Jogging memory

When I was working on my PhD at UofI Urbana, our data lived at Fermilab, and that's where most of the processing had to be too. To communicate with the computers BI (Before Internet) we used several modems (mostly 300 baud, but one was 110 and the prized one was 1200!), and, to save on long distance charges, a special telephone line that made our terminal room appear to be an Aurora location. Thus phone calls through it to Batavia were all local. We didn't use it for phone service, just computer connections--except once when there was some kind of outage and a PI had to be on the line for hours.

It wasn't an ordinary line, and it wasn't protected by the usual features. In particular, the line did not register as "busy" when we were using it. UPDATE: It's called a "leased line"

Somewhere in Aurora or Batavia, a woman had written her doctor's number on her refridgerator. Sometimes she needed to call him. There was a typo in the number. Our terminals would suddenly all freeze as the sessions died, and the phone in the corner would ring.

She apologized, and promised to correct the number, but perhaps she was distracted talking to her doctor, and we'd get a call again a few weeks later.

I decided to make the call memorable. On the next call, I grabbed the reciever first. "North American Casket Insurance: You can rest in peace when your tomb's insured. How may I help you?"

She hung up, and we were never interrupted again.

A T-Rex grows in Brooklyn

Over at XKCD the author answers what-if questions. This week's is "If a T-rex were released in New York City, how many humans/day would it need to consume to get its needed calorie intake?" If you haven't seen the answers in this series, go spend a little while and have fun.

The first question I thought of was how long the T-Rex would last.

For the purposes of the exercise, assume that the city government is paralyzed and the State and Feds are tangled in legal questions about endangered species, so the citizens are on their own.

NY has some issues with citizens owning guns (the Sullivan Act had more to do with politicians protecting their pet street gang supporters than public safety), and something big enough to stop an elephant isn't found in every local Walmart. So, what do they do?

If the net and cellphones are still working, put together a tracking system. Malicious folk will try to subvert it with fake sightings, but I think a majority rule evaluation and attentive administrators will be able to keep it real.

Then pick weapons.

A half dozen guys with 30-06's from a 3'rd floor window might do enough damage in a half a minute to make the T-Rex wish it hadn't chased the Time Traveler.

Get large pile of meat from a butcher and poison it, and have some brave soul haul it to a street ahead of the beast. Then wait and hope.

A dozen lads with Molotov cocktails and motorbikes.

Hijack a dump truck and run it in reverse to break his leg. Tricky, because he can probably turn fast enough to get that tail in motion, but ...

Yes, I'm punchy. Why do you ask?

Stove technology

BBC reports on a low-smoke model of cookstove to replace the traditional mud stoves. The model (now open sourced) may well be as efficient as they claim, but 40 pounds is, according to my office mate, about 4000 rupees and a very significant expense. I looked at the website of the firm, and it seems to sell/resell a number of different stoves, including several that use dung. No solar, which probably says something.

Nice idea and all, though I get a faint whiff of press release/ad news story. Smoky stoves are a curse, causing millions of lung problems around the world. If new stoves are less smoky, we have a lot less lung disease.

I wonder what can be done with the traditional material--mud? If the combustion chamber and piping was molded to good tolerances, could the efficiency go up enough and the soot output go down enough to make it worthwhile?

If so, then how about designing pipe and chamber molds so that a village could make a lot of mud stoves off the same mold? Not as nice or easy to clean as steel, but more affordable out in the countryside.

There's probably no good solution

This is West Washington Avenue looking out the window.

Traffic headed from upper right to lower left T's off at the capitol, and the city planners would rather have it go around an outer loop instead of the somewhat congested inner loop.

The dashed lines outline a dedicated bicycle lane.

Therefore two auto lanes and one bicycle lane turn into 4: 2 auto lanes turning right, 1 auto lane going straight at the capitol loop, and 1 bicycle lane going straight.

The bicycles in the right-most lane have to cross two lanes of automobile (and truck) traffic in half a block. The layout seems nicely designed to crush bikes.

Cyclists are not supposed to ride on the sidewalk, but sane ones do.

Creativity and Love (and doodles)

I’m composing this at Beaver Creek Valley, where about half the campers are Chinese and half are here for the archery season--with a lot of overlap. I saw one group running a blowtorch next to the grill cover, presumably to burn the crud off. It is noisy as all get-out and wasteful, but undeniably cool. But--why not add oxygen to the feed and make the flame strongly oxidizing? It would be faster and more dramatic--you’d have to worry about damaging the grill. This morning I moseyed over to the next campsite (they came in late and did the same thing while we were trying to sleep) and asked to see the result. Oops. I should have been wearing my glasses. Turns out they were cleaning squirrels; it is squirrel season too. Still, I like the grill cleaning idea. I’ll try it if I get the chance.

I remember overhearing the conversation between two brilliant scientists (one went on to win a Nobel prize) batting ideas back and forth. It was a joy to listen to, and also to participate in my own smaller way in similar discussions with friends. So what if most of the plans needed work, we could deal with the details when we picked a plan. (FWIW, both men were royal PITAs to work for. This may seem to sabotage my conclusion below, but the joy they had and I shared was real.)

Creativity can serve evil ends: history makes that overwhelmingly clear. But set that prospect behind us for now and think about other forms of creativity.

My experience and observation are naturally limited, but they are at least worth something. I find two forms of creativity.

One form is creativity oriented to some goal--getting a mouse out of the ventilation duct, or devising a faster way to clean the grill.

The other is creativity oriented to no immediate or even perceived goal--doodling a rocket ship in the margin of your English notes. Depending on your bent you might try to make the details aesthetic or functional, but my urge (and that of most I've watched) is to fill it out and not leave it schematic--unless that schematic has a beauty or completeness of its own. (Cartoons have their own aesthetic.)

I hesitate to call this "purposeless" creativity. The word "purposeless" is freighted with implications of randomness and waste. Neither corresponds with what I sense I am trying to do.

I'm composing this on a pad originally used by my youngest daughter for math. The inside front cover has a doodle of Legolas. She revised it here and there to make it more accurate. At the time she was captivated by Orlando Bloom as Legolas in Jackson’s movies. This had nothing to do with math, and she already had other and more accurate images of him—but she wanted to create something.

It seems as though creativity of this second sort is a fundamental urge or characteristic that isn’t derived from other thing--isn’t composite. In fact the first form of creativity--creativity aimed at some goal--is the composite, of "raw" creativity and filling a need.

At first glance goal-oriented creativity is easier to understand. I could try to define it as "If I have a need X, I think through the processes A, B, C that I know about to see if any of their goals or side effects can fit into a process that will achieve X." On closer inspection you sometimes have to define "process" so broadly that the description isn’t useful, and you wind up being circular with "creating new problems that solve the old."

You might sometimes look at non-goal oriented creativity as "make a problem and then solve it" where the problem is "This paper needs an image of Legolas" or "How convoluted an image can I draw in this margin without lines crossing?"

However you try to parse the definitions, creativity of any sort puts something in the world that wasn't there before. That shares in divine creativity, though we use an existing "something" to make our new things.

But creativity as we know it also comes with an impulse to do the thing well, whether that means beautifully or accurately or thoroughly, and we feel a lack when it falls short. The doodle among the English notes may have little time or care invested, but we’d really rather it looked good.

We want to make something new, something outside us, that we can make good, be happy with, and have affection for. Most of the time we will toss aside whatever resulted from the almost-aimless activity; judging it (correctly) not of the quality or importance to continue with, or perhaps a blind alley. But as for me I'd prefer that the margin's rocket design lack only the quotations for parts, and that not just the single dandelion I hold but the entire field explode in a whirlwind of fluff.

So creativity (as we know it) is generous--to the created thing. It seeks the best--of the created thing. It therefore--at least for human creators--partakes in the nature of love.

Given the rich detail of the world it isn't too far fetched to extrapolate that the creator of the universe created something outside himself that he could make well and be generous towards--be loving towards. (It doesn't matter if the creator is merely a gnostic demi-urge; the same extrapolation applies to whoever created the demi-urge up the fabulous gnostic chain.)

Is it possible that "God loves" is something we might have concluded from "God creates," in the same way that we might have (but didn't) conclude that God has the aspect of suffering servant from noting that God is just and that He hadn't destroyed us already? Some revelations seem needed to get through into our thick heads, and only after the fact can we say "of course!"

How to improve blogging

David Foster over at Chicago Boyz announced that August was going to be re-run month because the journal format of a blog is just not suitable for keeping track of essays of long-term relevance. Reading a blog focuses on whatever is most recent. Using tags doesn't help a great deal, since they are also ordered by time.

There's no automatic way to turn daily entries into a coherent whole. That is going to take effort by the author, and possibly quite a lot of effort; including rewriting to join essays together.

Using a "Best-of" tag is too coarse a division, unless the blog is laser-focused on only one topic.

I broach the subject with fear and trembling, because "new feature" is equivalent to "lots of new bugs and instability."

But... There are some things that would make connecting essays easier.

For example, suppose there was an option to order the presentation of essay in a category by rank. The most useful ranking is the author's (unless readership is static a Facebook-like "like" won't reflect real reader approval). The author then can put essays in some category in a "read this before that" order, deprecate things he changed his mind on, and so forth. Ranking in one category doesn't reflect ranking in other categories. This changes the "tag" structure associated with posts, but shouldn't be too hard to implement.

Simplicio: "But can't we do the same thing with meta-posts that consist of links to the others?"

Salviati: "Yes, but it is taxing for the reader to be perpetually jumping back and forth rather than reading longer blocks of related prose. In addition, it compels the author to edit old posts. Granted, there can be more connective detail between the links with the special-post format, but I think the user-interface argument is compelling.

Another thing that could make the user's experience easier is a way to use multiple tags in a single search: "Tribes" and "Geeks" for example. That requires a change in the generic user interface.

And one more thing: you create a structure consisting of different posts without bothering with tags, and tag the whole structure as a "book." A "book" might even include posts from other blogs, provided the authors of that blog all agreed to the inclusion (revocable at any time) and the outside posts were clearly formatted.

And if posts had version control available to the author and the reader--a "book"s version of a post could leave out duplicate introductory material (but still available for other views of the post).

Organizing the material is still going to be hard work.

When Helping Hurts

How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor … and Yourself by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert

The indigenous staff in my organization lead weekly Bible studies with the children in low income communities. These Bible studies are just one aspect of my organization’s overall attempts to bring long-lasting development in these broken communities. After a short-term team conducts a Bible study in one of these communities, the children stop attending the Bible studies of my organization. Our indigenous staff tell me that the children stop coming because we do not have all the fancy materials and crafts that the short-term teams have, and we do not give away things like these teams do. The children have also come to believe that our staff are not as interesting or as creative as the Americans that come on these teams.

The authors describe poverty in terms of material shortages, but also in terms of broken relationships with other humans, with themselves, and with God.

Material shortages are easy to understand and measure, and easy to relieve. But what happens when that’s just a symptom? And what are the side effects when free outside money pours in? Inflation= savers lose; local suppliers go broke; local banks fail; local leaders lose face; recipients’ self-worth is lost if a man can’t provide for his family, what use is he?; and so on. But wait, there’s more! What about the giver? He gets to be superior, a kind of god to the pitiful inferiors. Paternalism is poisonous. You don't want to become that kind of person.

There’s a vicious cycle in poverty where being poor makes you feel inferior and worthless, and feeling inferior discourages you from taking risks in education or work, or encourages you to drown your sorrows with chemicals—which keeps you poor. So your relationship with yourself matters.

Your relationships with others matter too; who will help you if you get sick? If you lose your apartment, will your cousin take you in?

And your relationship with God orders these and much more.

The first rule of relieving poverty is that you are dealing with peers, not inferiors. And they know a lot more about what works and what doesn’t than you do.

The authors say poverty generally lands in one of three stages: needing relief (just after a tsunami, for example), needing rehabilitation, and needing development. Relief needs to be immediate and short-term. The other stages demand the participation of the needy in their planning and the implementation. There may be very good reasons the farmers plant low-yield crops year after year.

Legal and social structures matter. The US welfare system punishes anyone who tries to save. Loan sharks (payday lenders, rent-to-own, and their third world brothers) are ubiquitous, and in theft-prone slums in Africa some people have to deposit their money with "savings sharks" who charge interest (up to 80%!) for keeping your money safe for you.

I’d never heard of Asset Based Community Development before, but it sounds like an excellent approach; and not just for poverty relief. It starts by finding out what skills and resources the people have, and tries to look for solutions to problems using community resources, building/rebuilding relationships between people and local institutions and being careful not to bring in outside resources unless absolutely needed. Often the local resources are far larger than even the local people realize.

One of the authors describes how he gave \$8 to buy penicillin to save the life of Grace, an ex-witch doctor in Uganda. And in Chapter 5 he explains why that was stupid and probably did more harm than good. A little bit of his mea culpa:

The truth is that there was more than enough time to walk back to the church, where the small-business class was still assembled, and ask the participants what they could do to help Grace. While the refugees were extremely poor, they could have mustered the eight cents per person to pay for the penicillin.

…

Why does all of this matter? Grace desperately needed relationships in the community in general and in St. Luke’s Church in particular. Her former way of life had created many enemies, and, being infected with HIV, Grace was going to need solid support structures as time wore on. In fact, Grace needed to have her poverty of community alleviated if she was going to have any chance for long-term survival.

What else? MicroLoan Institutions are nice, but not something that church missions should get involved in and not that useful in the countryside (they need a critical mass of customers). Financial education is often helpful. Hope and self-control are side-effects that are essential to climbing out of poverty.

When I went with a church group to help in New Orleans, we went under the auspices of a local church which gave us the assignments; and number one was "If someone wants to talk, drop the work and talk. You are here for relationships." We talked with the widow whose house we were rehabbing (she made us dinner), but there weren’t a lot of other people around most of the time—and the drug house lookout didn’t want to chat. A little, a little—who knows how useful it was.

The church has also sponsored wells in Liberia. The footage of people using the pumps is nice, but I never did get an answer to my question: Who has ownership, and how will they be repaired?

Read the book. And then ask some hard questions about how your aid money and effort gets used.

Outwitting the "crazy hairy ants"

The AP reported on a plague of fast-moving ants that were starting to infest the south. They short out wires, kill bees, and leave no room for fire ants (so they're not all bad). Kill one and chemical cues quickly bring the others in swarms.

If one gets electrocuted, its death releases a chemical cue to attack a threat to the colony, said Roger Gold, an entomology professor at Texas A&M.

"The other ants rush in. Before long, you have a ball of ants," he said.

.........

"I did a test site with a product early on and applied the product to a half-acre ... In 30 days I had two inches of dead ants covering the entire half-acre," Rasberry said. "It looked like the top of the dead ants was just total movement from all the live ants on top of the dead ants."

Perhaps we can finesse this defense so that it turns into a weakness.

Study the critters until you find out what that chemical cue is. Synthesize it.

Now dig a ditch near the infested area and spray it with this stuff and kerosene. After a few hours, ignite. Lather, rinse, repeat. I'd think that after maybe a week or so you'd start to exhaust the number of ants who respond to the cues. From the description above it sounds like they'll come from a couple hundred yards away.