If you have the budget, why not

Epic System is famous for several things, most happily the way they decorate their buildings. They're completing two more: "Azland, loosely inspired by “The Chronicles of Narnia,” and Elvendell, inspired by “The Lord of the Rings.”" ... "Two more buildings, Rogue Planet, based on “Star Wars,” and Dragonfell, reminiscent of Game of Thrones, are scheduled to open in spring 2028." (I'm not sure the latter theme is auspicious.)

Buildings across Epic’s campus share a similar footprint, with distinctive staircases, conference rooms and office space for about 300 to 400 employees, often working on the same team. But their interiors, from digitally printed carpets to walls covered in fantastical vinyl designs, give each building — and sometimes each floor — its own identity.

...

Much of the variation between buildings comes from the decorations, with most having the same general layout of offices and conference rooms. Recent advances in digital printing have made it easier to produce customized carpet patterns and vinyl wall coverings, including carpet designs featuring pictures of ponds and lion faces.

“The price is the same, so why not get the fun one if you have the choice?” Schumacher said.

Ambassadors

Back in the day the Womens Missionary Union organized a group for boys called "Royal Ambassadors", recalling 2 Corinthians 5:19-20 "ambassadors for Christ".(*)

"Royal" is nice and encouraging for the youth, but I wonder if "Loyal Ambassadors" for Christ are what the world needs more of. I know I haven't always reflected Christ well and fear I have sometimes passed along my own attitudes instead of the "word of reconcilliation".

(*) By popular demand they then organized a "Girl's Auxilliary: GA" group, which after a while turned into "Girls in Action: GA".

UPDATE: For those not familiar with the WMU, they were founded almost 140 years ago to educate (esp children) about Christian missions. Their influence has been large--McBride exaggerated a bit, but not all that much.

Patterns and language

When you read "blue" do you think of the sky, or ocean, or copper sulfate, or maybe a little of all at once? The word's just a word, a few letters, a sound, but you use that abstraction to bring to mind all these things, from colored chalk to the spectrum to the rainbow to the refringence in a bubble.

Anecdotal Evidence introduced Nemerov and his Figures of Thought (also see this and I like The Spy ). In that "Figures of Thought" he describes discovery of patterns in disparate things as a "dry delight."

"Dry"? Those spirals he wrote of, like blue hues, inhabit much in the world that we sense. Like "blue", the word "spiral" evokes something from our senses. But it also evokes something from our minds, like "care" or "depth" do.

If you do not know the name, the language, you can still see the commonality when looking at something as obvious as the color blue or a spiral, but you'll miss things less obvious things like the commonality between a pendulum and a wave in the water.

Heinlein exaggerated, but just as you can't fully appreciate Chinese poetry without knowing the Chinese language, or fully understand some paintings without knowing the symbols the artist used, you won't fully appreciate the poems of the world without knowing the language of the world.

Life is short, and I don't have time for all I find to do. I'll never learn Chinese. I'll just have to worry along with translations.

Something doesn't quite add up

When checking for comments for this blog, I noticed that posts were racking up a lot of page views. Curious as to why, I went to Stats, and then to More About This Blog, and then looked at Top Referring URLs. It says I have a large number of links, or at least "the previous site visited" (not sure if those can be distinguished) from the American Osteopathic College of Radiology. Just for completeness I checked, and my intuition was correct -- they have no link.

We wonders.

FWIW, blogger sometimes seems to count page views from spiders, which makes the blog seem more popular than it really is. The above oddity is probably more algorithmic goofiness, unless osteopathic radiologist training provokes a special love for my flavor of eclecticism. Maybe spiders have gotten smart, and pretend to originate from a pool of fake addresses, to get by the anti-spider algorithms.

Crosses

"And He was saying to them all, 'If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me.'"

He didn't say make a cross for yourself; you'd have one.

It occurred to me a few days ago that Jesus' cross represented suffering for others' sins. So, I suspect, do ours.

It's partly suffering from others' actions, partly pain at seeing others' ruin and pain, and partly the tension between trying to show love and trying to show truth.

Songs and memories

AVI posted a song I haven't heard in ages: Winchester Cathedral. I now see why the guy's voice sounded strange.

I remember where I first heard that – a 6'th grade classroom in Carbondale. For some reason the class had a phonograph, and we (I gather, nobody ever asked me) were allowed to pick a song during some break time or another, selecting from a box by the window. The only two that ever played that I recall were Winchester Cathedral and Georgy Girl. Oddly, Georgy's B-side (Last Thing On My Mind) didn't show up.

The school was directly across the street from where we lived that year. That made it easy to transport the artifacts back and forth for a class demonstration about Liberia. I recall bits and pieces: the teacher tried to encourage reading by having all her students log the number of books and pages they read. Did Lord of the Rings count as one book or three? I found a small sad iron in the rafters of our basement – no idea how it got there. I got malaria partway through junior high, and missed the practical exam for shop class, so I only half finished the shop project. (Drafting came first – you probably would never guess I took the class.)

I tried the experiment of quickly drawing a capital Gamma in all the boxes of a T/F exam and then adding the appropriate final stroke as I figured out the answer. It turns out that doesn't speed things up; the overhead of moving your hand dominates the time.

And a vice principal stalking grimly down to confront a friend and I for playing craps, and then wandering off quietly when he saw we were playing a math dice game. (numbers and symbols – in a minute generate as many unique numbers as you can from the roll).

And one student who looked just like a guy I knew from Liberia.

Bits and pieces… no narrative suitable for a memoir.

Nobel winner

A congratulations to Professor Halzen for his inspiration and leadership in creating the IceCube experiment!

He's a really knowledgeable and sharp man -- knows everybody in the field, it seems, and keeps track of all that's going on.

When I first heard of the plan to bury phototubes in ice, back when they were first testing the idea (AMANDA), I thought it wouldn't work. I was wrong; he was right.

FWIW, the IceCube web site is straining under the unexpected load: one collaborator said "they should really inform the sys-admins of a given experiment a few days before".

Also, the BBC story mentions about neutrinos that "The Sun produces vast numbers of them: every second, billions pass harmlessly through an area the size of your fingernail." That's perfectly true. However, they interact much more frequently when they are higher energy--and the high energy neutrinos are the ones IceCube looks for.

Flower photography

My wife wanted to visit a local flower farm she had just read about. It turned out we shared an unexpected connection with the lady on duty that day -- helping at the same school.

Career choice

I've heard that you should "follow your passion." A counter-example: Some people enjoy the job of prophet, denouncing the evils of their time (and especially of their enemies). Experience suggests that those who enjoy decrying others' sins are precisely those who shouldn't have the job.

Idolatry

Notes on substack

Bill Watterson’s 1990 Commencement Speech

For those who haven't read it: MIT archived a copy of the speech he gave at his alma mater, Kenyon College.

If you wondered at why he was so vehemently against capitalizing on the strip -- after all, Walt Kelly and Charles Schultz did a fair bit of it themselves -- the devil was in the details. It meant changing authorship, goals for the strip, and even how he operated. And the meaning of it. I gather that Kelly and Schultz had more control over their work.

And apparently Jef Mallett says that Frazz is not a grown-up Calvin, despite the personality similarities.

If the wait is boring

You've played the game "Find all the words using just the letters in the given word." E.g. STOP gives POTS, TO, SOP, etc, etc.

OK. On top of that, take that list and make the most compact crossword you can using all and only those words.

Quotation marks?

We're going through 1 Corinthians, and I suspect several things would have been much clearer -- all along -- if Koine Greek had had quotation marks. The letter was written in response to a letter from them ("Now concerning the things about which you wrote"), and also presumably in response to a report from "Chloe's people" who I guess brought the letter to Paul. (The postal service was for the Emperor and the army.)

The very next clause in 7:1 is "It is good for a man not to touch a woman." I find it a little hard to believe that the scholar Paul would have so forgotten about the first recorded commandment as to make such a blanket claim.

Likewise in chapter 10 he makes the provacative statement "All things are lawful", which seems to flatly contradict his statements in chapters 5 and 6 detailing unlawful things.

The difficulties vanish if he is quoting the Corinthian elders' letter. I'd suppose that they, in reaction to the moral atmosphere(*), made the extreme claim about sex, probably buttressed with examples as to why. And they explained their reasoning for allowing Christians to eat meat sacrificed to idols -- offsite. So I think of the text as containing quotation marks, and Paul is arguing against their application of the claim on their own terms.

---

(*)"To corinthianize" may refer to the Greek Corinth, destroyed by Romans in 146BC and rebuilt as a Roman city in 44BC. Or maybe both cities.

Houthi

An interesting article on the recent history and the players. I won't swear to it's completeness, of course -- I'm nowhere near knowledgeable about Yemen.

Stairs in an emergency

Some 911 survivors described getting out of the 60+'th floor by going down the tower stairs, of which there were 4 sets, one per corner. Obviously it took a while to do that, but they'd been required to do drills so they knew what to do and where to go.

It didn't take nearly as long as I'd have guessed, though, given my own experience at Fermilab. The high-rise is only 15 floors. The building looks like an ice cream sandwich that fell and opened up. It also has 4 stairwells, but the atrium set were forbidden during the tornado drill--exposed to flying glass. So during the drill, 15 floors worth of people descended through 2 enclosed stairwells. I was on the 15'th floor. (There's a 16'th too, but almost nobody is there.)

It took about 30 minutes for us all to reach the basement. If a real tornado had been heading at us, it would have caught us with our pants down. I didn't even get into the stairwell for over 10 minutes.

4 times as many floors, and more people...

Keeping up with the news

Twenty five years later

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

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

It was obviously a war.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aztalan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremiah

The Grim Weeper?

Dr Boli

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

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

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

Look for parallels at your own risk.