Foreknowledge isn't always knowledge

If you had described to me 28 years ago what my life turned out like, I would almost certainly never have married my wife. Who wants children with Aspergers? If you had told it to me 27 years ago, I'd have thought long and hard before proposing; and probably insisted that we never have children.

The mere description doesn't do justice to the reality, and the reality is that I wouldn't trade the family for anything. I'd do it again, except for a few (ok, more than a few) screwups along the way.

And I haven't any idea how I'd convey that fuller knowledge to an earlier me. Some words didn't have the same freight they do now, and I'd no idea how much meaning there could be in "being there." I'd have been scared.

I've not lived a particularly adventurous life, but I remember one moment that was an "OK, here goes" moment--just before "I do." I'll always be glad that I wasn't too scared.

What we focus on

Memories are fickle, and the details of the setting may be wrong, but the core I think is true.

When the Del Santos arrived in the port of Monrovia, it was too late for immigration procedures, so we spent the night aboard. It rained.

There were a few rickety wooden chairs on the deck under the overhang, and I tried to collar one, but there were more important people visiting us. I didn’t care so much about the VIPs—the rain pouring off the edge of the awning was more interesting.

Truly! The edge of the awning was straight, but the water poured down in individual equally-spaced streams. I was puzzled and pointed this out, and one of the VIPs replied that though the edge was straight and flat, the roof itself was corrugated, and so the water came in channels.

Aha! Maybe these VIPs are going to be interesting after all!

They were answering lots of questions, mostly about dull stuff—I was more curious about whether it was going to rain like this all the time. But by the time they got around to my question, the answer was obvious—the rain was tapering off. In fact, the runoff was down to the rate of drops instead of streams.

Drops didn’t come uniformly, and I tried to find the pattern—but there wasn’t one. It was a pleasant display of randomness, until it tapered off to nothing.

I’ve always been interested in the patterns and the why behind the scenes. Even at 8 ½ years old.

Civil War

by Bruce Catton

I decided to fill in a fairly large hole in my history knowledge, and tackled Catton’s books: Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Glory Road, and A Stillness at Appomatox. These cover the history of the Army of the Potomac, as viewed from the Union side.

Several threads run through the history, beside the obvious continuity of the army group. The Union side, for a long time, did not have a clear understanding of what they were trying to do. The Union side was afflicted with incompetent officers at all levels, and Murphy’s Law made sure that pivotal battles hinged on the decisions of officers who were in no hurry to fight. Apparently one pivotal incompetent was Pinkerton in his role as intelligence officer, who magnified the Rebel armies by a factor of two and frightened several generations of Union generals. Nobody knew how to deal with the new technology of rifles at first, or even with the muskets: in one early battle Union and Rebel soldiers just stood and shot at each other point blank. Eventually they learned to dig in and use trenches to fight from, but I gather they never did figure out that helmets would help. Accident and friendly fire played their usual stellar roles, and so did domestic politics: Democrats looking for political advantage did everything short of actually volunteering as soldiers for the Rebels to help them keep fighting the Union.

I won’t attempt to summarize the history. Catton tries hard to show what things looked like from the point of view of the ordinary soldier as well as the strategic picture.

It is fascinating, and horrifying, to see how easily things might have been different—in each direction. The anti-war party in the Union was so corrosive that it came close to achieving its aim: defeat for the Union. That’s a strong accusation, but accurate: peace without victory meant a dissolution of the Union. The Rebels were close to victory more than once thanks to incompetent Union generaling. And the Union was close to early victory several times—and if key figures had ordered ruthless attacks rather than waiting around, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.

The longer the Rebels fought, the Federal government became relatively stronger and the States became relatively weaker. In a battle for “State’s rights” they’d have done better to down arms immediately—States would have had a stronger position in the country today. Although perhaps this was for the best in the end: the US could not and cannot be successfully isolationist, and a strong coordinated central defense turned out to be essential for facing the imperialist powers.

I like the author’s style. Read it.

Searching is hard

I learned years ago that when I was annoyed with the church or its leaders, and nurtured that critical attitude, I wound up doing less good and more evil in the average day than I did otherwise. Something about that attitude spread through the rest of my life.

We’re looking for a new church home. And to find one I have to analyze what we find, and evaluate it: be a critic weighing pros and cons. I’m not looking forward to spending a lot of time that way.

Eden and beyond

The latest research in nano-technology shows more and more clearly how powerful biological fabrication can be. Large metal objects will remain the domain of large furnaces, but small and complex objects might be generated in other ways: if we knew how to tame the creatures to do it. A symbiosis between oysters and bacteria which reduce iron could produce laminates of iron and oyster nacre—small, but strong and very tough. It would take a lot of research, but it might work.

I’ve long thought that the dog was with us in Eden—an example given of what could be done when we subdued/tamed the world. In retrospect taming the dog seems straightforward: take a pack animal and make it part of the human pack. But it took insight to see that this was possible. The dog is just one part of the wide world. Could we ever have tamed it all? Not just the wolf and the sheep, but the mouse and the snake and the bees?

Taming a wild and dangerous world without reducing its complexity or majesty seems a huge task, and one I can only describe by analogies. The seamen of sailing ships did not try to create their own winds or dry the ocean paths, but used the ocean to support themselves and tacked when the winds weren’t favorable. They finessed the power of the wind and ocean to get them where they wanted to go. We dam up the sides of the Mississippi, and the silly river silts up higher requiring us to dredge and dam it higher still. Suppose instead we found a way to finesse the power of the river, letting it flood where we wanted it to instead of wherever it found a way loose. Or, as Lewis pointed out, if we could persuade mice to defecate someplace else we wouldn’t mind them eating our leftovers.

With greater and greater knowledge the taming would be more and more complete. There’d be work and to spare to understand each region and its creatures and to plan a web of obediences in it: science and art combined.

I have no way to imagine how human relations would be different in an unfallen world, where people could know each other in love, and therefore know each other far better than in our self-involved world.

And I’m in no position to even guess at what the relation between God and man was like.

The creativity and power and love that could have been is mind-boggling.

Eden is gone forever, though; and we’ve a world full of wicked problems; a world where a God who hates divorce sets up rules for how to arrange it; a world where sacrifices sometimes have to die; a world where those who try to build Eden create Babel instead—if they’re lucky; last century they often wound up with altars to Molech. Yes, I think Babel is a good analogy for what we are developing here in the US: great plans and noise and no common language anymore.

But though Eden is gone, and we’ve no hope for a harmonious world (let alone a loving one) anymore, we’ve hope and a still greater gift. Our creativity is just shards of what it might have been, but if we have the Holy Spirit living with us it is His power that matters, and that is greater than any Edenic man’s could possibly be. We have to live in the wreckage we made and suffer at each other’s mercy, but the meaning of it can be transformed in undreamed-of ways. Who knew that God was a suffering servant? And that we could be like Him that way?

Though our best work is just filthy rags, with His transfiguring power our poor endurance can be glorious.

Unless the seed dies

From My Utmost for His Highest

We tend to say that because a person has natural ability, he will make a good Christian. It is not a matter of our equipment, but a matter of our poverty; not of what we bring with us, but of what God puts into us; not a matter of natural virtues, of strength of character, of knowledge, or of experience— all of that is of no avail in this concern. The only thing of value is being taken into the compelling purpose of God and being made His friends (see 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 ). God’s friendship is with people who know their poverty. He can accomplish nothing with the person who thinks that he is of use to God. As Christians we are not here for our own purpose at all— we are here for the purpose of God, and the two are not the same. We do not know what God’s compelling purpose is, but whatever happens, we must maintain our relationship with Him. We must never allow anything to damage our relationship with God, but if something does damage it, we must take the time to make it right again. The most important aspect of Christianity is not the work we do, but the relationship we maintain and the surrounding influence and qualities produced by that relationship. That is all God asks us to give our attention to, and it is the one thing that is continually under attack.

That’s a hard thing to remember. I was blessed with various gifts—a good analytical mind, good big picture skills, flexible: surely God wants me as a teacher. But God doesn’t need anything of mine at all, and so long as I imagine that I know His plan I don’t listen. So long as I think of myself as a guide to the ignorant I’m not much use, and then what powers I do have tend to point people to me rather than God. I remember a half a year when I felt strongly that I was talking too much, attracting too much attention, and that I should shut up and let the scripture speak for itself without elaboration. I did, mostly. I got no feedback on whether lessons were better or worse. Life’s like that.

Of course one great temptation in the modern evangelical church is to imagine that because Christ did it all we have nothing serious to sacrifice, no hard work to do. That appeals to my rather lazy side. I know better, naturally, so I find some congenial work to do that other people might find hard, and spend a lot of time on it. It takes talent to blunder into pits on both sides of the path at the same time…

Birthday

I've been asked what I want for my birthday. I said I'd like a laser you can start a campfire with.

That's be cool!

With a historical flare, too.

Geek fire

Creative spam

I just cleaned out the junk mail from gmail--it doesn't have a single "dump it all" command, unfortunately, so I have to chuck it in blocks of 50 messages. In amongst the enhancement offers, come-ons and pleas for help from Nigeria, a message about Small Group Bible Studies: "What seven word phrase guarantees ..." (gmail only gives the first few words). I didn't need to read further: "guarantee" is a word of magic, not obedience. But I'd not have thought that small group leaders would be such a lucrative demographic to tap online. Somebody has more imagination than I do.

Oops

After weeks of almost nightly practice, last night was the first night of Patience. My wife suggested that it might be good if I bought a ticket, or at least came late. There were hours before then, so I went home and tried to attend to the suggested errands. That evening as I ground over reluctant alignment measurements, I realized: This isn't another rehersal, this is opening night!

I dashed off, figuring I could get in the last half hour. In the parking garage a large pickup truck stuck out into the turning zone, and a huge SUV decided they wanted the middle and my lane too. I tried to get past, and brushed up against said pickup. No damage done (big black mark on the side of my car), but the security guard turned around and tried to figure out what to do.

So I arrived just as the curtain fell. From my position I couldn't see my wife or son during curtain calls, and she never saw me.

So much for bringing moral support.

Compared to the great problems in the world, disappointing my wife probably doesn't register on the radar. But I can do precisely nothing about Hizballah and Israel or any of the other battles. But what I can do, I ought to, and I muffed this one.

Our Superstring Universe

by L.E. Lewis Jr.

Strings, branes, extra dimensions, and superstring-m theory.

Who edited this? I can’t believe a particle physicist looked at it, or looked at more than just a slice or two of it. Lewis writes like a reporter: reasonably clearly, and with a charming breathless disregard for the facts.

The preface announces that this may soon be the most important theory of science…ever. Even back in June 2003 it was no secret that superstring theory was running into serious problems—such as not being able to predict anything. But set that aside and plow on. He brings in the “space particle” interpretation of strings to support a “continuous creation of space” and then brings in “an interpretation of a feature of SS-M theory;” namely the holographic principle “which seems to imply and allow a concept generally considered to be outside the realm of science. It is the concept of a human afterlife.”

That’s just the preface.

Next he addresses the origin of our universe in a breathless set of pagelets describing the time intervals starting with the initial nugget (which encoded our “universe to be”, never mind the Darwinian selection mentioned on the next page). Only 3 of the 10 space dimensions succeed in uncoiling.

Along the way he interjects descriptions of what he means by force and motion, space-time, matter-energy, and symmetry. I’d like to applaud him for trying to explain symmetry to the layman, except that he gets a bit hung up on jargon and forgets to include translational symmetry. (Translational symmetry is like driving in the Great Plains. Drive a hundred miles and the landscape looks exactly the same as it did before—nothing seems to change.) Then he proceeds to screw up what he did talk about when he addresses symmetry breaking. Water, inspected at the molecular level as he wants us to, isn’t really very symmetric at all. To understand what he’s talking about you have to think of yourself sunk in the middle of the ocean—water all around you. Move, turn—it always looks the same (just so you stay far away from the boundaries—pretend they aren’t there). But when the water starts to freeze a solid object appears; and now you can move nearer or farther from it, and look at it from different angles, and the view isn’t always the same. Some symmetry is now lost, or “broken.” “Building symmetries” is also possible, along similar lines.

The reason this sort of thing is important is that the equations that describe behavior of matter change in subtle and important ways when there is no longer one or another symmetry.

During the section on the inflation of the universe, he mentions quark formation, saying that up and down quarks appear and create protons and neutrons. Except, of course, that you have to generate anti-quarks as well, which generate antimatter, which annihilate with ordinary matter, and only an asymmetry in the weak interaction leaves us with any leftover matter at all. No mention of anti-quarks appears here (or anti-electrons in the next section)—a stunning omission.

In Chapter 11 when he yammers about “a new energy source?” he asks ”is it possible that (electron’s) mass could be converted directly into energy?” The answer is no, and if he understood the symmetries he wrote of earlier he’d know that. (He uses a picture that shows why, but I guess he didn’t understand it.) Then he calculates the energy equivalent of the electron—and gets .54 kilowatt hours! Of course this is wrong by a factor of more than 20 billion billion. I guess he was asleep during the lectures on measurement and units. I find it rather creepy that he professes to be able to explain arcana of M-theory and yet doesn’t know that cm/sec isn’t the same as m/sec. It comes as no great surprise that he completely omits any mention of the unification of electromagnetism and the weak force in his section on the standard model.

He starts out reasonably clearly describing the history of quantum mechanics, and then bollixes the section about Einstein’s contribution. On the whole that section is worthwhile, though: clear expositions of this are rare.

When he talks about omega, the expansion of the universe, and the microwave background he leaves the reader about as wise as before—maybe a little worse if the reader actually thinks that light can “cool.” If you’re going to talk about “curvature” of space, you need to open with a few examples; explaining what motion looks like in 2-d curved spaces like a sphere’s surface and handwaving your way to 3-d.

The missing dark energy and dark matter problems come up. It’s been long known that galaxies act like there’s more gravitating matter in them than meets the eye. Recent work untangling the “Einstein lensing” (light bends in gravity, so you can get extra images of remote objects) of distant galaxies shows that the intervening galaxies that cause the lensing have a distribution of gravitating matter that doesn’t quite match the visible part. Theoretical calculations of the universe’s overall curvature parameter (omega) suggest that the visible matter is only 4% of what’s needed to get omega=1. Even with estimates for “dark matter” this still only comes to less than a third. (They call the missing part the “dark energy.”) You’d think this was time to give the theory the old hairy eyeball, and that’s part of the appeal of string theory.

I’ll admit that I’m not an expert on string theory. The learning curve is pretty fierce, and the math is pretty hairy. The model is appealingly simple, and work that’s been done hints at interesting links tying together various physics and astrophysics mysteries in addition to putting gravity and quantum mechanics together in a natural way. You just have to ignore the fact that nobody’s been able to use it to predict anything yet because there are an infinite number of resulting models of the universes and some fundamental problems with getting the parameters right.

The fundamental model of string theory is fairly simple. All particles are vibrations in a space of 11 (or 10, or 23) dimensions. Eh? You only know of 3? (Don’t forget time!) Well, you wouldn’t see a dimension if it were coiled up on itself in a minute loop—unless there was something echoing around in that tiny loop like the sound in an organ pipe. You still wouldn’t see it directly (too tiny) but you could tell when an energetic one went by from the kicks it gave other things in the vicinity—which is how you spot the elementary particles. With a few simple rules about interpretation (faster vibration means more energetic means more massive) and about the interaction of these strings you can come up with a theory of particle physics and incorporate gravity naturally. The loops of tiny dimensions and vibrating strings in them put natural limits to the unpleasant infinities that show up when you try to describe gravity in quantum mechanics equations.

Some glitches arise: there should be a whole zoo of very heavy elementary particles, unless they all decayed away long ago. The theory demands some dramatic cancellations between positive and negative energies to give the small masses of the known particles: unbelievably large numbers differing only by minute amounts. (Truth to tell, quantum electrodynamics in the standard model has its own issues with things like that; but they’ve found some ways to justify and systematize them with “renormalization groups.” Don’t ask. Physicists do things that make mathematicians wince. They work, though.)

”Supersymmetry” (an elementary particle symmetry between particles with two different classes of spin) arises naturally out of string theory. This is regarded as a virtue, for some reason. Supersymmetry theories predict that every particle known so far (electron, up quark, Z-boson, etc) has an analogous particle of the opposite spin class. This makes a lot of calculations simple and the models beautiful, but we’ve never found one of these supersymmetric particles. As far as this experimentalist can tell the theorists can always tweak their model this way or that to predict that the lowest mass “super particle” was just outside the reach of the last experiment. Of course there’s all that dark matter that we don’t understand; maybe that’s stable supersymmetric particles. Or maybe not; I can’t seem to lay my hands on any to test it.

Chapter 8, on “Curled-up Shapes and Extra Dimensions,” is not terribly clear. It may seem so to a layman, but I found a lot of the theory described to be unmotivated and arbitrary. Which I suppose is natural when you don’t know the theory very well. But I’m not going to take Lewis’ descriptions as accurate given his track record, and neither should you. The chapter on “Building Credibility” doesn’t. In “The Search for Proof:’ finding the predicted supersymmetric particles would bolster all supersymmetry theories, not just string theory; neutrino interactions are rare but still happen often enough that we build detectors and find them; etc. If we had some ham we could have some ham-and-eggs if we had some eggs.

I will pass over the section on the holographic principle and life after death in silence.

It was kind of fun to see some old familiar names like the Icarus neutrino detector. I worked a little on that long ago—it is a liquid argon detector under the Gran Sasso mountain; one of Carlo Rubbia’s ideas.

In summary: the author doesn’t know what he’s writing about. Parts of the book are clear and accurate, and parts of it are clear and wrong. And for some parts I can’t tell one way or the other.

One interesting site critiquing string theory is Not Even Wrong

Health, Second Edition

by Marna Owen

If I may paraphrase a more famous review: This is not a book to be taken lightly. It should be thrown down and stamped on.

Youngest Daughter is taking Freshman Health at home this summer. This is the book she was assigned. It is startlingly elementary for a High School Freshman course.

The subject area consultant is Dr. Anita Hocker, who is “Supervisor of Health Education and Health Services for Sarasota County Schools,” “a specialist in curriculum,” “has been a high school science teacher, a developer of community health programs, and a medical researcher.” That last bit of resume padding is telling: a researcher would mention what the topic was. Dollars to doughnuts Anita was a student hourly—an honest job but not a research position. The Curriculum advisor is Stephen Larsen, with degrees in speech pathology and learning disabilities. There’s no info about Marna Owen.

In this book one learns such marvelous things as “Bones are hardened cartilage” (page 48). The chapter quiz often refers to things not discussed in the text. It also includes “Health Issues” such as “Some states have laws that require people to wear seat belts in cars. Do you think that these are good laws? Should the government get involved in your health?”

Maybe it escaped notice somewhere along the line, but questions about government responsibilities have more to do with political theory than medicine. The book reads as though the text and questions were composed separately. And howlers like the bone and cartilage claim shouldn’t have appeared even in a first edition, let alone a second.

The mental health includes the usual nonsense chatter about self-image. Youngest daughter and I had a long talk about “good self image.” This little gem of a phrase carries substantial ambiguity: Does it mean that you think well of yourself or that you think accurately of yourself? There’s a fellow in the mental hospital who thinks he’s Superman—he has a great self-image. And another who thinks he’s already damned and in hell, and needs to be whipped: not such a nice self-image.

We read a bit of Psalm 51: David had a pretty low opinion of himself at the time, but it was accurate. And what was really important was his attitude. He decided to go repent and try to get forgiven, in the hope that even somebody like him could still be good and an example again.

I think it was the Incans who had a proverb loosely rendered as “Party as though you would die tomorrow; farm as though you would live forever.” Both images are wrong: you (usually) won’t die tomorrow and you aren’t going to live forever. But the attitudes matter: celebrate wholeheartedly, enjoying everything as though this were the only time you could; and work responsibly.

Researchers found that bullies often have a “good self-image” (contrary to the party line). Suggestive, isn’t it?

Youngest daughter and I also had a long talk about the necessity for professional help after crises. Once again, recent work looking at the use of counselors after disasters (NY Times archives) found that people who put the past behind them and (using good old denial and other defense mechanisms) tried to go on with life were generally in better emotional shape a few years later than people who tried to talk through their issues with the counselors. Some people benefit from professional help (I’ve seen that, and so has she), but most seem to overcome crises just fine with just friends and time.

Some people need therapy, but we don’t need a “therapeutic culture.”

And we don’t need this book. The school is going to get a very nasty letter about it. Luckily we have a number of good references to fill in gaps, but students in a class have no such luck.

Puns

Son, you are 12 years old and it is time for you to learn about the noblest form of wit: puns. With puns you are playing with sound and meaning, with the very nature of word and language. They enliven conversation, and sometimes even enlighten. You will find them in the books of the prophets, and Jesus himself is reported to have said one. Samuel Johnson can go pound sand.

You know, of course, that a pun uses words that sound similar to restate a phrase in a new way with a new meaning.

The most delightful of these are firecracker puns, which need no buildup but fit naturally into a conversation. In the best of these the new meaning fits into the conversation, and invites reciprocation. Puns where the new meaning is irrelevant tend to derail the conversation, which is not usually ideal—though sometimes a new direction is exactly what is needed. (It is very hard to give short examples, because they fit into the much longer conversation.)

Built-up puns are also fun. The shorter the buildup the better, and the more plausible the buildup the better. It is more fun for the audience when the pun is unexpected, so try not to spoil the surprise by announcing the joke in advance.

Puns must have context. Just noting that knows and nose sound the same does not leave anyone rolling on the floor laughing. It is a rather boring fact. But observing that “though an obstinate 3-year-old is unschooled he really no’s a lot” puts the similarity to use, gives it a context, and wins the undying thanks of an amused parent. Or so one hopes.

It is probably best to practice with built-up puns first, until you become skillful enough to see opportunities in conversation for firecracker puns. To do this you start with a reasonably common or plausible phrase, and see what can be varied.

Try “bar association.” That’s an organization intended to maintain standards for lawyers—if you don’t meet the standards you aren’t allowed to practice law. But bar sounds like “barre,” which is a ballet term. Who could “associate” in ballet? Students or teachers—pick one. The pun is more effective if the buildup has some links to the original, so we’ll pick the teachers as the associates, and try to put them in some sort of formal group.

That suggests an obvious buildup: “The ballet teachers unionized last month, and formed their own barre association.”

That isn’t too bad. It has the virtue of being short, at least. However, the “association” part isn’t very strongly connected with the “unionized,” and so the result is kind of limp. Unless there is more context (such as the word “association” having appeared already in the conversation), this is pretty weak.

It isn’t hard to strengthen it, though—because “bar” has several meanings already. One of them is “tavern” which of course is a place where people congregate/associate. So you can modify the buildup to be: “The ballet teachers union is at Matty’s Tavern for their weekly barre association meeting.” The word “association” is still not very well motivated, but “bar” is now a double pun. The more puns you can work into a phrase, the better (unless it starts sounding labored).

A built-up pun needs more and stronger context than a firecracker pun. If there are several of you in the kitchen and the dog begs for the ham bone, you can toss him the bone and say “Bone appetit!” The context is there already: the bone and the hope that the dog will enjoy his meal; so the pun can stand alone. This may be a bad example, because it is hard to come up with a plausible buildup: the best I’ve got is to talk about Julia Childe devoting a few minutes to explaining what leftovers are suitable for giving to the pets. To make that plausible you need to describe it with a sentence or two—and you start to lose the virtue of brevity. This pun works best as a firecracker.

Let’s look at another phrase, and see what it offers when we vary it:

Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen.

• Nobody. No-body; body. This could come from an undertaker, Dr. Frankenstein, or the famous wrestler’s name. The problem is that revising nobody gives kind of awkward grammar.
• Knows. Nose, no’s. The word “nose” appears naturally in contexts with dogs sniffing things out, elephants, or Cyrano. The phrase “no’s” is a bit awkward, but means denial—maybe someone contradicting one of those fake tell-all stories? But that assumes that your audience knows about them.
• Troubles. Tribbles. This is an old Star Trek reference (and has been done repeatedly) Not recommended: those likely to understand it will probably see it coming.
• I’ve. Eye, ivy. Eye is hard to work in, but ivy might, especially together with scene, below. Some kind of outdoor setting?
• Seen. Scene, screen, been. Scene means setting or view, of course. Screen can be in a garden too. Been would have to be pronounced with a long e, which isn’t standard anymore, but it fits in nicely with a confession (Nobody knows the trouble I’ve been)

We can pick out a modified phrase: “Nobody knows what troubles ivy screens.” Obviously the issue at hand is some kind of plant disease killing off the plants put there to hide the ugly brickwork. I leave working out the exact buildup as an exercise.

Or we can try to talk about watchdogs failing at their job with “Nobody nosed the troubles I’d seen.”

You always have to keep your audience in mind: puns about ballet may misfire if they use jargon your hearers don’t know about. For example, I only learned what the word “barre” meant a few years ago: before then I’d have just looked blank if you tried the earlier pun on me.

If your audience is familiar enough with the subject, you can sometimes use an indirect pun, where you don’t actually say the pun itself but say a phrase that references it. For instance, if someone mentions the ferry, you can say that you’ve heard of a collection of amusing stories about it collected by the Brothers Grimm. The actual pun—ferry tales—doesn’t need to be said. Carom puns like this work best in conversations, but they’re hard to fit in.

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Ready? Go bless the world with glorious puns.

More bumper stickers

On one car: “You can no more win a war than win an earthquake” and “Let’s get together and feel all right.”

I’m trying to figure out under what set of definitions the first statement could be true. At first glance it seems counterfactual (a polite way of saying “stupid lie”): history is quite full of counterexamples. But let me try to get inside this person’s head and figure out what sort of view of the world they are using.

I have to assume that the person who wrote this, and the person who stuck it on his car, actually mean something logical by the statement. It of course could be illogical nonsense that sounds good, and it is tempting to classify it that way—lots of people hunger for nonsense, after all. Or it could be the product of ignorance; but I doubt it—high school history has been dumbed down, but not dumbed down that far.

I’ll assume we both understand war to mean what happens when at least one group of people band together to fight with another group to achieve some objectives (keeping the other guys from killing them, or capturing slaves or land, etc), and that this fighting is on some largish scale. History is full of cases where one side’s objectives (staying alive, keeping their own property, grabbing the other guys’, or whatever) were met. It also is larded with cases where neither side’s goals were met, and a lot of people died with not much result. Nobody won those wars—no argument there.

Take a common enough setting as the example: country A wants a chunk of country B, and would like some slaves and other loose booty to go with it. A’s armies attack B. Repeatedly. After a few decades A practically (though rarely officially) gives up. Lots of people are now dead and both countries are poorer, but B survived, and so their objectives in going to war were met. (Substitute “tribe” for country if you doubt that this is common.)

My Bumper-Sticker Philosopher looks at this and says that nobody wins. He must mean that everybody has lost, and plainly both sides have lost a good deal in this case. Perhaps he is thinking of lives and treasure. If so, then he is saying that lives and treasure are more important than whatever the object they were risked for was. That sounds good at first, but on closer examination it isn’t quite as obvious as it seems. First, notice that the people fighting disagreed with him—they were willing to risk their lives for some mutual goals. Some were willing to die for those goals.

Look at the goals of the people of country B. They want to keep from being robbed, and keep from being made slaves of. If they valued life and safety more than protecting each other, unfortunately they would quickly have neither. So in a way they have to lose their lives to save them: be willing to die in order to survive. (The goals of the people of country A, though less ethical, are founded on their intent to take risks to provide for their own.)

If you take the claim that a life is worth more than anything else to its logical conclusion, nothing is worth risking your life for either.

So by what means do you avoid predation? Perhaps my BSP expects that each person will, if he feels safe from your attack, feel no need to attack you. That’s a common formulation anyway. A cursory glance at society proves otherwise: at least 1% of the population is perfectly willing to prey violently on the rest. My BSP seems likely to reply that this would not be true in a perfectly just society. This is true by construction (in a perfectly just society there aren’t any predators to begin with), but is not very useful (and I get very tired of hearing it). It is quite easy to increase that percentage, but it has been very hard to reduce it.

So if my Bumper-Sticker Philosopher thinks of loss of lives and treasure as the loss of the war, then he seems to be saying that nothing is worth risking lives for, and that he trusts in an Edenic society to make people good.

Maybe the BSP is more subtle, and he means something else. Perhaps what he means by loss is more of a spiritual thing. When we fight we become killers, in intent if not in execution. So when people go to war, something happens to their characters, making them less than they ought to be.

OK, I can follow that line of reasoning. Of course you run into Hamlet’s problem: “whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” or “to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.” For willingness to protect the innocent is as obviously noble a characteristic as is a peaceful spirit.

I can go farther. Unwillingness to protect those in your care is an ignoble abdication of your responsibility unless there is some better guardian available. Frequently there is no other guardian, and so you must fight unless there is a supernatural guardian and supernatural justice available.

I note that in this case my BSP’s statement does not absolutely demand that there be no wars. It may be that you must choose between ignoble actions. This differs from the purely materialist attitude discussed above.

So perhaps my BSP is a pacifist on religious grounds. I’m inclined to doubt it, though—because of the second bumper sticker.

The second bumper sticker carries, in this culture, an erotic, promiscuous, message. I’m not aware of any major religions that command both pacifism and adultery. The combination is found in do-it-yourself religions, with each man his own prophet. I am reluctant to dignify “it’s true because I say so” with the title of religion, or honor such a jackdaw as a prophetic follower of God. The tests for prophethood are pretty strict.

So I reckon there are three possibilities:

The message is nonsense in pretty language.

The Bumper-Sticker Philosopher thinks that life is too important to risk and probably also that a Just World (&tm;) will have no war or crime.

He objects to war on religious grounds, as defined by himself

I think I have spilled a lot of virtual ink on nonsense.

I should revise the numbers. A survey done in 2005 says youth gang affiliation in Dane County is 6%. So my predator rate (based on prison populations) is a factor of 6 too low.

Aha! Light

The pastor’s sermon explained a lot. When he spoke about following God’s leading he said (among other things) that he had not wanted to come to such a small church. That wasn’t the Aha moment—I had to sleep on it—but the lights made it clear.

A big church has multiple pastors on staff, and can hire managers. So do we now. A big church doesn’t need to rely on volunteer advice; it can hire consultants. So do we now. A big church has the big spotlights shining on the pastor. So do we now, and very clunky they look in our small auditorium.

We aren’t a big church, but we’ve got a pile of money and we’re using it to buy big-church accouterments. That’s an expensive way to humor the pastor.

The official reason for the spending is that we are growing, and need to have people in place as we grow. But the lights, intended eventually for the new building, are pretty useless right now.

Of course a few mysteries remain: Why the allergy to AWANAs? Perhaps it was Not Invented Here, or perhaps there were personality conflicts. And the allergy to adult education is also odd. I warned X that relying on small groups meant there was no systematic training, and he said that was something he was working on. This Sunday for the first time they introduced the small group leaders—not as teachers but as pastors! Maybe this is the kickoff for his more organized curriculum. Still, “pastors?”

What to do?

Is this a time for you to be building yourselves paneled houses when my house is in ruins? Haggai

Is this applicable now? Is God’s house in ruins?

I don’t see this applying to the finances of our local church—they have money, and are running through it like drunken sailors.

And yet it does apply to them, and to many other churches as well, where the congregants do not do anything but sit and watch and leave. I overgeneralize: some members of our church are far stronger Christians than I; some do more good works than I (easily arranged, I fear) and have grown in faith and love. But a lot of those are leaving, and the design of the services and activities seems calculated to drive them away.

I hear rumors of the same sorts of problems elsewhere.

What’s the plan? Attract people with sermons addressing felt needs and popular culture, show them the gospel, baptize the persuaded—and then what? Enlist them to recruit more in a holy Ponzi scheme? Hand off all instruction and guidance to small group studies with random study plans and no culture of spiritual disciplines? What’s the point?

And he pitied them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.

OK, maybe things are happening that I’m not seeing, that make the whole picture better. I doubt it, though. A large fraction of the youth in church youth groups don’t connect with a new church when they go off to college, and some never return to the faith. And when adult Christians, nominally instructed in the faith, can say things like “I have no problem with the idea of Jesus having been married” (yes, real quote; luckily not from our church), something serious is missing.

My own observations suggest that evangelicals often don’t get any systematic introduction to the faith, any systematic explanation of what is expected of them as Christians, and have no training to resist the solipsistic spirit of the age. I can name names of Christians whose only arguments to convince unbelievers are “The Bible says so” and “Darwin was wrong.” It’d be a pretty silly pagan who found that compelling.

I know the school of thought that holds that our true witness is our lives, and there is some truth to that—our lives should be signs and wonders that ratify what we say. But such content-free argument as I described mixes all too easily with the “Its true for you but not for me” attitude that saturates our society. Without clarity converts can and do mix in what they please, worshipping God and other gods—and we have some idea of what He thinks about that.

What we need to do is teach charity, clarity, and purity. Once saved, you are now a member of a new family and you must learn to grow in

• Charity: love for God, love for your brothers and sisters in Christ, and love for your neighbor; all eventually expressed in actions somehow
• Clarity: know what it is we believe, and why, and know how this differs from the blandishments of the world; and also to know what we don’t know and what we’re willing to disagree about.
• Purity: not just a negative—the absence of sin—but the positive changes in mind and spirit coming from a focus on God and His word, on righteousness, prayer, study and meditation, worship together, and more prayer

So what should I do in our local church? Make noise and complain about what’s missing? That’s been done—most of those complaining gave up and left.

Offer to teach it myself? That’s scary. About all I’m good at is the “clarity” part—I don’t have a stellar track record with “charity” and “purity” and I can read the book of James as well as the next guy.

I offered my ideas and service to the elders for the “clarity” part of the instruction we need in the church. Either they’re distracted, don’t like details in the offering, or don’t think it fits in with the grand scheme—the dime has not been gotten off. Maybe they were freaked out by the copyright notice on the book, but if it goes out under my name I want it to be what I said.

What next? Rattle X’s cage again? Ask Y for his take on the material/plans?

Or just do it? Announce that I’m offering this course at my home at such-and-such a time?

Why not?

• The material isn’t lesson-ready yet: it needs more questions, examples, suggested extra reading, and so on—several weeks at least, and I need some feedback wrt details and plans. I’m not a trained theologian, and there might even be a few mistakes in it.
• Venue: Parking is a problem around here, and the living room is small.
• Am I the right teacher for this? Will I be making myself the center? It is very easy for me to consider myself smarter and wiser than the elder board. They make it easy, but it isn’t a good attitude to have. (At least I don’t feel holier…)
• If the elders disapprove, there’ll be some more explosions, and likely a few more people leaving.
• Eats more of my time and adds some stress to the family—and with two Aspergers children at home we have an adequate amount of work and stress.

Of course all of these have answers: time, so what if we only have 3 people, somebody’s got to, too bad, and maybe it won’t be so bad.

I’ll keep praying.

Rolling Stone

I gather analysis isn't their strong suit. The sex scandal at Duke story has a few oddities that suggest that the reporter hung around with campus elites. Duke has 6500 undergrads, and they can't all hang out at Shooters. The author hung out with frats and sorors and talked about athletes. It makes for a juicy story, but I'd be more convinced if he'd talked to some chemistry majors too.

And they've an innuendo story about stealing elections . I judge that voting without a paper trail is a recipe for trouble. But I'm afraid that wishful thinking and skewed polls are not useful evidence of wrongdoing.

Both stories use biased sampling to try to reach conclusions (or more accurately, to give impressions and let us reach conclusions). I suppose reporters (not generally the best-educated among us) are never taught anything about statistics, and the editors seem to be no better. And I suppose a magazine devoted to the entertainment world isn't so used to looking past impressions to look at the details: impressions are a lot of what entertainment is about.

Rolling Stone is hardly the only offender (they're just handy). Think about the recent stories about the number of lives hospitals saved with more careful procedures in the last year and a half--and ask how many accidental deaths there were before, and start getting suspicious.

Wyalusing

Eldest son kept having butterflies (the tabby kind about 3 cm long) land on him and probe for water/ whatever (puddling, I think it is called). He wore a hummingbird-red shirt and had sprayed insect repellant on himself. Do butterflies like Deet?

The wind was strong enough to make my bottle sing its note if I held it just so. After a while youngest son figured out how to make his sing too.

I'd strained my Achilles tendon at the heel, and had an excellent excuse for not climbing bluffs. Unfortunately even the milder walks seem to have had ill effects.

I wonder where the Mound Builders went? There were some substantial migrations when the Iroquois started moving west--I recall reading that the Sioux were originally from the Iowa/Wisconsin neck of the woods.

For that matter, why do the bears and panthers have such round heads? Is that stylization or erosion? I tried to think up reasons for effigy mounds. Everybody thinks "totem," but it could be something like emblem: a memorial built when a leader from the bear clan or porcupine clan or clamshell clan (my idea--you'd get a conical mound that way :-)) was in charge.

It might make an interesting Boy Scout project for them to learn about and try to build their own mound. If it was 20' by 10' by 3' high and rounded, I'd guesstimate 300 cubic feet of dirt. Carrying the dirt isn't that big a deal, especially if you cheat and use inventions like wheelbarrows or the shoulder pole--digging is the hard part. If every boy moved 2 cubic feet of dirt in a day, that'd be 150 boy-days. If several groups got together (I suppose they'd have to, since you'd only build something like this on Scout property), they could build a fairly respectable mound in a couple of days without too many blisters.

Super Absorbant

The "superabsorbant" waffle-weave towels are supposed to be more absorbant and more durable than the usual tufted fabric ones. (They're also more expensive.) Well, a 18 inch by 36 inch one isn't enough to completely dry off a 6 foot tall man who is sopping wet. Your mileage may vary.

Monrovia Mon Amour

A visit to Liberia by Anthony Daniels

Anthony Daniels may be better known by his pseudonym Theodore Dalyrymple. He is a doctor and psychiatrist and a fine writer.

This book dates from 1992 and describes his observations from what must have been a couple of weeks visit to Monrovia during a time when the Interim Government of National Unity ran Monrovia (with the help of Ecomog aka Every Car Or Moveable Object Gone) and negotiations were in progress. Doe’s men still held the Executive Mansion and the military camp.

On the morning of my arrival in the Ivory Coast I learned that the Steel Trader was due to sail from Abidjan for Monrovia and I went straight down to the ‘Port Autonome.’ A man in khaki uniform, reclining on a bench like Madame Recamier, barred my way. I was not allowed to enter the port.

’Where are you going?’ he asked.

’The Steel Trader,’ I replied.

’Why?’

’I am a doctor,’ I said, leaving open the possibility that a terrible epidemic had broken out on board.

’Do you have medicine with you?’ asked the official.

’Of course,’ I said.

’I am always tired, doctor,’ said the guardian of port security.

’Why?’ I asked.

Laboriously, he levered himself up on to his elbow.

’Too much work,’ he said.

I searched in my box of time-expired medicaments for something suitable, and alighted on erythromycin, vivid pink antibiotic pills that looked as though they would glow in the dark.

’These,’ I said, ‘are very good for tiredness.’

’How many do I take?’ he asked.

’One a day, until you are no longer tired.’

’Merci. Bon voyage, docteur,’ said the official, collapsing back on to his bench.

That was the end of immigration and customs formalities in Abidjan.

The above is the first page of the book, and gives you a flavor of both the man and what he finds. (I’m violently allergic to erythromycin myself, and find his choice of medicines startling.) He toured the Masonic building, the University, the Maternity Hospital, and tried to invoke a feeling for the often banal existence before the violence, and from there arrive at an understanding of the destructiveness of that violence. For example, the Maternity Hospital was thoroughly looted and wrecked; the papers from it used apparently as toilet paper. Apparently only the medical records were so used, and not the more mundane correspondence, and from this he mused about the way the white man’s medicine must have evoked resentment from those whose world-view it was overthrowing. Maybe it did cause resentment, but he forgot that the looters were mostly illiterate; and a more mundane explanation might be that the medical records, on sturdier stock than typing paper, were a more useful substitute for the traditional toilet of large leaves.

He attended the All-Liberia Conference, discovering later that “the middle of the day was a good time to travel if you wanted to avoid road-blocks, because it was then too hot for security, and the soldiers would languidly wave you through from under the shade of a tree.” Of course the “history-making” conference made no history or breakthroughs. “The delegates sat around the tables, deep in political discussion. Lunch was delayed by an hour and a half. When finally the food arrived, there was a scramble for it as desperate as the scramble in which I had participated at Lagos airport one the boarding of the aircraft was announced (The Togolese market women had brushed me contemptuously aside with their baskets, seemingly laden with lead ingots). The leaders of the nation were terrified that there would not be enough lunch for them.” There he also met Tipetoh (leader of MOJA; Movement for Justice in Africa), whom he shreds (“He kindly gave me the Preface, a single sheet of paper, and also a large photograph of himself: in my experience, the few people who genuinely believe in the equality of man do not carry photographs of themselves in their attaché cases for distribution to as many people as possible”)

He later arranged to meet Prince Johnson, and was even more horrified by his vice-Marshall Varney than he is by Johnson. Still later he arranged to see the infamous movie of Doe’s murder by Johnson, and was startled at the glee his hosts display re-watching it.

Along the way he met and was suitably perturbed by various people with ill-concealed pasts—people who had active roles in the massacres on one side or another.

Memory can be a fuzzy thing sometimes, and many of the places he described are either places I didn’t visit more than once, or were built after my time. Providence Baptist Church—he slipped out of the service at the new building, which was still under construction when I left. Some of the ruins are of places not yet built 30 years ago, which makes his references hard to follow.

He toured JFK hospital, and the massacre site of St. Peters, and found some of Doe’s family still living in Doe’s house. He even got permission to tour the Barclay Training Center where Doe’s army remnant still camped, and eventually even the Executive Mansion. Along the way he met still more villains, but I have the feeling that a lot of his reaction was read into the men from what he knew of them; a reaction to his knowledge rather than to them personally. But he is honest with himself here. He attended an interview of General Brown by a Swedish TV team (and FWIW he found them an exception to the usual Swedes in Africa whom he describes, “I feared the compassion of the Scandinavians as I feared the cruelty of other peoples, for their compassion was simultaneously neurotic and abstract, sentimental and ruthless.” Yes, he justifies this with examples.). This Swedish team is interested in digging out stories, and grills the General, who says at the end of the interview “’You have asked a lot of questions,’ he said. ‘Now it is only fair that you should answer ours.’”

There were several questions I could think of which might have caused us some embarrassment: had we come to Liberia to further our own careers, did the destruction we found there confirm us in our feelings of cultural superiority, were we enjoying ourselves amidst the ruins, did the level of suffering in Monrovia match up to what we had expected and hoped for, or were we disappointed in it?

Dr Daniels doesn’t say as much outright, but the answers would probably have been “Yes,” or something closely kin to it. He is very sensitive to matters of architecture and culture, and sees meaning in things (such as the carefully sawn-off legs of the only Steinway piano in Liberia) that don’t always resonate with other people. His insights misfire sometimes, but he hits the nail on the head at others. The fall of every sparrow is attributed to some CIA conspiracy, because people want meaning in their lives and the notion that America just doesn’t care about Liberia is intolerable to them.

The situation in Liberia is now very different, of course. The corruption is still there, but for now there’s no war or threat of war. This dates the book slightly. Someone who had spent years there would no doubt have written a more accurate book. But the glimpses of what life is like with decommissioned murderers in the neighborhood are still useful. This book is good despite its flaws, and I recommend it.

20 months old

Neighbor Toby is twenty months old. He is cheerful and adventurous, and he speaks entirely in consonants, like the groundhog child Grundoon from the old Pogo comic strip. Yesterday he and his mom and brother were here because I had a new washer delivered, and every little boy loves to watch a big truck. Toby and brother Sammy, age 5, love exploring somebody else's house, and were thrilled to pet and play with our rabbits.

Toby's mom showed him our irises, which are huge and purple. The irises stood taller than Toby. We grownups forget what the world looks like from that level. I watched Toby reach up for a blossom, with the leaves framing his face. I remembered other adventures with our own kids, when their angle of view revealed delights I missed: the bumblebees hiding under a goldenrod during a shower; clams in the weeds under the "belly boards" along the marsh boardwalk, and the plain joy of counting frog noses in the pond.

Mrs james