Philanthropy

I'd had a note to look up Pakistani charitable giving, and that led to World Giving Report, where the map claims that China is in the top 20%! That seemed less than believable, but apparently there've been some changes made recently. Charities Aid Foundation put them at 95'th out of 142, up from about the bottom. "corporate philanthropy, which makes up the bulk of Chinese charitable giving, in contrast with Europe and North America where individual giving dominates." The WGR report has numbers that don't quite match the CAF numbers, albeit for different years, and since I gather that the statistics are compiled by the government and given largely to government-approved projects, I'm guessing that the China numbers may be inflated and that since even they say 76% of the donations are corporate, that these are often a kind of informal tax.

But it is very interesting that a) the Chinese see benefits in charity which they didn't a few years ago or b) the Chinese government sees benefits in appearing to be charitable. Or perhaps both.

Hmm. I'm not fond of jello numbers. Alliance says 73% of Pakistanis donate money and 16% volunteer while 42% say "they are unable to donate to charitable causes due to financial constraints." Maybe they give to their neighbors (as required by Islam) and don't consider that "charitable cause." The WGR says 51% give directly.

The WGR says 61% of the US population donate and 28% volunteer, and only 28% give directly to people in need. Nigeria has 89% donating, 69% doing so directly, and has 76% volunteering.

The "UK ranked 64th most generous country".

I'm not sure where the data for all this comes from, and what the denominators are (in Nigeria they use "working age people" for the volunteering rate), so I suspect some fuzziness and some apples to pears comparisons. But at some level, in most places, people are helping neighbors and even strangers.

---

Why Pakistan? It considers itself the "land of the pure", devoted to Islam; and one of the pillars of Islam is Zakat: alms giving. Apparently they take it fairly seriously: 1.64% of income (.75% directly) vs 0.97% (.26% directly) in the US.

Backup plans

One of my mental exercises is to try to figure alternate ways of getting from A to B without the usual tools (e.g. no car), no handy friends, and as cheaply as possible. To get from Fermilab to Madison, back in the day, meant walking (no bus at the time) to Aurora to get to the commuter rail line, taking that to downtown Chicago, taking the El to O'Hare, and then an intercity bus to Madison. The last time I took the El to O'Hare was 20 years ago.

One should revisit these things now and then, and not take the solution as "good for all time." There's a pair of buses now you can take to get to Aurora, the commuter trains run every hour until late, and the intercity bus leaves from close to Union Station, so you can skip the O'Hare link. Which is probably a good thing, especially when not at peak ridership times.

Which snapshot do you use

I thought I'd written about this years ago, but apparently not.

We visited an Illinois park with a little museum attached, which included a reconstruction of the interior of one of the cabins, with lots of original artifacts.

The cabin had been in use for a century, and undergone some expansion and remodeling and refinishing. Which snapshot do you use to represent its history?

With computerized displays alongside it (all the "cool kids" use them), why not all of them? Pick a year range and show what it looked like then. Maybe even animate them. If you wanted to be really wild you could let a camera take a picture of your face and have yourself among the avatars inhabiting the house. But a camera is one more thing to break, of course.

I'd think you could do this fairly inexpensively these days with the new AI drawing systems – I hear they've even starting getting the number of fingers right. It might help make it easier to understand that everybody had to start small, and simple, and rough. And a lot of the first changes were utilitarian.

"Finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order"

An image rather than a logical analysis: The world of a pagan or animist is full of spirits and gods, sometimes in unexpected places, providing unexpected limits on what you want to do. Beware of transgressing the ancient sacred sites and sacred rites that divide the physical and moral landscape.

When monotheism arrives, most of the sacred sites are swept away, and those that remain are, as it were, baptized into meaning as part of the monotheism. The landscape is cleaned and emptied, to some degree dis-enchanted, certainly somewhat exorcised.

If the monotheism fades, what new demons come to fill that now-empty space?

Approximating a magic function

I got to wondering about a function to generate the primes: $\Pi(n)=$ n'th prime. Obviously that would have truly weird behavior: an infinite number of primes are only 2 apart, and the gaps between primes can also be exceedingly large too. But just for laughs, suppose one existed.

I'd bet that you couldn't use a Taylor series to calculate it – maybe locally, but nothing like the famous $1 + x/1 + x^2/2! + x^3/3! ...$.

Suppose you approximated it with longer and longer polynomials. Name the polynomial that fits the first $N$ primes ${}_{N}\Pi(x)$ (with ${}_{N}\Pi(k) = p_k$; the k'th prime, with k less or equal to $N$), and the coefficient of the $x^j$ term call ${}_{N}c_j$.<\p>

As $N$ increases, and the new polynomial fits more and more primes, do the coefficients converge? The first (the constant term of the polynomial) ${}_Nc_0$ is always $1$. How about the second ${}_Nc_1$ (coefficient of $x$) and third ${}_Nc_2$ (coefficient of $x^2$)? (By the construction of these, the polynomial to fit $N$ primes will only have $N+1$ coefficients.)

It won't come as a great surprise to see that they don't seem to converge. The polynomials resulting from fitting the first 30 primes gives this for the behavior of those two coefficients. They look like they're about to blow up.

But its not that simple. Expand the graph to include the first 50 polynomial second and third coefficients, and they switch directions and start to blow up the other way. You see that the deviation that looked so large in the plot above is invisibly small in the one below.

Not a big surprise – we didn't expect that the magic $\Pi(x)$ function to find all the primes was going to be simple to approximate. After all, the magic function has to be extremely "jumpy" and polynomials are nice and smooth. But the variation is certainly dramatic.

Of course this isn't entirely fair – trying to fit polynomials to points is famously ugly and unstable. But this is pretty dramatic.

UPDATE: If you were wondering if I was plotting round-off error, the answer is no. I did the calculations using pari/gp 2.13.3, and only turned the integer rational numbers into floating point at the printing step. If you are curious, I include the script below:

Top = 50
coeffs=matrix(Top, Top)
for(N=2, Top, \
 target=primes(N) - vector(N, k, 1); \
 arr = matrix(N, N, i, j, i^j); \
 co = (1/arr)*target~; \
 for(i=1, N, coeffs[N,i] = co[i];););
\\
for(i=1,Top,\
 for(j=1, Top, print1(1.*coeffs[j,i],","););print(" ");)

I hadn't noticed

“If a slain person is found lying in the open country in the land which the Lord your God gives you to possess, and it is not known who has struck him ... All the elders of that city which is nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley; and they shall answer and say, ‘Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it.

And When Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing, but rather that a riot was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this Man’s blood; see to that yourselves.”

I'd thought it was a Roman thing, but apparently he knew a bit of the local custom.

Baseball cards

A few memories forcibly reminded me of some thoughts on foolishness as something that defiles.

After mentally squirming a bit, I moved on to other tasks of the day -- and ran across "The dean of the Episcopal cathedral in Pittsburgh" shoplifted $1000 worth of baseball cards from Walmart.

In light of eternity many things we're fascinated with are foolish, but even by ordinary light: he's 42 and "Very Reverend"; is fascination with children's toys seemly?

"For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales!"

Staying attentive

We got to talking about the difference in preaching between your typical anglo congregation and a black one. I suspect that the more congregation-interactive approach ("Can I get an Amen?") in the latter leads to less of "Beautiful Dreamer".

Hunger and thirst

Someone pointed out that while you could go a day without drinking anything, it was nearly impossible, if you were interacting with other people, to go a day without justifying yourself. Sometimes even when alone, we make excuses to ourselves for the less reputable memories.

Perhaps the "hunger and thirst for righteousness" is really very common, but we go hunting for it in the wrong places: Do-it-yourself frameworks (If I do X, Y, and not Z I'm good), excuses, or persuading (or intimidating) other people into affirming you.

All instead of wanting real righteousness and finding the One who can make it right.

One learns

We've driven sedans, then station wagons as the family grew, then minivans. I looked at people driving SUV's and wondered why? You don't drive them offroad, or carry heavy loads -- what's the attraction for you?

Well, minivans are scarcer and pricier, and a pickup doesn't match our main use cases. So if one or both of the drivers have a grumpy back, an SUV is quite a bit easier to get in and out of than a sedan. Sort of like those "old people's" big sedans with soft suspensions. I get it now... and we did, a compact SUV.

It's a little thing

but perhaps it only seems so.

I've no objection to -- in fact it seems fine -- a pastor or other leader joining in some silly and perhaps slightly humiliating play: e.g. slide down into a tub of jello just as the kids are doing.

The dunk tank (or pie throwing) isn't the same. Somebody is humiliating another. Participation is voluntary, yes, but the ball thrower is acting against the dunkee. All in fun? Maybe. I still don't like it.

Winning in Iran

I don't see the point of talking about "unconditional surrender"--we can't enforce that without boots on the ground and everybody knows we can't do that (Data republican has numbers).

My record at prediction isn't good, so don't take this as prophecy, but at a guess, since politics is the art of the possible and Iran's mullahs invested the IRCG with a lot of their enforcement power, then if there is "regime change" the IRCG will play some role. Who has the arms and organization to stamp them out?

That would imply that the new government wouldn't be entirely satisfactory to us, since it would include a faction that still wants regional domination (and maybe to "immanentize the eschaton" too), and not be altogether stable either.

That's almost certainly still better than the previous situation. We can't command nice clear-cut victories and transformations all the time; or even most of the time. Even World War II -- we had lots of boots on the ground and "unconditional surrenders," and we still had to make some very messy compromises at the end of it: not least with the USSR, but also with the Germans and Japanese.

I sometimes think it's safer to fight for interests rather than ideals. Interests you can compromise, if the matter is not existential: "We need X but the price is too high so we'll settle for Y, at least for the next decade"; but ideals sometimes demand more dedication.

Statutes and Laws and

The Old Testament uses a number of different words to describe God's laws, and I wasn't sure about the distinctions. So I looked up a fellow who knows a bit more Hebrew than I, and apparently there are some subtle differences, though the usages don't follow the patterns he hopes for.

Unfortunately I am as wise as before; these don't map into categories I use.

At least it is clear that when one is told to "keep" the testimonies and statutes, the testimonies -- things God said that aren't commands -- are as important to remember as the rules.

"Different"

I get it. They want to make sure that someone with a birth defect is not considered of lesser worth. They want to be kind and fair, so they coin labels like "limb different."

I think it rises from the denial that there's a human nature – physical, mental, spiritual. The way they define things, and people, is by their actions. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck – nevermind if it needs batteries.

If you define humanity by the things a person does rather than some essence or nature, inequalities of ability are a problem for you. The world's economies define human worth by economic value added, but there's no reason for us to give assent to that. We know better (I hope).

There are normal differences in people, e.g. skin color. There are also abnormal differences, e.g. skin color (albinism). It's normal to have 5 digits on each limb, and rare indeed for more than 5 not to be a defect.

The Salisbury Organist goes to old country churches to play their organs. Not infrequently a note will be bad or the machine slightly out of tune – and you wouldn't be able to tell because he picks the music to fit the organ.

If you don't have a right foot, walking is more of an accomplishment than it is for a healthy youngster. If we flatten everything to "difference" you lose that extra accomplishment.

Plenty of things are legitimately just "difference": including a lot of the skills. Just because it isn't always easy to agree on the names of things that are human essence doesn't mean they aren't real.

We seem to have a hunger to oversimplify. A "definition by action" is very useful (especially in mathematics), while a "definition by essence" is also important in determining purposes – like what a government is actually for. If we don't know what the essence of human-ness is, how do we know what human flourishing is? Keep both approaches, but in tension with each other.

To pour wisdom into young minds

Remember your senior year in high school? My memory is fuzzy – it was more than 50 years ago – but a few moments, and some of the people, still stand out. The yearbook has a photo of me reading a book in between classes, which probably helps illustrate why my memories of the rest of the place are faint.

Imagine yourself in one of those 50-minute classes. The now-year-old you would be bored silly by the material, and frantically trying to recall the names of the classmates around you.

Now imagine that 17-year-old you suddenly has the now-year-old you's mind and memories. You have 45 minutes – 5 to persuade the teacher to let you speak, and 40 to address your friends (aka captive audience). What do you say?

"Buy Microsoft" is pretty trivial advice. What do they need to hear? Can you warn them, inspire them, encourage them?

• They're young, and think what they've grown up with is permanent. "Almost all of you will live to see the USSR come to pieces without war." "The country of Poland was in a different place, within living memory!" I'm showing my age here.
• They have no idea yet how much their ideas and values are swayed by popular culture, and how much these will change along with the culture, without any thought on their part. Maybe a spot of Socratic dialog?
• They only think they know themselves and what they need in life. "We need to be needed." or "You want to be happy? Be grateful."
• Do any of them need an apology from you?
• Do they need to be warned that youth are ignorant, despite the popular call to "listen to the youth", and that the only change they'll make in the world is the little that will actually be in their scope?
• Do you explain your current religious or political faith?
• For that matter, are you a creature of current culture? If so, do you actually have any wisdom to impart?
• And, what would you promise the teacher to get permission to take over the class?

Would any of it do any good? Maybe just the apology...

It might be fun to guess how your friends might answer. Everybody at a table secretly writes what they would do, and then everybody guesses who wrote what.

A word to the wise about dryer seals

Replacing the rear felt seal has been more fraught than I expected. The video explaining how to replace it claimed it only took a few minutes. This is so iff there's no old adhesive to clean off (Goof Off worked, but it took elbow grease) and the replacement seal just drapes neatly around the drum. I had to clamp and stretch and reclamp and restretch to get the new seal into place.

A different video said use 4 clamps. I'm using 3 large ones and about 20 small ones, and am going to wait overnight for for the felt seal to "relax" into its new length before I try to glue it on. In the meantime I'll get a few more strong spring clamps (they'll also be good in wood work, so won't be a waste) before I start.

Iranian agents

For decades I have heard dark warnings that Iran has sleeper cells in the USA waiting for the word to do something.(*) I guess now we find out how many are ready. Or perhaps, how many are prepared to act before they discover whether their erstwhile paymasters are still in business.

(*) Not with hard evidence, just with "It's obvious that they would." And it is obvious that they'd want to try, but I'm not expert on how supply, command, and control would work on a decades-long insertion. It's probably way cheaper to fund existing networks than to create your own; though you lose the "control" part.

Blame the ELF's

While doing research for a story, I ran across more detailed information about Project ELF (alternative link) than the news ever carried. Part of the technology is apparently still secret, but it looks like they were trying to use granite bedrock as part of the antenna. It wasted a lot of power, but it worked. At these frequencies (76Hz) people's claims of hearing a "hum" seem plausible. I don't know about claims of harm -- I generally discount those unless there's a clear physical model to connect them -- but this was curious:

On the other hand, faculty and researchers at the Michigan Technological University (MTU) School of Forestry and Wood Products have found that the Project ELF’s antenna grid makes the trees grow faster. MTU foresters have been studying the effects ever since the system became operational ten years ago.

The forester's final report says "subtle EM effect to the cambial and stemwood growth of some tree species but not to any other parameter". They claimed a relationship between "diameter growth and magnetic flux density" for aspen and red maple, and "annual height growth and magnetic flux density" for red pine.

That looked like an increase when the field was O(2-3mG), dropping off to "normal" for higher exposures. My first guess when seeing something that only effects a few species is a "look-elsewhere effect", but there's enough similarity that maybe it's worth looking at in more detail. I wonder what the conductivity of the sap is in the different species.

Squirrel!

Yes, I know there can be confounding factors, like distance from a cleared area (they look at that) or herbicides

Sapir-Whorf and groups

AVI's recent post on Sapir-Whorf brought a few things to mind.

I took a course in linguistics as an undergrad. Our teacher assured us that there were no primitive languages. You could talk philosophy in any language. If you had to make up and define new words, that was always possible. I gather he didn't care for Sapir-Whorf, weak or strong.

I didn't attempt to prove him wrong – that's too many languages to learn. It seemed plausible, people being people everywhere. You can't talk about nuclear physics without words for nucleus, but you can explain what those are, just as you can teach the relevant math. To an adult, anyway.

But. Poverty of language makes it harder to communicate some things. If you have leisure, that doesn't matter, but when you don't have time to define nuances that aren't part of a common language heritage, you've got problems.

That matters a lot for slogans, which we often use as a shorthand for thought.

Step back from individual words and think of phrases, or words that have changed meanings. If a culture has succeeded in framing a dispute in terms that admit only a handful of options, you can theoretically describe an alternative, but in practice it's not easy.

Though some people make it look easy. Maybe the most famous framing situation is the one when Pharisees and Saducees tried to get Jesus to take a side in a political quarrel about the legitimacy of Roman oppression – should they pay taxes to the Romans or not? Answer "Yes," and the average folks give up on Jesus, "No" and the Romans will kill him. Jesus was able to rephrase the problem in two sentences (and change the course of Western Civilization). You or I would have been struggling to be nuanced and wind up looking spineless, and disgusting everybody.

The language includes things taken for granted (denotation or connation), most of which most of us never think through. Who has the time to think through what we mean by "liberty" when the the kids need supper? We quote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" but those invisible assumptions mean that John Adams would be startled at how we interpret the phrase. (Liberty: is it intrinsic, something granted, or something achieved? An addict is effectively a slave no matter what the law says. "Slave to one's appetites" is a real condition.)

Orwell went with a strong version of Sapir-Whorf: without appropriate words there are no concepts. But if you expand what you mean by language to include the cultural associations of words and phrases, and think in terms of average behavior, a weaker version seems to be true for populations – subject to the caveats that languages and associations(*) can be made to change, and one on one dialog can go anywhere the participants have the endurance for.

Insofar as slogans rule us, weak Sapir-Whorf seems true.

(*) E.g. Uncle Tom's Cabin changed the image and mental associations of "slave owner."

Ojibwe Singers

by Michael D. McNally : Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion

It's about Ojibwe hymn singers, who usually show up at wakes and funerals to sing Christian hymns in Ojibwe. Never heard of that before? Me either.

This is from 2000, so things may have changed. Most of the singers were older, and it wasn't clear then if youth would aspire to joining the singers, who held a position of respect in the community by their willingness to be there for others in this ritual. I know none of these people, though people I know might know somebody who knows.

Ancient Ojibwe traditions in music have the drum as a central (and spiritual) component. Songs typically have few words with much repetition and vocalisms, many are sacred, and many come from dreams. Catholic and Epicopalian missionaries judged that providing Christian hymns to them in their own language was essential for discipleship. They and gifted converts did their best. Some concepts don't have easy analogs in the other language – even "spirit" isn't simple, since the closest analog in Ojibwe seems to have a primary meaning of "mystery."

From the book:

The way the holy prophets went
The road that leads from banishment
The King's highway of holiness
I'll go, for all His paths are peace

Re-translated back into English from Ojibwe:

The way they were going, those who were wise
The little path that leads straight there
I, too, will go off on it
On the little path that is greatly pitied/blessed

The religious situation on the reservations is complicated: some are adamantly pagan/animist, some are Catholic, some Episcopalian, some various other denominations (Baptist, Pentacostal, etc), and some, to judge from the gang activity, have invested their faith in drugs and guns. Many looked on the hymns as impositions by the whites when they were introduced, and still do over a century later.

But in the meantime singing Ojibwe hymns a capella has become a tradition of its own, most especially among "those who pray" but recognized by the rest as well. So much so, indeed that the author cites:

When one Ojibwe man heard hymns at a ceremony honoring a new drum, for instance, he whispered his opinion that such "Christian" music was disrespectful to the drum. For this man, hymn singing stood in opposition to the other music of Ojibwe tradition in that hymns do not involve a drum. The irony of this particular interchange is also instructive. The drum in question was being initiated or welcomed into the community by entrusting it to the safekeeping and discretionary use of the White Earth singers.

The hymns are often sung very differently, though often the original European tune can be discerned, with much more stress on the individual syllables than either the tune or the lyrics as such. They are sung (not "performed") in a ritual, almost liturgical way, with a clear starting and ending hymn but much variation of songs and silences in between.

The author seemed most interested in the things that made the hymn singing specifically Ojibwe and traditional, and seemed to overlook a different aspect: the hymns are a way of saying two things at once: "This is our tribe's" and "We are also part of a bigger tribe."

The author (and apparently others) found no evidence that there was any intent to subvert the meaning of the hymns in any sort of anti-colonial push. Of course the mere fact that they were in Ojibwe during the era when the government was trying to suppress the language might have been a bit of push-back.

If the subject and its history sound interesting, by all means read it, but be prepared: it is painful to read. Not just the history part – plowing through sociological jargon was not fun at all. (Can you possibly say this in five words instead of a hundred words referencing two different other sociologists?) But his personal experiences and observations made it worth it for me.

And yes, one of the White Earth singers was non-native, but he lived like them and next to them, learned the language, and met the standards of hospitality and respect.

Microclimates

Close to the house is warmer, partly from shelter, partly from heat leakage and partly from sunlight reflecting off the south-facing side of the house. Thus, a crocus in February.

Happiness

AVI has a post about those unkillable "world happiness reports."

Self-reporting is both necessary and biasing--does your culture deprecate boasting about happiness or professing unhappiness?

And, of course, do we agree on what happiness consists in? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

Everybody recognizes all these problems, except of course the reporters turning the press release into a story.

I regard myself as fairly phlegmatic (especially when I have a head cold, but never mind that for now). I'm rarely ecstatic. I'm rarely depressed. How does a survey compare that with someone with bigger highs and lows?

I gather that these kinds of disposition are largely hereditary. I can easily imagine a survey giving radically different results on different temperaments. Suppose one ethnicity trends more choleric in one small country and a different one more phlegmatic in another... Yeah. Double whammy--the countries would have different average reactions to the survey and a different culture too, because of the differences.

My usual association with the word "contentment" is rest, but busy-ness can be contented too. Even driving, of which I am not excessively fond (I'd rather just be there without the intervening concentration and staving off chaos), can have a contented feeling when all is going well. And arriving can have a contentment, even happiness, of its own. It depends on what the journey's for.

Qui bono

Reports about the arrest of the prince formerly known as Andrew said he was suspected of misconduct in office, nothing to do with underage women. It always made sense that there was some financial or government interests behind Epstein's operation, not just supplying ladies to prominent men. (If so, I'd guess he supplied catamites too, though I haven't heard anything about that yet.) And making connections, cementing a reputation as deal-broker?

According the the BBC, he gave Epstein confidential trade reports from his visits to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam. That could be very useful to investors, or negotiators. I wonder if details about who got the info wound up in the files. I'd guess that there's nothing actually actionable, and Andrew will skate. And after 15,16 years the purchasers might not even be in power anymore.