Twenty five years later

I rode the bus to work with no radio and no internet. I saw nobody to speak with except Matt in the 3'rd floor who saluted me with a cryptic "It's your fault!" and walked on. I didn't know what to make of that – Matt had a strange sense of humor sometimes. There weren't a lot of people around.

I logged into the desktop, and the news was ugly. BBC's website was sluggish, the NYT was a bare skeleton page. I turned on the radio and listened.

It was obviously a war.

We'd been a long time without a major war, especially one on US soil. That kind of mostly peace couldn't have lasted forever, but I'd hoped …

The next thing I thought of was our 8-year-old youngest son marching off to war. I'd be willing to go in his place, but I was already too old for that. And there'd be a few years yet – I had no illusions about wars being short; they typically aren't, though the hostilities ebb and flow. In the event, we were rich enough to be able to trade money for blood, and didn't need large armies. So far. That trade only works if the war is mostly "somewhere else."

The culprits were identified surprisingly quickly. Or better say, "The proximate enemy was identified surprisingly quickly."

In the next few days the University sponsored a gathering to "work through" the news and the emotions, and with typical failure of imagination completely forgot to add to the roster of speakers a pastor or chaplain, i.e. somebody who regularly tries to comfort people suffering loss and pain. I didn't find that one professor's "travelogue" particularly moving or useful.

That blind spot persists, I'm afraid. Twenty-five years later I still don't see that the powers-that-be have a good grasp of what a religious war entails. Realpolitik may work with the rich and powerful rulers in a region, but in the end even authoritarian rulers hold their tenure by sufferance, and if the imams denounce you as an infidel there will be a change one day.

And it is curious what faith our aggressively secular rulers have in the evangelistic power of Mammon and John Locke.

Aztalan

Youngest Son and I went to Aztalan yesterday. It's a pity Van Buren wasn't interested in preserving the site, though it would have been amateur-excavated for souvenirs in any case; modern archaeology being, well, modern. One of the signs asserted that the population was about 300, which I gather they estimated from the fraction of the enclosed area devoted to housing and the number of posthole clusters they found for housing.

I wonder about that. The stockade (the outer one, anyhow, that they found postholes for) was about 2700 feet long, with "wattle and daub" to fill in the gaps between logs. That doesn't include defenses in or along the river, whose traces the Crawfish River would have obliterated long ago. And my own rough estimate comes up with room for more like 2-3000, though that estimate includes kids--so maybe 300 able-bodied men is reasonable.

And, pet peeve, they gave no estimates for how many people lived outside the city walls.

The mounds and stockade were built with stone tools. I'm not sure exactly how long it would take to cut down, trim, and haul the couple of thousand trees to build it. (Harder if the area was intensively used before hand, meaning they'd have to haul trees farther.) If it took a day for two men to cut/trim/haul a tree, that's about 4-5000 man-days for the stockade. You need farmers and fishermen too, so if you can spare a team of 20 to work on the job that's a couple of years of work (not in the winter or harvest time)--less than I expected. And then there's the weaving of small branches and vines, and the mud fill...

One of the mounds was a low kame that the residents built up a little, and one of the low mounds is almost completely gone. The others have been excavated and reconstructed.

They abandoned the city about the same time Cahokia was abandoned--something went sideways for the Mississippians, well before Columbus. People lived in the area for thousands of years, apparently, but the city was fairly recent. Figuring out what age the building postholes fit into is a bit tricky, especially since the area was heavily plowed for a while.

This part of the world doesn't have much in the way of ancient stone monuments.

Jeremiah

The Grim Weeper?

Dr Boli

"This explains why mad conspiracy theories are mainstream now: an idea that can be entertained only by someone with a limited experience of reality can be entertained by a majority of the people, because most people have only a limited experience of reality. What the phone tells us is more real than what the world outside the screen tells us."

I remember pre-internet, in a place without a lot of newspapers (or literacy) or even much access to radio news. Conspiracy theories out the wazoo. ("Queen Elizabeth has a book that explains this.")

Most information about the wider world came from unreliable sources, e.g. word of mouth. There wasn't much you could do about the news anyway, so its accuracy didn't matter -- a bit like entertainment.

Look for parallels at your own risk.

Fearing

The "Hymn Sing" tonight was an overview of Jesus' life, and we sang "What Child is This".

It's a little different from the nativity joy songs: "Good Christian, fear: for sinners here The silent Word is pleading."

A little reminder that something overwhelmingly powerful is here. Peter, and the Gerasene swineherds, and no doubt others I can't think of offhand, pled for Jesus to go away; they feared. Otto noticed that awe and fear seem similar -- we're not always eager to meet the awesome. Something about "that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed" probably plays a role too. We're small, and often unclean. And even redemption can be frightening.

Go play outside

and don't come back until suppertime.

Does early exercise make life-long changes in the body?

Perhaps for guinea fowl, when the life is relatively short. Maybe for people too, but that sounds like a long study.

Sparks a poppin

I read an interesting article that charged raindrops' charge is sufficient to, with time, blast through many protective coatings, including Teflon.

The question Ni, Berger, Butt, and their colleagues asked was what this charge does to the surface that the drop lands on next. To find out, the team released 35-microliter water drops, about the size of a large raindrop, containing a pinch of salt to mimic rainwater, onto a surface tilted at 50 degrees. The drops slid about four centimeters, picked up a charge, rolled off the edge, and then fell five millimeters onto a copper plate coated with a 60-nanometer film of Teflon, which is one of the most chemically resistant coatings on the market today.

That, btw, is the part that might not model real raindrops accurately--I'll address that in a moment.

The tilted surfaces were mostly chosen to mimic raindrops in the real world. One was a leaf from a Tradescantia spathacea plant growing in one of the researchers’ offices. Another was a PVC foam board from a hardware store. The third one was a sheet of transparent polystyrene sold as window glazing. Only the fourth one, the fluorinated coating on quartz, was more of a lab creation than something people usually see everywhere around them. The charges the drops picked up ranged from 0.2 nanocoulombs off the leaf to two nanocoulombs off the fluorinated quartz. A nanocoulomb in something the size of a raindrop works out to be a few thousand volts.

And yes, electrostatic effects (at raindrop speeds that's a good approximation) distort the raindrop into something pointy that creates a high voltage difference in the fraction of a second before impact, up to the kilovolt scale, which will cause a tiny dielectric breakdown. The researchers find damage to the surface.

The polymer coating is changed by the zap, and the underlying surface begins corroding.

The researchers identified the corrosion products on copper by Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction. They found cuprous oxide and basic cupric chloride, the pale green compound familiar from weathered copper roofs. Elemental mapping of the damaged zones showed oxygen and chlorine flooding in and fluorine and carbon from the Teflon flooding out—exactly what should happen when a coating has been disrupted.

Another study looking at rain on solar cells finds a voltage spike as the drop rolls off.

It seems like a plausible real effect, and suggests that protective coatings (like paint) need to include other factors besides chemistry.

OTOH, the first other study I found (1953) found that raindrops had a little less charge. A nanocoulomb is about 3 esu.

The average measured free charge brought down by positively charged rain was 0.022 esu (.007 nanocoulomb) per drop, and by negatively charged rain was 0.031 esu (.01 nanocoulomb) per drop. The ratio of the negative free charge to the positive free charge brought down by rain was 1.2, while the ratio of the number of negative drops to the number of positive drops was 0.88.

That's quite a bit less charge on the natural raindrops that aren't sliding off a roof or something. Under a tree, the raindrops can pick up an order of magnitude more charge than an unimpeded drop, but still an order of magnitude less than sliding off flourinated quartz. So, under a tree, raindrops could hit a few hundred volts. Unimpeded drops, maybe a few dozen.

Some other studies of raindrops are comparable. This has obviously been a matter of some study--trying to understand what is the relationship of rain and lightning, for example.

And therefore, of course, one can find other, contrary estimates: "At the rain-forming level" 50 esu/gram times .03 gram (.3 for a heavy storm drop) is 1.7 esu (.6 nanocoulomb) (6 for a heavy storm's drop). And another that didn't find much difference in charge with raindrop size. And different proportions of positive and negative depending on the rain type (pre-monsoon, monsoon I, monsoon II).

And "The results show that the magnitude of the electric charges range between 1 and 50 pC (.001 and .05 nanocoulomb) and more than 90% of the charges are mainly carried by raindrops >1 mm, even though most of the raindrops are smaller than 1 mm."

Interesting. My guess from a quick-and-dirty literature review is that the effect in real life is smaller than the lab effect. Nature is always finding ways to erode what you build.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention -- the greatest electrostatic effects appear when the surface being landed on is metal, since charge re-arrangement is easy.

Transitive

My wife ran across Cill Chais the other day. It sounded familiar. I gather that Lynn DeShazo modified the tune a bit, adding a chorus, to create the song Ancient Words. Michael W Smith covered it, and often gets credit for it.

Fine enough song, but one line is fingernails on the blackboard (*): "We have come with open hearts; Oh let the ancient words impart."

It wouldn't be that hard to fix, keeping the rhyme: "Give us what ancient words...", "Changed by what ancient words...", "We need what ancient words...", etc.

The next time the song comes up at the men's group I'll plead for a modification.

---

(*) for those old enough to remember chalkboards. That video does not reproduce the sensation; not sure why.

Computer visualization

I have not seen much 3-D math visualization; I'm not sure why. Modern computer packages should make it quite easy to do, and I gather the 3-D goggles have become much cheaper. Even 2-D, when you are able to rotate and zoom on the image, can put on your desktop things that used to require craftsmen to build. This is part of a collection of math geometry models at U of Illinois.

This Is My Father's World

Think of us as God's agents in the world, agents with authority to issue decrees backed by God's Amen.

Does that last phrase seem out of place? We're told that everything is sustained by God. No act, good or bad, could exist without His power.

Sometimes, perhaps often, we have no idea of the magnitude of the executive order we've just signed God's name to.

One snowy day I decreed that I would stop in and have some ice cream on the last leg of my walk. And God ratified that – "Ice cream you shall have, and you also shall meet a fascinating woman in the shop." (46 years so far)

Sin is a little more like treachery, since not all our choices are so benign. We'll answer for every word, presumably for every action too. "What is this you have done with My power?" "Do I put AirTags on my brother?" didn't cut any ice the first time around.

16 years ago I wrote about part of this before; about God as the suffering servant.

Roman freedom and slavery

I found this discussion from 4 years ago interesting. I'm not expert enough on Roman culture (despite the silly claim that men think of Rome every day) to evaluate its take on the different classes of relationship and their utility today. (She thinks the classes of libertas, civitas, and familia are still relevant categories, though in different guises.)

Dolly

I never met her, but I gather from others' testimony that she was pretty universally liked and respected.

I have known people like that. They didn't have the fame, but they had the character, and I wish I was more like them.

Worship instruments

Some music in a worship service is meant for meditation, and some for congregational participation.

Never mind the former for now.

I once caught the fringes of an argument about which was the most important instrument. I won't judge whether that was a noble argument to have, but the answer seems pretty obvious, and none of the disputants touched on it.

The most important instrument in congregational worship songs is the hearts of the faithful. You try to encourage the faithful to lift their hearts to the Lord with songs they sing; so the voices of the faithful are the second most important instrument.

Since typically the congregants aren't as well trained as the stage singers, giving them voices to follow is critical to confident singing. Which puts the stage voices in third place.

Fourth – I'm not sure. Something that gives the beat, but doesn't make it hard for the congregation to hear themselves (which excludes almost all the drum kits I've heard) – a piano-like instrument, for example. Or organ – the keyboard types have the advantage of giving the pitch at the same time.

After that come the things that give flavor (guitar, brass) and control (the mixer).

Down at the bottom comes what I started out on – the monitors giving the musicians what they wanted to hear to play in sync.

Vote by mail

We overlook one of the ways in-person voting gives integrity to the results.

We think of ID – is the person handling the ballot who they claim to be, and is this person eligible to vote in the first place.

Can you extend this to mail-in ballots? We've various proposals for managing this, which you may trust or not, depending on your experience with software. The USPS just came out with some guidelines.

But there's another feature to in-person that's almost impossible to extend to the mail-in voting. Independent observers verify that the voters have gone into the booths alone. Nobody looks over the voters' shoulders, and ballots all go into an anonymous box (no box A for our Beneficent Incumbent and box B for the Evil Challenger).

When our youngest daughter voted by mail, the envelope needed a witness, which I was. For the actual "filling out of the ballot" phase, I left the kitchen. Of course. Anybody who knows me knows I wouldn't lean over her shoulder and make suggestions. But there's no way to prove that.

Perhaps a mail-in ballot was in fact filled in by the person who claimed to fill it in, and perhaps that person is a legitimate voter. That doesn't rule out inappropriate influence.

Our town allowed early voting. Mail-in was one way, but another was to show up at City Hall and vote there. That latter seems reasonable enough. It doesn't have the election monitors present, but you can never tell who else is going to show up and ask why two people are involved with one ballot.

Suppose we deprecate vote-by-mail. With exceptions, of course. For most of us, being out of town on election day is a choice. Not all – my parents were posted overseas for years, though with access to the US embassy, which could have coordinated a voting system. And, of course, those in the armed forces don't always know where they will be next week.

So we need to make some provision to cover at minimum as many of our overseas armed forces as are eligible to vote but are posted away from their voting district. I'd think that at bases this wouldn't be hard – finding observers, setting up a temporary dedicated room and a time for voting, having a single place to receive, collect, and mail back ballots… A ship with a long deployment is slightly more complicated – when do you mail things back?

Men in combat are probably out of luck as far as voting goes, though it might be possible sometimes.

But with the understanding that there are some exceptions which we could account for, what do we lose if mail-in-voting is hard? On the plus side, we lose ballot harvesting. On the minus side, some people get posted to a new location for a long time, from well before the candidates have declared to well after the election, and they won't get a chance to vote. In larger cities in the US one might have reciprocal agreements for receiving/sending ballots at the local city hall, but that doesn't help the oil platform guys much.

A system with integrity will have friction. How much of each are we willing to trade off?

AI writing and drawing

While it's good to have "le mot juste" immediately to hand, I enjoy composing the words myself, even if it takes a little longer to polish. I’d like to be the one other people quote, thank you very kindly.

On the other hand, my drawing skills are at the “Is that an elephant or a race car?” level, and so there’s a strong temptation to (if I could afford it) have AI create the illustrations. I haven't done so – the free versions gave me ugly and irrelevant slop last time I tried them, and I'm disinclined to throw money at it.

Athleticism

I asked for some assistance in learning proper stretching and core exercises. The trainer (about 24) told me most of the kids she saw got little exercise, and too often needed some remedial practices.

She went on to say that I'd obviously had a more athletic childhood.

I don't know if that's just flattery, or if she was serious.

Anybody who knew me as a youngster knows I was far far more likely to be closeted with a book than running anywhere. Perhaps afternoon wandering in a tropical jungle counts double as exercise? You sweat enough...

Anyhow, if she was serious, the kids she sees must really be in bad shape. I see plenty in visibly bad condition, but also plenty who seem just fine... Perhaps I don't see the troglodytes tampletadytes? (tablet dwellers)

Greater power

Which seems more powerful, to dodge Death, never letting it lay a glove on you and mocking it always just beyond its reach, or to let Death do its worst and shake it off three days later? Which has more promise?

Looking for little people

I'm sure there are people traveling to the Northern Cordillera of the Philippines right now (Yunnan would involve more surveillance and New Guinea more wicked insects) to find mushrooms, either to try them themselves or to sell to curious Americans. And quite a number who are finding similar-looking mushrooms and lacing them for sale to those curious Americans.

That particular hallucination is so specific... little humans running around, swimming in your drink, climbing the bookcase ...

We tend to see faces in things, so maybe there's something hardwired in the brain to reconstruct people-images, but these are supposed to be always small, and dynamic. If everyday experience weren't so devoid of traces left behind by little people, it would be fun to imagine these as invisible imps, but it's hard to write a story about characters that don't seem to do anything.

Archaeology of play

Some Sami stone circles were made by children, not priests.

The default explanation for things archeologists don't understand is that "it's religious."

Fortunately the Sami knew about them: "The local representative who accompanied Thomassen even showed him the place where his great-grandfather had made circles like these when he was a child."

I'd like to say "I told you so," and if I could remember when I posted about hard-to-classify artifacts, I would. Kids build too. I know I did. Their artifacts shouldn't last as long, being made of things children can carry, but accidents can preserve things.

Party platform

Running against Farage one finds a range of candidates, including Howling Laud Hope of The Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Count Binface et al are likely going to be ephemeral, so I will preserve the OMRLP's platform for posterity.

I like "Social Media will be taken down one day a week for a 'Remember when we used to talk' Day"