Cool

I noticed a discussion on Althouse about California and "cool." There's an attempt to define "cool." A way I heard it described makes sense to me.

Up until age 7 to 9, you're cool automatically. You're you, and your interests are organic. When you're an adult, survival responsibilities push "cool" off the radar. The in-between adolescent years, when you and your interests are often heavily peer-shaped, is the only time you care about "cool." Of course some people never grow up...

That's a bit oversimple, since adults generally want to be accepted as much adolescents, and shape their clothing and language and political dialog accordingly. That adjustment doesn't seem to have that "fringe of stardom" aspect that "cool" does, though.

Ice XVIII

Super-compressed water seems to form a new state of matter in which the oxygen atoms form a lattice and the protons migrate around within it. That's not quite what you think of as a solid, nor what you think of as a liquid. It was proposed years ago, and appears to be verified by some new experiments. Powerful lasers blast diamond anvils, and the resulting explosion propels them into each other, compressing the bit of water in between them. Another set of lasers vaporizes iron at the side, letting the experimenters do X-ray crystallography.

Maybe Uranus and Neptune have some of this in their cores--or a mix of this and some other stuff. It might explain their weird magnetic fields.

I wonder what other bulk properties you could get?

Conjectures

Tracking down references from The Subtle Art of the Mathematical Conjecture, I ran across Art of Problem Solving, which bills itself as providing online courses ranging from "Introductory Math (Prealgebra to Geometry)" to "Advanced Math (Calculus to Olympiad Geometry)". It looks like an interesting resource: Twin Primes Conjecture, which leads to Brun's Constant (≈ 1.90216058) which might be a little heavy going for most advanced high schoolers. After the fact you can follow the proof, but coming up with it yourself would be challenging.

Anyhow, the Quanta link at the top is worth reading.

Mathematicians noodle around and find some pattern that looks interesting, and might be generally true. Then--you make a conjecture: X is true. Try to see if it is. If it is, publish. Or not, when the reviewer reminds you that it is a simple corollary of Bzirp's Theorem, published in 1905 in a Czech-language journal. (You have to know the jargon well to do a thorough literature search, and I'm not as well-versed as the pros. No, that didn't happen to me.)

Sometimes I've found my conjecture to be false, sometimes true and trivial, and most frequently I can't figure it out. The interesting conjectures are the ones that are simple, seem to be pretty easy, and take years--because the problem is really deep. Fermat's famous theorem was finally proved, but IIRC the journey there involved details about properties of elliptic curves and ran to hundreds of pages and several branches of math. I'm not sure he could have put it in the margin even with microfilm.

Swimming upstream

AVI wrote a series of posts exploring the essay "Who goes Nazi": here, continued, and
the original Harper's article. (alternative link) The thesis of the original article was that certain temperments and life-styles were especially susceptible to the appeal of a tribal and dictatorial philosophy. I use the word "tribal" rather than racist to generalize the claim. AVI noted that many of the "expected resisters" had already resisted groupthink in small ways.

We could distinguish the early embracers from the go-alongs. From You Call This Living?: "Comrade, I heard that you are a Christian" "A believer, but not practicing." "But you are a party member?" "Practicing, but not a believer."

If "everybody" else is doing it, well, "it is not good for man to be alone" and we're made for community--we're apt to adjust ourselves to that community. In the short term this can happen pretty quickly if your job prospects depend on not noticing that there are 2 sexes, or on not noticing that the Party can make mistakes. The next generation grows up with a new normal.

I spent my junior year bused to Little Rock Central High School. An experimental class on film-making called Project Tiger wrote and produced a movie on the famous integration of LRCHS in '57. I applied and got in on the script-writing team. We went through the archives, and were duly horrified at the racist calling cards and speeches; but we also watched some footage of protestors and I had a little epiphany of sorts. The folks I was watching were no better, and no worse, than the folks I saw on the streets outside. The only real difference was what sorts of evils were fashionable and accepted. Overt racism of that '57 sort (from whites anyway) was almost unthinkable in '72. But in '57 it was almost unremarkable in that town.

Were they hard-core racists? That depends on what you mean. They acted the part quite well, and got angry at the appropriate moments, and said the correct vile things. But some of those same people were alive in '72. I never tried to find and question any of them, which probably showed uncharacteristic wisdom on my part. But given how widespread the protests were, I undoubtedly knew some people who had supported the protesters. I'd bet that if pressed they would say that those were different times and they know better now. "Different times" = "different fashions" If you worked hard enough, and earned their trust, you would find a few that would say things in private that they wouldn't say in public. But most, unless I completely misunderstood the people I knew, wouldn't say such things even in private. (Some say that American society is and always has been irredeemably racist. Either they never learned what actually happened then, or they live in an echo chamber today--or they are lying for advantage.)

Could those attitudes come back? Sure. Similarly tribal attitudes are deeply entrenched in academia--not on the basis of skin color, but just as "othering" and angry. I've heard quite a bit of venom attached to the phrase "red-neck." Anything can happen. Who resists those attitudes? That's like the "Who Goes Nazi" question, but harder--since it isn't just a matter of rejecting the blandishments of a rising power. It's trying to swim upstream; the ideology is already in power.

It is harder than it seems to think outside the Zeitgeist. Orwell wasn't entirely right, but it is hard to think different thoughts when the language categories don't make it convenient. Suppose the category of "rights" wasn't part of the way people talked. "Duties" and "traditions" and "appropriate" and "outsider" and "family" and "clan" and "ruler" and "subject" ... how do you talk about "human rights" in that environment? If we're cut off from the thoughts of the past, we're especially vulnerable. And if we're cut off from God...

"The modern boy might think he too would stand nobly aloof from a degraded age as Columbus set out from Palos, refusing to participate in the expulsion of Jews, or going along with the Spanish version of the Inquisition, or watching slaves be sold in the market. But he would. Nearly all of us would, or would put up with it." America is claimed to be a Christian nation, but I don't think it would take twenty years for a shift to Chinese or Henry VIII-type state-approved churches to become the norm, and the members thereof be ready to complacently watch the punishment or even execution of the orthodox Christians. I'm not predicting this, but it is possible, and my point is that I judge that the change could happen very quickly. So could civil war, or a number of other bad things. But good changes can happen too. The Spirit of the Age has an opponent.

Other info: dutch and obit

If it's broke but it doesn't matter

The collaboration week (longer than a week if you include the pre-meetings) is finally over--perhaps now the lustre filesystem will quit wedging. I spent some good sleep time trying to get it back after the evening crashes, and our expert spent a fair bit of morning time on the morning crashes (and my typo). The talks were interesting, and so were the discussions offline--and the rule about experiments being believed by everybody except the experimenter is apt.

One researcher found a problem with how we unpack the waveform from the raw data. It's a real bug, and could conceivably have a detectable impact on low energy analysis and on analysis of events with very many signals. We have been gearing up to re-process all of our data and put the fix into the software running at the Pole.

Except: it doesn't seem to have any impact on any of the analyses! They look the same with and without the fix. We haven't heard from the low energy folks yet--they should have the answer next week. Or maybe later, thanks to the filesystem crashes. I suspect that we won't be implementing the fix anytime soon, and certainly not reprocessing the raw data. Not until the next big bug is found--provided that bug actually makes a difference. Then we'll lump all the fixes together.

---

FWIW, lustre is free (except for our time), and the rest of the pack is either not quite what we need, less mature, or eye-wateringly expensive.

Life's little joys

This evening while my son-in-law and I were talking outside beside the garden where we had been putting up a hardware cloth garden fence, a rabbit attempted to jump through the fence and bounced off. It took a while to stop laughing.

DOM

Off to the Smithsonian: one of our optical sensors will go on display at the Smithsonian--but probably won't see the public until 2026. That's probably appropriate, nobody is going to see the bulk of the installed DOMs for millennia--when the glacier reaches the ocean.

The article does have a howler: "The sensors, about \$5,500 each, must weather the extreme cold and pressure of the frozen tundra." No, the South Pole is a glacier; no tundra anywhere nearby. Over a mile of ice, yes--that's a lot of pressure.

The next stage of research for IceCube is burying more sensors to increase tenfold the amount of space able to be detected, according to IceCube lead investigator Francis Halzen.

The project, which will begin sometime after 2022, is called Gentoo, a nod to a penguin species living on Antarctica.

“That’s as close as physicists get to a sense of humor,” Halzen joked.

In case you missed it, Generation-2 = Gen-2 = gentoo

BTW, the next stage isn't Gentoo, but an upgrade project that is a proof of principle--a few more strings with different types of sensors.
The schedule is going to be very tight. Some systems are supposed to be ready by next March, but funds to start ordering boards haven't been released by NSF yet. Some people are going to be very very busy in the next few weeks.

Interest in science

The key is not to point out all of the women in science and say "You can do that too."

The key is to lead them to forget themselves and think "Wow! What is this?"

Spring cleaning

"Crap is the stuff you throw away. Stuff is the crap you keep."

Stuff is also known as "inventory." I have a lumber inventory. And...

Dean P

Alice pushed her unruly hair back nervously. In three years she had been called to the Head Mistress twice. That was bad enough. The Dean’s office was terrifying. She shifted on the hard bench and stared at the framed parchment with fancy Latin script. It was better than staring at the forbidding oak door.

She could make out a word here and there of the energetic conversation on the other side of the door, mostly from the sharp voice of her teacher. Her heart started beating faster when the talking stopped. She was about to be summoned. Alice thought about opening the door behind her and running down the hall and away, but she knew she had no place to go.

The door opened. “Send her in. You may leave.” Alice had never heard the Dean before, and her voice made Alice shiver.

“I should be here to explain the symptoms,” objected Dr. Franklin.

“I will not require explanations,” the icy voice said. “Send her in alone.”

Dr. Franklin gave in and left. He held the door for Mistress Coldwell and Alice’s teacher Mistress Beringer. Her teacher stopped halfway through the door and gently lifted Alice’s elbow. “Go on in now.”

Alice stood and her three accusers left. The outer door closed. She could hear the three waiting outside in the hall. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and walked slowly into the inner office.

“Close the door behind you and sit down,” the Dean commanded.

As she turned to close the door Alice got her first look at the wall and its rows and rows of books; books with grim titles like Economic Influences on Transmission and colorful books like Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Tales from the Cloud-Walking Country.

Without thinking she moved closer to the bookcase.

The voice behind her shocked her back to her predicament. “Ahem!” It didn’t sound quite as stern as before, but perhaps that was wishful thinking. Alice quickly closed the door. It shut with an ominous click. She sat in the furthest chair, smoothed out her mud-stained skirt, and finally dared to look at Dean P.

The Dean seemed taller in person. She wore a dark green suit and her just-turning-grey hair was pinned in a tight bun. She looked like Alice imagined a judge should look.

“Tell me what happened.” She had a folder open on the desk in front of her, and a sharp pencil in her hand. The harsh glare of the dry spring’s sun stretched across her desk like a barrier of fire.

“Must I?” Alice begged.

“Yes.”

“Do you know the cave in the steep side of the hill?”

“Yes.”

“I went in there to hide and then it wasn’t a cave anymore.” Alice went on to tell about the lake and the elves and the dark cloud and the wind-walkers. She stared in the Dean’s analyzing eyes, looking for signs of sympathy. She grew excited during the telling, almost forgetting her situation.

The pencil snapped, and Alice, startled, looked at the Dean’s clenched hands. The Dean eyed the ruined pencil and threw the relic in the waste bin.

The Dean leaned forward. The sunlight lit her face and the pins in her bun shone like gems. “Do you have family nearby?”

“I’ve an uncle in Hampshire.”

“That’s right; you’re an orphan,” she replied slowly. “So was I. I was older than you, but it was still hard—and I lost my brothers and sister too.” She considered a moment.

It had never occurred to Alice that the Dean had parents, or had ever been young. She tried to imagine the Dean as a third year.

The Dean went on, “Do you have a friend you can trust?”

“Jenny is my best friend.”

“Will Jenny believe you if you tell her your story?”

“Maybe.” Alice paused. “I think so.”

“Jennifer Hopkind is a sound child. Tell her. And tell no-one else.”

“Am I in trouble, then?”

“Not the kind you are thinking of. For now, go to class, tell Jennifer, and always …”

“Always Do Right,” they recited the school motto together. Alice had the sudden sense that that might sometimes be harder than she dreamed.

“You may go now, child.” Alice jumped to her feet to leave, and to take one more look at those fascinating books.

As Alice opened the door, the Dean said “One more thing.”

“Yes, m’am?”

“If Jenny does not believe you, send her to me.” The Dean’s regal smile went with Alice, but Alice thought she heard “Too old, too old,” muttered behind the closing door.

Relationship with God

It hadn't occurred to me until this morning at church, talking to a ring-shy gentleman, that the phrase might not have an altogether benign note to those of us for whom "relationship" is an "uh-oh" word. Popular mythology assumes that most of those are men. I can't say for sure--most of the men I talk to who use the word use it in a scientific or engineering sense.

Of course salesmen lunch with customers, so they can learn to trust each other. "Networking" and "cultivating contacts" is all about relationships. If Bill Gates called and explained that he was your long-estranged uncle and wanted to come to your birthday party next week--voila, another relationship. And if I could call the President and have him take my call that's another relationship. All are microscopic reflections of our relationship with God, and perhaps a little easier to handle than the "We need to talk about our relationship."

Purgatorio

The birthday cake I decorated with more enthusiasm than skill for mother, which I dropped into the sofa when I ran to show her--that was there. So was the time I turned to talk to Ben in the back seat and blew the stop sign and ruined Maggie's leg. And the time my great-grandson threw up on his date after getting tequila-drunk the way his grandad used to--who had learned it from me. It was all there.

I could see all of history, from the beginning to the ending, including all of my part in it. Much was horrid, some redeemed. I was eternally grateful to be part of the latter.

"I never knew the ripples from my choices could spread so far. She was tricked 140 years after I died!"

"I made you all to be connected to each other."

"I caused so much pain." I would say I thought a minute, but time didn't work the same anymore. "Can I take their pain back, make it fall on me instead?"

"Are you asking to help me wipe every tear from their eyes and make all things new?"

"Yes!"

I could feel that he was proud of me as he said "Be strong. Take my hand."

Snakes in high office

Are you sufficiently grateful that you don't live in the tropics?

UPDATE: He is back in his office in Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The presidential office was damaged in a fire in the Executive Mansion back in 2007.

Eyes

Driving back tonight with my eyes on the road and the sillouette of the steering wheel before me, the lights of the instrument clusters seemed to be dancing around. My first thought was: oh, crud--are my eyes starting to get old and lose their muscle speed?

I figured it out eventually--the instrument cluster was dancing around, as was the rest of the car--but the seat cushioning meant that I wasn't getting bounced as much, and since I was focussing on the distant road, my eyes weren't trying to follow the dancing instrument lights. Not going blind yet.

Car seat cushioning is a wonderful thing that we often take for granted.

Recycling

Large physics experiments are expensive. But if you find a "gold-plated toilet" in the budget, closer inspection will show that there's a really good reason for it--nothing else will work.

In fact, recycling and scrounging are important traditions. I knew some of the stories at the link--that CMS, needing brass for the material of an endcap, recycled Russian artillery shells. When an experiment ends, parts of the apparatus and the electronics become available--and some people are quite creative in repurposing detectors for new experiments.

I had not heard this story before:

Kephart recalled Lederman acquiring a 16-inch battleship gun to filter out particles traveling at the wrong angles. One of Lederman’s grad students was just small enough to slip inside.

“I’ll never have a grad student of that caliber again,” Lederman would joke.

Notre Dame

Other people have already said everything reasonable to say (and a lot of unreasonable things as well), and all I can add is that I hope they can rebuild it. The amount of volunteered money is encouraging, but a few noises suggest that jockeying for control has already started. The usual winners of these artistic contests seem not to have any great interest in beauty, much less Christianity.

If you haven't seen the robot Colossus, watch it. It could go where people couldn't, and keep watching, and keep the water flowing. And the Paris Fire Brigade borrowed some drones, and got the "geofencing functions" bypassed so the drones could fly within the city limits. Apparently the French bureaucracy can move quickly when it wants to.

The cathedral has been modified before. I think this time maybe they shouldn't go with oak timbers. Steel. And since the upper stone is probably weakened, maybe some additional framework on the outside. It won't look the same--but then it didn't look quite the same after each earlier remodeling.

But first and foremost, if they want to rebuild it with any meaning, it must be a church.

Entertainments

People spend billions on advertisements in the belief that they change people's attitudes. They seem to work. The shows must have an impact too.

To film a TV show you need to have room for the cameras and the lights and for characters to come in and out dramatically. The room being filmed is therefore necessarily large. So when you watch, you see something larger than life--or at least your life. How come the people like me have bigger houses and more stuff? And they don't have much work to do, either income-generating or household maintenance.

A play now and again might give you a sense of things you could aspire to. A steady diet of amusements in which everyone has plenty of stuff without obvious effort has got to effect you too. I'd think it would redefine what "normal" is. Work 9to5 isn't normal on TV, and even on shows where a character's job is significant, the work doesn't usually seem to be the center. I can think of exceptions, and you can probably think of many more, but on the whole that seems to be the rule.

A fantasy now and then is harmless, and probably good. We want something different from everyday life, with a little drama and conflict, or silliness that we wouldn't care for in real life. I don't want to watch an assembly line, or a man writing code, or another planning meeting.

I don't see how a steady diet of entertainments can avoid shaping your attitudes about what "normal" life is like--and not in a good way. A steady diet of "entertainments" that were "realistic" sounds cruel and unusual. It seems as though many of us grew up with one foot in a land where problems are solved and there are no trade-offs and everyone seems wealthy without effort. One candy bar is good, but a box of them...

Since we are, by and large, rich enough that existential problems are rare, we don't have as many reminders that the magic land isn't real.

A lot of the action in society happens from the tails of the distributions in attitudes. It doesn't take a very large change in the average to make major changes in the proportions of the political players, or the cultural players. Can you imagine someone 50 years ago offering to "celebrate her abortion?" That fringe wasn't nearly big enough. They were there, but didn't seem to be applauded by very many.

It hasn't been hard to find people in every era who believed that the vague "rich" were responsible for our woes, and that if they were found and properly shaken down all would be well. We have a significant number of them today among the nominally educated.(*) Open a newspaper Click a news-site and find what used to be fringe personality problems staking out self-important claims to be society leaders. Most of us don't care, but the tails of the distributions have shifted a lot, and that's where the cultural action is. And the political action.

Don Quixote lost his mind from over-indulging in heroic romances. At least he got a sense of duty out of them. Us--not quite so noble.

(*) Perhaps I am unduly snarky here, but most of these people I've met seem not to have spent much study in "subjects where there is a right answer or the bridge falls down" or in "subjects where there is perennial debate and good arguments all around."

Gene Wolfe

Died at age 87. The obituary says his wife died a few years ago of Alzheimers. That's a lot to endure, and to be kind through it all...

Some of us can tell stories wonderfully well--I wish I could write half as well as he did. Some of us compose great melodies--I'm listening to Strauss as I write this.

We all live a story. We all live a song. Sometimes we're too close to hear it.

For those who like building stuff

This is her latest.

You see, way back in 2011, when CDs were maybe(?) still a thing and Blackberries still thought maybe they could make a go of it, I decided to build a computer. Usually when I tell people I built a computer, they think I went and bought a power supply and an ATX motherboard and some silly neon lights and whatever else the kids do to play Crysis these days. Then I have to explain that, no, I mean I built a computer.

In this episode she starts trying to use a GPU. Recent posts have involved repairing a pinball machine and building a steam motor. ("I was completely unprepared for how much steam was released, and the force with which it comes out. Everything in a six foot area was completely soaked, I dropped the camera, and it took me some time to gather myself back up. The good news is, the blow-off valve worked perfectly! All in all, it was a great success and I learned more respect for 60psi of live steam."). That's the last of a long series of posts, btw.

Sometimes I wish I had a small machine shop too. Investing in the parts to repair my own brakes is probably more in line with my budget, though.

Black hole data

It turns out there's actually an IceCube connection to the black hole picture story.

The data had to be shipped back to the analysis center by freight, not by internet. If you look closely at the side of the box he's resting the server on, that's got a penguin in a tux and A-379-S on the side; it's one of our crates.(*)

The data transfer rate of a jet loaded with disks is very good. The transfer rate from the Pole by satellite is pretty slow, though between some US sites it can be much better. For example from NERSC to Madison it would take a little less than 6 months do move 5 PB. And 5TB is supposedly the total data set from all sites, not the amount of data each one sent.

If you remember your galaxy positions better than I do, you might wonder how it is that the South Pole Telescope managed to help image M87. (The EHT telescopes are in blue on that image.) After all, there's a planet in the way.

I haven't read half of their papers yet, but I know how I'd use the station. When you want to understand your detector, you need to know what it sees when part of it isn't working, and you want to know what it looks like if there is extra information. You can't bring Palomar along with you on a trip, but you can compare what your telescope sees with what Palomar sees when you are looking at the same thing, and that tells you something about what your scope can see by itself.

I'll bet they tried to use the telescopes to look at several nearby sources, and analyzed the data with and without the ones that couldn't see M87. That would have helped them calibrate their system--and it would have been even more fun if the source was near enough that they could have an optical comparison as well. That way they could get an estimate for what the resolution was--and you don't have a measurement if all you have is a number. You also need to know the uncertainty on that number. I gather that they deliberately blurred the image they reconstructed to match the actual resolution, so that people wouldn't think they saw structure in what were accidental artifacts of reconstruction. (People translate noisy pictures into "aliens on Mars" all the time.)

(*) Actually, I suspect that the photographer wanted a picture of him beside an Antarctic box, any box. The story just talks about shipping packs disk drives around, not servers--not even disk servers. (We also used Cabbage Cases). We ship our data on disks also, in two copies in case one disk fails (and they do). The summarized stuff we beam back by satellite, but sometimes you need the gory details.

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.

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(*) 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.

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(*) 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."