Ask a Grandpa

Possible youth group addition: A table for private questions.

Linen armor

Oldest Daughter spotted these attempts to solve an old mystery: how was linen armor made and made useful?

Unraveling the linothorax mystery or how linen armor came to dominate our lives. A short summary. "The only way we were ultimately able to cut the laminated linen slab was with an electric saw equipped with a blade for cutting metal. At least this confirmed our suspicion that linen armor would have been extremely tough. We also found out that linen stiffened with rabbit glue strikes dogs as in irresistibly tasty rabbit-flavored chew toy, and that our Labrador retriever should not be left alone with our research project."

linothorax for sale Authentic? Who knows. Do you make it with layers of linen boiled with salt to harden it, or glued together into a hard lump?

More linothorax at UW Green Bay. Yes, he was wearing the armor when they shot the arrow at it. A video of the same: linothorax .

A linothorax won't stop "a determined spear thrust", but does pretty well at shedding arrows.

Thank you! I don't think I'll be trying my hand at it, but ...

Academic honors

360 high school graduates.

• 40: cum laude
• 26: magna cum laude
• 76: summa cum laude
• 17: 4.0 average

You expect the distribution to have a diminishing tail to the right, don't you?

The obvious explanation is that there's a bit of gaming going on: that the cutoffs are based on GPA and not relative difficulty of the courses involved. I'd weight a B in chemistry or French III more highly than an A in PE. Perhaps I'm biased--I did horribly in PE. If you're already doing "well enough" selecting an "easy A" course would help push the average up, maybe to the next category. That wouldn't work unless there was already a bit of grade inflation, and 44% getting honors seems a trifle inflated.

I got a little grumpy with the student speeches. They were way too "change the world" You know, there are billions of other people with different ideas about that: it makes for a lot of pushback, "follow your heart," A famous shortcut to disaster, etc -- though the last one emphasized that the world wasn't friendly and you needed adaptability and willingness to get up after disasters. Bravo!

Quibbles to the contrary, the graduation went well. The graduate seemed a trifle overwhelmed, and expressed a preference for low key celebration: pizza and games at home instead of a restaurant.

Planning

Do managers ever rubber duck their proposals? (with someone who does not report to them, of course). Also see rule 12. You can think of business or government decisions with unhappy side effects that should have been forseeable.

Odd

The book is nominally to be released on 18-June, though word is that Amazon started shipping already.

But "SuperBookDeals" claims to have it available already, second hand. I assume they won't ship until they actually get a second-hand copy, and thus delivery might take a while, but that's a curious business model. "81% positive over the past 12 months"

Shattered Sword was Parshall's book on Midway.

Bohemian Rhapsody

The East and West mixed choir sang this, as arranged by Philip Lawson. I can see why they left out the part about Why the "poor boy from a poor family" was in such trouble -- singing about random murders is maybe not what you want impressionable youth doing -- but it changes the tone quite a bit. This way the singer seems almost justified in his complaints.

Libraries

Thanks to Anecdotal Evidence, a description of our living room: To Read. So many books, so little time...

Formation

Evangelical colleges have not been on my radar--never really were, since I wasn't planning to study liberal arts. The link explains why they're in trouble: partly demographic change, partly cultural changes (can I get a good job?), and partly heads in the sand.

What's the purpose of them? Liberal arts education and Christian formation, apparently--seminaries seem to be the place to go for specifically church-related credentials like MDiv (*) and MRE.

If the evangelical college is like a secular college but with Christian focus and an effort at formation, then how can this be accomplished more flexibly and cheaply?

Online study is popular, though zoom is an inferior substitute for in-person discussion. One obvious problem is supplying the "Christian formation" part. If the college partners with the home churches, perhaps the local church could implement formation plans. Of course you might ask: "Aren't the churches supposed to be doing that for everybody?"

Well, yes. But I notice that the church doesn't keep close tabs on who "attends chapel," and doing that might cause problems. Unless, of course, the person volunteers for closer supervision and regular meetings with his spiritual advisor.

Even with that voluntary aspect there's still the risk of developing a two-tier church with "ordinary" and "more holy" groups. Which would be very very bad.

There's interest in programs for spiritual formation. Naturally, they will only be as effective as you let the Holy Spirit be. And there's a lot of fuzziness in definitions. I just looked up one (EFCA) program that read like a course description instead of a relationship.

I clearly have quite a bit of reading-up to do. And I should collar one of the pastors and ask some questions.

(*) Master of Divinity -- among all the weird names for a degree, this stands out.

Wisdom of teenagers

Fledgling robins fly about the garden, hoping to still be fed. Or something. Two stood on the far side of one of the garden fence panels, giving the mulched garden the side-eye. Then one tried to hop in as though the chickenwire wasn't there.

Then it tried again. And again. And its nestmate tried too. Three times. Finally both wandered off. As far as I can tell, they didn't try to fly in that day. Not that there was much to dig for in the wood-chips.

Honeyberry

aka haskap, grows nicely here. We've had some in the front yard for several years now. I've only eaten about 3 or 4 of the berries, though.

The way that you know that the berries are ripe is to look at the bush. If the robins are busily eating all the berries, they're ripe.

FWIW, we also planted strawberries in a 4x4 raised bed. They never produced much, so we yanked them out and planted flowers and fennel (don't do that) and whatnot. However we missed a few runners, and the strawberries spread, escaping the baleful shade of the coneflowers and forming a perimeter about the central garden, that actually produces strawberries. We usually get a few (mice get more), which is fine for a no-maintenance/no-expectation plant.

It took about 25 years for the grapevine to start producing significant quantities, and by then all the kids were grown, but grandkids learned how to harvest them anyway. We squeeze a lot of plants in a tiny city lot. You can't feed a crowd off them, but that wasn't the point.

Doxology

I've sung it thousands of times, but had never heard about Thomas Ken before. Maybe he would have liked it that way.

All Praise to Thee My God This Night has as the last verse: "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow" -- the famous doxology.

Ken sounds like he would have been a good man to know.

Wikipedia claims that he wound up crossways with Gilbert Burnet, of whom I had also never heard before, and of whom it was said "Indeed it was not easy to wound Burnet's feelings. His self-complacency, his animal spirits, and his want of tact, were such that, though he frequently gave offence, he never took it." I think I've known a few like that.

Negotiations

I commented back in March that the IRCG in Iran was probably going to be in the final state in Iran unless we were willing to go all out with boots on the ground (or the big bombs, I suppose).

I didn't think about what shape agreements would take. The Strait open goes without saying. The question is what about the uranium?

I don't see the IRCG being willing to publicly give it up. Supposing a faction had the power to do so, offering to would be an invitation for another faction to denounce and attack them, grabbing their territory and control of the uranium.

So face-saving would be built into the agreement. They'd agree to something lesser that in practice (and in secret) amounts to giving it up.

Except for weaseling. They would fake the records ("A GBU-57 ate my homework") and offer up half the uranium.

We'd have to rely a lot on intel, and by this time I'm not sure how many useful assets remain.

And, of course, nobody will explain what's really going on, leaving lots of room for nasty politicking.

Waiting Room

A short story on Substack

Smile

I'm not immersed in music lore, and didn't recall having heard of the never-quite-converged "SMiLE" Beach Boys album. I gather that at least some of the peices existed in multiple versions, and the group hadn't decided on what to pick.

I was curious. It exists on Youtube.

It feels sloppy, and I can easily believe they didn't yet know where they were going. Good Vibrations ends the set--the contrast seems stark. They experimented with all kinds of instrumentation and musical ideas, but it didn't seem confident and ready to me.

Sometimes you need to respect an author's privacy about "unfinished works." There's likely a reason the thing wasn't finished.

Quiet

Where can we go for quiet?

A walk in the woods sometimes qualifies, but it isn't always convenient, especially in winter.

I use quiet for prayer and writing and just being silent sometimes. (Walking is lousy for writing.) Other people live here as well as I, and they listen to music or podcasts or talk on the phone (or sometimes want to talk to me, which is fine, but not quiet).

When I need silence, I find that headphones and instrumental music to overcome other people's music/noise is almost as good. Half the time. If I need to be doing something rather than resting the mind, it isn't good enough. (Do I need to say that any music at all is bad when trying to write poetry?)

When you have little kids, silence is more of a late-night thing, and you're tired and sleepy then.

Early in the morning? Perhaps. There are tradeoffs.

Banquets

I find banquets frustrating. The level of ambient noise from distant conversation makes conversing with anybody but the person next to you difficult, and almost everybody is quite some distance away. You catch a fragment of a conversation that sounds interesting, but too far away to join in.

Can you work out a seating arrangement for a banquet in Heaven?

If we weren't limited to 4 dimensions... How about a "Hilbert table" with as many dimensions as guests, everybody sitting next to Jesus and kitty-corner with every other guest?

Bookstore Angel

See Anecdotal Evidence today.

Who matters

Chesterton's The Donkey is a fun short poem.

And we're that donkey too, aren't we? Not who we are, but Who we bring with us matters.

Obedience

Obedience teaches. Some things you may have words for, but don't undestand what they mean until you've lived them. I understood the demographic preference for monogamy over polygamy (and I certainly didn't have anybody else in mind), but after years of marriage I'm starting to understand what "one flesh" means and why more wives would be less.

Kids are in no position to decide what's best. "Just learn your times-tables; you'll understand later." We didn't go the "unschooling" route--we knew better than the kids what would be useful in understanding the world. Once they had obeyed and learned the background they could dig into what they pleased.

Sometimes we learn from bad choices, but I know a few adults who double-down on willfulness.

Automated Synthesis

The phrase Artificial Intelligence isn't appropriate. Slapping the word "intelligence" into the name doesn't make it real, and the result is misleading. This morning one of the men in our prayer gathering complained that the CEO, and a number of the new hires, were putting undue faith in the computer's analysis, and ignoring experience.

Since what the systems do is a more like a probabilistic synthesis of existing material, "Synthesis" seems like a better word than "Intelligence." That term emphasizes the aspect of compilation of existing material, instead of the implied "thinking about" that isn't actually happening.

In place of the term "AI", I propose that we use "AS": Automated Synthesis. Given the systems' notorious propensity for hallucination, one might call it "SS" -- Stochastic Synthesis -- but I gather some systems are getting better.

Maybe with a more accurate label people will be less tempted to put inappropriate trust in the systems, and recognize and use them for what they are. Rectification of names?

Ghost melody

Can you make out the original tune by subtracting notes from a background?

Can you make out any kind of melodic movement at all?

In trying to answer that question I hit two obstacles: I couldn’t hit the notes I needed to reliably, and I already knew what to expect.

To deal with the competence problem I used MuseScore software to compose and play back for me, and as for the bias due to expectation—I can’t solve that for myself unless/until I script something to take a random tune and generate the silhouette tune automatically, but I can solve it for you by obfuscating the title of the tune.

I chose to use as a “background” the collection of all the notes used in a tune. For each note in the original tune I played this background without that original note. I thought of it as like a ghost in the background noise.

Does that ghost, that absence, make something melodic?

Youtube video of Gjvaxyr (I am still learning ffmpeg. Please forgive the video quality. The audio was assembled with Audacity.)

Those who have some musical background will predict that the result will be dissonant, and so it is.

I think I can sort-of hear something, that is vaguely like the original—sometimes.

Later I’ll look into removing chords rather than single notes, though I expect it will still be dissonant.

I wonder under what conditions would the ghost tune not be dissonant. A base song with notes only from a chord, yes--others?

UFO data

I have not looked at the UFO data released the other day.

I assume that there's nothing security-related in there--which implies that whatever we're working on lately won't show up. (I hope we're working on some new secret technology...)

Some claim that UFO reports are the modern parallel to ancient visions of angels, demons, or gods. Um. I don't know how to compare rates of "strange observations" between not-always-literate times and now. Maybe people have always seen unusual things in the skies and attributed it to whatever the zeitgeist suggested. It's a plausible hypothesis, but I wouldn't care to try to prove it. I suspect that a large fraction of the UFO reports are due to artifacts of modern life, including secret military tests and glitches in our detecting/displaying systems.

Let's suppose after accounting for glitches and private drones and secret project, that there is a residue.

That could be due to natural but not understood or expected phenomena. In this case the rapid changes in direction and whatnot are "real" but not quite what they look like--sort of like the spider on the telescope looking like a monster. Once we figure out the mechanisms, we'll understand them going forward, though probably never be able to retroactively determine what somebody long ago saw.

They could be displays by supernatural creatures: ghosts, angels, demons, or other things not in our catalog. I'm assured that angels and demons exist, I'm agnostic about ghosts (lots of testimony but little that's clear to me), and I can't say much about "unknown."

Or they could be displays by "non-supernatural" creatures, i.e. like us (even though we're arguably supernatural also). Aliens, natives we haven't met -- whatever. If they're from elsewhere, how in the world did they get here? The structure of spacetime restricts how fast you can get around, and astronomical distances translate to astronomical times. If they're from around here, why haven't we run into them? We've been looking hard enough.

Bottom line: not much I can say about "unknown."

Do I think there are aliens out there?

Yes. I look around our planet and see life everywhere, even in hot springs, deep underground, and around hot vents at the bottom of the ocean. From this I take a guess about the nature of God: He's very creative and He likes life. From that I predict that there will be plenty of life in the universe, though not necessarily things we would recognize: different chemistry and ways of using energy, living much faster or much slower, other things I haven't imagined. That's not even including angels and whatnot, whose relationship with our physical universe isn't at all obvious to me.

As Lewis pointed out, just the existence of other intelligent creatures doesn't say anything one way or another about the relationship of God and man, or even man and the other creatures. We'd have to know a lot more.

I don't expect to learn anything from the documents.

For the history buff

A virtual walk-through of 4'th century Rome: most of the city model along the road is there. I've never been to either modern or ancient Rome, and the reconstructions are fun--and leave you wondering what living with such monumental reminders of history would be like.

It's missing a little something, though...

Damaged taste buds

From an article on recovery of radiation-damaged taste: "All the five taste types are seen to decline around the fifth week after the start of RT. Bitter and salty tastes are affected the most while the sweet taste is the least affected."

Recovery of taste function may occur as early as 4 to 5 weeks after the completion of RT. Complete recovery of taste function following RT is still not quantified or reported. Whether the damage caused to the taste buds is temporary or permanent is still unclear. Partial taste loss is seen to be prevalent even 20 years after completion of RT.

This was an overview of studies, which varied a great deal in methods and selection and radiation targets, and only the most general information is obtained.

I've another data point, though. I could appreciate sourdough fairly soon after treatment, and bitter seems to have gone into overdrive. And nobody will be hiring me for wine-tasting in the foreseeable future. After nearly a year, recovery seems to have plateaued. "This is what things taste like now."

FWIW, I lost about 25 pounds, but was slightly above optimum weight so I had some slack available, and am only a little below my original weight now. There's more to taste than just the tongue's part. The nose plays a role, as does the "mouthfeel," and though I couldn't taste sweet for a while I could still feel the effect of sugar. I'm not sure how, exactly, but I could.

Teaching how to cheat

Musing on an irrelevant news bit reminded me of John Scarne the magician who the Army hired to teach soldiers how to spot cheating.

They figured that the risks of soldiers learning how to cheat were outweighed by the benefit of soldiers learning how to recognize cheating. This is something he did for the Navy.

Children

Althouse has a post on people not having children, and a lot of the talk is about economics and technology and social propaganda.

What I thought of was Chesterton and "The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial."

The world is rediscovered every day.

Which super-power?

AVI remembered an old question: what would be the best superpower?

I suppose that depends on a balance of your fears, your dreams, your work, and your amusements – and your calling, if any.

Invulnerability, for example: It would be nice not to have to worry about falling or getting hurt in a fight, but it would also be very handy for a vulcanologist, or just somebody with 'satiable curtiosity. It's also handy if your calling is crime-fighting with emphasis on the literal fighting.

In college the topic came up with a small group of guys and one guy volunteered that his preference would be the "time stop" or whatever he called it because – OK, I tried to argue him out of it and never really dealt with him afterwards. Creepy.

Super-speed could be handy sometimes, but most of the time what use would it be? Skipping the commute is all well and good, but then you're at work.

Teleportation to anywhere would be wild, if you could afford the spacesuits to go with it. Even restricted to just teleporting on Earth would be handy – sometimes. Especially if your work involved acquiring portable and valuable property...

Talking to animals – might get boring, though zoos would probably love you. Super-hearing, super-vision – you'd be in great demand by researchers. Changing an object's relative momentum by arbitrary amounts just by touching it – a bit niche, but wonderful for some jobs, and lots of recreational fun taking pebbles and firing them at a cliff to chip out an image in the rock.

If mind-reading is a superpower – so long as you're not born with it; that could get really rough on a baby – if you could turn it off when you didn't want to be bothered it could be very handy. If you couldn't, given what flits through people's minds, that power could be very depressing.

Super-persuasion? I'm not sure I'd trust very many people with that. Maybe not even me.

Superfast reading could get me caught up on a backlog...

AI in command

When I first heard about the story of PocketOS having its production database and backups deleted by an Anthropic AI I thought back to the Anthropic dispute with the Department of War claiming the DoW was using its products for military purposes. They thought that unsafe, and probably had other objections too. It would seem a 'shoot yourself in the foot' kind of demonstration, but human dumbness is pretty extensive.

It looks like somebody at PocketOS needs to be booted far. Their architecture was weird: the backups were on the same volume as the production database (????), everything was on the cloud with no local copy, the designer gave unfiltered control to the AI agent -- lots of dumbness. But the AI's "confession" seemed really weird. If the agent had rules, how did it ignore them? There's something odd here.

FWIW, we had databases too, some more mission critical than others. Depending on the "brand" of database (mysql/mariadb or postgres or mongodb or sqlite) we had different backup approaches, but the copy was always done by entirely different agents, and copies kept in different servers in different buildings. I can't think of a way anything but deliberate admin action on different machines that could damage both. The whole point of backup is to keep the data somewhere safely distant from problems on the original host. Ideally you'd like a copy that only a different admin can delete, just in case somebody goes postal.

It turns out the cloud provider here was able to provide a way to access the data after all, but that's not usually the case.

UPDATE: Not reading the documentation compounded with sloppy security compounded with trusting the AI

Out of touch

We bought a replacement car, which came with a trial of Sirius. I am getting fliers and emails urging me to sign up for the low (or "current") price and suggesting channels to entice me. What does? Talk radio--hardly. Sports--no. "Every music genre" that didn't list the only channel I'd be interested in. "Nonstop news" sounds like Babel torture. "So much comedy"--not a diet of it, thank you, and most of the modern comedian shorts youtube offers up are more bitter than funny.

My wife was on the phone with someone talking about a child interested in manga. I looked it up. I'd heard of Isekai--I'd written something that might be classed as "portal fiction" (though not Isekai)--but most of the classifications were new to me. I'd have to spend quite a while at the library reading through stuff to get up to speed, and even then I don't know if the library carries some of the more "adult" stuff. It might--libraries have been getting a little odd lately.

Maybe a movie a year at the theaters, no broadcast TV, no cable TV... The HBO/Netflix/etc produced content I haven't seen at all. Young adult conversations are replete with references to catch phrases from shows I've barely heard of. I'm told the caliber of the work is better than the old 60's/70's TV shows (which I'm not interested in rewatching). OK.

The book of Daniel says the Babylonians trained their most promising captives in the language and literature of the Babylonians--presumably because the way the language is used references the literature for additional meanings. How far out of touch can I be before communication becomes difficult?

Some words have already changed meanings.

Won or not done?

Althouse wrote: "The war is over. We won. Iran just won't admit it,"

I'm not sure that's true. I think we won the first phase (taking more hurt than we admitted but yes, winning), and now we're in the second phase--the seige. Remember seiges? We remember WWII as mostly kinetic, but in the Pacific we did some island hopping too; isolating Japanese outposts and waiting for them to wilt.

I assume that the mosaic land defense the Iranians planned was paralleled by a "mosaic" coastal capability as well, and that eradicating all their hidden coves and attack boats will take a while. No simple "decapitation" here. And some of those attack boats/mine layers will be genuine fishing boats, slightly repurposed.

Another one

Curious. The would-be assassin went to CalTech for his undergrad (I didn't get in), but for grad school went to Cal State Dominguez Hills, which has high rankings for "Hispanic enrollment" and "social mobility" but which I have never heard of before. I gather he worked on engineering a wheelchair brake, but so far haven't found any reliable details. Changing majors between degrees makes sense--sometimes you don't know how it really is to work in a field until you try it for real. But it seems a bit odd to jump from "world-class" to "never heard of it before."

From a screenshot of LinkedIn: "Mechanical Engineer, IJK Controls, "Reworked existing two-axis gimbal design to fit specifications of new project by redesigning..."

Maybe a mechanical engineer can tell how much skill that requires. I have no idea.

In case you were wondering about drones

People are learning how to use and counter drones in battle. By now it's common knowledge that a truck is a drone (followed swiftly by artillary) magnet. This is for the foot soldier, though some is relevant for civilians caught in the middle.

---

My suspicion is that the vast open areas in the USA make us more vulnerable to drone attacks and assassinations than more congested countries, once an adversary manages to smuggle inventory in.

You would think

that having to lie abed sick would give you more time to read. Turns out you need energy to concentrate, and eyestrain is a problem.

After Saturday comes Sunday

Is there a Muslim group that denounces the Little Satan that does not also hate the Great Satan?

It seems that it has been this way all my life.

Observation

Watch people walk by, immersing themselves in too-often vicious social media, inattentive to all but their mo' bile devices.

Artemis

Some people are excited about the Artemis mission, and others are pretty grumpy about it. Moon shots have been done before, of course, and the thrill isn't going to be the same. I remember the original well.

The same reasons for not doing it at all circulate again: Benefits are speculative, We've got great needs (wars, the poor, etc) that all need dealing with and this is a mere distraction, and so on. There's a new reason too: Why not use robots for exploration since they work so well now.

Of course the benefits of using low earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit are not speculative at all anymore, but we have a better handle on what we can find on the Moon and Mars and a better appreciation for how hard work there will be.

The "How can we spend money on this when we have so many poor/etc" sounds very noble-minded, but that argument has no boundaries or limits. Why did Beethoven waste his time composing music when he could have been agitating for peace and trying to relieve poverty?

No. There are things worth doing, things that make life better, that have nothing to do with the usual list of desperate needs. I judge exploration (physical and scientific research) to be among those, along with arts. "We can put a man on the Moon but we can't fix homelessness." Well, we can carve a Pieta but we can't cure drug addiction--and probably never will. I don't believe the societal-problem advocates should have an automatic veto on the work of the rest of us.

The question comes down to balance. You can overdo anything. And there are several kind of costs to consider: money of course, but enthusiasm and good will too. Thanks to the intervening years of development some effects can be had for much less (in constant dollars) than they could for the Apollo program. Enthusiasm seems harder to come by, for pretty much anything. A certain decadence set in in society, and NASA turned rather sclerotic. Private rockets pack a lot more enthusiasm now.

If you argue that the Artemis program lacks vision--that we're just doing what our ancestors did, just a little bigger; a little larger pyramid this time--I admit there's justice to the argument.

If you complain that it's inefficient to try to loft people instead of robots--granted.

If you complain that the Constitution doesn't mandate research spending like this--well, it doesn't mandate poverty spending either. And several decades of the latter have shown some stubborn problems with poverty elimination and a moral hazard or two as well--the programs are not an unmitigated good.

You could argue that private firms should take up the torch of space travel. I like the idea, though we have a tragedy of the commons problem already.

Where should the balance be--this year? I don't know. Existential problems, such as war or overwhelming debt, may demand cuts to the bone and beyond. We don't have a good track record of facing up to problems and making hard decisions either.

Nor do I know on what scales you weigh conflicting desires: smaller classes or more to teach about?

I do know that if I had funding authority, I'd want to keep trying to explore.

Webcam and zoom

(Logitech C615, ubuntu 22.04.5, gnome/wayland) Under cheese the resolution looks quite decent, but under zoom it's fuzzy, as though it doesn't want to focus. It turns out that changing the resolution can't be done from a zoom desktop, but only through logging into the web interface to the account.

Even with that, autofocus is painfully slow.

Speeds

When I learned to type we measured speed in words per minute. Did Incan scribes measure their quipu speed in knots?

Judas

We get some detail about Judas, but not a huge amount. The story isn't mainly about him anyway.

He was a thief, and helped himself to what was in the moneybag. How did John know? Matthew, a tax collector, might have spotted small discrepancies easily enough, and told Jesus, and John, close to Jesus, heard of it. Was Judas afraid of exposure, unwilling to repent?

I've read it proposed that Judas, knowing Jesus' power, wanted Him to quit dilly-dallying and use that power and popularity, and so tried to force Jesus' hand. It didn't work the way Judas hoped, hence his despairing not-quite-repentance. It's quite plausible, but not supported by the texts.

Or perhaps he was jaded with miracles. Many others saw the same miracles and merely got angrier with Jesus, and not at all interested in following Him. Jesus had said some things that would be really hard for a good Jew to listen to ("eat my flesh"), and maybe Judas was wondering if Jesus was really good. We're told that the disciples, when on mission, were also doing miracles--perhaps Judas did some miraculous healings too. People are really good at forgetting inconvenient things, but that would be a doozy to try to forget.

Or perhaps he was sloppy and the devil slowly took hold of him.

Or perhaps his motives were a mix of all of the above.

I heard it asked if Judas had a choice; if the prophecy meant that somebody had to betray Christ. I think that's a bit backwards. If Judas had chosen otherwise, the prophets would have been told something else to say.

It's been claimed that Peter is Everyman, standing in for us all, denying Christ through fear and surprise. But so is Judas, betraying Christ and perhaps not entirely sure why. And so is Thomas, doubting the testimony. And so is John, loved by Christ.

Speedy trials

A mysterious death. After a gold miner was found dead, "tensions escalated when during the procession into town, residents claimed that, in line with traditional practices, the corpse allegedly identified Thomas Cooper as responsible for Morris’ death."

That would certainly explain the mob that tried to kill Thomas earlier.

Following the incident, Thomas Cooper reportedly confessed, alleging that Morris was killed through traditional means. He claimed that food and alcohol consumed at the gold mining site were poisoned through witchcraft. He also alleged that others were involved but has not disclosed their identities.

Authorities say investigations into the matter are ongoing.

There's a picture of a partly destroyed house that Thomas was hiding in. I rarely saw palm-branch roofs--they weren't legal. Crowded villages tended to have one house set the rest on fire, so corrugated metal or asbestos roofing was mandated.

I wonder when during the various proceedings the confession happened. I'd bet it was before the authorities rescued him.

Naval engineer's prayer

Drachinifel says this was a real plea by midget submarine engineers.

Grafting

Discussing Romans 11 this morning we noticed how Paul uses the reverse of normal grafting to emphasize that his Gentile audience shouldn't get swelled heads: grafting wild grapes onto a cultivated vine.

Grafting is weird -- who thought of it? How could you guess you weren't going to just kill the scion?

People started doing it somewhere between the Middle East and China, and it slowly spread from those places. Apparently more observant people noticed naturally occurring "inosculation" where branches or roots grow together on contact. I've not seen this with branches, but I have with tree roots -- I just never made the connection. Somebody did, played around with the process, and came up with other possibilities.

Lots of other possibilities.

Bus numbers

Back before Covid, before the bus reorganizations but after they first started running them to this town, I'd drive to or be dropped off at the bus stop and ride downtown. I never saw more than 15 people on the (rush hour only service) buses, and usually about half that. I liked the convenience--I could use my time much more usefully than I could driving--but wondered just how heavily the town was subsidizing the ride.

The city then expanded bus service, including an in-town only route, which I have used twice. Once again, I wondered: how much was that subsidized?

Budget shortfalls are bringing a lot into public view. Last year Metro Bus+Paratransit had 113,951 riders on this town's lines. Counting weekends as a single day, that comes to about 9 riders per bus run. That's more than I expected, based on what I see through the windows, but OK. To be clear, there are two circulator lines, and one which links to Madison downtown. I just assumed everybody rode the circulator.

The contract with Metro this year is for 2.04 million. That's about 18 dollars per ride, all lines included. Fares were about 2 bucks (and there is some state aid, but that doesn't reduce the cost per ride, just changes who pays), so the city itself subsidizes 600,000 -- a bit over 5 bucks a ride.

Madison Metro got itself a reputation for exploitive contracts with the suburbs, but 18 dollars a ride? You'd have to put 2 people on every seat to make 2 dollar fares alone pay for the contract.

For the in-city short hops, a taxi costs less than the real price for the bus ride. I wasn't expecting that.

Voodoo lily

One of our daughters gave us a few bulbs. Last year they grew in a pot on the deck, and provided an exotic complement to the other flowers there.

This year one of the bulbs started sprouting early after the winter-over, so my wife potted it and set it up in the kitchen window. (We don't get a lot of direct sunlight in the house.)

It grew nicely, and started to flower.

I spent some time emptying cabinets trying to find the dead mouse until I realized where the smell was actually coming from. Turns out the voodoo lily is related to the infamous titan arum.

It is now in the garage with a plastic bag over it to keep it warm. When it is done blossoming it can come back inside, or if the weather warms up return to the deck...

Science and art

Patrick Kurp posted some thoughts on science writing and literature. He quotes Chappell: "Poetry celebrates visual appearance while disciplines like chemistry and particle physics plunge below appearance into a universe often impossible to visualize, a void punctuated by brief pulses and intermittent bleeps of electromagnetic energy. There is, besides, the dread problem of accuracy:"

One could quote Dirac on learning that Oppenheimer wrote poetry:

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say ... something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand.

That's probably not being entirely fair to Oppenheimer, though it may depend on which poems Dirac was thinking of. (I don't think my wife would be thrilled to receive such an Epithalamion.)

But in the general case Dirac was wrong, the poetic ideal is to be understood.

"True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind."

True, in the sciences and in math precision is vital—a statement should mean one thing only, while in poetry a phrase can stand for or allude to many things—preferably compactly, memorably, beautifully, and rhythmically. "In size, a node; in swing, more anti."

Dirac was convinced of the importance of beauty in physics, that the clumsy expression of the details of reality could be underpinned by simple and beautiful equations.

The language will be unfamiliar to many, but surely this is also a kind of poetry too.

(And it's better poetry than when we try our hands at more traditional versions.)

Quasi-war

Perhaps my history books covering the era were defective, or my memory is, but somehow I missed the US quasi-war with France. Stuff like the XYZ affair got overshadowed by the War of 1812, I guess.

France had loaned us money for the Revolutionary War. In 1793 we found it inexpedient to keep paying (Louis was dead, and we were having trouble with the Brits), and the French Directorate got a bit upset with us and let loose privateers to seize ships. With customary brilliance Congress had sold off the last warships.

The Brits had us over a barrel--they had a bigger navy and were at war with France (and seizing some of our ships trading with France too) -- and the resulting Jay treaty left us nominally sort-of anti-French (not popularly, though).

We wound up losing about 2000 merchant ships by the time things wound down.

No declaration of war (the Supreme Court said that was OK) -- that set a bit of precedent. It made sense not to go all out; all we wanted to do was shoot up their corsairs until they quit bothering us. And get reimbursed for our loses, which didn't happen.

"that is"

A verse caught my eye this morning: Revelation 13:6. The part that looked interesting was "to blaspheme His name and His tabernacle, that is, those who dwell(*) in heaven." (*) Or "who tabernacle" (as a verb). The "that is" isn't in the text, but is inferred from the grammar--in the Vaticanus/Sinaiticus versions. The KJV used a different Greek text that has an and there.

It's a trivial difference, and both readings make sense and neither changes anything about the thrust of the passage.

But the image of "those who dwell in heaven" is different between the two. With the "that is, those who dwell in heaven" reading, all those in heaven have the Spirit of God within them, and are also a kind of tabernacle and a kind of incarnation.

Catholic and Orthodox devotions refer to the Virgin Mary as the tabernacle--the place where God is/was staying. Some call her the first of the new tabernacles. Seems reasonable.

Bear suit

Some of us remember the safety engineering IgNobel prize given for a bear protective suit back in 1998.

I, of course, did not remember the man's name -- Troy Hurtubise -- nor whether it was actually ever tested yes, sort of. The grizzly was afraid of it and the Kodiak bear's trainer wouldn't let the other trial continue.

Check out that wikipedia page: he invented several things, including a fireproof paste, a nominally bulletproof exoskeleton for soldiers, and "angel light" for making things transparent (I hope I may be forgiven being more than a smidgeon dubious). He died in a fire from a traffic collision with a gasoline truck.

He filmed tests of his Vulkanite.

Accidents in manufacturing

"If you ain't bleeding, you ain't knapping" was the signature in one man's emails. Apparently he wasn't exaggerating.

we conducted a 31-question survey of modern knappers ... A variety of injuries (lacerations, punctures, aches, etc.) can occur on nearly any part of the body. The severity of injury sustained by some of our participants is shocking, and nearly one-quarter of respondents reported having sought or received professional medical attention

"Recommended protective gear, which modern knappers use to varying extents, includes gloves, leather lap pads, leather or rubber hand pads, and eye goggles"

Using leather protective gear suggests that somebody has done a bit of successful hunting already.

When asked what he would do if he got a knapped flake in his eye, Ishi indicated that he would “pull down his lower eyelid with the left forefinger, being careful not to blink or rub the lid. Then he bent over, looking at the ground and gave himself a tremendous thump on the crown of the head with the right hand”

Just in case you were looking for a new hobby. Or were trying to write a Robinson Crusoe story of your own.

Found via this article about bow and arrows in the Americas. With dating material so scarce, perhaps they have the first appearance of it (1400 years ago) wrong--maybe it appeared in the south first.

Deciphering labels

We've been getting a variety of whole wheat bread lately -- I won't give the brand. It's a smidgeon pricey, so I looked over the ingredients to see if this was something I could make myself. (And one in the household is keeping track of nutrition.) If I understand labeling rules, ingredients are supposed to be listed in order of their contribution by weight.

One of the ingredients is "Malted Barely Flour." OK...

The label says a loaf provides 17 serving sizes. Loaves consistently have 15 slices of bread, including the heels.

The loaf is listed as 1 lb. The kitchen scale says 1 lb 3 oz.

I'm not complaining, but has anybody looked at what they are advertising on their label?

Anyhow, the nutrition scaling factor is 1.34.

The right kind of sign

In John 6 we read of the feeding of the 5000 and the aftermath: Jesus withdraws to avoid being proclaimed king, walks on the sea that night to overtake His disciple's boat, and is followed by the crowd that had been fed. Jesus accuses them of just following Him for the sake of food, and this follows:

Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, has set His seal.” 28 Therefore they said to Him, “What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?” 29 Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” 30 So they said to Him, “What then do You do for a sign, so that we may see, and believe You? What work do You perform? 31 Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’”

"What then do You do for a sign?" In light of what happened just the day before, that's an odd question. "Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness" Hint hint hint.

"You just gave us ordinary bread and fish. We want a jazzier miracle."

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.

Warning signs

For the past few years my wife has been looking at the thermostat and asking, "Who turned this up?" and turning it back down.

The rest of us stoutly denied touching the instrument, but there it was, set for 72 instead of 69.

It looks like nobody was lying. Last night the thing decided that spontaneously shifting its setting wasn't good enough and what it really needed to do to get a little attention was to leave the control circuit open permanently.

That was at 2AM. It has departed the wall to live in an HVAC repairman's barrel of junk, and my wallet is lighter. But at least the house is warm again--it was 17 outside and blustery.

Musing on the Muses

Song and dance and epic poetry and comic poetry all have their place, and according to myth their Muse.

Every now and then the moment requires something different.

Sometimes one longs to invoke Hesychia, the muse(*) of silence and tranquility.

(*)I gave her a promotion.

One flesh

I wrote several years ago complaining about Augustine's take on sex: he only had a concubine, not a wife, and thus probably lacked full appreciation of the matter. Wanting privacy isn't the same as shame.

Another aspect came to mind today. Genesis said and Jesus emphasized that "the two become one flesh." I'm a bit protective of my flesh, and I don't want my internal organs exposed to the day and the inspection of outsiders. (Surgery is a big deal!) It interferes with the mutual operations of the organs, and leaves the self in an inharmonious state, not an organic whole. If two are one flesh, an outsider likewise leaves their "one flesh" in an inharmonious condition, not a unified whole.

I've heard it claimed that a couple is "one flesh" in their children, which is no doubt true in some sense, but not, I think, the main meaning. Paul wasn't writing about having children with prostitutes.

Dogs and puppies

The story of Jesus and the Syrian woman is one of those rather jarring anecdotes and parables that leave you wondering "What gives?" Jesus calls her a dog?

I was told that the translation is traditional, but poor -- there are two words for dog and this is the one "kynarion" that means puppy, as opposed to "kyon" (as used in Revelation 22:15) that means "dog" in a perjorative sense. The Mark passage reads a little differently with that translation:

it is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the puppies. But she answered and said to Him, "Yes, Lord, but even the puppies under the table feed on the children's crumbs"

You get the picture, right? Kids feeding the pet dog under the table? It's a lot less harsh.

I gather (same source) that some preachers want to imagine that Jesus learned a valuable lesson about racism from the woman's faith, i.e. Gentiles are just as good as Jews.

Well, there's an extended story that Mark tells earlier, from Mark 4:35-5:43. Jesus tells His disciples to head to the other side of the lake. A storm scares them half to death and nigh sinks the boat. On the other side they meet a demon-possessed pagan, whom Jesus exorcises and sends home with the mission to tell everyone about what God did for him. AFAIK, this is the first apostle whom Jesus commissioned. Jesus cared enough about this (pagan) man and his subsequent mission that travel, scaring His (jewish) disciples silly, the fate of a herd of pigs, and even the temporary death of Jairus' (jewish) daughter were secondary.

That sounds like He had very different priorities than I would have, but they're certainly not bigoted.

Connections

Some mathematician with a sense of humor decided to borrow a bit from the study of graphs to illustrate how significant Erdos has been in modern math. You are "connected" to Erdos if you have co-authored a paper with him, or with someone who has co-authored, or with … and so on. Erdos himself has number 0, someone who wrote a paper with him has number 1, someone who wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with him has 2, and so on. I have Erdos number 4 – not because I'm a good mathematician (far from it) but because I was part of a physics experiment in which some theorists (who I actually never met) had co-authored a paper with some mathematicians who had number 2. The connection between me and Erdos is tenuous enough to make the matter completely silly.

It's the "6 degrees of separation" thing, just applied to a particular man.

Just for fun, can we extend this to Epstein? He's number 0, and just for fun assign 0 to Maxwell too.

But what do we mean by connection? Having spent time with him or in his parties, or having had professional dealings with him? Maybe both? His guards or his chef would have "Null" for social connections and "1" for professional. Trump and Clinton have a "1" for social connections; dunno about professional ones. In fact, never mind the professional connections, it's boring.

Do I need to say that I'm not going to be in the lists? I don't run in "connected" circles. But pretty much everybody in the House and Senate is either a 1 or 2: knew him or knew someone who did. The people who know/work with them in turn are 2's or 3's in social connections. The next ring out will be the state legislators and such.

So if you know a state legislator (a former one was in a Bible class with me), you might have an Epstein number of 5 or so. Of course that's attenuated enough to be pretty meaningless too.

Me? Well, theorists like Hawking (a "1"; Epstein seems to have liked to hang out with scientists) tended to hang out with theorists, but the top guys do meet sometimes, so I'm probably at least a 5, maybe a 4. I don't feel particularly tainted by such a distant association.

Pick a figure or two you don't like. How connected are you to them?

It seems trivial to say that the "well-connected" will be have more connections to each other than to the rest of us, but the rest of us group into clusters too. I had one set of connections at the university, and a different set at church. At separations of less than about 3, there was pretty much no overlap.

Some of those clusters map onto tribes, and some of the tribes are hostile, but even so there are still connections. If your church is helping some of the poor, members will be establishing relationships with them (I hope), and have less separation from the underclasses than, say, members of the math department will have with them.

Connections can be curious. How is O'Hare airport connected to Al Capone? If you don't know…

UPDATE: Closer than I thought! Lisa Randall spent some time in the CDF control room. IIRC the accelerator was down and so we talked a bit about what I was reading to pass the time: Augustine's Confessions. This was before 2008, so I doubt that there would have been any.

Love and Death

O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you. Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

love ... without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you

The prayer isn't gospel, of course, but since God is love, if we don't have love we, that far, do not fully have God in our life. Which is like not having life in our life.

We kid ourselves about love a lot, of course, thinking we're better at it than we really are, and mistaking sexual attraction and inoffensive habits for the deeper thing.

How much of what I did today was infused with "willing the good of another"? Was all the rest "wood, hay, and stubble"?

Hands-on science demonstrations

The elementary school science night is coming up next month, and I'm debating what to demonstrate this year. Part of the point of it is getting the kids up close and personal with the equipment (or the rocks, or the crafts, or the snakes in the case of the snake show people), so the demonstations have to be short – no big lecture hall demonstrations, all hands-on or hands-close.

I have the usual lasers and lenses, diffraction gratings and polarizing filters, and this year I can do a double-slit demonstration too. And I can do some electrostatics demonstrations this year, not just the usual magnetic field demos.

A kids' favorite is the Newton's cradle with 1 pound steel balls. It is a bit too battered to be a nice momentum/energy demo (it doesn't keep clacking back and forth for very long), but with bits of paper in the middle there's a nice connection to meteors. Unfortunately the fishing line breaks a lot on that one and the younger kids want to make the balls flail around, so it needs extra supervision.

This year I got a cheap geiger counter, and wonder if some simple demonstrations of radioactivity are in order. Pro: they may not see this again until college, if then. Con: some people freak out easily and fear is contagious. But then people seem OK with the snake demo crowd, so maybe that's OK.

Since I'm alone at the table I have to supervise all the demonstration gear and do the spiel for the current demo at the same time. That's another limit on what I can do.

I've a uranium glass plate that makes the counter sing, but not much else. I could open up a smoke detector (I'm not such a fool as to try to get the source out of the well, though), but I'd probably get in trouble for that unless I posted it. The counter's not sensitive enough to pick up potassium chloride pills, much less bananas. The old thorium lantern mantles haven't been made for years. Any inexpensive suggestions? I can order some uranium ore, but I've already got uranium in the plate.

What would you have gone for? This is indoors, so nothing explosive or flammable, and the age range is 4 to 11 years or so.

A daughter generally does rocks and minerals at a different table. A rocket club shows some of their rockets but doesn't launch anything. A pity. Outdoors we could tether a rocket to wrap around a bar, or try a pinwheel.