How the mighty are fallen

Fermilab has had some issues with performance and meeting goals recently. Evaluations ranked it as the second worst in the country.

I recognize very few of the names. It has been quite a few years since I spent much time there, and even then I hung out with colleagues and not the administrators, or even the staff. I just didn't stay long enough each time. (and the names I recognize are some of the good guys)

Apparently they centralized Safety, which then lost close contact with the Divisions.

Fermilab's leadership is accused of cronyism and allowing a "toxic work environment." The incidents documented were certainly toxic; perhaps this was widespread, perhaps not.

Giorgio should have run the paper by a proofreader before submitting it; in one case the text reads the exact opposite of his obvious intent.

One of their problems is the ratio of administrators/auxilliary staff to actual workers and scientists. Part of what causes that imbalance is the regulations--even something like purchasing differs so much from ordinary business practice thanks to the many extra rules(*) that it constitutes a specialty of its own, and one scarce enough to demand high salaries that cause dissatisfaction among the already-working staff--assuming they are permitted to pay the high salaries. (If not, positions don't get filled.)

And they've made it harder and harder for the public to visit. The cited reason was security, but the lab does no secret research. Safety I could believe--you could kill yourself if you got into one of the labs and started monkeying with some high voltage or gas systems, and if you broke into a source cabinet you'd get the newspapers freaking out, though the danger was objectively less.

(*) When I was there, a colleague employed by Fermilab instead of a university had extra hoops to jump through in order to get travel approved; e.g. prove that American carriers didn't fly to the location, get extra layers of approval--starting long enough in advance that the conference date wasn't always fixed yet.

Gnostics

You may not thank me for reminding you of the Eurythmics most famous work: "Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody's looking for something. Some of them want to {use you/get used by you/abuse you/be abused}".

Yes, it's supposed to be a song expressing disillusion. The way it does is gnostic.

Those with the Knowledge know better than the rest of us, and are free from the demands of the world's illusions (like love). Check.

The original Gnostics thought material existence was flawed and even evil. Check.

The original Gnostics taught that there was a chain of creators and Aeons and whatnot. Doesn't quite match. Anyhow.

The song ties in to our strange reductionist belief that the meaning of things is always trivial; that the less beautiful/ thoughtful/ moral/ supernatural explanation is always the true one. There's no such thing as essence, only action, and only the actions that I care to monitor matter. Because I have the Knowledge.

The "operations-only" approach has its uses and strengths, but also unacknowledged limits.

---

Early in my UW career I carpooled for a while with a woman from our neighborhood. One week she picked up her daughter too, who was due to be married shortly. Naturally she sat in the front and chose her favorite station, which was playing Sweet Dreams. As she sat back, satisfied with her selection, I hoped it didn't reflect her attitude to the upcoming wedding. Never found out...

Trying to imagine

This time when I read Psalm 97:5 "The mountains melted like wax at the presence of the Lord, At the presence of the Lord of the whole earth," I looked at it differently.

From the point of view of the mountain, what's the presence of the Lord like?

This would differ a bit from what happens when a human encounters the Uncontingent, since there's no mental or moral component.

The verse speaks of melting, and the first thing you think of is heat, and energy--infinite energy here. If I'm a mountain, and face infinite energy, I suppose I'd melt. And boil. And...

But think about what being a liquid means. Each atom isn't just right there in some crystal, it moves--it can be here, then there, or somewhere else a fraction of a second later.

OK, suppose I am a mountain in the presence of Someone to whom all possibilities are known, and are present in some sense. I've got crystals here and there, but with a slightly different history they might have been in slightly different places. If "mountain me" partook, however slightly, in that knowledge of the possibilities of myself, I would know myself as "not quite fixed," with every part as unstable as water among all the "could-have-been"s. Sort of like melting.

Argentine Armadillo Abattoir Question

AVI found a report about what looks like 19,000BC butchery in far South America. Why, he asks, did such early humans not do in the megafauna, as later ones seem to have done (though there are claims for climate change and meteors, and possibly all-of-the-above)?

I've seen a few artists' reconstructions showing fur-clad proto-Indians doing in mammoths. The weapons are generally spears, and spear points show up in mammoth bones. I don't recall seeing any images that included another tool, developed about 21,000BC (perhaps not in time for the earliest waves into the Americas): dogs.

I'd think it would be much safer and more effective to go after a mega-critter with a spear after it has been nicely tired out by your own private wolf-pack, or while it is confused which foe to face first.

I wonder how you'd estimate the effectiveness of hunting a lone mammoth (not going to have much success attacking a herd) with and without dogs to chivvy it. Without practicing various tactics on elephants, of course.

UPDATE: Found a picture.

Joe Pye weed

A heads-up. To stabilize a slope with plants that wouldn't require much attention, we planted prairie natives and some native milkweed. It turns out that Joe Pye weed spreads easily, grows quite tall, and overtops things like the monarch-bait milkweed. Fortunately it's easy to pull, but we hoped for a little less maintenance than that. And getting it out of the roses is going to be fun. And it turns out that the fall die-back means a lot of stalks to clear out--so much for trivial maintenance.

I guess there are no shortcuts and no plant-and-forget plans.

Merlin

The Merlin app has become popular in our family, and sees quite a bit of use. It isn't infalible--on one outing a woman a hundred yards away shouted for her daughter to come back, and Merlin promptly said it heard a trumpeter swan.

We were in Door County, and my eldest wondered if Merlin could be fooled by mimics. Within the minute, a strange call was identified as a ruffed grouse. There was nothing in that tree but bluejays. Quick answer(*).

FWIW, the dawn chorus isn't all the birds all at once. They have their entrances and their exits, as it were. First up were the cardinals; though I'm not sure why. Maybe they roost higher in the trees (they like thick bushes and tall trees), in line with the suggestion that the higher birds see the sun first.

(*) FWIW, we had a bluejay land on the birdbath on the back deck, and give a redtail hawk call--presumably to ensure privacy.

Likely myths

" Fable is, generally speaking, far more accurate than fact, for fable describes a man as he was to his own age, fact describes him as he is to a handful of inconsiderable antiquarians many centuries after. ... Men may have told lies when they said that he (King Alfred) first entrapped the Danes with his song and then overcame them with his armies, but we know very well that it is not of us that such lies are told. There may be myths clustering about each of our personalities; local saga-men and chroniclers have very likely circulated the story that we are addicted to drink, or that we ferociously ill-use our wives. But they do not commonly lie to the effect that we have shed our blood to save all the inhabitants of the street."

When do you stop using a writing system?

A question implicit in a post from almost five years ago: when did people quit using cuneiform? If Augustine didn't know the histories of the "Assyrians," maybe the use had been lost by then. I tried a prediction: Alexander the Great would have introduced the alphabet in a great way, and the complicated cuneiform system would have dried up--maybe quickly if the new Greek masters wanted official records translated.

So, what says wikipedia? Oh. Which cuneiform? There seem to have been a lot of them, from about 2900BC to the most recent object known made in 75AD; with a major change when Old Persian became dominant (e.g. Darius I, about 525BC)--which made it into a simplified syllabary. I wonder what future archaeologists would make of our computer texts -- alphabet plus pictographs. Would they try to detect the derivation of our alphabet from the emojis?

Yes, people have been trying to use AI to do more rapid translations, though "Predictably, the AI had a higher level of accuracy for formulaic texts, such as royal decrees or divinations, which follow a certain pattern. More literary and poetic texts, such as letters from priests or treaties, had a higher incidence of “hallucinations,”"

If an empire begins to crumble and its cities are overrun, will the conqueror care about the old history? Probably not much. The old literature? Eh. Maybe, but not obviously enough to make an effort to preserve it. That burden would lie on the entertainers. How about the old religious ritual records? Not so much; that burden rests on the clergy of the defeated gods, to make the case for honoring the gods of the land. How about old title records? William the Conqueror said the land all belonged to him now, and he'd fief it out--that probably wasn't a novelty. Still, it might be handy to keep the local administration running, working for you, so that would keep the old systems going awhile.

So maybe there was no great reason for the records to survive. Things like astrological texts, math, etc, would be translated by the practitioners for the use of their new students.

The Seleucids and early Parthians were still using cuneiform in the hellenistic period up to April 69 BC, though it wasn't the same as the very oldest cuneiforms.

This rabbit hole looks deep.

Assassination try

I was afraid this would happen. (and glad Trump wasn't killed!) The relentless demonization of Trump, and other politicians as well, logically leads to this kind of action. You don't negotiate with demons.

I was expecting a leftist loon of the usual stripe, the kind nobody wants to be around, stimulated to save the world by killing the demon. I wasn't expecting one of the brownshirts to be the attempted assassin. I expect to hear of very careful failure to analyze the funding for Antifa.

UPDATE: To be clear: I suspect he acted alone without his colleagues knowing, but logically you should investigate his associates as well, and I think that investigation would reveal that prominent figures are associated with the organization--and that therefore an investigation of Antifa will not be thorough.

UPDATE: The initial ID seems to have been wrong, and loon is probably the correct category. Fortunately.

MAM

As you can probably could guess from the previous post, we went to the Milwaukee Art Museum yesterday. Other people with you notice different things.

Some pictures tell a story, such as Grutzner's The Catastrophe and Waldmuller's The Interruption.

Others illustrate a story, and need explanation, such as Brocas' The Death of Phocion. I didn't recognize the situation in the picture, had no idea who it was, and had to have the story explained (in the label at the side). We explained the Sacrifice of Isaac to a young woman.

Others do neither, like Jawlensky's Landscape. Sometimes the technical aspects of a modern work showed considerable skill and care, but often they didn't.

Many things, such as much of the glasswork, had no meaning and didn't need it--they were just fun to look at. Which is pretty much what I usually want.

Idris Khan

The Milwaukee Art Museum had a special exhibition of the works of Idris Khan, including some made for the exhibit.

Early on, he experimented with overlays of pictures or musical scores or book pages.

In a way the result was like a time projection, in which everything "happens at once", or at least all the pages do.

Later on he created pictures by overlaying stamped phrases in sunburst patterns--not readable except on the fringes. So long as you don't try to read or understand the patterns, it is reasonably abstract, but there's no communication involved.

My take-away was that art relies on what you choose, but also on what you reject. Lumping everything together loses intelligibility and beauty. It's not a mode humans are made to appreciate: God can see everything at once but we can't.

Some of his stamps:

When it rained

In Africa my parents bought a number of board games to keep us kids amused and instructed--the rainy season was about half the year. The latter game never caught anybody's fancy, though Equations was frequently played, with an adjustment to the rules about challenges.

One year they brought home Coup d'etat by Hasbro. The title was pleasingly edgy, but the complicated game play had no particular bearing on the game conceit, and I'm not sure we ever finished a game.

Tactics 2 was a wargame--one of the first modern ones--and it took so long to play that it only got exercised three times. I wasn't old enough to appreciate it, I suppose, and when I was old enough, nobody else was interested. The Technical Advisory Staff included names my father knew from WWII, but meant nothing to me.

Some of us liked trivia games--not I. Especially when somebody else had played often enough to have memorized all the cards.

Monopoly got used a lot, and chess. Somebody's family got Gettysburg, but we looked at the complicated rules and noped. 3M got into games, selling bookshelf games in shelvable boxes. Twixt was good; Stocks and Bonds had a bug in the playing odds that we found quickly.

I remember playing baseball with 5 players total, and trying to make touch football work with a 7-year span of ages, but not in the rain, and there was a lot of rain. (And static-y TV only from 17:30 to 22:30) Books and board games... and homework, but that usually didn't take too long.

Naval militia

A recent squirrel chase through the net found me looking up naval militia, and then the naval militia(*) in Wisconsin. Wisconsin had one up until a bit after WWI, and recently proposed reviving it with centers in Milwaukee and Madison. (The proposal failed.)

Milwaukee is logical, but Madison? It has some lakes and the little Yahara River.

New York has one, and they used to assist in cargo loading when retrieving Flight 800 bodies and wreckage, and after 9/11 helped with evacuations, did logistical/clerical work, security, and first aid support. Their SeaBees put up a tent city for the emergency workers--there are a couple pages of bullet points. Now we're all grown-ups, and know the need to maximize the number of categories in a report (Assisted the Security Chief in moving his desk), but clearly there were ways to help out in a disaster that don't require that you be in a boat.

OTOH, I'm not sure what this would bring to the table that the Army National Guard wouldn't, except in oddball situations where the Reserve is stripped of one kind of skills and the Guard of another.

But we might still yet have our own naval militia.

(*) Not the same as privateers.

Grim future

From Real Clear History, an essay on confronting another Axis, looking at historical parallels to the budding and active conflicts now, and possible directions. It isn't pretty. In WWII, none of the Axis powers (including USSR) had a reasonable hope of dealing serious damage to the US homeland. That's not so true anymore with our current set of adversaries, and we're badly exposed overseas as well.

He's pretty sure China will use air and sea border controls to try to control Taiwan--not a blockade or an invasion. That puts us over a barrel.

Viewing Supreme Court Decisions

The Wisconsin State Journal yesterday had as its top banner headline "Limit for Jan. 6 charge"--the US Supreme Court decision, of course. The bottom story was "Bans upheld on sleeping outside"--another USSC decision.

Both stories will be presumed bad decisions in this country, and stir strong emotions: Trump-hate/fear and concern for the idealized homeless.

But the more important decision didn't appear until page 8--overturning Chevron. At least I assume that how we use laws to regulate ourselves is more important than the rather obvious observation that forbidding campsites in city parks isn't equivalent to hang/draw/quartering someone.

I assume the Journal knows its audience, and how to tickle its ears. Still...

Meanderthal

They walk among us. The most famous is no doubt Jim Blaine, but there's a touch of the breed in all of us whose websearching guideline is "Squirrel!"

I wish I knew to whom to give credit for the term.