A letter out of retirement

Benedict's letter seems to be causing a bit of a stir. The usual suspects hate it ("divisive!"), but there was enough fuzziness in reporting about it (*) that I decided to read it myself.

The translation isn't ideal, and there are clearly some philosophical terms in play that don't get clear explanation--I'm coming in on a conversation where I don't know all of the background, where a trial is described in terms of competing goods.

Aside from that, if the translator hasn't left things out, then I think Benedict is very tired. It reads as though sections were written separately, and some connective bits were left out. The reader can figure out what they are, if he makes the effort to understand Benedict.

He tries to remind us of one of those ugly little secrets from '68--the sexual revolution proponents were often very much ok with pedophilia. The collapse of sexual morality was dramatic. It had been in the works for a while, of course, as he mentions. Whether the antinomianism derived from the sexual greed or the other way round, or both developed together, is a point he should have tried to address--it would have tied his essay together better.

He touches on the rise of homosexual cliques which came to dominate some seminaries.

He describes the revolt against absolute truth, and links it to an abandonment of the use of "natural law." He seems to support the claim that a complete moral system can't be based exclusively on the Bible. The Bible doesn't address every single issue in that kind of detail, and a substantial amount of "common sense" is needed to deal with the rest. I admit I haven't considered the matter in that kind of detail, but it's a plausible claim.

He goes on in a long parenthesis to explain how the procedures and structures of church discipline made it difficult to convict/defrock an abuser. I don't know if the translation got in the way, or if I'm missing some important details about procedures here.

One victim of the failure to deal with abuse is the Church, in the sense of the body of the faithful who were scandalized and betrayed. Several news stories are deliberately obtuse about this point.

He wraps up with a call to focus on the Eucharist and not to think of the church as a mere political institution.

Franz Böckle, ... announced in view of the possible decisions of the encyclical Veritatis splendor that if the encyclical should determine that there were actions which were always and under all circumstances to be classified as evil, he would challenge it with all the resources at his disposal.

...

Martyrdom is a basic category of Christian existence. The fact that martyrdom is no longer morally necessary in the theory advocated by Böckle and many others shows that the very essence of Christianity is at stake here.

....

Above all, a criterion for the appointment of new bishops was now their "conciliarity," which of course could be understood to mean rather different things.

Indeed, in many parts of the Church, conciliar attitudes were understood to mean having a critical or negative attitude towards the hitherto existing tradition, which was now to be replaced by a new, radically open relationship with the world. One bishop, who had previously been seminary rector, had arranged for the seminarians to be shown pornographic films, allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behavior contrary to the faith.

There were — not only in the United States of America — individual bishops who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole and sought to bring about a kind of new, modern "Catholicity" in their dioceses. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that in not a few seminaries, students caught reading my books were considered unsuitable for the priesthood. My books were hidden away, like bad literature, and only read under the desk.

(*) Mainstream reporting about religion is always at least incomplete, and often completely wrong. It's like they're trying to report on a news story written in Chinese, by looking at the pictures.

Black hole image

Kudos to the team! I'm still reading the papers linked to here, and don't have anything to comment so far. This was a tough analysis.

They had 4 independent teams, blinded to each other's work, using different approaches, so that they could be sure they were doing it right. And, FYI, that ring you see? The light doesn't come straight. Photon paths are strongly bent around the black hole. And light coming from the side of the plasma disk that is headed our way has a huge Doppler boost compared to light from the receding side.

UPDATE: At the journal club today, Halzen said that one of the journalists at the press conference asked why the picture was so blurry. We got a good laugh out of that. If I understand correctly, this is the highest resolution image ever taken.

Information control

Satellites don't carry most of our communications between continents. Submarine cables do.

While people tend think of satellites and cell towers as the heart of the internet, the most vital component is the 380 submerged cables that carry more than 95 percent of all data and voice traffic between the continents. They were built largely by the U.S. and its allies, ensuring that (from a Western perspective, at least) they were “cleanly” installed without built-in espionage capability available to our opponents.

...

But now the Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies, the leading firm working to deliver 5G telephony networks globally, has gone to sea. Under its Huawei Marine Networks component, it is constructing or improving nearly 100 submarine cables around the world.

...

Naturally, Huawei denies any manipulation of the cable sets it is constructing, even though the U.S. and other nations say it is obligated by Chinese law to hand over network data to the government.

Bearing in mind that satellites are fragile and EMP isn't that hard to arrange (seriously, our infrastructure is horribly fragile!), what happens to communications when the cables work only at someone else's pleasure? Not to mention tapping, since the author already did.

On a related note, my wife is reading a lot about WWII as she writes a book set during the war. We didn't win because we were smarter. We won because a) we were able to read some of our enemies' secret messages and b) we were rich enough to be able to crank out lots of airplanes and tanks and warships. Without those things we wouldn't have gotten close enough to use an atomic bomb. Or been able to develop the better planes and radar-controlled artillery and other goodies. Right now I suspect our adversaries read pretty much all our secret messages (sometimes on the front page), and I'm not sure how fast we could ramp up production of our super-expensive weapons systems.

Incarnation

I don't have the skill to do justice to Jesus' Incarnation, nor even to the distant echo of it that is my own.

I'll limit myself to the shoe and the bookcase and hope I can manage those and not ramble too much.

I'm facing three large bookcases--2 of them 6' x 6'. I built them back when money was a lot tighter, and they've made several moves with us. I spent quite a bit of time measuring and drilling freehand, and learning the hard way about decorative brackets (an invention of the devil), and realizing after a few years that I had to bite the bullet and unload and varnish them.

My time and effort went into them, and if my time and effort are part of my life there's something of my life there. Ever since I made them they've been part of the background and tools of my life, and of my children's lives, and of my wife's life (sometimes to her chagrin, for I was far from an expert carpenter). Although it isn't good to be overly attached to things of this world, when we use something it leaves a mark on our lives and we leave a mark on it.

A shoe is almost silly. There's this reflection of my foot sunk into the material. If another one of those accidents at 1st and Washington takes me out, there'll still be this ghost of me in the shoe. It isn't an important thing, but it illustrates.

When our time ends, I suspect we bring into eternity what we put our selves into. Keeping the home clean is an action and not a thing; that comes with us too. My body has some trivial little quirks that don't seem important--the remaining hair keeps growing and needs to be cut now and then. Care for those trivial things is part of my life anyway. So is digging in the garden, an easy job that leaves a useful mark on the world. (but what inertia I have to overcome to do it!) So, I'm afraid, is procrastinating--and an absence of action is a very strange thing to bring into eternity.

The things we do and care for don't last in this world. The board is erased and the next boy steps up to the chalk. But I was put here to invest myself in work and people, for God. One way and another I've done that; put myself into things and people. This seems almost like a kind of incarnation of me in the things around me. I wonder what that will look like from eternity.

Opportunities for fraud

New ballot found in McFarland village president race decided by one vote.

McFarland Village staff found the unopened absentee ballot Monday morning in a bin used to store and transfer absentee ballots in last week's election and subsequent recount, Village Administrator Matthew Schuenke said.

"It was found sealed within an envelope used for absentee voting and it is not open," he said. "The contents are presently unknown, but it does appear to contain a ballot."

No. Just no. There is no clear chain of possession. Absentee ballots in general have that problem and in my not-so-humble judgment should not be widely encouraged. But this is just crazy.

At the cross

Isaac Watts' hymn "At the cross" is wonderful, but the refrain is marred by a ... um ... a lie? At best it's aspirational, or using the word "happy" in a deeply non-standard way. "At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light, And the burden of my heart rolled away, It was there by faith I received my sight, And now I am happy all the day!"(*)

The music directory's wife has Alzheimers. The pastor's wife has cancer. "Happy" just isn't the right word. It has bothered me as long as I can remember.

We can do better. Even I can do better. "And now you walk beside me every day." "And now joy in Jesus lifts each day." "; Jesus' love sustains me all my way." "And His love sustains me every day." There are lots of variations that don't mar the meaning or the meter, and that's just tweaking one line.

Maybe you've a better replacement--great!

We've seen some demi-competent attempts to make lyrics more inclusive, sometimes OK and frequently clunky. Surely we can get a grass-roots "theological" fix in place. Can I get an Amen?

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(*) I wasn't familiar with the Campmeeting refrain. It's OK, but it's kind of passive, and doesn't have the same movement as the Hudson refrain, or the rest of the song.

Ack

Sometimes you almost want to cry for the wasted opportunities.

Today was Engineering Expo day for school-kids, and I was helping chaperone. It was too cold for the IceCube T-shirt, so I didn't do a lot of IceCube PR.

The first thing the 6 under our care were curious about was a talk called "Changing the Universe." I will omit the man's name. He was a relatively slow speaker, which was a bad sign, but introduced himself as having worked on the ISS from the inside, and also on the IceCube experiment, which were good signs.

He started by introducing Ptolemy's model using an old illustrated picture that nobody could read, said things about planets going backwards, and then introduced Copernicus using a similarly old drawing and mentioned Kepler's contribution. Then he started explaining the 1/R^2 rule by describing a candle inside a sphere.

By that time 3 of the 6 kids were nodding off. We bundled them out.

Even for adults the lecture would have been slow and unclear. For 5'th graders it was awful. I later explained why the 1/R^2 rule made sense, by talking to them about lawn sprinklers, and getting more or less wet the closer or farther you were from it.

You may ask if I could have done better.

Sure!

He was using Powerpoint. That supports animations.

OK, show what people observed in the night sky. Animate it. Start with the Sun and Moon, which are nice and simple. People figured out those patterns early on, and it is easy to illustrate those with easy animations of the Moon's position against the "fixed stars." Yes, that requires a bit of animation-fu, but it isn't rocket science. I'm fairly sure there is educational software that does that sort of thing already.

Then show the planets, and how they move against the "fixed stars." That's a little trickier to animate if you want to do it right, but I assume you want to do it right. A little patter to point up "What the heck are those lights in the sky doing?" doesn't have to take very long, and you get to start out with a simple puzzle to try to catch their interest.

Illustrate Ptolemy's model with a clear animated cartoon, not a thousand-year-old illumination. Then remind them of the weird epicycle clunkiness of the model, and show them Copernicus's animated cartoon. It isn't hard to show, with a couple of lines drawn on that cartoon, that a Sun-centered model doesn't need epicycles.

Then, instead of saying that the Milky Way is made of lots of stars, show it. Zoom.

Instead of starting with 1/R^2, start with the question--how far away are these stars--and then talk about how you start with the simplest assumption: the stars are the same brightness (not true, but you have to start somewhere), and then you need a relationship between apparent brightness and distance.

You introduce the 1/R^2 relationship by talking about things from their experience. Parallax you introduce with cartoon illustrations (I've seen plenty of these), instead of the eventual trig problem. If the kids know trig they'll figure the connection out themselves, and if they don't there's no point in it. A cartoon gets the idea across just fine.

That's where we left.

I figure working up the slides to get this far would take several weeks. There's a lot of stuff to get looking right, and PowerPoint presentations always take me forever even without animations.

But afterwards even 5'th graders could walk out understanding how and why our picture of the universe has changed. You'd even have time to point out the shock a non-Earth-centered description was to naive thinking about our position in the Universe.

... Deep breath ...

On the other hand, the kids seemed to enjoy some of the other demonstrations, and making catapults, and directing robots, and making vacuum-formed plastic, and so on. Yours truly thought that making marshmallow towers would be a terribly frustrating exercise, but since you get to eat your failures I suppose it has its attractions. There was even a Candy Crusher, in which a machine used to test the strength and resilience of materials was used on different varieties of candy. "This springs right back after being squeezed, while this never does quite recover..." The reactor wasn't open this time.

GPS glitching

There's a bug in the GPS system.. April 6 is the change (a week-count rollover bug), and depending on the local receiver, the time may roll back right away, or maybe in a few weeks--it depends on the firmware. AFAIK it won't matter for consumer devices; they don't really care what time the GPS thinks it is, just where the cell phone is.(*) But that time is important for a lot of research systems.

Including IceCube. I heard a report on this last week, at which it was decided to switch from the old (the company doesn't exist anymore) receivers to the new pair of receivers. The new ones gave slightly better time resolution too, which is a plus.

The timestamp matters a great deal to IceCube, since we need to know the timing of signal pulses to nanoseconds--it matters. The GPS feeds the clock, which fans out to our detectors. To reconstruct a track using the signals from the phototubes we need to know their relative timing accurately. Most Multi-Messenger Astronomy doesn't require nanosecond timing, luckily. (In fact, different particle signals could be delayed by days wrt each other. Protons won't arrive at quite the same time as photons, and different production processes may happen at slightly different times.)

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(*) The old Honda's instrument cluster is completely out of stock, and junk yards don't have them anymore either. I could either have yanked it and tried to find and fix the intermittently broken wire, or used a cheap GPS speedometer. I went with cheap. I don't think it's going to go nuts on Saturday.

Not a panacea

My biggest takeaways from "Going off psychiatric drugs" are that

1. My intuition that using drugs for mental illness is a form of "percussive maintenance" is not that far off the mark. They're life-saving for some people, but just because A is melancholic doesn't mean A can benefit from B's meds for depression.
2. The process of stopping a medication takes a long time and can be harsh. Do-it-yourself scheduling is not a good idea.

Witch hunts

Last year there was a little flap about Strumia. I read his slides, though I haven't heard his talk. He shot himself in the foot when he insinuated that a woman with fewer citations had gotten a job he was angling for, simply because she was a woman. If he'd left that off, he'd have had a fairly bullet-proof talk--albeit clumsily done and seriously politically incorrect. Probably we'd have gotten the same "Particle for Justice" sign-up anyway, because even in physics we have a lot of PC-ism. I looked at the sign-up, and concluded that it didn't accurately reflect either Strumia's statements or reality.

Ferrets and physics

I'd heard a rumor of this story, in which a ferret was conscripted to try to clean out the FNAL accelerator beam pipe. (BTW, the usual notation these days is GeV, not BeV--for Giga-electron-Volts.)

Very free translations

The lyrics of the most common English version of Desafinado had nagged at me over the years. The singer seems pretty self-centered--and insulting as well: "what good's a heart that's slightly out of tune. Tune your heart to mine the way it used to be." The original is pretty much 180 degrees different. Don't blame me for not satisfying your perfect ear, "In the chest of those who sing out of tune, A heart is beating as well."

History notes

History is interesting, and sometimes instructive. I'm not sure whether to classify these as lessons learned, or rules to apply. "Embrace the power of and."

1. "Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved." People are screwed up everywhere.
2. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." That's a really good rule, but you can find exceptions. There are people with the integrity to handle power. I say nothing about their personal lives; some of them have been seriously unpleasant. But they managed their public responsibilities correctly. The problem for the rest of us has been that there's no way to accurately identify these people--volunteers should be instantly disqualified--and as sure as Absalom this kind of integrity isn't a hereditary trait. (Possibly this is because because their screwed-up-ness can manifest in family relationships, or possibly because noblesse oblige is wildly unpopular among the entitled.)
3. Maslow to the contrary, the most powerful human need is for self-justification. This means histories need to be read carefully. I tend to trust warts-and-all histories a little more. Sometimes. I'm not sure how far I trust Procopius.
4. The virtues and skills that successfully build a tribe or an empire aren't the same as the ones that successfully maintain it. Sometimes they militate against stability--think of Alexander the Great.
5. In a related feature, the virtues and skills needed to attain power are not at all the same as those needed to use it well, or even necessarily to hold on to it.
6. Corollary: wisdom is not needed to attain power. It might even be a liability.
7. Some people hunger and thirst for power. They make it an end in itself, and are very dangerous.
8. In dangerous times, people will put up with evil characters, provided those evil characters are on their side. They will make tradeoffs--"We'll forgive those crimes and give you X amount of land if you'll stop the invaders from killing/enslaving us." It is very easy to judge their decisions from a point of safety.
9. "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time..." A lot depends on how long you need to fool them.
10. People love magic words. By and large they don't think too hard about what they mean.
11. After a generation, nobody remembers benefits, but everybody remembers injuries. Generally the forgetfulness is faster than that.
12. Mobs are fickle. Rulers are even more so. Don't even ask about courtiers.
13. Rulers can't trust anybody. Nobody should trust them.
14. One goodie today is worth ten tomorrow.
15. Tribalism is the default setting for human relationships.
16. People are pretty much the same mix everywhere, but different cultures value wildly different things. Lots of groups have (and some still do) valued "killing non-persons and taking their stuff." As a more innocuous example, Western individualism isn't that common around the world. If you don't appreciate that, you'll never understand them.
17. Some cultures are worse than others. Even the bad ones have some virtues anyway. They wouldn't survive if they didn't. It is stupid not to recognize those.
18. History is a wonderful opportunity to look at your own culture's values.
19. What the rulers want doesn't always match what the common folk want. One famous example is the US Civil War. The leaders of the South were explicit about what they wanted. What they urged the common folk to fight for was something different.
20. Religion is extremely important. It is the center of a civilization. Rulers find some religions easier to turn to violence than others, but they usually find a way. Atheism has been even easier to manipulate.
21. In dangerous times, it is not fun to be a woman. And often in non-dangerous times too--it depends very strongly on the culture.
22. Sometimes providing an option to your enemy to let him back down and still save face works. Sometimes it doesn't.
23. UPDATE: Even slaves have to be taken into account. If there's nothing in it for them, you have to spend lots of effort to keep the oppressed oppressed.

The day the Cretaceous died

"this whole site is the KT boundary!"

An amazing find, if it pans out.

Yes, it sounds too good to be true.

Taboo breaking

Someone who posts under the name of "Sophia's Favorite," (?probably the same person) who knows a lot more about anthropology and comparative religion than I do, pointed out an interesting connection: "limit experiences" ("He went on to challenge surrealism with a kind of anti-idealism searching for what he called the impossible by breaking rules until you reached something beyond all rules.") are exactly parallel with witchcraft ("In contradistinction to "sympathetic magic," these opposite manifestations of magic may fitfully be described as "transgressive magic," because they are based on the violation of fundamental taboos. ... taboos are sometimes deliberately violated by individuals with the intention of thereby obtaining certain benefits.").

Foucault (the subject of the first quotation) wanted to break rules--break taboos--in the hope that somewhere at the end of all the broken laws would be something superior to all the laws. That it is called "experience" is telling--it is something for him or his emulators, not for the rest of us. It is something which obviously makes him superior to the law, and presumably to the rest of us as well. The classic witch wants power, and will violate any law to get it--notably including human sacrifice. (Leopard Societies are still active.)

S.F. calls Foucault a "skinwalker." We're not talking about a Stephen Schwartz witch here. More like this.

In fact, one of the sources of a witch's power is the fact that the witch refuses to recognize boundaries, and thereby terrorizes others. Still better is if the witch can persuade you that he is superior because he breaks taboos. An "unshockable" person is obviously more cosmopolitan and experienced than the rest of us, right? Or else his heart is more deadened and his conscience more seared--pick one.

I leave the application of this observation to modern arts as an exercise for the reader.

Updates for (I hope) more clarity).

Tin

Real Clear Science has a brief overview of the spread of the use of the metal tin.

The first known tin bronzes seem to have appeared in the Caucasus region of Eurasia in about 5800 to 4600 BCE. That these very scarce early examples of tin bronze may have been accidentally made from rather rare ores that naturally contained both copper and tin simultaneously.

There is abundant evidence that by about 3000 BCE, tin bronzes were being made in the Aegean and Middle East (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran) by deliberately alloying tin and copper, with the ores being obtained from separate sources.

I'm trying to imagine what the smelters/blacksmiths would have been doing.

They need surplus. If every bit of your product is in high demand, you don't have time/resources to tinker. But if you have some spare time, and your stock in trade is the (sometimes literally considered magical) transformation of rock into shiny metal, you're going to try other rocks to see what you get. Just a guess, but probably most of the tinkerers would be young men trying to prove for themselves what would work and what wouldn't. More experienced smiths would probably have developed rules of thumb about which rocks work and which don't--and the rules of thumb only worked for a subset of the ores they handled.

If you have a surplus, you can afford to "waste" a batch by mixing metals together. Maybe it will be just as good, probably it will be worse, every now and then it will be better.

But, and I'm guessing here, it doesn't seem likely that there would be a trade in rocks as such. So if you didn't have tin ore nearby, you would never try it for yourself.

One possibility is that a local smith who made stuff out of tin was given some trade copper whats-it to repair, and, not having enough copper left, filled up the lack with tin--and it worked. There was trade in copper ingots back in Greek times--that had to start somewhere.

Another is that the blacksmiths who learned to use the "joint" ore were recruited elsewhere, and finding the local ore only had part of what they needed, recruited traders to prospect around looking for the kind of rocks they thought they needed. ("Take this along with you, and if you find something that looks like it, bring back a vat's worth for me.") Once a good source was found... it was rare and valuable. "Evidence of tin trade in the Mediterranean can be seen in a number of Bronze Age shipwrecks containing tin ingots such as the Uluburun off the coast of Turkey dated 1300 BC which carried over 300 copper bars weighing 10 tons, and approximately 40 tin bars weighing 1 ton"--though that was almost a thousand years after that area had started exporting tin.

Once knowledge of tin's utility spread, it would spread faster within a civilization, but outside of a society it probably only spread by slow migration of blacksmiths who learned from blacksmiths. Especially in areas where the blacksmith was thought to be a magical person... Guessing.

It says here that copper smelting (as opposed to use of raw copper) appeared in South America circa 500-800 BC, but making tools didn't seem to be a priority and though there was a little arsenic bronze, there wasn't much bronze until about the time Cortez showed up. In North America raw copper was straightforward to come by, and smelting wasn't economical, so no sophisticated metallurgy developed. (Curiously, the Pacific NorthWest had iron--salvaged from wrecked Japanese ships.)

If most of the metal was ornamental, and the color was the most important aspect, it isn't obvious to me that the useful aspects of bronze would have been as obvious to the American smelters as it was to the Eurasian smelters.

"The slowest of the performing arts"

Plant Breeding: Prof Irwin Goldman

RR Lyrae stars

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is of globular cluster M15.

The variable stars are easy to spot in the animated gif, and there are a lot of them. Go watch it for a minute.

Michel Bacos

He was the leader, but there were 11 others to salute as well. I haven't found their names yet.

There's a bit more of the rescue story here.

For staying with the passengers and urging other crew members to do likewise instead of accepting release, Bacos was reprimanded and suspended from duty by Air France.

Reading between the lines

Overture panel on 'Miss Saigon' postponed

A panel discussion about the musical "Miss Saigon" scheduled for Overture Center at 7 p.m. Wednesday has been postponed indefinitely because of a misunderstanding among the participants about the goal of the discussion, according to a press release from the arts center.

"...It appears that we were not all on the same page as to our goals, objectives and the purpose for tonight's event," said a statement in the press release

Just an educated guess here, but I'd bet that somebody wanted to grandstand a protest, and made the mistake of tipping his hand. Or guessed that the others would feel compelled to go along anyway.

UPDATE: It looks like I was right. Overture Center worried about the bad press and is rescheduling the panel--well after the show is over. I suspect it won't have had any impact on ticket sales one way or the other.

NASA space suits

A "first" spacewalk with two women was cancelled because NASA didn't have 2 space suits available.

Never mind the desperate scratching about for newsworthy activities; think about that space suit issue. It turns out to be just a symptom.

Did you miss this story too? A space suit almost drowned an astronaut back in 2014. Once back inside the airlock, Parmitano and the other space station crewmembers found that about 1.5 liters of water filled the helmet.

The space suits are kind of old.

A 2017 NASA report on space suits

The spacesuits NASA astronauts currently use on the International Space Station (ISS or Station) – known as Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMU) – were developed more than 40 years ago and have far outlasted their original 15-year design life.

NASA continues to manage an array of design and health risks associated with the EMUs used by ISS crew. In addition, only 11 of the 18 original EMU Primary Life Support System units – a backpack-like structure that performs a variety of functions required to keep an astronaut alive during a spacewalk – are still in use, raising concerns that the inventory may not be adequate to last through the planned retirement of the ISS.

The Martian rovers lasted well past their promised lifespan (though I understand that the engineers low-balled their lifetime estimates to be on the safe side), but there were plenty of glitches along the way that needed to be fixed remotely. "Hey Dan, can you hang on to the strut for a bit while we download a firmware fix for your propulsion control unit?"

Diophantine equations are hard

There's a solution to x^3 + y^3 +z^3 =33 for x, y, z all integers. 29 is a pretty trivial target. 32 is impossible (as are "all whole numbers that leave behind a remainder of 4 or 5 when divided by 9").

"Until Booker found his solution, it was one of only two integers left below 100 (excluding the ones for which solutions definitely don’t exist) that still couldn’t be expressed as a sum of three cubes. With 33 out of the way, the only one left is 42."

What is “sufficiently interesting,” Booker explained, is that each newfound solution is “a tool for helping you decide what’s true” about the sum-of-three-cubes problem itself. That problem, stated as k = x³ + y³ + z³, is what number theorists call a Diophantine equation — a kind of algebraic structure whose properties have fascinated mathematicians for millennia. “They’re rich enough to encode [other mathematical] statements that have nothing to do with Diophantine equations,” said Browning. “They’re rich enough to simulate computers.”

Money and choice

When you don't have the money for either, there's no question of whether the cooking knife or the axe should be replaced first. I'm not thinking of the feckless poor here, but those who have so little that they can't make choices about what to do. Their only choices are how they choose to think about necessity.

If you do have the money for painting the house, you can choose whether you want to spend the next couple of decades looking at green or blue. Choices are possible, and they shape your life because you can't undo them easily. You've saved up, and finally this year you can take a big family vacation. Just the one, though. Do you want the kids to have memories of the West, or of the East, or maybe New Orleans?

If you're rich, the only choices you have to make have to do with your time. You can have somebody repaint, have one of every kind of kitchen knife just in case, visit a dozen countries in a whirlwind tour. It almost doesn't matter what choices you make, because you have the resources to undo it and make others.

Except, of course, that your time is a finite resource. Turns out money doesn't buy more time.
But it buys a lot of "looking the other way" about any vices you may indulge in.(*) "The rich man's wealth is his fortress, The ruin of the poor is their poverty."

Perhaps that's part of why Jesus wanted the rich young ruler to divest himself of his fortune. It can shield you from a lot of consequences. "The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes." The disaster comes when you believe that sort of thing yourself.

We all have to decide about time, and about our attitudes. But I suspect we are able to make a clearer choices about the rest of our life from the middle ground--not so poor as to have no choice and not so rich that choices don't matter.

"Give me neither poverty nor riches"

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(*) The rich can afford their vices, for a time anyway; the poor have no such margin for comfort. They are, in fact, endangered by the vices of the rich. I don’t simply mean that the rich man can extort his will from the poor, or wield the law as a club to keep the poor man in his place. He can do worse: He can infect the poor man with his vice, and that may be the quicker way to destroy him."

Debatable matters

Not everything is equally important. Jesus said so. See Matthew 23:23

You can roughly divide doctrines up into those that

1. Are vital to knowing God at all
2. Are important for worshipping Him properly
3. Have application to our conduct
4. Don't have any bearing on worship or application

Unfortunately there are disagreements about the divisions.

In fact, some denominations would say I am wrong, and deny that we are capable of making such distinctions. They say that we have to regard everything as important, because we don’t know what small detail may make a big difference. For example, Jesus mentioned a minor but unusual incident from David’s life to draw a conclusion about the Sabbath. Jesus also said that not even the tiniest pen-stroke of the law would be removed until all was fulfilled.

I noticed from Romans passage that Paul tried to stand things on their heads, and said that those with the most detailed regulations about eating and drinking and special days were the ones with weak faith. I suspect that he meant that we should all think of ourselves as the ones with strong faith, and therefore the ones to bend.

Not WASPs

I'd been keeping half an ear tuned to news from France, and the Yellow Jackets are getting to be kind of a big deal there. But since everything I get is from BBC, I haven't been able to de-convolute the filtering bias they use. It helps to have other sources of information, and the protests just haven't been considered very newsworthy here.

I should have been more observant--there's an interesting detail in the Wikipedia link, brought out in the article by Sara Hoyt that's getting attention now.

Friends in France tell me that the Yellow Jackets are mostly middle class and middle aged, people who never even joined in the perennial French sport of striking; people who have jobs, bills, families. My corroborative evidence for this is that the protests happen mostly on the weekend. These people are busy the rest of the time, and can’t afford to lose their jobs.

"On the weekend." That was something I should have noticed. Yes, this could become a very big deal--if there are enough middle-class left in France.

Achievement gap

I've been hearing for several years how the achievement gap in Madison between black and white students is one of the worst in the nation. What could we be doing so badly? We try hard. Very hard.

Madison schools achievement gap driven by higher-than-average white test performance.

Madison students include a larger than average number of children of professors and higher level government workers.

This was the first thing I thought of when I heard of the devastating achievement gap, but nobody seemed to have the numbers in hand.

FD-302

If the devil is in the details, what happens when the interview is summarized after the fact, and the summary relied on for the details? If you haven't read about how the FBI reports on interrogations, read the story.

Neutrino masses

I'm going to try something a little different this time, and address the report in reverse.

When I was in school I remember the math class made sure, for no apparent reason, that we knew what "COMMUTATIVE" meant. A+B=B+A That seems pretty banal. Of course A-B isn't B-A, but that difference didn't seem worth making up a new word for.

That was the fault of the textbooks. Easy exercise. Take 2 dollar bills and spread them out beside each other so George is looking at you. You will do the same 2 rotations on each one, but in a different order. Rotate the first clockwise by 90 degrees. This rotates around a vertical axis. Then pick up the far end and bring it towards you, turning the bill over in the process. This rotates around an axis that goes left-to-right.

Now take the other bill. Pick up the far end and bring it towards you, turning the bill over in the process. Then rotate it clockwise by 90 degrees.

A lot of things in life are more like those rotations than like grade-school addition--you have to get the order right. You can't put on shoes and socks and expect the same result as if you put on socks and shoes.

Most operations you can do to an object don't commute.

Suppose we have a function that describes the state of a brick. (Humor me) You can look at that function and say: "The brick is in this spot." Now suppose we have a "do-something-to-the-function" thing-a-mabob that we call an operator. The "operator" that I am thinking of right now changes the function so that the position of the brick is "over there." In the real world we call that "shifting the brick." The mathematical description involves an "operator."

That seems a little odd at first glance, but it is very handy for describing elementary particles. (You know that you can't tell one electron from another one, right? That has profound implications for descriptions.)

The model reflects the real world: operators do not always "commute." The order matters.

Some kinds of operators turn the simple function into a more complicated one: sort of like an operator that turns a function about the state of a brick into a function about the state of two half-bricks. I leave the physical interpretation of this as an exercise for the reader.

You can think of a measurement as a kind of operator that multiplies the function by some number characteristic of the thing it is describing--like the mass. Or the color. (Humor me.)

Quantum mechanics was designed to account for the observed fact that some measurements interfere with each other. You can't measure both the x-position and the x-momentum of a particle perfectly simultaneously. (Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) Quantum mechanics reflects this: the operators that measure those things do not commute. The descriptions match--I won't go into the math.(*). Quantum mechanics also relies on the observation that particles are waves.

Different forces involve different operators. So does identification; operators which measure "What kind of neutrino is this?" for example.

We've 3 kinds of free elementary charged particles: electrons, muons, and taus. (4 if you count the W-boson, which I'm not going to worry about here.) The only things that seem to be fundamentally different between them are their masses and their "identity." "Identity" is conserved, btw. A muon and antimuon together add up to 0 muon-ness. You may ask what happened to protons and the rest of the zoo--they're composed of quarks, which can't move around freely like electrons.

Neutrinos seem to match 1:1 with those 3 particle types: electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino. They partake of the same "identity" as the 3 also. An electron and an anti-electron-neutrino together have 0 electron-ness.

Here's the weird bit. You can't measure the mass and the "electron-ness" of a neutrino perfectly at the same time. With an electron, you can. With a neutrino, no.

The neutrino is created from some interaction, perhaps radioactive decay of a nucleus. That would give us an unambiguous electron neutrino. But that electron neutrino is a combination of three possible different mass states (alternatively, each mass state is a combination of electron, muon, and tau neutrino), and different masses with the same energy don't move at quite the same rates.

So what started out with unambiguous "electron-ness" will, over time, wind up having "muon-ness" and "tau-ness" too. The operators for measuring the mass don't commute with the operators for measuring the identity.

This results in what's called neutrino oscillation.

The title of The 'True' Neutrino is therefore a bit of a misnomer. Either way of looking at the neutrinos is perfectly fine--in its place. The neutrinos we interact with interact using an identity, and so will always be a blend of the mass states. But we'd really like to know what those masses are. They're small... And you'll notice that I lied up above when I said that "identity is conserved." Because the neutrinos can change, "lepton" number can change too. Just not during an interaction.

The report linked above explains a recent IceCube result in which it seems as though those unobserved mass states have their masses lining up in the expected order--though it's too soon to be sure. The community has had bounds on their size of their mass differences, but that doesn't tell you which is bigger.

---

(*) Lubos Motl is quite a bit smarter than I, but he keeps mistaking the map for the territory and describing quantum mechanics operators as fundamental. The observations are fundamental and quantum mechanics is the simplest description.

Guinea worms

I hope you consider it good news that the guinea worm is almost extinct.. It's a bright spot in the gloomy headlines--and the Carter Center was a big help.

More Baltimore, not so deadly

(I can't resist this story, sorry)

Baltimore mayor, when a senator, succeeded in selling a lot of her children's books to the University of Maryland Medical System. Google images of the contents seem rather banal. I wonder how much of the attraction was due to the office? And somehow she is also on their board of directors?

Healthy Holly

Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh’s book company has given \$7,040 in political contributions over the past three years — including a \$5,000 gift to her own campaign.

Healthy Holly LLC also gave \$1,000 through a ticket purchase to Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr.’s campaign, as well as \$1,000 to state Sen. Jill Carter. The Olszewski campaign said Tuesday it would return the money.

Pugh resigned this week from the University of Maryland Medical System’s board of directors after coming under fire for failing to fully disclose the \$500,000 business relationship she had with the system, which bought 100,000 copies of her self-published children’s book series, “Healthy Holly.”

More Healthy Holly

While school officials say they still have no documentation on the 100,000 copies of Mayor Catherine Pugh’s self-published children’s books that were reportedly donated to the school system, there was some late-breaking news on the Healthy Holly front:

“We can confirm that approximately 8,700 copies of ‘Healthy Holly: Fruits Come in Colors Like the Rainbow’ are currently located in a district warehouse,”

....

After today’s sighting of warehoused and apparently untouched books, 71,300 more still remain unaccounted for.

Business as usual, I suppose. I wonder if Baltimore has somebody like Mike Royko? He'd have had fun with the story.

UPDATE: As of 26-Mar, people are searching hard to see if they can find any more of the books. The suspicion is spreading that most were never printed.

A little more of the rest of the story in Baltimore

From RealClearInvestigations: how a more-or-less working crime reduction effort went down the toilet. I'd heard a number of early reports, this includes some followup.

Thunderstorms and cosmic rays

Noodling around to learn more from the previous post, I discovered that folks have already observed lightning triggered by cosmic ray showers. Details in the preprint here; the final paper is behind a paywall.

We already know that the electric fields in a thunderstorm can exceed 1-1.5KVolt/cm--that's why you get lightning. One electron knocked loose is accelerated in that field and knocks loose others, and others, and pretty soon you have a nice flash in the sky.

The cosmic rays we see at sea level are mostly just muons left over from more extensive showers of particles high in the atmosphere that came about when some cosmic proton or helium nucleus (or oxygen or iron or) hit a nucleus in our atmosphere. A charged particle flying though the air at high speeds is going to ionize some molecules along the way--providing the electrons needed to start a local cascade.

The experimenters looked for "Extensive Atmospheric Showers:" muons reaching the earth over a wide area and Cerencov radiation from the high altitude particles flying through the upper atmosphere but not reaching the ground. And they looked at lightning flashes, and found some coincidences. Cosmic ray showers can trigger lightning.

They also estimated the energy of the original cosmic ray for an "EAS", and looked at the energy of the radio pulse from it, and estimate that the radio pulse resulting from a cosmic ray shower going through a thunderstorm is many times larger--the thunderstorm amplified it.

FWIW, other work has suggested that the ionization trails from cosmic rays can form "seeds" for water droplets to begin forming, which could have an effect on cloud formation. There is no good reason why cosmic ray rates should be constant over the long term, and some good reasons why they should change--nearby supernovae, for example, could kick the rate way up--and presumably cloud formation rate as well. The atmosphere might be more reflective and the Earth correspondingly cooler.

Thunderstorm electric fields

The Tata Institute, using GRAPES-3 claims to have measured the electric fields in a thunderstorm to be of order 1 gigaVolt.

Their detector measures mostly positively charged antimuons, and the electric field in a thunderstorm would tend to slow them down and reduce their energy--by of order 1GeV. This would cut down the rate considerably. High energy muons would make it without trouble, but fewer of the much more numerous lower energy ones would.

This is a clever measurement.

But.

I can't read the original paper yet, but Whitehorn pointed out that in a thunderstorm there's a gigantic updraft, so the density at high altitudes (10km and more) is a lot higher than before. That slows down muons too, and would likewise reduce the rates. I'm not sure how much.

Hariharan et al could well be right. There's a puzzle--we see anti-electrons from thunderstorms. That speaks of very large energies, which means very large accelerations, which means very large potential differences, and gigaVolt differences are about right.

Trying to import wars

I have ignored Chelsea Clinton, on the grounds that politician's children should not be blamed (or praised) for their parents' policies. OTOH, she has apparently eagerly gotten involved in political punditry, so she's on her own now. And getting slimed. "The 49 people died because of the rhetoric you put out there." What was the inflamatory rhetoric? "We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-Semitism." Dweik's response: "People haven’t forgotten the Islamophobic mob she incited against @IlhanMN. There is no sense of responsibility."

So not hating Jews is supposed to encite hatred of Moslems?

I don't want Dweik's home country's wars here. She is here at our sufferance, and she might want to take that to heart.. Don't make me try to take sides in your war.

Popularity downsides

Models, like actors, can do anything, until they get too popular.

The Hungarian government bought some stock images for use in an ad campaign.

The government of Viktor Orban is bringing in a "family protection action plan", which includes tax breaks for mothers of multiple children.

Eagle-eyed Hungarians, however, noticed something familiar about the models on posters that went up in Budapest.

The poster uses a stock image featuring the "distracted boyfriend" meme star and his partner.

They are even wearing the same outfits in both images. Hilarity ensued.

Zero-tolerance rules

The Madison teachers' union claims that teachers who were disciplined for using the n-epithet were not intending to demean students.

The Madison School District's teachers union said Friday that none of six teachers who used the N-word in front of students this school year directed the slur at students or used it in a manner meant to be derogatory.

All of the teachers were removed from their positions shortly after the incidents, and all later resigned.

Writing in the Monday edition of its weekly Solidarity! newsletter, posted online Friday, Madison Teachers Inc. says "some instances have involved staff citing this word as an example of inappropriate language," while "other instances have involved staff repeating offensive comments made by students which included the word."

I gather that simply reporting a class incident may run afoul of this rule.

Ruben Anthony, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, ... declined to say whether if what the union says is true, the six teachers should have been able to keep their jobs.

I gather that school administrators aren't selected on the basis of common sense. And I'm afraid that Ruben Anthony has safely ensconced himself on my "Political-advantage is more important than truth" list.

"Time Travel" clickbait

I won't link the clickbait sites that claimed that physicists had reversed time, against the laws of physics.

A better story is here. You know that billiard balls bouncing off each other would look the same if time were reversed, but a video of a dropped egg would look exceedingly strange. The reason has to do with entropy, and the dissipation of structure.

If you take a particle whose position and momentum are known as well as they can be (Heisenberg Uncertainty forbids both being known simultaneously), and let it evolve over time, the waveform describing it will smear out over time. Is that the same thing as the dissipation of structure you get with an egg? Not really, but it looks kind of like it.

They modeled this quantum-mechanical state with quantum-mechanical q-bits.

Instead of an electron, they observed the state of a quantum computer made of two and later three basic elements called superconducting qubits.

The researchers found that in 85 percent of the cases the two-qubit quantum computer indeed returned back into the initial state. When three qubits were involved, more errors happened, resulting in a roughly 50 percent success rate. According to the authors, these errors are due to imperfections in the actual quantum computer.

Or in other words, they modeled the system with something which they were able to reverse (most of the time), just as though time were reversed. Except, of course, that time wasn't reversed, just the structure of the system.

I don't know how the rest of the community is taking this, but it doesn't seem like a surprise to me. The smearing of such a simple system seems very much like a quantum-mechanical analog of those billiards--just the sort of simple thing that could be reversible. I haven't read the paper, so I'm taking them at their word--and it sounds clever. But no, it isn't time reversal.

School discipline

Does the teacher need it, or the student, or both? There's blurry footage of the teacher and the student and a third party in a conflict in the hall, but nothing from the classroom where it started. District Attorney Ozanne isn't pressing charges: "some members of our community have coupled this information with their own experiences, drawing conclusions that are simply wrong." I only know what I read in the papers about the incident.

The mother of the girl who supposedly had braids pulled out is a special education assistant at MMSD.

"I have been in several situations where students have kicked me, spit on me, broke my ankle, and I still did not conduct myself in that kind of manner," Price said, noting that she believes Mueller-Owens lost his cool and snapped.

"Broke my ankle." I don't believe it is reasonable or right to expect teachers to endure that level of violence from students, no matter how young the students are. I suspect Price exaggerates her experiences, or minimizes her responses. But other reports tell me that many schools do have startling levels of violence, and not just in the inner cities. Teachers aren't the only targets, of course.

I'm well aware, more so than most, that some children have special needs. But when the problems reach the furniture-throwing level,(*) mainstreaming is not a good option any more. Separate classes, extremely tight discipline--maybe those will help. It should help the other students. Maybe there'd be a stigma associated with attending special schools, but there's a stigma associated with throwing furniture too.

---

(*) Not this case, but others I've heard of. I don't have details and couldn't share them if I did.

Venezuela

I hear that some are advocating military intervention.

If someone will explain what our strategic interest is, and why this would demand our boots on their ground, I'm all ears.

IIRC the Monroe Doctrine was simply that outsiders weren't allowed to intervene, not that we would.

Magnetic monopoles

Mining the CMS beam pipe for monopoles: The old section of beam pipe from the collision region in the CMS experiment (at the Large Hadron Collider) is going to be ground up and fed through superconducting loops, probably with a SQUID.

Good old Maxwell's Equations say that if you have a perfectly conducting loop and you shoot a charged particle through it, there will start to be a current in one direction, which will rise, fall, and die away as the particle passes through and away from the loop.

But if you shoot a magnetic monopole through such a loop, there will start to be a current in one direction which will rise and level off, leaving a constant current flowing through the loop where there was none before.

Nobody knows if there are magnetic monopoles. A bar magnet has North and South poles, and by no contortions can you split or twist it to get an isolated North pole. It would be nice to have some, but despite years of looking nobody has found any.

But maybe, just maybe, some heavy monopoles were made during the years of high energy particle bombardment during the first CMS run. (They didn't see any clear evidence for candidates during the analysis of their detector.)

If monopoles were heavy enough, they might have been stopped inside the 1/10 inch thick material of the beam pipe. If you grind up the material (it is toxic, btw, and was probably radioactive too) and feed it through the loops, maybe you'll see the current rise and not fall again.

That would be, if I may put it mildly, very exciting.

Picture taken from Dzhordzhadze et al. The upper plot simulates the way a current would change with an ordinary charged particle and a monopole. Arbitrary units, and without pesky background noise.

Two views of preparedness

"In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it" RAND analyst David Ochmanek said Thursday.

Smarter Every Day interviews a 4-star about multi-domain operations.

One detail from each. In the war games, "the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers." In the video, propaganda is a vital part of operations. In the first link, the complexity makes things more fragile; in the second it makes them more powerful. You pick.

Our Achilles heel in some recent conflicts seems to be an absence of clear achievable goals. Neither link deals with that problem.

Risks of the approaching spring

The thaw that makes flowers start to bloom in time to wilt in the next deep freeze may be what gardeners fear, but the former puddles are my bane.

I did the Wisconsin ice dance(*) in the parking lot this morning, and my knee has been getting steadily worse all day. I suppose I'm getting more skillful: I've never before flailed so far without falling down.

Rectification of names

The last post got me thinking about the word "racist." I've said that I didn't think the word had much meaning any more, but that isn't strictly true. Two major factions use the word differently.

One faction uses it in the classical sense of regarding other races as intrinsically unworthy of respect, an attitude generally reflected in actions to demean or exclude or impoverish the others. Among the enlightened, this is a character flaw, and 1) the person with the attitude should learn better and 2) the rest of society should discourage malicious actions. By and large, unexpressed personal attitudes are between you and God and not the business of the rest of us.

The other faction uses it largely in the sense of political systems designed to demean or exclude or impoverish those of some race. The existence of differences is taken as proof positive that such malicious systems exist. Among the enlightened, this is a social menace and 1) the rest of society must change the system(s) to eliminate the menace.

For the latter group, opposition to their changes is racist by definition. It is, using their definition, reasonable for them to say that anyone who disagrees with one of their political proposals is racist.

There is no necessary reason that such opposition should be taken to represent a character flaw. In fact, supporting some of their proposals requires a kind of willful blindness that is a character flaw.

Other word usages seem to need rectification too. "Ally" is a symmetric relationship; what is usually meant by the word is "satellite." And "woke" clearly means "fashionably angry."

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.