago. Yes, I'm not up to date.

It was a feel-good movie, remembering the old can-do culture. (From all reports I've heard NASA is a pretty sclerotic bureaucracy these days.) See the movie if you haven't.

Some scenes pushed willing suspension of disbelief quite a bit, though. The outsider with the solution was too silly, his solution didn't require supercomputer access(*) (and you don't get access that way anyhow--servers are monitored and somebody trying to crack one would get some attention), and the solution wasn't a solution, as the plot eventually showed. You have to know about a vast number of moving parts in that kind of system--more than any one person can keep track of--and so you have to run it by many dozens of engineers who know what you can keep and what you can discard--and what you could discard if it weren't joined at the hip to something you need. The devil is in the details. I've worked on big experiments for years. Changes need buy-in from people who know the details. Wonderful improvements don't happen because there isn't the power, or the bandwidth, or 6mm extra room, or because somehow a little bit of epoxy got squeezed through a crack into a cooling tube.

And the mixed sex but unpaired team sent to Mars is the kind of nonsense 'new' NASA would come up with. And, despite the famous scene in Marooned, unfortunately you can't speed up work concentrated in a tiny area--when you put more people in each other's way, they work slower.

And the connectors... Ever rummaged in a box of connectors looking for the kind you need? And the Iron Man...

Never mind. Fun movie.

---

(*) Unless you are running thousands of possible configurations in parallel. And for that you need the details only the engineers know.

Who to serve

I help out with the sound and slides and lights for church services.(*)

I don't like the drum/overamped guitars/praise chorus variety of music. I don't like the style, the volume hurts my ears, and I can't hear myself sing and have no idea whether I hit the note or not.

The music grated on me each Sunday, and after a while I started to think of the band as interfering with worship—as adversaries. When I realized that I thought of them as opponents, my duty was clear.

I had to serve them.

That's when I volunteered to work with the sound team. I wound up behind the stage curtain managing the monitor board (and handling microphone batteries and matters arising). Their wishes were my commands.(**) I wore black so the congregation wouldn't notice me getting in and out of the stage-side booth.

A few years later the church reorganized the electronics, eliminating the need for a separate monitor board, and opened two other services. I started serving in one of the other venues instead.

I still don't like loud music, and think it is bad for congregational participation. But I like the people of the bands, and I have a feel what they're trying to do, and I appreciate them.

It's kind of an obvious distinction, but I'm a slow learner sometimes. And the appreciation isn't abstract, but real.

---

(*) The directors say about rehearsals that "If you're early you're on time; if you're on time you're late." The sound man has to be there even earlier.

(**) “I need a little more of me in my monitor.” “Got it.” “A little less now.” “Got it” “OK, that’s good.” The level is right back where it was before—probably the musician just needed to re-sensitize his/her ear.

Technological artwork

Hackaday sponsored a contest.. "Can you use the wires of the circuits themselves as the structure of a sculpture, and tell a story with the use and placement of every component?"

This is one of the winners.

"The circuit itself is a light-activating chirping circuit built with 7400-series logic and installed in the hollow of the bird. The sensor is in the nest, and sounds like the baby birds beckoning their parents to feed them."

Unexpected source

I missed this when BBC first published it.

I suspect my grandfather's hands shook as he took the measurements and fitted the suit of this particular German officer, who must have been pleased with the finished article as he then offered my grandfather and brother-in-law a warning: "Get out, while you still can. There's a round-up coming."

...

Dr Werner Best was a doctor of law and had an uncanny ability to bend the law in his favour. After the war he not only convinced the Danish courts to commute his death sentence to a prison sentence, but years later - when he was accused of signing the death warrants of 8,000 Poles - he managed to convince the judge that he was too sick to stand trial. The case collapsed and he lived for a further 17 years as a free man before dying of natural causes.

...
A key priority for Best, as the Third Reich's plenipotentiary in Denmark, was to maintain the flow of agricultural goods from Denmark to Germany. ... Hitler's order to make Denmark "free of Jews" - Judenrein - therefore came at a bad time for Best.

...

And when it became apparent that the primary escape route was across the Oresund, all German patrol boats on the water were ordered into harbour. They remained there for three weeks, when the bulk of the escapees were crossing to Sweden. The official explanation was that the boats needed a paint job. All of them - at the same time.

...

When the extent of the failure of the round-up became apparent, Hitler telegrammed Best ordering him to explain himself. He responded that he had done as he had been ordered - he had made Denmark Judenrein.

Maybe he thought Hitler's order was evil, or maybe simply stupid. He seems to have participated freely enough in the Nazi rise, but had qualms about scorched-earth during its fall.. People are complicated.

1 mana = 60 gin

I hope you appreciate algebra. When you look at the alternatives, what you tried to learn in high school looks almost trivial. Algebra wasn't hard; just a bit tedious.

Since India and Mesopotamia were pretty close, it isn't obvious which discovered what when, since we only have a few fragments. And a lot of the "Arabic" work was done in Mesopotamia too. But "The Precious Mirror of the Four Elements" was probably made independently.

Dance

Peasants and hunters and other folk dance.

In the West we also have a tradition of nobility dancing too--IIRC for a while dance was one of the things young nobles had to learn. I was reminded of that while listening to the New Years' Strauss concert on youtube the other evening. It might be beneath the dignity of some sufficiently august ruler to try to cut the rug, but the tradition was still there.

How about in China? You can't imagine the Emperor on the dance floor--I'd think there'd be professionals doing the dancing. Turns out that different dynasties had different ideas about that. The dances were apparently often also important rituals--though sometimes peasant dances might be reworked for the court.

Persia had court dances too, for amusement and for ceremony. And later: "The harem of Nassereddin Shah, the 4th Qajar king, hosted dance performances in which many of his eighty-four wives and a number of his daughters participated. At the time, Shiite law forbade any kind of dance, but the most powerful man in the country had the luxury of breaking religious law."

I wonder what they were like.

Ironic

The most memorable vacation times are those spent with people. Some people just click with you.

Scenes and actions are wonderful (except possibly the white-knuckle times) too, but something about those click times is amazing.

Sometimes, when driving by a town, it occurs to me that somewhere in that town are some men and women with whom we could spend a joyful few days, who we do not know and almost certainly will never meet in this life.

I wish there were a way to meet them.

Boring

Youngest Daughter is currently between jobs, and has spent quite a bit of time online. She commented to me tonight that Facebook et al get boring. There's much that's flashy, but not much substance, and no accomplishment.

The Old Order Changeth

"No, he said there's no way to stop it."

"Then our time's about up. Half a million years is a good run, though. I think we've done well with the years."

"I agree, but that's for the judge to decide," Heard answered.

"We'll finally get to see what the Hadrokkons did. If their sunset dance was anything like ours."

"Probably not. Their tails were completely different." Heard could not imagine anyone not doing a sunset dance.

Gerald asked, "The manira are cute. Are they the next in line?"

Heard replied, "He said it would be the descendents of those," and gestured with his short clawed arm at some skittering small creatures dashing from the cluster ferns to a hole in the ground.

"OK; not what I would have expected at all. Did he say anything else?"

"No, that's all we needed. We'll learn the rest when we reach the timeless ourselves."

"21 days. Where will it hit?"

"Just offshore."

"Ouch. That will make a mess."

"The whole world, he said. Time for something new."

"I hope the manira make it. I love watching them."

"Are you ready to work on the final song?"

"I should walk with Dromo for an hour first. She inspires me. I want to do this right. It's quite an honor." Gerald swung his tail to a musical fragment in his mind, and then turned to run to the grove where Dromo liked to listen to the manira. "See you tonight!" he called over his shoulder.

Spending time

Isaiah 55:1-2 says:

Ho! Every one who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.

Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, and delight yourself in abundance.

It isn't quite "without cost." It costs us time and a choice.

I have 24 hours to spend today. What will I spend them on? There may come a day when I'd give the world for 2 more hours, but it turns out I can't bank them. And in between now and then, I will have spent them all. What will I have bought with them?

Each moment has choices. Most of the time I just keep doing what I started doing a few minutes ago, but sometimes I distract myself. While I wondered what to write next, I clicked over to read some news. I didn't really learn anything, so why did I bother?

I can't bank choices either. Some choices are big (who to marry, what career to work in) and require follow-through with the lifetime of implied little choices--in fact, if I don't follow through, did I ever make that big choice to begin with? Or was I fudging? This brings to mind the whole issue of New Years' resolutions.

Most of the people I work with understand choices and promises in their professional life. You make a promise, make a choice, and that binds you to a lot of subsequent choices. Nobody wants to work with you if you don't. You don't get anything done if you don't. They mostly understand the principle in personal life, but not always or all the time. I wonder what makes it easier in one case than the other.

And why it is always so easy to choose what isn't bread.

The contemplative vs the active

AVI has an interesting post up about IQ and success.

This reminded me of an old story, as told by J.D. Suggs:

The preacher had to go across the lake to the church, and the boy rowed him across. This Sunday morning a new preacher walked down to the boat, says: "Good morning, son. Are you the one carries 'em across the lake to the church?" Boy says, "Yessa, parson." So the preacher gets in the boat. He asks, "What do you charge, son?" "Twenty-five cents a person."

So the parson gives him a quarter. Boy shoved off from the bank. Preacher says, "Sonny, you ever go to Sunday school?" Boy answers, "I hate to tell you, parson, but I never did." "Did you ever learn the Ten Commandments?" "I hate to tell you parson, but I never did." Preacher said, "Son, you lost half your life then."

Then he asks him: "Son, did you ever learn theology? Did you ever learn geography?" "No." "That's too bad, son; you lost half your life."

About that time the boy paddled on a snag up there in the lake and capsized the boat. Out went the parson. Boy, he commenced swimming off. Parson went down. When he come up the boy hollered to him, "Say, parson, you ever learn swimology?" Parson said, "No, son, I never did." "Well, parson, I hate to tell you but you lost all of your life."

New Years Note

Just a word to the wise: When you are installing a Twist-N-Set, allot plenty of time for scraping the inside of the pipe, and plenty more to slowwwllly twist that gasket up to the proper (tight) position before pushing it into place. There's a lot of friction there--so much that the notion of "tightening it in place" is a joke. Never mind what certain Youtube videos suggest.

The tiler left too small a hole in the tile to put in a normal flange, so I trimmed the Twist-N-Set flange down with the table saw. It's OK now. One closet bolt is in the original cast iron flange, and the other is a hanger bolt sunk into the beam beside the broken part of the flange. If the iron flange breaks again, we'll have to cut into the tile, but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Further Further explosion followup

Footage(*) of the gas line explosion was released.

No criminal culpability was found. The widow is suing the firms involved.

Followup to an Earlier note

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(*) I'm showing my age with the word "footage."

The debtor is the slave of the creditor

Taiwan News claims that China is

preparing to seize some major assets in the African nation of Kenya, as a result of debt-trap diplomacy.

African media reports that Kenya may soon be forced to relinquish control of its largest and most lucrative port in Mombasa to Chinese control.

Other assets related to the inland shipment of goods from the port, including the Inland Container Depot in Nairobi, and the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), may also be compromised in the event of a Chinese port takeover.

Kenya has reportedly taken extremely large loans from the Communist government for the development of some major highways, and especially for the SGR, which forms a crucial transport link to and from Nairobi for the import and export of goods through Mombasa.

Very interesting, if true. But this makes the report sound a little over the top:

The African Stand also seems to suggest that the SGR, which is operated by the Chinese, may have been designed to be a “loss-making venture.”

With a reported loss of KES 10 billion (US$98 million) in its first year of operation, it would be nearly impossible to repay the loans taken for its construction in the time requested.

Yes, the Chinese might have been hoping for defaults so they could get hold of resources. But if that were so, with Zambia (and possibly other countries) also facing defaults, I wonder if they would be underestimating resistance to collection.

We'll see if this is hardball negotiating or new colonialism. My guess is the former.

More Augustine

City of God is interesting. Apparently Livy reported that King Numa Pompilius wrote and was buried with books explaining the religious rites for Rome he had established. When these were accidentally uncovered, the Roman Senate examined them and ordered them burnt. Augustine draws his own conclusions.

I speculated long ago that polytheism grew naturally from compromise: I encountered the numinous at the river and you at the mountain, so let's have two gods. It naturally diminishes my worship of the rivergod to merely a rivergod when I have to acknowledge this mountain add-on, but we can worry along somehow. Sort of. After enough add-ons, though, the numinous doesn't matter nearly as much as the rites and the "what's in it for me."

So what happens when you merge different pantheons? You can try to equate Zeus with Jupiter, but there are these pesky differences in rites. You have an oceangod, and so do they, so maybe one is the deepoceangod and the other is the waveoceangod. Ok. Now add another pantheon, and you have to partition responsibilities even farther. Rome started as one city with its own gods, but had gotten to be a pretty big empire. I wonder how many pantheons it had absorbed in the process of trying to maintain civil peace. (just within Italy, before it became such a big player and could impose..)

Venilia, says this theology, is the wave which comes to the shore, Salacia the wave which returns into the sea.

Merry Christmas

Or, if "happy" isn't going to work this holy-days, I hope you have a joyful Christmas.

New Years' resolutions

We tried assigning each other three New Years' resolutions last year. One on my list was "write a sonnet about raising chickens." Another was to play more video games--and I've played twice as many this year as last (or 10 times, either works--I hope that counts). I bogged down on the story about a chickadee in a bowler hat, but I did get the sonnet written early on. Since it's about time to wrap things up...

They promised me an endless source of eggs
And calming gentle clucking in my yard
From happy nesters with their drumstick legs--
But not that keeping them alive is hard!
Two heatlamps for the chicks--since one must fail.
Each virus spreads like rumor through your coop.
Is 'grower feed' or 'layer' in this pail?
Does that pale eye and wattle mean the croup?
Find droppings spreading everywhere you look,
And when you didn't, tracked inside your home.
That bloody pecking wasn't in the book,
Nor just how far afield escaped birds roam.
A haze of feathers floats above the run.
A blessed fox has called the project done.

8-Jan-2018  JNB

Just a reminder

Earthquakes and undersea landslides can happen in the Gulf of Mexico too.. A map is here.

There are other hazards associated with the Gulf:

Submarine volcanoes have the ability to emit large amounts of gas into their surrounding waters. These gas emissions can happen suddenly, at any time, and are not always tied to a volcanic eruption.

If the amount of gas is large enough, it can significantly reduce the density of the water. Ships on the surface will ride lower in these waters or even sink quickly when the gas-laden waters are encountered. This hazard is one of the reasons why ships are advised to steer clear of the area around Kick ‘em Jenny when any activity is detected. Volcanic gases can also be deadly.

Kick ‘em Jenny is an unusual name for a volcano, and many people are curious about its origin. The name was once used for Diamond Island, which is a short distance away from the volcano. That name was given to the island and its surrounding ocean because the waters there can be extremely rough. After the volcano’s first known eruption in 1939, people began referring to it as “Kick ‘em Jenny” and the name stuck.

My wife's father told us of having to monitor water temperature carefully when his sub was near a Pacific volcano--if they got into hot water they could have trouble controlling their depth.

Sundays

From time to time I hear the claim that schools, and the rest of the country, went downhill after Engel in 1962--a ruling that a lot of school officials then and now take to mean that prayer is not allowed.

I don't propose to evaluate the merits of that claim--it's too big a topic. It has the attractiveness of being a clear milestone.

Slower changes, such as the spread of shopping on Sunday, don't strike one as forcibly, and can perhaps even pass unnoticed. Even so, I'd expect to hear that blamed for the decay of our culture, and I don't. Yet it was an unambiguous statement that "No god or thing may get in the way of making money," and established as the default that a worker is always available. In practice most employers make accommodations, but not always--and school sports programs quit caring about students' religious observances long ago. Office workers may have the weekend off, but not everyone is so lucky.

It seems like a small thing, but some think it very important--important enough to be a touchstone for a righteous life. A sabbath is not just a day of R&R, but a sacrifice and re-ordering of my life. A random "day off" does not have the same purpose.

Look at ourselves first.

A reminder

6 years ago I proposed hunting season for drones.

A few common-sense rules:

• An annual license is required, with fees set by the local state, and a bag limit of no more than 5/day.
• All incidental damages caused by a drone's crash or malfunction are the sole responsibility of the person who launched or was currently controlling the drone, not the hunter.
• Ownership of the remains of the drone and any contents belong to the hunter, who is responsible for cleaning away the remains.
• Shooting at military drones is forbidden, and may render the hunter liable to being shot back at in return
• Shotgun-only using birdshot inside city limits
• No hunting
  • Within 20 miles of a national boundary or nuclear power plant
  • Within 5 miles of designated drone hobbyist areas
  • Within 5 miles of airport approaches (unless expressly requested by the relevant authorities)

I haven't decided if police drones should be fair game.

Gatwick drones

Gatwick airport has been undergoing a denial of service attack by drones.

I warned about this a couple of years ago.. The airport authorities must not read this blog.

I gather that the police are worried about stray bullets, and disinclined to ask citizens to show up with shotguns. And that the army hasn't been able to trace the controller (if it has one--it might be pre-programmed).

Japanese shields

Last night one of the folks in our study said that the Japanese didn't use shields. That seemed kind of odd, but I'd never seen depictions of armored Japanese warriors with them, so it seemed plausible. Time to find out...

It seems that it is mostly true. The favorite weapons were bows and spears, which are a bit hard to use while carrying a shied. And their armor was quite good, so an armored samurai wasn't at a serious disadvantage without it. Footmen, on the other hand, did carry shields, like European archers did--something to shelter behind while reloading. BTW, some commenters contradict each other on that page.

Funerals and connectedness

AVI has some thoughts about funerals, inspired by a funeral that went sour that Althouse posted about. I gather the whole story isn't available. There are other points to think about anyway.

We say the funeral is about the mourners, not the dead. But that's not the whole story: consider what the words of the traditional rites say. Part of it is about us "Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitterness of eternal death." But part is very explictly for the dead person: "O God, who by the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ destroyed death, and brought life and immortality to light: Grant that your servant N., being raised with him, may know the strength of his presence, and rejoice in his eternal glory; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."

We're not praying to make ourselves feel good. We're asking God to take care of our dead loved one. Granted, some people don't think prayer is effectual, but they can arrange their own rites.

And what we do with the dead matters. You can holler yourself hoarse that it shouldn't matter; that the body is just the temporary housing of the soul; that the dead don't feel anything anymore. We still feel that it makes a difference.

The traditional Christian understanding of the human person is that we are body and soul--when the body dies the human person is broken, not Platonically "released." Jesus wept about this, so we needn't feel ashamed to do the same, even if we know the loved one is "absent from the body and present with the Lord." What we see before us isn't good, though good can come.

We cling to the particular. This field is where we played pirates, that ring is merely a substitute for the lost wedding ring, that person, and not a generic person is our spouse. The particular is connected to us somehow. Part of us is there--not incarnate, exactly, but really there, really connected. These things can fade, but they feel very real. A two-year-old wants his ball, not a substitute. You feel a loss when someone builds a garage over the ditch where the "pirate cave" used to be.

The particular gets meaning from those connections. Another Althouse post quotes LLosa: "At the same time, love is a private experience. If it's made public, it becomes cheap, shoddy, full of commonplaces. This is why it’s so hard to write about love in literature." In its place sex can seem holy and funny at the same time; displayed to the world is seems merely animal or even obscene. The family jokes and traditions seem empty and banal when broadcast to strangers, but the family's loves make them live. Something intangible makes a vast difference. Strict materialists have to work hard to explain it away.

We sense that the dead body is still connected to the person. The past isn't entirely past. We can't keep the body and the link is too deeply broken for us to restore the person, so we use the prayers and the burial to respectfully recognize the breakage.

A "celebration of life" ignores that breakage. It's probably harmless, but we need more.

Dictator prose

"What can we learn from dictators' literature?". Go read it.

Mao described his own propaganda department as the “Palace of the King of Hell.”

...

Striking, too, is their awe at the power of the written word. Many dictators had been transformed by books: Lenin modeled himself after a character in Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? While Stalin went by the pseudonym “Koba,” the hero of the potboiler The Patricide. In his own What is To Be Done? Lenin argued that he could use a newspaper to express his will and effectively write the revolution into existence. Once the revolutions failed to deliver, dictators attempted to overwrite reality with propaganda. A side effect of this awe was a terror of the power of wrong words, resulting in language policing and strict policies of censorship.

Under the ice

A large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland

The meltwater draining from under it carries sediments with shocked quartz. The radar shows a crater-like depression, with a rim about 300 meters high! (They predict 800m when freshly made.) Figure E is pretty evocative of what happens when a glacier erodes things.

The crater looks pretty recent. It can't be younger than about 12K years, or much older than a million or so. They guess the meteorite was about 1.5km diameter iron--or more if it had to pound through an ice sheet.

A core sample or 5 would be nice to have. And maybe a gravity scan.

Without a clear date it's hard to connect it with anything else. Nobody found any obvious ejecta from the crater in the ice, but with ice sheets advancing and retreating there might not be much left to find--especially if this was a grazing impact.

It's pretty dramatic:

Whatever remains, no matter how improbable...

Holmes' rule doesn't really work. A lot of what's "impossible" is merely unlikely. If you told me that Prime Minister May walked through Trafalgar Square naked, I would call that almost vanishingly improbable--but if she'd been doing bath salts it could happen. Even then, I'd think her aides would have taken charge of her long before she got to the square. It isn't like dividing by zero, though.

At a Sonic drive-in an 11-year-old found an ecstasy pill while unwrapping her 4-year-old brother's hamburger. It is deeply unlikely that the girl put it there herself. The restaurant manager was found with three identical pills on her person. It isn't quite impossible that the girl did sleight of hand in front of her brother and by a remarkable coincidence ... but ... no. The restaurant manager is by far the most probably source.

Was the manager careless, and just accidentally dropped it in? The rest were hidden in her clothing. That makes it unlikely, but possible, especially if she had been "guinea-pigging the product." Quick googling suggests that pills might run $10 each, and most folks would be fairly careful with such items.

Was the manager playing a nasty joke? If this were an average person off the street I'd say "unlikely," but there are people like that--I've known some, who had no notion of how serious such things are. (They were teenagers at the time, and learned better fast.) And I know of at least one person who was secretly given Rohypnol (luckily she had friends around).

Was the pill meant for a special customer? It isn't what I expect from a fast-food joint, but a fast-food establishment would make better cover for drug sales than a street corner.

The most likely explanation implies that there is a drug industry that I wasn't aware of. I should have been alerted, though. Such a clandestine emporium might explain something I observed a few years ago--nothing was obviously wrong, but the clientele didn't reflect the neighborhood. I should look more closely in the future.

Probably some of you heard about these long ago--I'm still learning.

What the machine wants

John Kass has an interesting column in the Chicago Tribune.

David Krupa, 19, who is running for 13th Ward alderman, filed 1,703 signatures of ward residents to petition to get on the ballot. Political workers went door to door with official legal papers and collected more than 2,700 affidavits of people revoking their signatures.

...

"We turned in 1,703 signatures. We compared them to the 2,796 revocations, and found only 187 matches, meaning only 187 people who signed David’s petitions filed revocations," Dorf said. "So, what about the 2,609 people who didn’t sign for David but who filed revocations? That's fraud. That's perjury. That's felony."

Kass thinks nothing will be done. He knows what it's like there.

Swapping definitions on us

Grim has a link to The Impossibility of Integralist Reform , which points out that Americans no longer share a common definition of "racism." Many of us retain the traditional definitions of "hatred for another race" or belief that one's own race is superior.

The latter definition might be disputed—does it need a second clause to the effect that this gives you the right to dominate others? After all, suppose noblesse oblige required the superior to help the inferior? I suspect the "inferior" would take exception to the evaluation, and consider the attitude to be racism no matter what.

But there's a new definition abroad, not viewed through the lens of the individual responsibility to respect and not harm your neighbor, but viewed in the framework of what the government can do to equalize outcomes.

That various governments did "frame mischief by statute" is unquestioned. (We forget how much of a victory that is!) That such rules ought, where possible, to be rescinded is also not really disputed (though how much influence ought the USA to have over the laws of Mexico? Really?)

But once the explicitly racist laws are undone, at what point does the effort to change end? They present no clear endpoint except for "equality of outcome."

To make it worse, I find no evidence that social forces are sufficient to produce this equality of outcome, or even to get arbitrarily close. The contrary is possible, as we know. The political philosophy, absent an endpoint for government intervention, is therefore defective.

This redefinition tries to bring the opprobrium that attaches to tribalism/racism to opponents of a defective political philosophy. This is dangerous. First, it poisons the discourse—you don't need to listen to obviously evil people, right? Second, it normalizes real racism by equating everyday political disagreement with hatred. I've complained about this before. We haven't seen the worst of this yet. Tribalism comes naturally. We worked hard in this country to minimize it, but it can and will come back. Our Diversity Czars won't fix things.

Eliot understood.

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good

UPDATE: To be just, although I know many whom Eliot's description fits to a T, I also know some who don't, who seem to partly regard the work as their share in trying to incarnate the Kingdom of God.

When you're young...

I remember listening to an album on which one of the songs was "Oh Mary Don't You Weep"

O Mary, don't you weep, don't you mourn
O Mary, don't you weep, don't you mourn
Pharaoh's army got drowned
O Mary, don't you weep

Some of these mornings bright and fair
Take my wings and cleave the air
Pharaoh's army got drowned
O Mary, don't you weep

When I get to heaven goin' to sing and shout
Nobody there for turn me out
Pharaoh's army got drowned
O Mary don't you weep

When I get to Heaven goin' to put on my shoes
Run about glory and tell all the news
Pharaoh's army got drowned
O Mary don't you weep

I was going to link a Youtube video of it, but there are more versions than I care to spend time listening to, and none had quite the feel of the one I remembered.

I remember being puzzled by the refrain. Did it mean that Jesus' mother should stop weeping because Pharoah's men were dead (long before she was born--and weren't they taking shelter in Egypt???), or saying that this is good news and she should not start weeping, or asking if she's sad that so many went to hell? Clues were there (made pretty explicit by other lyrics not in the short version), but I didn't make the connection of Miriam=Mary until years later. Oh yeah--a spiritual, slave days, oppressor defeated and freedom arrives--stop crying.

A number of popular hymns confused me too. "My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought!" Hmm. I thought sin was supposed to be bad? I learned the song before I could read. With a few more years to understand convoluted sentences, and finally reading the punctuation(*), I get it now.

And they weren't even trying to make things confusing!

---

(*) I often run slides for the songs at church. They generally come without any punctuation whatever. I leave to your imagination how the complex sentences read in that form, before I get ahold of them.

Galli without a cause

Among the gods the Romans worshiped was a relatively late addition: Cybele, the Great Mother. The Galli were her devotees. They castrated themselves, probably amputated the penis, and wore women's clothing. They collected alms in return for fortune-telling--or else for going away. In any case, they made their devotion to their goddess perfectly clear.

Some three hundred years ago if a young Italian boy had a good voice he might be castrated to preserve his beautiful soprano. That was brutal, but a career as a singer was more lucrative than many other available opportunities. There was a grisly point to the mutilation.

Today we have despicable hucksters hawking expensive surgery and drugs to make people into modern Galli. It makes the hucksters wealthy, but the victims have neither the honor of being dedicated to a god nor the possibility of a lucrative singing career. They become Galli in the name of finding their true selves--as though mangling yourself and drugging yourself out of your mind was ever likely to be a path to self-discovery. It's much more likely to lead to suicide, but that doesn't phase the hucksters or the fashionistas.

The fashion seems to be based on sympathetic magic--if you make a doll of something that looks like X, it becomes X. It might also remind you of the Aristotelian notion that a woman is an incomplete man--just make yourself incomplete, and presto!

We usually don't intervene in most affairs of adults, even when one party is plainly preying on the other. But they have taken to preying on children and persuading gullible parents that being a tomboy or wanting to dress like a Cavalier is a sign that the child needs to be mangled.

Be yourself..

That was the fortune in a cookie the couple at the table behind me shared. It seems curious advice without a little explanation. How would you explain it?

Be yourself:

1. What choice do you have?
2. You'd make a lousy Marilyn Monroe
3. Nobody else is qualified for the job
4. Try it, you might like it
5. Practice makes perfect
6. But move very slowly