The same item

Two different children independently decided to order a replacement for something their grandmother had had when they were young--a modern version of a German face mug.

Can you spot the differences? No, one is not tilted; that's just to keep the illumination roughly comparable.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

Short answer: sometimes yes.

About 48 years ago an Illinoisian wrote a science fiction novel and spent a fair bit of effort publicizing it; even wangling an interview on a local radio station. In order to keep his science fiction un-prejudiced by current trends, he hadn't read any science fiction--mostly romances. I did my part for the university sci-fi club and spent the money and read the book, and wrote a review. I kept the copy around for a few years until I decided that emptiness was nicer to have. (A beta-reader told him the book was too long, so he cut out the only chapter with action/exposition. No, I'm not making this up; he said in the interview that's why he cut out a chapter. A reader could figure out where and what was missing.)

I don't know what brought that to mind yesterday, but I checked to see if the book had made any more of a splash. According to google (which is less than stellar for pre-internet things), the answer is no; it was listed among new books, but nobody's review (not even mine) was findable. No loss.

However, his self-publishing firm had put out two more books in 2017, with the same pen name. I read the blurb for one of them, and it is odd enough that I wonder if he read any more sci-fi in the intervening forty years. I'm guessing not.

The press published a bunch of books by somebody else, with titles like "Atomic Spirituality" and "Alien Threat from the Moon." I'll pass on all four of the writers.

Once burnt, twice shy.

Influential people

The local paper had an article today of the "influential people" who died this past year. It was pre-Carter's death, so I added that one in for my count. Of 69 entries, about 3/4 were entertainers (including sports figures here).

I wonder who wrote the headline. "Famous" might fit better than "influential"-- at least I hope it does.

Traditional sightings

At solstice the news had photos of the usual suspects circling the standing stones at Stonehenge and clambering around barrows--dreaming of a wight Christmas?

Letters to Malcom

Chiefly on Prayer, by C.S. Lewis

I've no good excuse for not having read this before. Something about the title seemed off-putting, perhaps--I'm not greatly intrigued by somebody else's correspondance, and reading about prayer can seem as much of an awkward duty as doing it can sometimes be (and Lewis wrote about that in one of the letters).

At any rate, I have corrected that deficiency, and if you haven't, you should. His letters show as much vivid imagery as his work written for publication, and some things he has thought about much more deeply than I.

A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question, "What on earth is he up to now?" will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, "I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks."

It isn't hard to find the book.

Carols

A joyful Christmas to all! And if joy isn't the first thing in your thoughts (a friend died yesterday--the doctors were pretty accurate as to how long he had), Jesus has been there too.

Thinking about carols: we all know that Joy to the World isn't a Christmas song, but we sing it then anyway. Some of the old favorites have grammar that confuses children (I was one) thanks in part to fashions for making English poetry work like Latin. But they are fun; they help us celebrate; they help us remember.

I got to thinking--is there a lack in the Christmas carol collection?

In the Christmas story we have John the Baptist, Elizabeth, Mary, Zechariah, Simeon, and Anna, inspired directly by the Holy Spirit.

We have Joseph and the magi, indirectly informed by the Holy Spirit in dreams.

We have Mary and the shepherds, informed by angels sent from God.

I can't think of any Christmas hymns devoted to the Holy Spirit. They all point to Jesus, and perhaps reference the Father. Perhaps that's appropriate, but it seems a little odd.

Fasts and Feasts

A post of AVI's brought to mind this Patheos post about an Orthodox Archbishop:

Visitations by Archbishop Dmitri Royster of the Orthodox Church in America were different, since the faithful in the 14-state Diocese of the South knew that one memorable event would take care of itself. All they had to do was take their leader to a children’s Sunday school class and let him answer questions.

During a 1999 visit to Knoxville, Tenn., the lanky Texan folded down onto a kid-sized chair and faced a circle of pre-school and elementary children. With his long white hair and flowing white beard, he resembled an icon of St. Nicholas — as in St. Nicholas, the monk and 4th century bishop of Myra.

As snacks were served, a child asked if Dmitri liked his donuts plain or with sprinkles. With a straight face, the scholarly archbishop explained that he had theological reasons — based on centuries of church tradition — for preferring donuts with icing and sprinkles.

A parent in the back of the room whispered: “Here we go.” Some of the children giggled, amused at the sight of the bemused bishop holding up a colorful pastry as if he was performing a ritual.

“In Orthodoxy, there are seasons in which we fast from many of the foods we love,” he said. “When we fast, we should fast. But when we feast, we should truly feast and be thankful.” Thus, he reasoned, with a smile, that donuts with sprinkles and icing were “more Orthodox” than plain donuts.

I have not been doing very well with my Advent fast this year, with remarkably little change in my diet--though I'm keeping the carbs low. I've proved somewhat better at the feasts. I think I need both, in rhythm.

Deaths in a happy season

I didn't know anybody at ALCS, but friends did, and friends had children there. One ten-year-old was in the room across the hall from the shooting, another child sat next to the shooter for a class, another had a locker close by and saw her regularly. Another friend might have, had paperwork been handled differently, been in the room that day.

Remember the Holy Innocents. It's not always a "happy" season.

Deuterocanonicals

The New Testament contains a number of references to the Jewish version of the Old Testament which many Protestants endorse: notably Isaiah, Genesis, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Micah, Malachi, and so on. Quite a few of those references are prefixed with "it is written."

Here is a list of quotes and "allusions" in the New Testament to the Old. Some of these are "it is written" references that assume the authority of the passage cited, while others are parallel—and sometimes it's a bit of a stretch.

The New Testament also contains a few obvious references to non-canonical material, for example: "Cretans are always liars", "in Him we live and move and exist", and the difficult one, referring to Enoch's prophecy. The first link is an obvious joke paradox, and the second was quoting their own writers to some pagan Greeks.

The Enoch one is hard – the book of Enoch as we have it is a mess (in my not so humble opinion). Some scholars think at least some of it dates to about 100BC, though parts may be older. The Jews think it contradicts the Torah, and though several early church fathers thought it valid scripture, today only a couple of Ethiopian churches do. I had a little trouble keeping the thread of the book sometimes. It is heavily into judgment – in fact, 1 Enoch 1:1-2 seems to say that it is meant for the last generation before judgment.

FWIW, Jude also quotes from the now-lost Assumption of Moses—so say several early Church Fathers who still had access to the work.

Whether what we have of Enoch is what Jude had (and the Qumran folks) I can't say. Jude's citation seems perfectly innocuous; the confusion comes from his attribution of the quote to "Enoch the 7th from Adam." I'm content, after having read it, to agree with everybody but the Ethiopians and read Enoch no more.

---

At any rate, the obvious question is: Are there citations of the Deuterocanonical books in the New Testament? (The next obvious question is, are those books cited by the early Church Fathers? Yes, they are, but I haven't investigated how significant the citations are. And they approvingly cite books that nobody includes in canon, so the Fathers are not the sturdiest reeds for this sort of evaluation.)

So, I looked around and found a list of alleged references at scripturecatholic.com.

At one point the list says "James 2:23 – it was reckoned to him as righteousness follows 1 Macc. 2:52 – it was reckoned to him as righteousness." I think one could argue that Genesis is older than Maccabees, and refer to Genesis 15:6 instead. There are several such dubious references.

The list also has lots of what look like reasonable parallels. It links Pauls' "sacrifice to demons and not to God" to Baruch 4:7, which is a quite reasonable parallel, though not a "it is written" class of citation.

And there are a lot of sort-of parallels that I'd not really count unless the New Testament author explicitly made the connection for me, as Matthew does.

All in all, I don't see the same sort of obvious connections to the deuterocanonicals that there are to (some of) the rest of the Old Testament. That doesn't rule out canonicity, of course—most of the Old Testament isn't cited either. The New Testament would be much longer if it did that.

If there were such a "it is written" citation to Judith, I'd bet there wouldn't have been any argument about including it.

Human sacrifice

Spencer Klavan reviews a documentary about Lily Phillips, the woman who had sex with 100 men in one day for OnlyFans. I will not be watching the documentary, much less OnlyFans – sometimes curiosity can be an ugly thing, and sometimes dangerous to the soul. I'll take Klavan's observations of the documentary as accurate, and avoid the other for obvious reasons.

No one described the situation more clearly, or more fearsomely, than the anonymous viewer who wrote, “So weird, it's like watching someone commit suicide but they are still alive.”

I gather from what Klavan wrote that Lily's words in the interview were of empowerment—the ideology of antinomian liberation—while her manner spoke of torment. The ideology/religion of limitless emancipation demands some examples: prove you mean what you say about limitless pleasure. Even when your nature rebels against the lies your mind affirms.

In 2024 we are all extremely comfortable talking about “systems” of injustice and oppression, disembodied mechanisms and algorithms with the power to influence and entrap us. What distinguishes these forces from those that older authors called “powers of the air?” Less and less, it would seem. The medievals probably attributed consciousness and intention to these powers in a way we do not. Are we more justified than they were?

His description sounds like a human sacrifice.

Noise

When the defrost fan is running on high and your ears are muffled under a tight wool cap, you might not hear the engine stall as you try to back the still-cold minivan down the driveway. It will seem very strange that you have no acceleration, and that the steering now requires a gorilla to turn. A mild disadvantage of a smooth-running engine...

Rituals

BBC has an article about how rituals help us connect; little things that we do together. The interview doesn't go into how to create them, or if robust ones only arrise spontaneously, and I'm not buying the book right now to find out.

It struck me that there might be a dark side--rituals that disconnect and repel us from each other. Are there rituals in unhappy marriages, or rituals that reinforce solitude?

Some tribal recitations are ritualistic, even though they're not actions, for example the conversational challenge/response that assures your comrades that you're still one of them."

Decades ago we got a year-long subscription to Chocolatier (I think that was the name) magazine. Out of the 12 issues we recall nothing but the recipe for cranberry nut bars, which everybody liked and we've made every year as a Christmas bar since: a spontaneous tradition. In the other direction, early in our marriage we didn't do anything in particular for Advent, but some time ago we decided to make the Advent candle time a tradition, and barring the sometimes illness it has been so ever since: deliberately creating a tradition, with our particular flavor.

Fire in Liberia

"fire engulfed the Capitol Building, the seat of Liberia’s Legislature." Also: "The Liberia National Fire Service and the Liberia National Police responded promptly to the emergency, but their efforts were hampered by limited and outdated firefighting equipment."

Second fire in about a week--first was attributed to an electrical fault, with no major damage. I'm not expert enough to know if a smolder can last a week and flare up again. If you don't have equipment to look for hot spots...

There's blame. Two factions in the House of Representatives claim to be in charge--one group removed Speaker Koffa from his position. Rep Foko is being arrested for questioning, accused of making "incendiary remarks" ("If they want us to burn the session, we will burn it.") Protestors had been out in front the day before, and were dispersed aggressively. You may believe Johnson or not as you please: ""rights as enshrined in our constitution can’t be trampled upon by neither Mr. Boakai, nor his irresponsible homophile police Director Gregory Coleman. The firing of live bullets at unarmed citizens speaks to the undemocratic and tyrannical nature of the Unity Party government and this reminds us of the numerous bloodshed orchestrated and executed by Unity Party over the years,” he said. "

I don't think I'd care to pay them a visit until the dust settles a bit.

UPDATE: 8-Jan-2025

Investigators say that a) the fire started in multiple places and b) they found a container with an accelerant. They have invited some people to appear to explain themselves.

Interesting. There's a chance for me to visit, but we wonders, aye we wonders.

Is volume the important part?

I checked several stores for metal tins we could use to pack homemade cookies in. They're pretty scarce, and for a few cents more I could buy tins of cookies, eat the cookies, and reuse the tins.

Work at Home

A discussion at AVI's turned towards Work At Home and its effects.

I don't have statistics or analysis, but I do have some anecdotes and a few thoughts.

Obviously a lot of things just can't be done from home. A computer systems manager may have everything monitored and automated, such that he can keep track of things while traveling, and fix 98% of all problems remotely, but when a disk goes sour somebody has to walk into the server room to replace it. And that's a white-collar job.

I was able to do almost every bit of my job from home. The plus side included saving 90 minutes of my day that would have been commuting, and being available for emergencies. I got more sleep and ate better, and I think I was more focussed as a result. The down side was that I was also available for non-emergencies, which militates against staying "in the zone." I'll get the the "growth" downside in a bit.

I knew another manager, working for a company instead of the University. He could easily do all his work from home, and did. However, others in the same group also could, and didn't--or at least not as well. Since the job involved monitoring a lot of equipment, if somebody slacked off problems didn't get noticed as fast. Not earth-shattering, but it degraded performance.

I heard tales of K-12 students nominally doing "remote learning", who found ways of hacking the system (still images instead of videos, etc) to hide the fact that they weren't paying attention, or indeed sometimes even present at all. You might wonder if they'd have learned much more if they'd been physically present; that's a fair point. Some, though, I'd guess.

Some managers can trust the people they manage, and I'd guess that WorkFromHome works pretty well for them. But if their management philosophy tries to measure everything--not so much.

If what the kids see you doing teaches them about how work works (and how to do it well), then being at home where your kids can see what you do might help them. (Assumes, of course, that they are at home when you are, and that they don't interfere too much.)

WorkFromHome can interfere with growth, though. In person you get a wider understanding of someone's abilities and personality. For the jobs you have right now, the people you have right now may be just fine, but when the job broadens, or somebody retires, or you need a new manager: Zoom/Teams/whatever meetings may not tell you enough to predict who the best person to promote will be.

Meetings for lunch could be revelatory: "I hadn't heard about that; tell me more." Sometimes the topic might be options for problem solving, and another the Packers game.

In a tech field this matters a lot. We've solved problem X, what do we do next? You have quick talks in the hall, or around the table in the CERN cafeteria, to start the seeds long before you know to organize a workshop or symposium. The research projects of the future start with "Did you see this?" in the hall, or "What if?" at the table. That doesn't happen from home.

Our group tried using a Discord feature: turning on the camera so we were as visible at home as we were in our offices at work. Why? At work I could look in the window beside the door and tell if a colleague was concentrating hard, and couldn't be bothered with a question. At home, who knows? Well, in practice that didn't work. Probably the camera and mike were too close and intimate.

Fearful

At prayer meeting this morning, several men worried that some of their adult children were afraid--afraid to drive, afraid of change, afraid to leave home, or other manifestations. (OK, a worry that you'll hurt somebody when you are still objectively bad at driving isn't crazy.)

We agreed that "The world is ending" trope for grabbing clickbait eyeballs didn't help, and likely the "Mankind is a cancer on the globe" trope didn't tend to enspire confidence.

AVI had thoughts a while back about how people who grew up "in" a partly virtual world valued the virtual relationships far more than those of us who mostly didn't.

An obvious extention to that is "virtual adventuring." Do kids get out less than they used to? My sampling is somewhat biased--we live in a lower middle-class area--but some of the younger kids do get out on their bikes a lot, especially when there are more kids at home.

It's hard to know what you're capable of if you don't experiment with doing a few hard things now and then. "Hard" is relative, of course--I was a rather shy kid and "hard" included striking up conversations with new people. Virtual interactions allow some buffering.

I didn't have smart phones (for half my childhood we didn't have any phone) or computers, but I did have books, and spent a substantial amount of time with those, and not as much time socializing/playing with others as other kids did. I suspect that was partly because I was shy, and partly it reinforced the shyness -- not so confident because not so experienced.

Does "virtual life" sap time and experience from "physical life?" It does seem likelier to restrict your circle of acquaintances. I overhear things in buses and bookstores that I don't run into in my "virtual circle"--such as people who honestly believe they will live long enough for their mind to be downloaded into a computer, or people who believe that Trump staged getting shot at (I gather that the woman had never actually tried to hit anything--gun, bow, or just throwing a rock). And then when you do run into people you don't understand, perhaps you fear?

Old writings

C.S. Lewis strongly recommended On the Incarnation of the Word by St. Athanasius. I finally got around to reading it. Yes, read it. It's short and the language is clean--it doesn't need lots of explanatory footnotes. He explains why the Incarnation is fitting and offers proofs for the divinity of Jesus.

I notice that he brings forward among the proofs of his case both the lives of Christians and miracles. I wonder what he'd refer to if he wrote today.

Lewis also recommended Boethius. Cheers for CCEL!

Burnout Prevention and Recovery

A few decades ago I read rec.humor.funny (rec.humor was mostly trash). Some of that is archived at a non-https site (www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/93q3/msview.html), so I can't insert a link without blogger throwing a fit, but one post reminded me a bit of grad school.

10. TAKE CARE OF YOUR BODY. Don't skip meals, abuse yourself with rigid diets, disregard your need for sleep, or break the doctor appointments. Take care of yourself nutritionally.

    MICROSOFT VIEW: Your body serves your mind, your mind serves the company. Push the mind and the body will follow. Drink Mountain Dew. (it's free.)

11. DIMINISH WORRY AND ANXIETY. Try to keep superstitious worrying to a minimum--it changes nothing. You'll have a better grip on your situation if you spend less time worrying and more time taking care of your real needs.

    MICROSOFT VIEW: If you're not worrying about work, you must not be very committed to it. We'll find someone who is.

Mozi

AVI has a link to a Spengler article which offers to explain Chinese governance policies as a consequence of its geography and formation: bottom line is that something as critical as flood control has been impossible without central organization and control for at least a couple of thousand years. China isn't an organic entity, and doesn't act like it.

OK, it's a plausible model. I'm not sure his comparison with Rome is accurate.

Along the way "Spengler" wrote "Chinese philosophy focuses on acceptance, hierarchical loyalty, or adherence to authority, in its respective guises of Taoism, Confucianism, and Legalism."

Back when I was in grad school I tried to read Mencius. (I didn't finish the book; see "grad school" above.) He spent a fair chunk of ink blasting a different philosophy, not one of the famous schools, called Mohism. Its characteristic theme was "universal love," or "impartial love."

I looked it up.

It's a curious confection. Apparently the school rented themselves out as philosophical advisors to rulers (as did the Confucians), but also for designing fortifications. Mozi held that "since development of music involves man's power, it reduces production of food; furthermore, appreciation of music results in less time for administrative works. This overdevelopment eventually results in shortage of food, as well as anarchy." This sounds like a dislike for ostentatious events more than for playing a flute, but I never finished his treatise and can't swear to that. And he was big on frugality; without which you could not have contentment and the material wealth and population growth he regarded as the marks of a good society.

From Wikipedia

Law and order was an important aspect of Mozi's philosophy. He compared the carpenter, who uses standard tools to do his work, with the ruler, who might not have any standards by which to rule at all. The carpenter is always better off when depending on his standard tools, rather than on his emotions. Ironically, as his decisions affect the fate of an entire nation, it is even more important that a ruler maintains a set of standards, and yet he has none. These standards cannot originate from man, since no man is perfect; the only standards that a ruler uses have to originate from Heaven, since only Heaven is perfect. That law of Heaven is Love.

Not agape, however. Similarities to Christian ideas are only superficial.

Observant Secular Jew

Judaism without God is an opinion peice posted at the Times of Israel addressing the problem of being simultaneously atheist and Jewish. Nathan Cardozo admits that it's hard to think of commandments without a Commander, but

The problem, however, is that Jewish history proves over and over again that the moment Jews stop being observant, assimilation sets in, and within a short period of time Jews stop being Jews and their grandchildren are lost to the Jewish people.

But, stipulating that the Jews must continue to exist, how is one to be observant without a motive? His answer boils down to "Teach ourselves to do it anyway."

when Judaism is taught and lived such that the secular Jew will be so uplifted by the grand ideas of Jewish Tradition that, despite his denial that God exists, he cannot resist living by its sublime directives.

...

One can only understand the meaning of Shabbat when one experiences Shabbat by actually observing it. To claim otherwise is identical to a person who denies the sublime beauty of music on the basis that he never heard it.

...

It will be necessary to organize special courses and even academies to teach Judaism in such a manner that even the most secular Jew will be inspired and feel the inner need to become observant without admitting that there is a God.

So far, so speculative, not to say fanciful--though he has a good point about the Sabbath. But then he wrote:

In this respect he is greater than the religious Jew. He is the authentic Baal Teshuva!

Of course that begs the question. If the religious Jew is obeying a real God, he is in touch with something greater than any academy or human resolution.

You can inspire some people to follow some commandments because of their beauty: the Sabbath, for example. But I'm not sure what you can say to make eschewing bacon and pepperoni pizza attractive.

Lost

A Sippican Cottage post from 2017, still apropos.

I noticed something about my behavior, and the behavior of many other people, when I got lost. You speed up. The lost-er you get, the faster you go, and the more frantic you become. There is almost no better time to slow down and think things through than when you’re lost, but people don’t do it. People behave just the opposite, almost to a man. It’s the same reason an inveterate gambler lays his last, borrowed dollar on the green baize. He’s trying to win back everything he ever lost, all at once, all the time.

Twisted little plots

As preparation for a project, I wanted to look at the behavior of $x^x$ on the unit circle. For those not familiar with the unit circle, that's on the complex plane, where a complex number is displayed by its "real" part (along the x-axis) and its "imaginary" part (along the y-axis). Numbers with absolute value = 1 appear on a circle in this plane. Each point on the graph represents a single complex number, not two numbers, though it can be broken down into two numbers.

I start with points $x$ on the unit circle (marked in blue), calculate $x^x$, and connect the dots for the results in green. There are a few red lines to guide the eye showing what points on the unit circle map to points on the new curve.

Now since $1 = e^{2 \pi N}$ where $N$ is an integer, there can be a lot of different results. The simplest case is $N=0$, of course. In that case $-1^{-1}=-1$. The point where the curve crosses itself is at $(e^{-\pi/2},0)$.

A bit twisted.

If you're curious what happens when $N=1$ (I was), look at this.

The real curve is smooth; I only used a few points to calculate it which is why it looks jerky. There's a bit of swooping around 0 that doesn't show up at this resolution. To see that, look at the central part. For N=-2, -1, 0, 1, 2, the central part looks like this:

There are things that look like $1$ that don't entirely act like $1$.

A modern Great Game

Grim has a nice summary of who and what in Syria right now. Will Assad stay in Moscow? Will it matter?

I have no idea how many observers we can rely on there, but Trent Telenko says he's heard that the Turkish backed forces have been using drones heavily, presumably inspired by Ukrainian tactics. It would be interesting to know how that's working -- and maybe learn a few lessons ourselves.

Assuming Erdogen's proxies win, I wonder if he will turn his sights on "Greater Syria" (aka Lebanon) or the Kurds first. If Lebanon, he might find it convenient to try to wrest Hezbollah out of the Iranian orbit -- it would give him tremendous leverage in Lebanon, and street cred with his Islamist allies, given Hezbollah's fight against the "Little Satan."

The enemy of my enemy is my Best Friend for a Few turns.

If you tarry 'til you're better

You will never come at all.

An Episcopal priest has decided that Jesus' demand that you be reconciled to your brother before coming to the altar means he mustn't celebrate the Eucharist, or take it, until the church has dealt with its history of "white supremacy." Not surprisingly, he'll probably be defrocked.

He seems to be either objecting to God's denial of inherited punishment or claiming that we can make ourselves pure enough on our own. He'd do better, I think, to claim that inequalities of income or status represent current sins -- there's a little more of a tradition of that sort of claim.

Protests such as Ramey’s have been key to forcing change in the Episcopal Church, said the Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, former dean and president of Episcopal Divinity School in New York City. Bishops ordained 11 women to the priesthood in 1974, in defiance of church policy. In 2007, five priests in Massachusetts refused to officiate weddings until the church allowed them to perform same-sex marriages.

FWIW, This Douglas the story cites is called "an expert on racial reconcilliation." She's written a book, but permit me to wonder who exactly she has managed to reconcile. I’ve said it before and will continue to say: you can’t be white and Christian. I don’t mean that in terms of looking like a white American, but instead, the construct of “white.” With allies like that...

It looks like he decided that his parish (he resigned, btw) was obstinately sinful because of the inaction of the greater church, and that he should declare his own interdict.

Prince Johnson

is dead. He apparently collapsed and died in his shower early today (other sources say died in bed) (Thursday starts earlier in Liberia). During the Liberian civil war he became one of the warlords, and famously captured, tortured, and killed Doe -- and had it filmed.

Following continued clashes with Taylor and the pro-Doe ULIMO group, the INPFL was disbanded and Johnson was forced into exile in Nigeria in 1992, where he converted to Christianity and reconciled with the Doe family.

The "reconciled with the Doe family" is interesting. You always wonder if a famous conversion like this is real or political, but if he managed that, I'm guessing real. He became a pastor, and a senator--apparently not always a straight-up one, but that's not surprising in a senator. I never met the man and have no personal impressions.

Do I need to say that the tribes he represented remember him fondly, and the tribes he fought against are angry he never stood trial? His troops did a lot of ugly things during the war.

I've already opined about Truth and Reconciliation in Liberia, and I don't know of any new evidence to change my conclusion (it's probably a bad idea). I think the only political way forward is for the warlords to die off. There's another way, a supernatural way, and it sounds like Rev. Johnson found it.

Christmas in Singapore

From Plough

Rising and descending between Venice and The Shoppes amid the rootless evergreens, I realized that I was witnessing a colonization of sorts – but it was not the imposition of Western or Christian values on the world. The West itself had been the first to fall to this new empire without realizing what had happened, leaving behind caricatures of itself and expensive retail chains. Political philosopher Patrick Deneen coined the term “anticulture” to describe this colonizing force – not a nation-state but the unspoken ideology of those currently running our nation-states – that drives global commerce and government, uprooting local traditions in order to sell us newer models of ourselves. Weaken the ties of family, faith, community, and culture, of the particularity that roots us in time and place, and nothing remains but homo economicus, whose only fixed identity is to consume.

Left of Bang

by Patrick van Horne and Jason A Riley

How can you predict dangerous situations before they go bang? This book was highly recommended by several folks. The first chapter annoyed me--you don't have to give a sales pitch when you've already sold the book.

Bottom line: They provide some categories and things to watch for, but the only way to apply them is to spend time watching the people around you in order to get a baseline to work from. My neighborhood isn't yours--there are about 5 languages within half a suburban block. It would be quite different just across the highway in the apartment complex, and neither resembles Afghanistan.

Once you have trained yourself to see things, and know what to expect, you can spot the anomalies.

I had our kids read The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. I don't know if it helped.

Update: I forgot to mention--the authors say 10 years to become expert, based on Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule. I assume that means a) less than ten years and b) native talent can make it even faster.

An Autistic Guy's Guide to Security

by TL CR The author is British, and the book badly needed proofreading, but on the whole the advice is sensible, and explains why some things are important. I think it would be better paired with the book in the next post.

China Marine

by E.B. Sledge.

Some of you know his With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa: an enlisted man's tale of some of the worst fighting in the Pacific. What happened when the war ended and it was time to come home?

As the book's title hints, he didn't come straight home. His unit was sent to China to help demobilize the huge Japanese armies there, and try to help the Chinese Nationalists get control of the country back from the Japanese, and try to stay out of the way of the growing civil war.

He met wonderful people there, and found himself in strange situations--cultures clashed quite a bit sometimes. And then he finally came home, where people were busily trying to forget the horrors that few of them had actually seen. A veteran was a veteran--but some had been on the bleeding edge and some hadn't heard a shot. (My father spent his Navy time typing paperwork on Manus Island so other guys could come home.) (Bill Mauldin drew about coming home too.)

He found his personal peace becoming a biologist.

Read it

Maybe I shouldn't go by the extremes

Transhumanism seems to borrow a bit from ancient philosophies that held that the human spirit was trapped in a physical body, and needed liberation. Except that this time liberation from the world comes through being reincarnated in a different body: one made of electronics instead of self-repairing flesh.

"Effective altruism" claims nice things on their websites, but the things I've heard of a few of its devotees bring Linus to mind.

Little people

In the mostly English and Irish legends I knew of, the Little People were not generally friendly. I read a suggestion about 40+ years ago that these were displaced indigenous peoples still hiding in the woods and wastelands. Insofar as such displacement happens pretty much everywhere, and the folks hiding will probably not be as well nourished and certainly not dressed in the usual fashions, it wouldn't be crazy to find smaller folk who look different, hiding in the woods. The tale would then "shrink" in the telling. Nice theory.

However, these tales show up in Alaska, where one expects the displace-ee's to live, and Hawaii, and Flores Island, and the rest of North America, and places in Africa. OK, Africa is different--they actually _have_ little people, but Hawaii had no indigenous people before the Polynesians showed up.

So from whence the stories?

Maybe the stories are retellings of retellings of truly ancient stories of the humans who met Neanderthals et al before they spread around the world. That would be interesting, but wouldn't tell us much about the encounters.

Maybe they are a kind of hard-wired reaction to tell a story that explains uncanny things that happen in the woods; attributing them to humanoids since we understand humans, and the humanoids have to be small because there's no sign of them afterward.

Or maybe they're real, and just have gotten good at hiding. Really good at it, because lots of former residences of the little people are now suburbia and farms. Maybe that explains why I can't find the garage door opener...

Folk music

We went to the international folk fair in Milwaukee this afternoon.

Most costumes were a snapshot of what was popular at some time in the past (the Malian men wore current styles, though) The art displayed, ditto. The dances were usually done to more modern fusions, using old-style costumes.

I wanted to ask "What is modern Lithuanian culture? How does it differ from generic 'European'?" I didn't want to embarass anybody, though. And the answer might be hard to put into words. They undoubtedly have songs and books in their own language, and some of the things they write would inherit somewhat from the old culture, but I'd bet that most of it would be written within the context of the broader generic culture, with its values and assumptions.

Backing up, what goes into culture? Religion, collective history, local fashions, local traditions. Besides the language, one obvious distinctive of (e.g. I'm not really trying to pick on them; plug in whoever you like. That was just the booth I was in front of when the thought came to mind.) Lithuania is their politics, which sometimes partakes rather strongly of religion--but isn't something other people can appreciate.

Just for laughs, I looked up vibee.tv for the top 10 pop stars in Europe today. One "star" was a duo (UK and Nigeria). 3 were US, 3 1/2 were UK, 1 Korea, 1 Canada, 1/2 Africa. 1 was EU. I get the impression of some blenderizing of culture.

How does "Lithuanian" music get to compete in that environment?

It manages. I wonder why they didn't put some of it in at the fair

Education in Liberia

"Dr. Benjamin Wehye, President of LICOSESS College of Education recently returned home from Zambia with his PhD earned in Education after five years of what he termed as “intensive online research based and solution development study,” accompanied by in-person seminars." What does he say about Liberia's well-known problems with education?

raised concerns about Liberia’s seriousness to break away from the 1860s educational philosophy which he said was centered around exclusively educating children of freed and repatriated slaves and neglecting back then, the native residents who laid the foundation for the country that is today known as Liberia. ...

Once a slave, the mindset becomes narrow and restricted to thinking that freedom is yet too far away. This is why they train their children in the same fashion, making them believe that a certain class of people does not deserve the opportunity to rise to certain levels.

Exactly what from the 1860's educational philosophy remains in the Liberian system today isn't specified. Nor is it clear what the limited educational opportunities a century ago (native tribes didn't get a lot of schools) has to do with all 25,000 applicants failing the entrance exam a few years ago: that's the descendants of the native tribes, of the "Congo" people, and of the Americos -- none passed.

If things are still pretty much as they were when I was there, problems include low salaries, unreliable payment of same, poor oversight, and low prestige for teachers--if you have an education, you want a better government job than mere teacher. There was also the problem of school fees that not all families could afford, though I gather there's been some effort to find the money in the budget to deal with that. (No doubt much will go astray.)

Rhetoric about historical offences seems unlikely to address those issues. For that matter, if this report about the LICOSESS Gbarnga school closing is a guide, the good Dr. Wehye has some housekeeping at home to take care of: "allegedly using course guides instead of a complete curriculum for its B-certificate program in Gbarnga".

If LICOSESS does what it's advertised to, that will help. They've graduated quite a few teachers already from several campuses--the important things are simple. Train teachers, and remember to pay them.

Throwing Away and Wasting

Jesus warned that we might have to throw some things away, in fact, give up everything. True, this can translate to treasure in heaven, but in the meantime things seem to be lost.

Though one hopes that gifts to the poor aren't lost, not infrequently they're squandered, and any value will have to be supernatural. Ordinary wealth can and does vanish and benefit nobody--and may be wasted.

But in a few passages something else seems to show up. After feeding the multitudes, Jesus says to gather up the leftovers so nothing will be lost. After the Resurrection, He asks seven of the disciples to haul in a load of fish, even though he already has fish and bread waiting for them.

He seems not to want things He provides wasted. Which is encouraging.

The internet

I wonder what Dr Boli has been reading lately. FWIW, some of my scratch paper notes have become blog posts. And other things.

Special Days

The city calendar hanging beside me has almost every day flagged as some "Day": Bison Day, World Freedom Day, Fast Food Day, Craft Jerky Day, Cake Day, and World Hello Day. "Cookie Cutter Day" has another, unmentioned, name this year: the start of Advent.

At least they got Christmas Eve et al on there.

Subverting the Patriarchy

The Catholics and Southern Baptists (I'm a bit more familiar with the latter) are held as exemplars of patriarchy, which is understood to be a bad thing™(*).

Catholic devotions are famously Mary-centric, even more so than the Orthodox. (Rosary, anyone?) The Southern Baptist liturgical year celebrates the lives of Annie Armstrong (Easter) and Lottie Moon (Christmas) and their determination to serve God no matter what ossified patriarchs got in their way. I see an interesting contrast between alleged "know your place" teaching, and teaching "be like these women who overcame the people who wanted them to stay in their place."

---

Any form of organization is subject to corruption and misuse, but why patriarchy should be uniquely bad isn't clear. If Darwin's rule is any guide, approximately patriarchal societies seem to be very successful. (Is it still a patriarchy if men run some aspects of society and women rule others?)

---

Dan McBride wrote

But when the church needs workers, they do not wrack their brains.
They go enlist a lady that the WMU has trained.
It surely is a good thing that the women enter in,
'Cause we'd all be in trouble if we left it to the men!

After 55 years, a different view

Early in high school I read the collection of Saki (Hector Hugh Munro). All at once, of course. He had wit and excellent twists in many of his short stories, some of which turn up in school readers. He was known for it.

I acquired a volume for our own kids later, and it gathered a bit of dust until recently. I found it on the coffee table, read here and there in it again, and concluded that one should limit his reading to one or two stories, and not try too many at once. In bulk (more than four or five), they depress. I got the impression that the author, or at least his favorite characters, didn't like women or children very much.

But in small doses:

A Poet praised the Evening Star,
Another praised the Parrot’s hue:
A Merchant praised his merchandise,
And he, at least, praised what he knew.

Conspiracy theories

They're all the rage, and I suppose they always have been. I run into claims about drug company this, or Monsanto that, or "October surprise" scheming -- and some of the old "Jews run the world" themes seem to be getting new life, and an ugly amount of influence.

I don't hear much chatter about QAnon anymore. The only place I heard much about it was media reports; outside of those I only know of one person who is/was into it, and I never met him. It never seemed to have any institutional support, unlike Kendi's conspiracy theory, which has a great deal. and is unusual, in that he posits an unconscious conspiracy

What gives a conspiracy theory cachet? Some critical mass of celebrities endorsing it? Tribal endorsement? Popularity great enough that nobody wants to say anything against it?

Unknown story of forgiveness

Judas wasn't going to explain his doings to anybody before the betrayal, and wasn't in a mood to afterwards, so from whence did the synoptic gospels get the information about the "chief priests and officers" and the silver?

Acts 6:7 says that "a great many of the priests were becoming obedient to the faith." If one of those chief priests was among the converted, what a story he must have had! Just like Paul, he was certain he was on the side of the angels, though using rather disreputable means, and then -- oh oh.

Maybe it was one of the officers. There probably weren't a lot of people in on the secret, though.

A reflection on the rhetoric before and after

"a curious disease which they have all caught--an inability to disbelieve advertisements"

C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress

Garden fork

I learned about this item rather late in life: shovels and spades and snow shovels I learned about quickly, but this one escaped my notice. It turns out to be very useful when you need to break up the soil, especially when your better half plants bulbs--a shovel's wide slice dissects more of them than the few spikes of the garden fork.

A shovel also tends to bring dirt up more as clods, and so requires a little more work to break it up so you can stir in the fertilizer or whatever. A fork is also handy when you're trying to trace grass/mint/bindweed roots traveling sideways--you can figure out which way they're going and pull more of the root out.

However

A word to the wise: the garden forks we have (garage sale specials) don't have tops as flat as a shovel's (or even the example above) for planting your foot on to ram it into hard or rooty soil. Look for flat tops when you get one.

If you try to push the more rounded models with your foot, you'll force your muscles and tendons to work harder to try to hold your foot straight and not turn sideways. You may not notice your mistake until the next day, but you'll notice. It's been a week, and whatever the tendon is attached to the tibia medial malleolus is still sore to the touch.

New World metallurgy

I'd heard it proposed that the presence of so much native copper in Michigan, and trading so widespread, meant that there was no great pressure to learn smelting. Tin ores are quite scarce, so bronze wasn't going to be made locally north of Mexico. Meteoric iron could be found, of course, and seems to have been used here and there.

South, though: Jonathan Hall's post is quite extensive, and if he's correct it looks like Peru had an impressive metallurgical culture, which spread north into Mesoamerica; but apparently the trade in metal goods didn't go further north into the modern USA. The absence of tin would explain why nobody bothered to try to smelt bronze, and the easy availability of native copper removes the need to smelt copper, but why wouldn't there be some trade? Did the North have nothing the Mesoamericans wanted, or were the desert stretches that great a trade barrier? There's always the coastlines and raft-boats -- unless there really was nothing they wanted.

Banality

Douglas Murray has at Hannah Arendt and her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, citing research that shows she was (at best) duped. He also argues that her cute slogan has contributed to our widespread inability to call evil evil.

I wonder if she read The Screwtape Letters' 1961 preface, "I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice."

Those quiet men sometimes harbor the wildest evils in their hearts and in their minutes.

Time

I'm helping beta-read a novel, and one aspect of it headed me down a rabbit hole about time, to a 31-year-old paper presented to the NCTE about "Indian time." "Indian time" is mythic, based on appropriateness of action ("I eat when I'm hungry, I drink when I'm dry, and if whiskey don't kill me I'll live til I die."), while "linear time" contributes to dislocation and illness. As is typical, the author cites special relativity without showing the remotest understanding of it.

The problems attributed to "linear time" and "technology" are curable with "mythic time" and simplicity, of course. Patton seems to be unacquainted with Christian traditions about materialism. And Mander's comparison tables, cited in the Appendix, are not just invidious but inaccurate. Some tribes did in fact work to produce surplus for trade, and trade networks could be extensive.

You can tell that the paper is old; it doesn't try to attribute wickedness to whites, just to "technology." It probably would run into a lot of flack today.

At any rate, I didn't find what I was hunting: anything like the (surprisingly late!) idea of returning to the past. Stories of one-way time travel to the future are very old.

Of course, after making a bit of fun of the paper, I need to give an example of what she means. When I lived in Liberia, people referred to Liberian Standard Time, which in practice meant "whenever:" Maybe half an hour after the hour specificed, maybe the next day. Things happened, and meetings ran long, and part of business was maintaining relationships. And land line telephones weren't that common. When I returned, cell phones were ubiquitous, and often interrupted things. It seemed that the rule that "a meeting lasts as long as it lasts" was now something of an exception. Was maintaining relations still such a large part of business? I wasn't there long enough to find out.

Internment

We're all told about the US interning Japanese. I hadn't heard that the Canadians did too, and that some of the Japanese-Canadians couldn't return home until 1949.

Incitatus

We vote for a president; we get a team.

BBC's famous "Yes Minister" comedy assumed that the existing bureaucracy defines most of policy (and tries to perpetuate and enlarge itself). I haven't seen much evidence that this is wrong.

There's no way any human being can know all the people in a single government agency, much less the whole government. To pick people to direct an agency you have to trust someone else's vetting of them – and trust the standards by which they were measured. The reports that cross your desk are distillations of distillations: how do you know if there was a pattern to what was omitted?

We hope that the president we vote for will pick a trustworthy team to farm out the other personnel selections to and give them the general policy directions for their various underlings to implement, and then listen to what we hope is their good advice. We hope we can trust the policy statements and party brand. We hope we're not buying a pig in a poke. That's a lot of hope.

Trump seemed to have some sensible advisors, but so many of his team rotated in and out that I figure continuity had to have suffered – and then bureaucratic momentum wins. "Personnel is policy:" and the bureaucracy has most of the personnel already – and offers a pool from which one may select directors.

Perhaps instead we vote for Incitatus, with religious faith in the party brand and trusting that the team that selected Incitatus is benign. That team, invisible to any ballot, will pick the cabinet, set the policies, and try to decide on the proper reactions to the crises that will arise. The president will sign bills like a living autopen, read from teleprompters, and smile or glower on cue.

It might seem as though either way the bureaucracy dominates, but it isn't entirely just a difference in degree. In the case of a compos mentis president, decisions in the various crises would be made by the same person; there's no guarantee that the same person each time would give Incitatus the lines to say. And a forceful president might have some impact in despite of the bureaucracy.

Post-liberalism

First Things has an essay by Nathan Pinkoski "Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed. It rested on an essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction."

In 2006, then prime minister Blair said that the “traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong, as just made for another age.” Soon after, his home secretary John Reid elaborated. The previous age—the postwar age—began in response to concerns about the threat the “fascist state” posed to individuals, Reid said. Today, the threat comes from “fascist individuals,” not fascist states.

This, after Pinkoski's description of the subsuming of private enterprises under government control in a way that is fascist in all but name, is telling.

Leaves

This time of year can be beautiful, with leaves changing yellow and orange and brown and red--highlighted by evergreens here and there. On the tree, with the sunlight shining through them, most dead leaves look at least great, and sometimes amazing. But dead oak leaves look so emphatically skeletal and withered and dead--they're ugly. I suppose they fit in with the ubiquitous Halloween themes, but I'm glad there aren't any oak trees in my window's view.

Mushroom song

The Internet is a wondrous thing sometimes. A fragment of a ditty about mushrooms stuck in my mind and surfaced today: I'd read it in a book about campers back in '66 or so. Searching about, there seem to be several variants, and one version claimed James Thurber as the author (?I didn't find evidence). I went to camp but once in my youth, and that camp was more about singing hymns than folk songs--not that I cared much for either--so I've no historical bias. Which, if any, of these 4 did you learn?

(The third seems slightly corrupted, but maybe the music was different.) archive.org is back.

The mushroom is a vegetable
To select it few are able
You won't know them when you meet them
You won't know them 'til you eat them
If in heaven you awaken
You will know you were mistaken
And the ones that you have eaten
Weren't the ones you should have et.

Mushrooms are a vegetable
which you eat when you are able
you will know one when you see one
you will know one when you eat one
if in Heaven you awaken
then you’ll know you were mistaken
Must have been a toadstool, tough luck!!!

Mushrooms are a veg-e-table
That you eat when you are able,
You will know when you eat them,
You will know them when you eat them.
If in heaven you awaken
And you find you were mistaken,
That the mushrooms you had eaten
Weren’t the ones you should have et.
Must have been toadstools -- tough luck!

“Mushrooms is a veg-e-table; 
to detect them few are able. 
If in Heaven you awaken 
then you’ll know you were mistaken, 
And the ones that you have eaten 
weren’t the ones you should have eat!”

Gleam again

We went to Gleam again this year. The "Star Stuff" exhibit needed to be dynamic, and with more lights shining on their metal stars, but the rest were good. The dragonflies glowed with colors as wild as real ones, the illuminated trees were beautiful, and the pond with the fluctuating strings of lights was great. My favorite was "Yield": a "corn maze" of glowing corn stalks, with colors changing in ways that seemed almost seasonal (and bright white flashes to go with the thunder sounds).

The only downsides were my forgetting a cap, and the mandatory word salad on the signage explaining why looking at this exhibit will make you a better person. Why can't an artist just say "I thought this would look pretty"?

There were interactive exhibits too, and foxglove blossoms 14" high, and they made sure the interactive things were kid accessible.

Simple cell-phone cameras do not do it justice--they haven't the dynamic range of the human eye. And anyway, it seems better to just stand and take it in.

Tired of only seeing some relatives at funerals,

we've planned some road trips. The south loop was earlier this year. We just finished the central-east trip. In retrospect, it was probably wise to not include Florida as part of the plan. Of course we dropped the North Carolina leg--I'm not in the finest shape to help out.

Gas mileage through West Virginia wasn't quite nice. Minivans... As we ate our snacks at a rest stop there, a young lady drove up in a car leaking some kind of fluid from the front, who promptly got on the phone. I asked if she was OK--she'd hit a deer, and apparently it went under her car. I'd not thought of that damage vector before. (We didn't see any deer.)

I listened a lot, and learned some things about building airports and dog training for deer hunting and building garden hardware, and about family I'd not been in close contact with for a while--some things joyful and some sad.

Allegheny cemetery

One feature not frequently remarked on is the groundhogs, who leave surprise holes here and there to twist the unwary ankle.

Many of the older stones were eroded by acid rain, and are difficult to make out, but there's a great deal of what is essentially public artwork honoring the memory of people you've never heard of (and some you have). I gather that the Winter mausoleum is the most famous. Winter copied the design of the Woolworth mausoleum: a pseudo-Egyptian temple with busty Greek-style sphynxes and heiroglyphs that mixed real phrases and gibberish, and doors showing the proprietor being aided by de-animal-headed Egyptian gods.

Many of the mausoleums have stained glass within, which you can view through the front door's grating--Winter's has 3 panels. Oddly, even the good Father Pitt/Dr Boli only mentioned one of them--which shows Winter as Pharoah enthroned. Modesty seems not to have been Emil Winter's most prominent virtue.

Yes, the noses of the bronze figures on the door show signs that visitors have been rubbing them, and the snooty sphynxes show similar signs, though not on the nose.

It isn't just rich businessmen who are buried in the cemetery, of course, a friend and confidant "of the illustrious Washington" is also buried there. Daniel O'Niell's statue shows him still at his editor's desk, and the (presumably recopied) stones for Ebenezer Denny and his wife Nany Denny ("Stop, Passenger! and here view whatever is admirable summed up in the character of Mrs. Nancy Denny...") tell of older ways of memorializing.

Many plots had a little walled flower garden above the grave--sometimes a painfully small grave with small numbers on the stone. Once there was a fashion for headstones shaped like scrolls, which, combined with the flower-garden cavity gives the impression of a giant sardine can being opened with a rolling key.

Karl Lennart Gronros from Finland had a stone paid for by his friends so that all would know that the 24-year-old was a mechanical engineer.

It is a bit disconcerting to see so many headstones for people younger than me.

Risks

I've heard the stories from North Carolina about officials blocking aid workers (though nothing so far on followup), and also people saying that the authorities have to manage who gets in so as to keep out looters and other predators. It hasn't been mentioned, but they need to keep out amateurs who'll get into trouble and need rescue themselves. (I've also read testimony that they haven't seen anything like that kind of friction with authorities--I'd bet it's more a function of who the folks on the ground are instead of policy.)

We need to balance risks. Predators flock to the scene--they already have. But the risks from them seem, so far, relatively low compared to the risks of locals running out of clean water and medicine. It isn't a nice way to think about things, but in an emergency you have to triage and spend your energies efficiently, and some people are going to get murdered who wouldn't have been if you spent the time to vet everybody every time, but more will live because they got uncontaminated water to drink in time, or got shelter when their home and roads washed away.

We're not always good at evaluating risks.

Grim says the Feds haven't shown up yet in his area, but local and private assistance are helping a lot.

Reminder

Their web site mentioned a 9am service, which was early enough for us to attend and still continue travelling. The service turned out to be a Sunday School, which turned out to be the pastor lecturing on background and interpretation of the passage in Revelation addressed to the church in Philadelphia.

I'm fairly bald, and couldn't tear out much hair--his background was amazingly confused. He mixed decades and centuries, put Nero in the 300's, explained that Catholic meant imperial (didn't seem to know about the Orthodox at all), explained to the assembled that Baptists maintained a parallel unbroken tradition back to the apostles and didn't break away from the Catholics, and when one woman asked him afterwards why he didn't end with prayer, asked that she show him in scripture where this was illustrated or commanded. (Acts 20:36)

I prayed I could find some way of contributing positively, and was granted such an opportunity. But the situation was also a good reminder--I know a fair bit about the Church's history, and the background for the faith, but the important parts lie elsewhere. His history was a garbled mess, but his talk about Jesus' message to the church was fine.

So far

Traveling has been calm, setting aside the occasional lunatic driver, and visits with kinfolk have been very pleasant. And the hotel stays were simple to cancel--though the Black Mountain one had to go through the national number, since the local phones were not up. See Grim for updates to the situation there--when he's able to.

Even as far away as Louisville and Cincinnati we saw trees and branches down.

Minor amusement

I know I should use the time walking laps more productively, but I find it hard to compose in my head: I start a scene, but keep circling back to the beginning. Praying gets distracted too. So. Factoring numbers, anybody?

Everybody knows how to check if (in base 10) a number is divisible by 3: just add the digits, and if the sum is divisible by 3, so is the original. 9 is easy too: just add the digits, and if the sum is divisible by 9, so is the original. 2 is easy: is the right-most digit even? 5 is easy: is the right-most digit 0 or 5? 4 and 8 are easy to do sequentially, or you can look at the last two digits: if divisible by 4, the whole number is. The last 3: if divisible by 8, the whole number is.

Ah, but 7? Hmm. (Spoiler; there's a simple way to check, but I didn't know it then.)

If we've a number k whose digits are $N_n N_{n-1}...N_2 N_1 N_0$, where $N_0$ is the units digit, $N_1$ the 10's, and so on, we can write this as $\sum_i N_i 10^i$. That's trivial. Suppose we divide by 3, but divide each of the $10^i$ terms. For $i=0$ (i.e. 1), we have 0 R1. For $i=1$ we have 3R1, then 33R1, 333R1, etc. Now we have two parts: $\sum_i N_i 33..3$ (a nice integer) and a remainder of $\sum_i N_i (1) / 3$. The leftover part, the sum over the digits, determines whether the number is divisible by 3. OK, that's pretty simple, and proves that the old rule, which we knew already.

Dividing by 9 works the same way, except that the integer part after dividing by 9 is $\sum_i N_i 11..1$ with 1's instead of 3's. The remainders are also 1, just as before and the remainder term is also a sum of the digits, divided by 9.

How about 7?

i	$10^i$	integer	remainder
0	1	0	1
1	10	1	3
2	100	14	2
3	1000	142	6
4	10000	1428	4
5	100000	14285	5
6	1000000	142857	1
	etc

So, If you create the sum $1 N_0 + 3 N_1 + 2 N_2 + 6 N_3 ...$, if the sum is divisible by 7, so is the original number.

Granted, it's not as nice as the simple digit sum, but it works.

Before you ask, no, I only worked out the sketch of this on the track. I need pen and paper as much as the next person.

For those who have been snickering, yes, I looked this up and found the easy way too.

One way to think about the problem is to note that if you think of dividing the number into all the digits except the units digit, and the units digit, there'll only be 1 or 2 possibilities for the units digit for which the whole is divisible by 7. So maybe breaking the number up that way would be productive; maybe there's a simple relationship.

$k = 10 \times A + B$, where $B$ is a single digit. Now noodle around a bit: multiply by $5$. $5 \times k = 50 \times A + 5 \times B = 49 \times A + A + 5 \times B$. Part of that is obviously divisible by 7, so if $A + 5 \times B$ is divisible by 7, the original number is also. E.g. 4627 $4627 = 10{\times}462 + 7$, so $A=462$ and $B=7$. The formula says $462 + 5 \times 7 = 497$. Inspection says that's divisible by 7, so the original was too. Obviously you can use the formula $A - 2B$ as well. You'll find both easily on search engines.

Suppose we wanted to find a similar formula to tell us about 11. We need 2 digits for $B$, so we rewrite our number $k$ as $100 \times A + B$. Looking closer we see $100 \times A + B = 99 \times A + A + B$. Since 99 is already divisible by 11, we immediately see that if $A + B$ is divisible by 11, so is the original number. Check 7271: $72 + 71 = 143$, which is $11 \times 13$.

For 13, it isn't hard to see that $A + 3 \times B$ works: try it with 8593.

No doubt there are tables of these simple tricks somewhere

Yes, the church nursery posts a number in the sanctuary if a parent needs to come see to their child. And yes, I try to factor it.

Thinking about Rome

Roman values at ACOUP, hat tip to AstralCodex

The guardroom was one rod long and one rod wide

I have always found the temple measurements in Ezekiel 40-42 to be rather obscure. Why are these measurements supposed to be important enough to keep track of? They are clearly for a future or a possible temple, not one that existed then or since.

Revelation echoes this, with a twist: "Get up and measure the temple of God and the altar, and those who worship in it. Leave out the court which is outside the temple and do not measure it, for it has been given to the nations". That's suggestive: measurement relates to possession or ownership, perhaps? God owns it in the ultimate sense, but the temple is for the worshippers.

In Genesis there's a different kind of "measurement"; a measurement by foot, and one that puts Abraham in the place he/his is to possess. "Arise, walk about the land through its length and breadth; for I will give it to you."

I have no clue what the measurement numbers are supposed to signify in Ezekiel (if it's a physical future temple, why? in light of Hebrews 10), but I like the idea that measurement might signify "we are there." Measuring is something people do, even if is only "how many of us fit."

Black Mountain, NC

What's interesting to see/do around there? The Biltmore doesn't sound like my cup of tea. I gather there are a number of scenic areas nearby. My wife has a conference at Ridgecrest.

Advice

A reader has asked whether she should return to college after dropping out several years ago. She’s still young, not yet thirty. Advice is dangerous stuff. If taken and the outcome is unhappy, the advice-giver has set himself up for resentment and blame. Rather, I urged my reader to examine her motives and expectations. She’s smart and better-read than most of her contemporaries, so a typical college curriculum could crush her.

Titan testimony

The BBC is reporting on Lochridge's testimony about the Titan's implosion. The pictures are hair-raising--but lack explanation. Delamination as dramatic as that in the picture on the left would almost certainly have been spotted when the submersible was checked after a dive--and why would it delaminate so deep in the structure? What was the test they used that created that split?

The places of greatest stress, and greatest likelihood of water infiltration, would be where the composite met the endcap (or a penetration, but you get extra longitudinal compression from the endcap). I'd expect microscopic water infiltration at an edge flaw to cause the outer layer to delaminate (maybe with a little crackling noise?). That makes the composite structure just a tiny bit thinner there, and exposes the next layer to the water. Maybe there's a flaw handy; maybe not. But I (and apparently quite a few others) would expect material fatigue after a while, and the next layer's boundary with the endcap to slowly fribble.

The picture on the right screams for context. Is that supposed to be a typical layer? Do they pull regular test samples? (If not, why not?)

FWIW, when the leak broke through, the water speed would have been about 270m/sec--end to end in 24msec. A blink is about 100msec. Leaks are bad things

Signs of the times

We'd been having the local paper delivered for over 30 years, and went to online-only a couple of months ago. Delivery was just too expensive to justify. I'd looked at the publishing company's financials a few years ago, and we're not the only ones--what's keeping revenues up for them is printing fliers and whatnot for a wider and wider range.

Two obvious signs of problems are the size of the paper itself (getting slimmer and slimmer) and the ratio of ads to copy (larger and larger)

One I hadn't thought of is the comics. They'd been going with a half-page, of which two were popular re-runs (Peanuts and For Better or Worse). The online edition had an additional page, with a mix of popular and less so--including (would Madison subscribe to a newspaper without it?) Doonesbury.

I hadn't bothered to ask how much these subscriptions cost the newspaper, but I assume that the more popular strips cost more, the reruns a bit less, and the less popular and the drama serials still less.

They just redid their amusements pages, and pretty much everything is new. I get the sense that the comics are a bundle, and not the top-tier bundle either. If my gut reaction that the mix isn't tailored to the community isn't enough evidence: they got rid of Doonesbury. Zippy may aim for a similar demographic, but I'm not familiar enough to say, nor do I care to do the research.

It's no skin off my nose, but that's another metric to watch.

I suppose I should start examining the sports section a bit more carefully. Local sports news is something that they can't acquire just by piggybacking on the national wire services. I figure that'll be the last thing to be cut, and when I see cuts or shortcuts there, the paper will be almost dead. Maybe counting bylines?

Tis the Gift to be Simple

"Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."

I'll not try to unpack all of that, but one thing little children are good at is "being in the moment." Not for long; steadfastness is not one of the frontline virtues in a child. But there's something admirable in the pure enjoyment of the taste of icecream. The flip side is the pure horror and rejection of the abomination of cottage cheese. Oh wait, that's me as an adult.

A rainbow to me as an adult isn't a "pure thing": it recalls the other rainbows I've seen and made, and who I was with, and other memories fun and sad. A bath is a simple sensual pleasure, and maybe it recalls other baths and other oceans. But it isn't perfected by having the radio play Carmen while I'm eating a fudge sundae. Adding too many other related pleasures can detract from fully enjoying any of them.

Our pocket shrines help keep us out of the moment, of course, but so (at least for me) does the "narrator", the "drunken monkey stung by a scorpion". And neither is good for steadfast concentration and enjoyment.

I need to work more on "doing one thing at a time."

Benghazi

I remember wondering what was going on in Benghazi--what was Stevens doing in this out of the way post? Somebody pointed out that some connected Saudis were in the area, getting out of Dodge as fast as they could, and that there was a rumor about weapons going to Syrian rebels. And what had just been opened up? Gaddaffi's arms stash--he had weapons to provide for one of the largest armies in the world at the time. (I didn't say one of the strongest, notice.) (I assume some of those arms wound up spread among Islamist groups in Africa.)

Hmm. Buying up loose gear and having Saudi's deniably ship it to Syrian rebels? It seemed plausible--the first part of it laudable.

Close but no cigar. Apparently they were trying to buy back weapons they'd given to Libyan rebels. Alarming stupidity at every turn...

Amusement for a little while

I'd never heard of BunaB before. The instruction sheet for the BunaB #7 is reproduced at SamuelJohnson's site, together with links for images for the board and instructions for the Zudirk game (BunaB#2). ("ZUDIRK is a modern adaptation of a game believed to have originated on the Scilly Islands, off the coast of Cornwall, England, centuries before the arrival of the Romans. A favorite sport of High Priests of the Druidic cult, it was originally played outdoors, the implements--burning tinder, heart-shaped boulders, stone adzes and condemned criminals.")

Well, over a million Pet Rocks sold--and apparently they're still selling. Why not BunaB?

Over the years I've bought a number of things that never were used--some substantially more expensive than these novelties.

over-wise

Grim cites the Havamal on one of AVI's posts:

54

It is best for man to be middle-wise,
Not over cunning and clever:
The learned man whose lore is deep
Is seldom happy at heart.

The usual way I've heard this described is that it's no joy to know the terrible things that you can't dodge, and also that knowing too many options causes paralysis by analysis, which is often worse than merely being wrong.

It reminds me of Ecclesiastes: "Do not be excessively righteous and do not be overly wise. Why should you ruin yourself?"

The first half of that verse is widely argued, of course. The second half in turn reminds me of Luke 12:47-48. "From everyone who has been given much, much will be required."

and also: "Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment."

I'm already not wonderful at doing what I know I ought. What would it be like if instead of fuzzy generalities and "close enough" I knew with exquisite precision what I should be doing, and still didn't obey?

In any event, I suspect I'd be found innocent if charged with excessive wisdom.

Unfamiliar symbols

"Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" I wonder if any of those silver images of the temple are still around. There are statues of Artemis still around; she seems to have canes in her hands (canes are also seen in a crude lead figure, so if it was a stability artifact it was in the original--it looks top heavy). No idea what that was taken to mean. The Artemis has a garment with lions and cows and antelopes and whatnot, and women on the sides--small breasted, possibly to avoid competition with the vast array of breasts the goddess sported. I assume the multitude of breasts has to do with fertility and providing for the world. The effect is remarkably ugly.

I haven't turned up any silver images of the temple. Probably all were melted long ago.

One of the images of Artemis' head has her eyes rolled up in an expression that seems almost Hindu--which wouldn't be terribly surprising. The city clerk spoke of an image fallen from heaven. Was that a special inner shrine with a meteorite, or had stories been told that this top-heavy thing had really fallen from the sky?

I’ve suggested before that polytheism is the compromise you get when different tribes with different gods met. I think it can work a bit the other way too. If you have a pile of gods you have to keep up with the appropriate seasonal rituals with each, but perhaps one takes your fancy--say Krishna. I suspect that the more people are devoted to a single god in the pantheon, the more that one will take on aspects that others are nominally the managers of. A fertility goddess could easily pick up aspects of wrath, and even of battle--if people cared about her enough. (Priests might have a little competition going here too--one stop shopping, get all your prayers done here...)

Be that as it may, I look at the statue and find it opaque. And this is the relic of a literate people, from whom we have many documents--there's some connection between us still. And then I look at the pictures at Göbekli Tepe. Wild guesses, all.

Great was Artemis of the Ephesians Wright's site has a picture of what's left: a mismatched column with a stork's nest on top. The ruins of the temple were scavenged to build a basillica, and eventually the ruins of that for a mosque, and the mosque isn't in great shape now either.

There's always somebody..

Via a comment at Sippican Cottage, behold The Christian Topography by Cosmas Indicopleustes ('India-voyager').

There can be few books which have attracted more derision, mixed with wonder, than the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes. It advances the idea that the world is flat, and that the heavens form the shape of a box with a curved lid. The author cites passages of scripture which he distorts wildly in order to support his thesis, and attempts to argue down the idea of a spherical earth by stigmatizing it as 'pagan.' The approach to scripture is discreditable, and the conclusion made simply wrong.

The book is often cited as evidence that Christianity introduced the idea of the flat-earth into the world, and brought in the age of ignorance. This is hardly fair, since Cosmas does not represent a mainstream of any kind, personally or spiritually. The latter pages of his work are devoted to rebutting the criticism of his fellow-monks, that what he was saying was wrong.

It almost makes current political discourse look sensible. I almost made it through Book 1.

Using more of the fruit

The BBC reports that Swiss chocolate researchers have found a way to use the cocoa fruit and not just the cocoa seeds. The article drags in irrelevant self-flagellation about slavery, and somehow manages to miss the fly in the ointment--the cocoa fruit rots quickly. Harvesting that would demand refrigeration on site and in its delivery, and the concentration process would have to also be in-country. The latter industry would be a good thing for the producing country, but providing reliable electricity to the farms might be challenging.

Anyhow, kudos to the researchers!

Chickens of the world, keep warm!

The chicken bomb was supposedly not an April Fools joke. Blue Peacock was a serious proposal to put nuclear mines in Germany in case of Soviet invasion, and somebody (I have to believe the proposal was tongue in cheek), proposed that to keep the delicate nuclear mine working in the winter, it be kept warm with live chickens.

Raconteur Press

Raconteur Press is a new business whose current focus is science fiction and fantasy anthologies, rather like the pulp magazines of old. The term "pulp," derived from the inexpensive paper the old magazines used, now refers to a style of writing--fast paced and entertaining. The press has published two books a month for the past year, with anthology themes like space marines, goblin market, moggies in space, wyrd west, and The Super Generation. I need to read the other stories in that last book.

I find writing to spec difficult, but a useful discipline. I've tried several stories for them before--one story wound up so far out of spec that I threw more words at it and tried to make a novella out of it (it's currently being beta-read).

Keep it clear

With a hat tip to Sippican Cottage, a story about how bad display design crashed a destroyer. Control of the engines and rudders can reside in several different machines on the bridge. Critical little bits of information are found in teeny tiny boxes -- the user interface is hair-raisingly bad. As for example, whether the propellers run at the same speed (you can turn if they don't; helpful if the rudder isn't turning you fast enough). As for example, whether your station has command and if so, of what (turns out that transfer of control goes one propeller at a time!). I'd want a big bright star, or sharply different color, to show what I've got control of, and something a bit more dramatic--like a big band connecting the thrust indicators--to tell whether the thrusters are in sync or not.

The ProPresenter our church uses for slides and videos puts a yellow rim around the image of whatever the current slide being projected is. I don't care for this; it should be as subtle as a brass band. (Maybe it's configurable--I need to complain.)

In the heat of the moment, you want your context switching to be as clear as possible. I know, I know--practice practice practice. The Navy has young sailors with a limited amount of practice time, the church has every-other-week volunteers, and whoever painted the traffic lines on the street forgot that you can't see over the hill and out-of-towners won't guess that there's a left turn on the other side.

Drone defense

Some of the video from Ukraine suggests that drones are getting to be quite effective weapons. If they were quieter, I suspect the criminal cartels would be using them for assassinations already--loiter and attack the witness/judge/competitor.

Some of the videos show them capable of entering shelters through windows or passages. And, of course, they're good at watching for things, whether they have offensive capacity or not.

OK, how do you stop them? You're with your buddies in a truck and hear/spot something headed your way. Shooting won't do much unless you're super-super-accurate. Net guns... they look nice, but I wonder how practical those are in the field. Hide behind trees...

Pros and amateurs try their hands at downing drones in this video (which has a very annoying long commercial in the middle). Some of the methods are more amusing than useful.

One of the methods tried is the vortex ring cannon, which can pack more of a punch than you might expect. For sufficiently large vortex cannons, of course. Of course, you could also try using guns adapted (with blanks) for the purpose. The article cited talks about "knock-down effect" on humans (mediocre), but it might be suitable for trying to knock down lighter flying objects.

Copter-type drones are somewhat at risk for vortex ring state, where instead of pushing the air down the propellers push air down and around and up and back through the blades again, in a "circle" that doesn't provide lift. The article explains how designers have been mitigating this. However, if a strong vortex ring hits a quadcopter, it should provide some impact, some twisting, and maybe cause one or more of the propellers to get into VortexRingState.

If the equipment is just an adapter on the end of your rifle (and maybe blank rounds, maybe not), it might be easy to carry, cheap(*), and relatively quick to field. The vortex ring is a lot bigger than a rifle bullet, so your chances of hitting are better.

There are obvious possible issues--would it destabilize the drone enough with an average hit? would the ring move fast enough to reliably hit a moving target (80 m/sec??? with my sloppy estimates for vorticity)? and can soldiers/civilians aim well enough, especially at night? Oh, and is the effective range good enough?

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(*) "Cheap" would probably be the kiss of death, unfortunately.

UPDATE: I found an Army report. The Wikipedia image of the vortex ring was out of a 40mm barrel, and they developed 100kpsi in their chamber, using a "rupture disk" to get the cleanest possible flow. They did not design the test system for rapid fire. So this probably wouldn't be a snap-on, but a separate (hopefully light) blunderbuss. They found that C4 wasn't great--the ring momentum was low--so they converged on "exotic" explosives like Red Dot and Bulls Eye (up to 30g). They were getting about 160'/sec.

Their aim, so to speak, was attacking humans, who are typically less fragile than drones in flight. The idea might work. I assume that with lower pressures the final velocity would be proportionately lower, but fluid dynamics is messy.