Genetics

I complained a while back that the simple model of DNA in popular thought ("Let's clone a mammoth!") wasn't good enough. It turns out I didn't know the half of it. The article is about what DNA looks like and how it actually works--as far as we know. Sections include: Genomic Perplexities, From Junk to Living Organism, The Dynamic Chromosome, The Dynamic Space of the Cell Nucleus, Metamorphosis of the Code, DNA’s Many Languages, Meaningful Form, The Sensitive Nucleosome, and The Nucleosome as Mediator.

I knew things had to be dynamic, but I had no idea how many different factors interplay in expressing a single gene. Go read it. Maybe you'll need more than one sitting, but go read it.

Caricature and Attraction

When I was young and wanted to be an archaeologist, I was fascinated at how ugly the Egyptian women’s stylized makeup was. How could anybody think it attractive?

Now I understand how it works. I’ve lived long enough to see it in action.

Apply just a little exaggeration to the features of beautiful women, and make them the standards to emulate. Advertising campaigns or being Pharaoh’s daughter both work fine.

Give people a few years to get used to it, and then, a few fashion cycles later, deepen the exaggeration just a hair’s breadth. If you can saturate the media you can make the look the new baseline. Children will pick up on the message: this is needed to make you attractive. After a few years the symbol will start to dominate. Look at some of the eye shadow used in recent ad campaigns. Just sharpen the boundaries slightly instead of feathering them out, and it’ll be almost Egyptian, although without the little tail.

Symbolism and stylization can go very far. Think of Indonesian dance, or a huge swath of Chinese painting genres. They’re unintelligible to outsiders, because they’re dominated by symbolic movements or shapes. One angry-looking Chinese mask is a monster, and the other is a beneficent defender against monsters, and the difference all comes from tiny symbols and color choices that I know nothing about.

Or, closer to home, consider the pole dance. We’ve all seen clips--one played in a show on the flight back the other day--a woman clinging to, rubbing against, and climbing around a pole on a stage. A scantily or un-clad woman is erotic, especially when in motion; but for the pole to add anything to the scene you the viewer have to come prepared to think of the pole as a stand in (symbol) for yourself, for her swinging her leg high to be a symbol of her offering herself, and so on. If you don't accept those symbols, her exaggerated motions look creepily unnatural, and for her to be wasting her caresses on a chunk of iron suggests an unattractive confusion. But the dances are popular enough to have "found their way" into other entertainment, like a TV medical show. A lot of people have been trained to accept the symbols.

I wonder how often we wind up preferring symbolic to realistic action. I know politicians rely on that, but those kind of odd choices show up in other areas of our lives too. Its not hard to notice other folk's strange decisions; I don't know a simple rule for identifying my own.

Marriage

This still says it well.

You might say sentimental, you might say sappy; but sap is what makes things live. God bless you, daughter, and new son far away.

Songs and Memories

Some music provokes a deep reaction from me. The strongest reactions are the oldest, from songs I must have heard on the radio in the kitchen in California. I hear one passage from one of Tchaikovsky’s works and I’m back sitting at the table while Dad listened to the radio. Serenata by Leroy Anderson sings of lost opportunities and a different, warmer path than the one I chose: a melancholy reaction to such a cheerful piece. The Route 66 theme evokes exactly what it is meant to: the rhythm of the wheels on the road and the turning off to the goal (not home). Long before I learned to drive it defined the experience for me. I only saw part of the show when the family visited friends once, but somewhere I heard the tune.

Sometimes just a fragment of a song is all that it takes: "Once there were valleys where rivers used to run" from Greenfields by the Brothers Four—not so much the rest of the song, but that line resonated with the "cat who walks by himself." Or "I hear the music from across the way, across the bridges of my mind" (not so much the rest of "Music from Across the Way") calls up the ghost of a dream of walking down 2am streets with the streetlights that shine like grubby winter, past the mansion of music to an alley of pointless errand.

The wedding march 30 years ago was the carillon from Bizet’s L’Arlesienne, but although the memory is fond the music isn’t visceral in the same way; perhaps because that day was supplemented by 30 years worth of other days with other incidental songs.

The Uses of the Trivial

John Reynolds wrote on looking for entertainment and the importance of trivial things. A sample:

Finally, the trivial engages one part of self and allows other parts to shine. Playing Risk is no great pursuit in itself, but it allows a social setting where fellowship can take place. Playing the card game "hearts" was one of the great learning times of Bible College, though "hearts" should never appear in any curriculum. While we were dealing the cards, we talked about everything and somehow achieved an honesty that would have escaped us if we had nothing to do but sit and talk.

"Let’s talk" shuts many of us up, but "let’s play cards" opens up many a mouth.

Stuxnet

The Ancient and Noble Order of the Masters of IT works an esoteric ritual known as "backup." I do not doubt that the Iranian branch still performs this traditional rite.

Granted, the government's interest in secrecy may keep the number of backups small, but I'd guess that restoring the main systems is no more than a few days, and restoring the auxilliary systems no more than a couple of weeks. All the PCs with important information will have to have their disks combed in a clean environment, and that demands some expert time (and user time) to retrieve the vital stuff, but all is quite doable.

Work will have been lost, but it isn't a catastrophe or a showstopper. Probably pretty much everything the media has said about it is either a mistake or a lie.

What is going on?

• It could be a coincidence. Stranger things have happened.
• It could be a test weapon that got away before it was ready to be used.
• It could be a feint: for example to focus Iranian intelligence on computing at the nuclear plants rather than personnel at the airports. Anybody else notice that several high ranking Iranians died in air crashes in the last few years?
• It could be meant to panic them into buying new network gear to isolate the control systems, gear that somebody has put backdoors into.
• It could be a coverup to keep attention away from real spies in their nuclear facilities.
• It could be meant to panic them into a spy-hunt in their facilities, which could tie things up worse than a worm.
• It could be a probe to find out who's really in charge of some division.

One thing I'm pretty sure of: the announcement of a name in the code that might link to the book of Esther was meant to mislead. That's a pretty far-fetched link, and did you see the code? Me neither.

"God's Perfect Plan for Your Life"

I've always had a contrary streak. Even after I became a Christian I didn't think much of this phrase. "Plan?" Does God have a minute by minute checklist? Does anything in the heavens above or the earth below or the waters under the earth care which shoe I put on first in the morning? Do I have to pray to ask whether I should go to work again today?

And if you admit the possibility that there can be a variety of freely chosen actions that are all perfectly acceptable in the plan, then the Plan begins to assume a very different form. Not a checklist or a schedule, but a form and a framework.

Perhaps you have a special calling: you must be a missionary; and perhaps you've been given a special message: "Come to Macedonia and help us." Perhaps you've been told to run alongside a chariot and eavesdrop. These tie in very nicely to the model of a Plan as a schedule. But what about deciding that you will work nights as a tent maker rather than ask for support? Paul testified that he had flexibility in carrying out his orders. For him the Plan was a set of objectives, and not a detailed daily list.

WWII Officer Candidates' School: The officer in charge of a bunch of candidates gave them a test. The question was how to raise a 20-foot flagpole. In the scenario they were given a block-and-tackle, a sergeant and six men and asked how to get it done. Each man came up with a set of diagrams, math formulas and various theories. The officer then said, "Gentlemen, you are all wrong. The correct procedure is to turn to the NCO and say, "Sergeant, get that flagpole up."

"Paul, get the gospel preached in Macedonia"

"The Best of All Possible Worlds" is the same confusion in a different form. Who said that universes had to be orderable in that kind of way? You can easily conceive of less-good universes, but also of classes of universes which are equally good.

Within that kind of flexibility, I suspect that it often doesn't even matter who you marry—within some general guidelines, of course. You don't need to be a prophet to predict that certain personalities are going to conflict more often than necessary...

Jesus' life seems to show this flexibility. I've heard the miracle at Cana taken to prove that Jesus was willing to modify his schedule to suit his mother, and that therefore we should ask her to twist his arm for us (never mind John 16:26-27). But look again. Over and over we read something like "He had compassion on them and..," and over and over He told the healed to not tell anyone about what He'd done. If that isn't showing flexibility in the schedule, it sure looks like it.

Of course He didn't lose sight of the main objective. And we (OK, I) have a tendency to be flexible in the direction of maximum personal comfort, which doesn't follow Jesus' example very closely.

Wet Wedding

After I got a clear schedule for when the repairman would arrive to fix the water heater, I went over to the atheletic club for a soak. From one urgency to another I hadn't gotten to it since the water heater croaked, and I was kind of achy.

The therapy pool had a photographer (one of the lifeguards), a boombox playing Mendelssohn's famous march, and about twenty elderly folks standing in it holding large balloons and making arches with fanoodles, under which the curves of which the bride and groom walked to the front. The bride wore a kind of lace half veil, and everyone was in swimsuits.

I did not intrude or gawk, but as I walked away one person seemed to be asking them questions, and a few minutes later there was cheering. Perhaps they met in a therapy class, and thought this would be a cute way to involve everybody.

Political Crowds and Me

President Obama will be visiting UW Madison this afternoon--the first president since Truman to visit. That makes it "historic" in the loose sense newspapers use the term.

I'm not bothering to go.

It would be inconvenient, though not overwhelmingly so, but even if it was a snap to show up and get a reserved front row spot, the spot would stand empty.

It's not just because I consider the man a misguided empty suit. I'd offer the same somnolent enthusiasm to a similar visit by President Bush, a man I came to respect.

Does anybody remember John Anderson? Back in 1980 he came to the University of Illinois as part of his presidential campaign. I'd heard the buzz about him, and I went to hear him. He unburdened himself of his standard stump speech, tailored for UI, and left.

If the purpose of the effort was communication, it utterly failed. I'd heard it all before. I concluded that day that if I wanted to find out what a candidate thought, going to campaign rallies was inefficient, and also probably the most boring method available. The script was going to always be the same, with fill-in-the-blanks for the football team and the local pols. There'd be no "Churchill at Westminster College" moments.

I've not attended a campaign rally since. I've talked with a candidate or two running for local office--that's much more interesting and perhaps even useful. But for President, or Senator, or Congresscritter? The speech has nothing much to do with the candidate's real goals--it's been polished by spin doctors and PR people to sound as nice as possible without saying anything substantive. Possible dissenters in the crowd are cordoned far away so that no hint of disagreement taints the love fest. What's there to learn?

But of course that's just me. I'm an Apollonian sort in a rather Dionysian culture; one who just gets a headache from football cheers and just can't seem to care much whether the Cubs win the championship this year. I assume they will sooner or later--Dante told us the lowest circle of Hell was frozen over.

Which leads me to wonder what purposes rallies have. Maybe there's something I'm leaving out.

---

First and foremost, the rally is an opportunity for the faithful to commit darsan with the illustrious visitor. Laugh, but we all do it--I'd go see Neil Armstrong, even if I knew I'd not get to meet him.

Second, the rally gets everyone together to hear the message. As I said this is terribly inefficient, which makes me think this really isn't a major function anymore.

Third, it is an opportunity to be part of a community enthusiastic about a cause. You come blase, and leave excited ("Oh whip me, whip me into a frenzy with your cries and cheers and freighted words!"). I'm not a huge fan of manufactured enthusiasm, but I can imagine that connecting with other people is good even when shaped like this. The key for me is not the community, but the cause. Is it worthy of my enthusiasm and devotion? Getting pol A elected instead of pol B generally isn't. Defeating slavery or abortion, or championing safe working conditions--yes.

Fourth, it is an opportunity to encourage others in the cause--to make them feel as though the support is great and the victory inevitable. Once again, the cause makes it or breaks it for me.

---

Now meeting somebody in person; sitting down for an hour or two over dinner--that's a whole other ball game. I'd be happy for the chance to have an unscripted chat with any of the presidents, provided the talk wasn't about politics. (I really don't want to hear kvetching about how X couldn't get along with Tip O'Neill, who famously got along great with political opponents) For most of them I think we'd find something to talk about.

But "historic" visits? Eh. The tea party rallies are a historic movement also, and I've not been to any of those either--and they, being more local, would be more interesting.

Knock Knock!

Sight of the day: a downy woodpecker hammering away at the entrance to a birdhouse in the backyard. There are no chickadees this time of year, so nobody's being disturbed, but I've no idea what he thought he was going to find there.

Yesterday we had a young woodchuck in the front garden; probably told to leave the nest a few blocks away. When he showed signs of wanting to take up residence we shooed him out of the foliage, tossed a basket over him, and guided him into a live trap. I don't want any unscheduled excavations.

Sports

"If ever it should happen that the system of English athletics should vanish from the public schools and the universities, if science should supply some new and non-competitive manner of perfecting the physique, if public ethics swung round to an attitude of absolute contempt and indifference towards the feeling called sport, then it is easy to see what would happen. Future historians would simply state that in the dark days of Queen Victoria young men at Oxford and Cambridge were subjected to a horrible sort of religious torture. They were forbidden, by fantastic monastic rules, to indulge in wine or tobacco during certain arbitrarily fixed periods of time, before certain brutal fights and festivals. Bigots insisted on their rising at unearthly hours and running violently around fields for no object. Many men ruined their health in these dens of superstition, many died there. All this is perfectly true and irrefutable. Athleticism in England is an asceticism, as much as the monastic rules. Men have over-strained themselves and killed themselves through English athleticism. There is one difference and one only: we do feel the love of sport; we do not feel the love of religious offices. We see only the price in the one case and only the purchase in the other."

From Twelve Types by GK Chesterton.

"I say its spinnage, and I say the hell with it."

A headline on a newspaper this evening said: "Gender pay gap smallest on record."

Somebody tried to find a nice way to say: "a lot of good jobs went away leaving a lot of men unemployed." Trying to put a happy face on news like that edges some distance into dishonesty.

Not a new problem

"It is too much the custom in politics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhumane, as utterly careless of his country, as utterly cynical, which no man ever was since the beginning of the world. This kind of invective may often have a great superficial success: it may hit the mood of the moment; it may raise excitement and applause; it may impress millions. But there is one man among all those millions whom it does not impress, whom it hardly even touches; that is the man against whom it is directed. The one person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the man whom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach."

From the "Twelve Types" by Chesterton, the section on Pope.

Friday on shift

I came in for shift. For the first time I traversed the route I had in mind: didn't have to make last minute corrections when I realized I was lost. On the other hand, I stalled 3 times--in daylight with no steep hills. Unlike yesterday, when I was in the middle of Cessy trying to turn left without crunching the car behind me while pointed uphill onto a half-blind intersection. I stalled there 7 times, and rolled backwards (and got honked at) 4 times. I suspect riding with me would turn your hair grey. I have come to detest roundabouts: I feel like the can in a paint shaker after driving through St. Genis.

Shift started and so did the alignment meeting and so did a bunch of configuration questions and the DCS shifter asking "Why is the DCS monitoring of your detector halted?" and the main shift leader asking when we'd be done flashing our firmware. (It turns out that the Xmas monitoring system that is under CSC control can and does stop the DCS monitoring of chamber voltages. And restart it again without burdening the DCS shifter with details. Actually, I suspect that every subsystem has some skunkworks method of bypassing DCS. Probably makes life very interesting for him, since he's nominally responsible for monitoring the safety of the whole system.)

After the chaos and flurry, it is dead. ECAL isn't working, and they've tried several times to start new runs--failing each time. The warnings are not beeps and wheeps as at Fermilab, but clips of pop songs: "I think its stupid and sad that everything turned out so bad" or "Don't stop me now, I'm having such a good time." and "Its a kind of magic" I gather the last one is for starting the run, and at least one of the first two is for a run ending.

Actually, CDF's beeps and wails are for subsystem warnings. The Run Control's messages are computer-generated and nearly unintelligible readings of text error messages. You can imagine how acronyms come across.

Homophones

French drives me nuts sometimes. A conversation rattled down the hall this morning, and the only clear phrase by my door was "EEL AH PLU" He has more? Than who? Of what? Oh. It rained.

Yesterday I sat by a group of ladies discussing the dynamics of different cultures and tolerance and immigration. I got that much. I couldn't for the life of me tell whether the main speaker was pleased with or criticizing the situation. Just a few key words went missing, or went sideways.

Noise canceling headphones

Even Hearos soft earplugs start to hurt my ears after about 7 hours, and the flight from Chicago to Brussels is 8 hours. (The return trip is 9) You can buy a basketful of earplugs for the cost of a Bose, so that was never an issue. But a cheaper on-ear set from Able Planet seemed like it might be worth an experiment.

I tried them in a few settings: my office, my office while making a conference call, a flight (by themselves), and a flight (with earplugs as well). I'll try them with the table saw later. Will I be able to hear the telephone?

• They are comfortable, and the cord disconnects so you can just use the bare headset if all you want is sound cancellation.
• In my office they cut out a lot of the computer fan and AC noise, which was a pleasant relief. Conversations are slightly muffled but not enough to interfere.
• The headphones were annoyingly static-y for the conference call. They will not be very suitable for work with the monitors--and they may not block the drums anyway. I suspect a more expensive set would work better, but I'm not going to try.
• I felt a slight pressure in the ear when using them on the jet.
• They do not block as much sound as earplugs; on the other hand earplugs cut conversations too and the headphones don't. Much.
• They seemed to block more of the middle and upper range frequencies.
• They are lightweight and adjust comfortably.
• After 4 hours the inside (not the outside!) of my ears started to hurt and I felt a buzzing in my ears. I switched to earplugs at this point.
• After an hour or so I added the headphones again. This cut the sound even more. There's probably an irreducible minimum sound level that comes through bone conduction.

Mental stimulation and Alzheimer's

Some recent research suggests that mental stimulation does stave off the onset of Alzheimer's, but the final deterioration is faster. This would be consistent with the disease beginning at the same time in both samples (mentally active and inactive), but that the mentally active group's brains "rewire around" the damage until it becomes too great. We know the brain is somewhat "plastic," and can reorganize to a surprising degree: see an early story and the followup on London cabdriver brains.

It might be interesting to compare brain activity and development between other different groups: parents and the childless (not involved in teaching or care); police and assembly-line workers; and so on.

I was going to write "police and nurses" but it occurred to me that both professions demand extreme attentiveness to details of other people's actions and appearance. The element of personal danger is much higher for the policeman, but an empathetic nurse might feel the danger to the patient too.

In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle

Somebody was hard at work in the Amazon: "they have also found vast orchards of semi-domesticated fruit trees, though they appear like forest untrammeled by man."

Obvious unspeakables

We have a weekly pizza lunch in one corner of a lab, and a former employee brings in old magazines. The cover of a journal I'd never seen before (Spin) quotes a singer I'd never heard of (Hayley Williams) to the effect that “sexy doesn't have to be a tan blonde girl showing off her goodies.”

Hurrah for the resoundingly obvious! "Sexy" means capable of exciting sexual desire, and if the number of babies in the world is any guide it is a quality shared by those "tan blonde girls" and by stout middle aged African women and by elderly Japanese women and so on around the globe. Perhaps each one she passes doesn't go "Ahhhh," but she has it where it counts.

What people seem to mean by "sexy" instead is something more like young and available, which is a dirty linguistic trick to play on unsuspecting minds, especially in conjunction with the implicit assumption that "sexy" is what makes a woman valuable. It follows that to be valuable you must always be young and always available, or at least apparently available.

And it is so obviously wrong...

Another unmentionable fact is that by the time a child reaches kindergarten he has learned to speak, to walk and run and play games, moral rules, the ways of the neighborhood, and probably his letters and numbers as well. From observation and imitation he has learned more than you realize--if he could reach the pedals he could pilot the car down the block. Of course he'd want to play bumper cars too. Teaching him how to use the toilet took effort. All taught by his parents (probably mostly mommy). The credentialed educators aren't going to be teaching him nearly as much, nearly as fast, or nearly as well. Why kowtow to a teaching certificate? The hard teaching jobs are at home, and so is expertise (except for class management). But we have such great respect for degrees and credentials that what grandma advised never shows up on the radar. Did she enroll everyone in Little League, or tell them to get out of the house and go play until dinner time?

"Is _that_ how that works?"

We helped give some international students a tour of Madison this Saturday, ending the tour at a host home where we narfed goodies and chewed the fat. I talked for a while with an earnest young grad student from India, who was concerned about the poverty rate in his home country and what to do about it. The conversation went on to what we'd been doing the previous day, and I said I'd been fixing things and doing household maintenance--the usual sorts of things you have to do when you own a home. He seemed a little surprised: "We have a maid to do that sort of thing." I pointed out that salaries were a little higher in this country. I wonder if he made the connection to the poverty rate he was worried about...

Infinite Campus

Youngest Son's math teacher emailed us that we ought to sign into "infinite campus" to keep track of his grades this semester in high school. Perhaps the phrase is meant to convey the impression of unconfined learning, but I was in high school myself long ago, and instead it conveys a whiff of "Hotel California:" you can never leave.

Aura

Again

Ground Zero

I think I agree with Shrinkwrapped: this whole tempest would never have gotten out of the teapot if we’d actually started building something to replace the twin towers. The obvious absence advertises a lack of something on our part: confidence, vision, will, ability—and it seems to be a very sensitive sore point.

And it does seem to be much ado about very little. The site isn’t at ground zero and apparently was planned a long time ago.

The list of claimed purposes of the site starts with such gems as

1. Uphold respect for the diversity of expression and ideas between all people
2. Cultivate and embrace neighborly relations between all New Yorkers, fostering a spirit of civic participation and an awareness of common needs and opportunities
3. Encourage open discussion and dialogue on issues of relevance to New Yorkers, Americans and the international reality of our interconnected planet

I often see lists like this. They serve more like pleas for attention than serious plans. The imam seems to have accomplished point 3 in his list, though.

---

The Orthodox church troubles in rebuilding their destroyed church seem to partake of a "he said she said" quality. I can believe that they overreached in trying to get funding to rebuild, but I can also believe that the city of New York was throwing up obstacles. Absent further information I can’t tell what’s going on, though I’m less inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the heirs of Tammany Hall.

French Grammar

I made my weekly foray into Facebook this afternoon, and Middle Daughter’s fiancé turned out to be on at the same time and struck up a chat—the first time I’d chatted on Facebook. He is a Senegalese student (almost Masters) of French grammar, whose spoken English needs some serious work, though his written English is understandable.

Most of the chat went on in French, he using a few “text-message” shortcuts and I using my inimitable mixture of French and English. I can never remember when to use "passé simple" and when imperfect, so I generally use "passé random."

I figure the best rule is to speak with courage and throw in English when I don’t know the French.

Pawn shops

When I went to Champaign to study for a doctorate, I found I needed a few tools, and there were a couple of pawn shops nearby. One offered a cheap socket set. I still have it, though the common sizes wore out and were replaced by Craftsman sockets when I could afford them. The other shop had a “Going out of business” sign outside, which it still wore when I got my degree years later. I visited both from time to time, but rarely saw anything I cared to spend my scarce dollars for.

It wasn’t until later that I wondered how the second shop managed to make any money—perhaps it was the jewelry, or perhaps something not quite legal; but the merchandise I noticed didn’t move quickly.

Once I had a family of my own (and wasn’t using stacked boxes as a dresser anymore) I started to get a more personal understanding of the sometime need for funds and lack of need for an old TV. I never pawned anything myself, but I started to see the shops as a window into the culture and what was really going on at the bottom rungs in town, and developed a little curiosity about them. I think regular visits would tell something interesting about the changes in a town, and there’s a local flavor to them. The shop I visited in Montana was, as you might expect, more stocked with horse gear and guns than the Illinois shop.

A chain opened in Madison recently, and I decided to pay a visit. The parking lot was crowded, the pawn windows were busy, and there was a huge store to go with it.

It has a huge selection of cheap CDs and DVDs, and I shudder at how little the previous owners must have gotten—10 cents on the dollar or less. Since this is a chain, they doubtless ship excess merchandise from place to place and I can’t draw clean conclusions about Madison. But one aisle was grim: almost all of it was well-used pneumatic nailers, with a few pneumatic wrenches and other items of power construction gear.

Could be?

Is having a bad credit rating a fate worse than debt?

Eastward to Tartary

Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus by Robert D Kaplan

There is no better example than the story of Zviad Gamsakhurdia to show that Shakespeare is a better guide to politics than political science.

The book is from 2000, and of course much of the Middle Eastern and Balkan political landscape took new faces since then. I got it out of the library on the recommendation of Assistant Village Idiot, because my knowledge of the Balkans is meager and of the Caucusus even worse. Kaplan doesn’t pretend to give a systematic history of the regions he traveled through—this is a travelogue with history to explain what he sees and why he stops at certain places, such as Merv, which made the mistake of trusting Tuluy (one of Genghis Khan’s sons).

Kaplan says several times that he hates describing people in terms of national characteristics, but that he’d have to be obstinately blind to deny the facts on the ground and the way the people describe themselves and each other. But

The fact that national characteristics were undeniable did not mean that they would always be so. The fact that the Near East was a battleground of power politics did not mean that power politics could not make a positive difference. It was the impermanence of bad governments that gave me hope.

Ancient history (think Assyria or Genghis Khan) rhymes over and over through the area, where tribe is vital and megalomaniacs build cults to themselves and exterminations are part of the background.

Anarchy in some form or another, as I had seen, was almost everywhere in the Near East. Thus far in my journey I had found vibrant institutions only in Turkey, Israel, and, to a lesser degree, in Jordan. Even in Romania and Bulgaria, the countryside was anarchic, while the situation in the Caucasus was much worse. Syria was like Brezhnev’s Soviet Union: instability kept at bay by a stultifying sectarian tyranny. Meanwhile democracy—which offered the best hope for building and sustaining vibrant institutions—was facing serious obstacles when one considered Romania’s seamy coffeehouse politics; Bulgaria’s corruption; Lebanon’s company-run state; and the various power vacuums in the Caucasus. History shows that only states with the unity and strength to preserve themselves remain sovereign, and I had seen few o f those in my travels. The rest would be likely to be absorbed into some new imperium—unless they disintegrated to the point where nobody cared. Herodotus had recorded cycles of autocracy, freedom, chaos, and autocracy once again.

He describes areas so poor that the police don’t even bother to demand bribes from travelers, considers Shevardnadze the unsung hero of Glasnost, and interestingly bemoans the partitioning of “Greater Syria” as resulting in the creation of a severely unstable Syria. The legacy of the Soviet empire is everywhere, and almost always horrible—but the natives often judge that there are things worse than an oppressive empire. They’d rather be governed by one mafia than several competing ones.

I think we need to rethink our model of the nation-state. I’ve thought so looking at Africa, and I’m certain of it after reading about the Caucasus.

Read the book.

Science with a Smile

by Robert L Weber

This is the third in the series of collections of science humor that began with A Random Walk in Science.

There are a few gems in here, such as how to deal with bureaucracy ("MAXIM 3: Every organization is self-perpetuating. Don't ever ask an outfit to justify itself, or you'll be covered with fact, figures, and fancy. The criterion should rather be, "What will happen if the outfit stops doing what it's doing?" "). It also features medical humor and an interesting chapter on hoaxes. And don't forget:

The phases of a project are:

• Enthusiasm
• Disillusionment
• Panic
• Search for the guilty
• Punishment of the innocent
• Praise and honor for the nonparticipants

Alas, the pieces tend to be longer than in the earlier books, and with a somewhat lesser humor density. He generally got the best stuff in the first book.

Unorthodox massage

This year we've a plague of Japanese beetles, a voracious little invasive that loves grape vines and roses and similar things we prefer to beetles. Rather than spray we decided to set out hormone traps: beetles fly to the smooth plastic rig, walk around, slip and fall through the funnel into a receiver. When we've collected a few inches worth the thing makes a faint eerie rustling groan.

We found the simplest way of disposing of them was to dump them out into a box or plastic bag, close it and stick it in the deep freeze. An hour later, we pour them out on the lawn as a free meal for the birds.

Youngest Son has been wondering about how to use them, suggesting that perhaps one might find a way to render them into biofuel. Yesterday he poured a quart's worth of catch into a plastic bag, and noticed that it wiggled curiously under his hand. He suggested to me that it would be interesting to make a cushion of these to sit on as a massage chair.

Obviously this wouldn't work, because you'd crush them; but I suggested that it might work as a "blanket," and that with the appropriate "Life Energy" jargon you could probably make a mint in California offering earthworm "massages."

Newsfeeds and the Commentariat

Give an ordinary man a day to write an article, and he will remember the things he has really heard latest; and may even, in the last glory of the sunset, begin to think of what he thinks himself. Give him an hour to write it, and he will think of the nearest text-book on the topic, and make the best mosaic he may out of classical quotations and old authorities. Give him ten minutes to write it and he will run screaming for refuge to the old nursery where he learnt his stalest proverbs, or the old school where he learnt his stalest politics. The quicker goes the journalist the slower go his thoughts. The result is the newspaper of our time, which every day can be delivered earlier and earlier, and which, every day, is less worth delivering at all.

G.K. Chesterton:

Chernobyl and the Creatures

A new report described by BBC says that biodiversity is less in the Chernobyl exclusion zone than it should be. I wonder if the apparent tolerance to radiation I theorized on before is related. The environment is hostile and perhaps some species aren't as able to tolerate radiation damage because of the metabolic cost.

Betrayal

I sometimes wonder why anybody in a war zone would offer to help out the USA. The chances of having your identity revealed to your personal enemies would seem to hover near 100%. If I were an Afghan I'd keep my distance from Americans. There might be short-term benefits, but the likelihood of having my cover blown, and the certainty that they wouldn't be sticking around, conspire to make the long-term effects of helping out rather bleak.

1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10

It doesn't seem like very many years when you write it like that.

That holds thousands of ideas and plans that never went anywhere, and a handful of things I kept going with.

The constellation of little decisions that make up each day seem to flash in all directions: here a luncheon indulgence, there sitting down to answer algebra questions, here sitting back to daydream, there sorting the laundry. Any detail by itself doesn't generally signify much--no great crimes or astounding charity--but the collection over the years paints a pointillist image, with perseverance the brush.

From time to time I get a little sense of what that image holds. There's still time to change a few things, right? Right? I've known friends who persevered in service, and others who persevered in futility. I've done some of both.

Perseverance in a marriage draws an image of something bigger than I could have guessed. There aren't good words for it, but you can sense it around you.

There are wonders in the world that take a little while to see.

Mainline Church notes

The Patheos site (hat tip to the Anchoress) is hosting sets of articles on the future of the world's religions, and this week is "Mainline Protestantism." I've been perusing the articles, and ... um ... maybe I should look at earlier weeks' articles to see if they're in the same style.

Let's see.

• I can't make head or tail of what Sam Alexander is writing about, and I don't think he knows either.
• Jim Burklo hails "progressive churches" in general but without much particulars.
• Jerry Campbell wants the church to act like the good Samaritan and build bridges.
• Phillip Clayton calls for a new ecclesiology rather than new theology, to be found by experiment I hope he overstates for effect.
• Monica Coleman thinks most black churches are conservative and horrid and wants black people to walk out.
• Kenda Dean thinks youth ministry will allow churches to evolve into new paths I agree, and shudder.
• James Davis thinks mainline churches can infuse civility into the national debate by reaching the "muddled middle" (and thus shoots down his own proposal).
• Bruce Epperly doesn't believe the God who created spacetime knows the future.
• Greg Garrett is hopeful that modern culture will find mainline denominations more congenial.
• Larry Goodpastor thinks the future of the UMC lies outside the US.
• Anne Howard wants to serve the common good embracing the "politics of compassion" (as opposed to the "politics of purity").
• James Kang writes a letter to an imaginary daughter's ordination in 2050 extolling some innovative groups and running down everybody else.

It is getting late, and the chaff to wheat ratio is pretty high; I don't think I can go much farther tonight.

Many of the authors remind me of the churches who keep American flags at the front and preach on how great the US is.

Bailout cash abroad

Sounds like I was right about where bailout money was going. We were shoring up foreign banks too. In for a penny, in for a pound--if it was necessary to shore up Goldman and AIG, it was also necessary to shore up some European partners too.

Of course that leaves unanswered the question of why banks were allowed to get to be "too big to fail." Nothing is so big or bureaucracy so well-vetted that some stupidity can't bring it down--and one day will.

Pinafore

We went to the Madison Savoyards' production of Pinafore this afternoon. It is easier and quicker to list the problems: Josephine should have been miked--in delicate passages her voice couldn't overcome the strings. So should Deadeye Dick, who had to sing against the rest of the chorus a couple of times.

On the other hand: the music was well-played, the singing was good, the set was well-done, the acting was good, the stage play was creative (a cousin fetched a box for the short Sir Joseph to stand on to face the Captain, etc), and of course the story and music were Gilbert and Sullivan at their peak. Sir Joseph's climb to the top is as relevant now as ever. Result: much laughter and good music.

I didn't recognize many people this time, though as we left one of the singers recognized Oldest Son, who'd played with the group a few times before. Schedule conflicts forbade any of us from trying out this year.

The Savoyards are partly volunteer and partly pro, and they put together quite respectable shows every July. Youngest Daughter got to see Patience when only a few months old, and didn't get frachity (and then was easily calmed) until the end.

See them if you can.

Pakiban

So Wikileaks has discovered that Pakistan's ISI is still supporting their creation, the Taliban. I'm not sure who's supposed to be surprised by what's been common knowledge for years. State has to pretend that the government of Pakistan speaks for the country, but everybody knows the place is split 6 ways from Sunday Friday.

The "White House" (I wonder who actually approves these statements) calls the leaks "irresponsible," but the ISI part of the info dump seems tailor-made for backing out of Afghanistan. Make a fuss, Pakistan gets their dander up and cuts off supply lines, we leave.

I'm not perfectly clear on what our goals there are right now. I suspect that whatever our goals may be, they depend rather crucially on the intentions and "sway-ability" of no more than a hundred influential Afghans and Pakistanis. And humint is not exactly our strong suit in intelligence.

With wicked problems like Afghanistan, the strategy of "Go in, rip the bad guys a new one, and leave" (repeating from decade to decade as needed) seems the least bad of a bad bunch. I gather that option doesn't satisfy the criteria for recent formulations of a "just war," leading me to suspect that whoever is doing the theorizing left a few bits out of the analysis.

Reporting on Obama

When Obama first started to appear on the national radar, some of my kin were interested in him. I predicted to them that he would enjoy a lovefest from the media for a few months, and then muckrakers would look for, and magnify, flaws; and swarm around like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Little seems to give a reporter as big a rush as finding the clay feet on heroes.

I was wrong. You saw adulation, but hardly a breath of any dirt-digging; and what little there was never went far. I didn't understand why. Was group-think that entrenched among reporters, or were the big media editors nipping off potential stories? I thought reporters loved discovering things.

Now we're beginning to find out. Apparently the answer was both: groupthink and behind-the-scenes collusion to squelch embarrassing stories.

That's discouraging. Perhaps it is a side effect of the consolidation of media empires--a few people can wield startling control over what people hear, and they do.

Tribes

Assistant Village Idiot contemplated the role of tribes in American culture and politics in a number of posts, but he points his readers to an essay by Codevilla and tells that us Codevilla says it better. (Well, perhaps more thoroughly, though without AVI's personal anecdotes)

I don't know a great deal about Woodrow Wilson, and so had not heard of things like:

Woodrow Wilson began this double game in 1919, when he assured Europe's peoples that America had mandated him to demand their agreement to Article X of the peace treaty (the League of Nations) and then swore to the American people that Article X was the Europeans' non-negotiable demand. The fact that the U.S. government had seized control of transatlantic cable communications helped hide (for a while) that the League scheme was merely the American Progressives' private dream.

Codevilla neatly describes our ruling class (hint: elections don't matter nearly as much as they used to) and how it formed and is maintained, and then goes on to warn that merely organizing a political party to throw the bums out will not be an adequate solution: that tends to replace one corrupt party system with another machine, and the well-connected will still get the goodies. The only long term solution combines a pruning of government with a decentralization of power and a regrowth in initiative. If the public keeps growing dependent, we will be subjects of a ruling class, and not citizens. The first reform is of ourselves.

I think he has the diagnosis and the history down. How to get out of the hole is the question.

Teenagers

Our church's parking lot is terraced, with green slopes in between parking areas. One of the resident killdeer made a nest in a green space, and this morning was going slightly nuts. Her two 2 1/2 inch high chicks were racing around at not-quite-adult speeds; big enough to clamber over the curb into the pavement but not big enough to climb back over into the grass again. Momma was chirping to beat the band but not moving around much: the old broken wing trick wouldn't be much use here. And there were cars and huge two-legged strangers all around. One of the latter captured an escapees and brought it back to momma, to the tune of raucous abuse from momma. The escapee promptly headed back to the curb and toppled its way over into the parking lot again.

Vertigo(*)

Just a clarification: it was definitely NOT me standing on the Genie railing. I have a little trouble with heights. In fact, I can sometimes get vertigo looking at a picture of the view off cliffs.

It isn’t just me. When I see my wife or one of the children standing at the edge, I start sweating and my heart speeds up just as though it were me standing there.

Strange that I don’t get vertigo in airplanes, but fortunate, given the amount of traveling I have to do.

---

(*) No, I never saw Hitchcock’s movie. Which perhaps explains why I gave up on High Anxiety halfway through.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy

On my thesis experiment at Fermilab, every now and then a channel in a NIM module would fail. If there were spare channels, we'd reroute cables and if not, we had to get the module replaced. Fermilab supplied these, and perhaps repaired some of them too, but that could take a few days and we were getting beam now, so several of us learned the art of “midnight acquisition.” Another experiment in the same area was in hiatus, awaiting funding for a new incarnation, and some of their apparatus was in storage. Somehow a key was acquired, and a swap made. Presumably when the other experiment was reassembled they found some defective modules, but they had plenty of time to get Fermilab to replace them.

I shudder to think what would happen these days.

About 15 years ago the national labs were told to address safety concerns, and told Tiger Teams would be visiting. Brookhaven blew them off, and wound up shut down for a while. Argonne got the message, but the teams still found lots of problems. Fermilab panicked. Lead bricks, those ubiquitous doorstops, had to go, even if wrapped in duct tape. Papers stacked 10 inches high on tops of filing cabinets—bad bad bad.

The big safety basics had always been in place—interlocks for the radiation areas, procedures for handling radioactive sources, mandatory OSHA training courses for university teams with members fond of standing on the railing of fully-extended Genies (That was a very dull week. I still have the book.) and so on. But that wasn't enough.

Years later, the Tiger Teams are gone, but the committees are going strong. There are safety courses for driving, recycling programs out the wazoo, and paperwork.

That paperwork is scary. It isn't enough to be a good carpenter or painter—you have to be skilled at filling out forms too.

Grand Tour Revisited

A few weeks ago I chanced on a blog post complaining about a politician I'd never heard of. Said pol had felt the need to claim that his many years in Europe had "made him more of an American," and the blogger was taking him to task for being disconnected. I think. I just glanced at the post, which was a tangent to a tangent to a tangent from my usual orbit

Certainly it is true that years away from your potential constituents tends to isolate you from their needs and their values. And, America being partly an ideological nation and partly tribal, it is possible to hold values that are antithetical to American ones. Unhappily for the blogger, one of those anti-American ideals is that someone should get the power to judge which ideals are American. I will cheerfully argue that sharia is utterly incompatible with American liberty and democracy, but so is a committee to officially say so.

It is also possible that the pol, spending so many years abroad, has become cosmopolitan; which is to say homeless.

Let me be a little contrarian here.

The Grand Tour of Europe that well-to-do Englishmen used to take was a many-months-long road trip. This had a number of beneficial effects

• It showed that you were fashionable and had adequate disposable income
• It gave you a working knowledge of several other languages
• It challenged you. If you could still convey an upper crust air of superiority when you couldn't speak as well as a toddler, you were set. If you couldn't, a little humility was good for the soul.
• It acquainted you with other laws, customs, and cultures. These were related closely enough to your own that you could understand them, and different enough to startle you.

Not that all cultures are equally good--God preserve us from such nonsense--but some are, and different people value different courtesies.

On the last trip to Switzerland we stayed at a hotel which served breakfast. I overheard one of the staff explaining to another guest that they had not brought out refills because a Japanese group (?) was there, and when they brought out refills they found that those groups would eat them all up. Dueling courtesies: in one case a guest feels he should eat what he needs and leave the rest for others, and in the other case a guest feels he should show enthusiasm for his host's hospitality by eating everything set before him.

That's a simple kind of issue, but think about this: if pretty much everyone valued the same courtesy at the table, the staff would know what to do and other guests would not go hungry. Without that shared courtesy, you need extra rules ("One plate only: no seconds"), and then little exceptions ("Can I take some rolls back to my sick wife?") and on and on.

This interplay of rules and courtesies is as invisible as the air to you when you grow up with nothing else. What you need is a new vantage point to view them. History is one such, but often a little attenuated because so many details never got recorded. Spending time (not just a few days, or just eating in ethnic restaurants and watching foreign films) in another culture is better.

Especially if you are going to be making laws, you need to intimately understand how the courtesies and values and laws interact. Sometimes you get a vicious cycle: eroding courtesies require more laws, and more laws leading to less sense of personal involvement and less courtesy. Sometimes it works like a champ as courtesies and laws mesh smoothly. Switzerland's traffic laws strongly restrict traffic when a pedestrian is in the walk, but the courtesy of pedestrians keeps them from tying up traffic excessively. "No traffic from either direction when someone is even stepping into any part of the walkway" wouldn't work in Madison. I know a few people who'd make a point of sauntering as slowly as they could.

So yes, spending time abroad could make you more aware of what goes into the American culture, and "more of an American." Assuming you haven't become disconnected from your constituents....

Mythic Image

Youngest Son is very interested in computer animation, and recently showed me a video made with open source animation software; called Elephants Dream. The animation is well made, but the movie is cruel and unpleasant—but there's one evocative scene in which Proog is dancing in the air. Wherever he swings his foot, a support rises to meet it, so that he never falls or misses a beat.

Years ago I had an image of a blind girl running through the woods—never knowing what lump or hole lay before her foot but always adjusting her stride to meet what she could not see. Stepping to the left without knowing of the tree, lengthening the step and meeting the only rock in the stream; running blind but protected.

That same kind of abandon—running into the unknown not knowing where the next meal will come from but certain that it will appear—I fear and long for, and see in men like Francis of Assisi.

Trust

I'm saving up larger denomination Swiss coins for use in the TPG machines. A stack of 2sf coins hefts a little, but they're just decorated disks of metal--plus something. In a sense I'm looking at little promises, and a kind of embodied trust. Not "in God we trust," but trust in the other Swiss; trust in their fellowman to trade effort for effort in an understandable way. Trust that you can wait until tomorrow before getting what you need: work now and be able to eat next year. Trust that someone else will tangibly value your effort.

Dante put forgers and coiners in the second-lowest circle of hell, next to the traitors; and they are a species of traitor too. Earlier, and perhaps not foolish, centuries put them in boiling oil. The forgers, whether amateur or official, destroy trust as they debase the money.

The official forgers rob from everyone at once on a huger scale, and history considers them villains--villains and traitors they surely are. But most of them went into the business with a "only a little bit won't cause problems" attitude: 4.5grams of silver or 4.4 grams--what can such a little difference do? It is only a little bit of robbery--but it is a lot of breaking trust.

π = -π

I just got email from a grad student asking why two groups disagreed about the default angle for a chunk of hardware: One had π and the other used -π.

Cursed

Sometimes Afghanistan seems a cursed land. It is cursed with endemic tribal wars, cursed with manipulative neighbors, cursed to have boundaries not commensurate with the real tribes of the area, cursed with the presence of an especially malignant form of Muhammadanism, and now cursed with mineral wealth. Anyone watching the world knows mineral wealth by itself means more war, and more corruption, and more social chaos.

It doesn't matter if the ones controlling the mining are big business or government; they and their friends get the money and the "shortages are shared among the peasants." Unless the state doesn't actually need the windfall, the windfall is bad news. You need an existing social and economic infrastructure to manage these things. Some culpably naive folks claim that a democratic government(*) will use windfall mineral wealth fairly. Observation says otherwise--unless (as in Alaska) the money isn't actually essential or there's a very strong culture of all pulling together already in place.

It might almost be better for a business owned by a single person to exploit the resource, because there's a chance the owner might develop a conscience. A board of directors or government bureaucracy never will.

---

(*) What stranger incantation is there than the phrase "democratic government?" It conflates a form of selecting particular government officials, the liberty of the people, and a constellation of sensed responsibilities. Just have right form of government, and everything happens by magic.

Sportscasters

The World Cup is on, and there's now a projection TV in the CERN cafeteria. At dinner time the games were over and the sports wrap-up was on.

If I ever flatter myself that I'm starting to hear french, all I need do is listen to a sports broadcast. They speak so rapidly, with jargon and metaphors--I can make out one word in 10, and that's usually something trivial. It wasn't until the replay that I understood that the Swiss team had won.

Traces

We bought our house 16 years ago, from a woman who no longer needed to fix it up since she was getting married. The previous tenants had been three early 20's guys who specialized in parties. Some earlier owner had been a contractor who'd tricked out the place using this and that (including a central AC unit that never worked, basement paneling and an out-of-square basement room). Somebody had done some motorcycle work and painting in the basement. The short wrought-iron railing along the basement stairs had bar spacing more than wide enough for small children to slip through, and it was low enough that inebriated guests of the party-ers had more than once taken tumbles. (We replaced that with a wall surmounted with a lattice.) On a 90 foot long lot there had been 8 trees--only two remain. None were suitable for tree-houses, least of all the Russian olive.

Repairs and gardening are archaeology. Traces of aluminum siding were buried in the window frame. In inaccessible corners drippings of the old bright yellow paint liven up pipes in a bathroom. Behind old molding was 80's era cereal box toy cards. As we've dug the gardens we've found a little metal car, toy soldier, and marbles. On Thursday we found an old torn tablecloth trimmed with lace holding the bones of a small dog.

Nowhere is there enough to tell what those who lived before us were really like--just traces.

Airport gods

The Denver airport now has a giant statue of Anubis to join the giant demon horse statue (that killed its creator). Anubis was the Egyptian god of mummification. Mummies don't seem terribly apropos for an airport, but presumably Anubis also oversaw the petrified food served to the dead--and to fliers.

Neutrino mixing

From a CERN press release today:

Geneva, 31 May 2010. Researchers on the OPERA experiment at the INFN[1]'s Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy today announced the first direct observation of a tau particle in a muon neutrino beam sent through the Earth from CERN[2], 730km away. This is a significant result, providing the final missing piece of a puzzle that has been challenging science since the 1960s, and giving tantalizing hints of new physics to come.

The neutrino puzzle began with a pioneering and ultimately Nobel Prize winning experiment conducted by US scientist Ray Davies beginning in the 1960s. He observed far fewer neutrinos arriving at the Earth from the Sun than solar models predicted: either solar models were wrong, or something was happening to the neutrinos on their way. A possible solution to the puzzle was provided in 1969 by the theorists Bruno Pontecorvo and Vladimir Gribov, who first suggested that chameleon-like oscillatory changes between different types of neutrinos could be responsible for the apparent neutrino deficit.

Several experiments since have observed the disappearance of muon-neutrinos, confirming the oscillation hypothesis, but until now no observations of the appearance of a tau-neutrino in a pure muon-neutrino beam have been observed: this is the first time that the neutrino chameleon has been caught in the act of changing from muon-type to tau-type.

Antonio Ereditato, Spokesperson of the OPERA collaboration described the development as: "an important result which rewards the entire OPERA collaboration for its years of commitment and which confirms that we have made sound experimental choices. We are confident that this first event will be followed by others that will fully demonstrate the appearance of neutrino oscillation".

"The OPERA experiment has reached its first goal: the detection of a tau neutrino obtained from the transformation of a muon neutrino, which occurred during the journey from Geneva to the Gran Sasso Laboratory," added Lucia Votano, Director Gran Sasso laboratories. "This important result comes after a decade of intense work performed by the Collaboration, with the support of the Laboratory, and it again confirms that LNGS is a leading laboratory in Astroparticle Physics".

This is good news, as it means they may be able in another year or so to collect enough data to measure the mixing between those two neutrino flavors.

You may wonder why one type of neutrino would change into another; and rightly so because this is certainly an odd sort of phenomenon.

First notice that, contrary to the accepted wisdom up until '69, neutrinos turn out to have a mass. If they had been truly massless particles, they would always move at the speed of light and never have the opportunity to turn into anything else.

Second: it isn't just neutrinos that can change type.

We find there are "families" of particles that have the same sort of arrangements. Within the "first generation" family you have the electron (charge=-1), electron neutrino (charge=0), up quark (charge=+2/3), and down quark (charge=-1/3); plus of course their antiparticles. The "second generation" family has the muon, muon neutrino, charm quark, and strange quark having the same relation; and the third has the tau, tau neutrino, top and bottom quarks respectively. These aren't the same particles, and nobody has succeeded in finding a structure to them that would make the electron a ground state, muon an excited state, and tau an even more excited state of some primal "preonic atom." People have tried (me too) and they seem to be fundamentally different.

So a meson made of a bottom quark and an anti-strange quark is different from one made of a strange quark and an anti-bottom quark, but it turns out that they can and do transform into each other at a measurable rate. The trick is that they can temporarily transform into an intermediate state, which can then transform into the other type. Notice that electric charge stays the same: 0=0. It also appears as though a particular type (flavor) of quark doesn't have a well-defined mass, and a quark with a well-defined mass doesn't have a clearly defined type. This "flavor mixing" is an area of active research, and you can easily imagine why.

Neutrinos can do the same kind of thing for apparently the same reason. The neutrino masses are small (though the tau neutrino mass isn't known well), and difference in masses between neutrino types are also very small, but the masses of their partner particles vary a lot. We don't have any neat way to make a beam of tau neutrinos, because tau's are so unstable and hard to work with. Beams of electron neutrinos from reactors (or the sun) are easy and intense and, unfortunately, of such low energy that you haven't a prayer of seeing one turn into a tau neutrino and generate a tau in a subsequent reaction. So you need beams of electron neutrinos from anti muon beams--which also give you anti muon neutrinos to contaminate the signal with. It takes some careful analysis to make sure you can tell one from the other, but muon neutrino and electron neutrino mixing has been seen.

You can pick up more details on how this is modeled, but it helps to know a little about matrices.

Advice

for the great

I cannot find the original, but I remember reading story this years ago. I will paraphrase.

It occurred one day to an avaricious and headstrong monarch that perhaps he should think about how posterity would see him, so he summoned a wise man of the kingdom and asked him: "What can I do to benefit the world?"

The wise man answered "The best single deed within your power is to sleep until noon, so that for that interval you will not afflict mankind."

Why Politics Is Unjust

Daniel Jackson at Sense of Events, a blog he shares with Donald Sensing, explains in two posts Bailey's Stratagems and Spoils and an example of how it plays out in the real world. Essentially, there are two kinds of rules: "normative rules" describing how things are supposed to be and "pragmatic rules" for how to win; honestly or not. (I'll have to read the book sometime.) To win requires knowing how to mix the two: playing to the house with the normative rules (make yourself sound good or victimized) and getting your licks in with something not quite ethical. He illustrates why having officers required to keep the peace tends to mean that the side that threatens more violence first tends to win: why having easily mobilized thugs is so useful in a peaceful society.

It isn't just limited to the ancient history of coal company goons: you can read about the same sort of tactics every other week in your local paper. Somebody "lacks advancement," and the threat of demonstrators looms.

Good News on Ebola

Researchers have a start on a monkey vaccine. This is all preliminary, but so far it seems to offer some protection to macaques. They were immunized and then exposed to a new strain that wasn't part of the vaccine preparation.

The fly in the ointment is the problem of human testing. There can't be a control group for a disease with 60% kill rate, and I'm not sure how many volunteers there would be for a test group.

Where the needs are

Germany has over 30 Autobahnkirche.

Wolfgang Fritz: "In my life I have to fight all day. In the construction business, we fight about everything. But I also have to fight to stay a human being."

One site is family-owned:

And at Exit 76 I find one of Germany's biggest motorway services. It is owned by Manuela Strohofer and her family.

"We have three gas stations, a garage, a hotel, a swimming pool, three restaurants - and our church, of course!" reveals Manuela.

The Strohofers decided to build their motorway church after Manuela's younger brother Anton was killed in a road accident.

"Our church has a motto," says Manuela. "It's from Matthew chapter 11; verse 28 where Jesus says 'Come to me, all of you. You're tired from carrying heavy loads and I will give you rest'."

R&R or R&W?

Tushnet

Eve Tushnet wrote how sin is like a child. She's an interesting and lively writer:

"I've done a lot of awful stuff in public, because I'm awesome like that, so if you know me just assume that this post is about something worse than the thing you're thinking of."

What do Zombies mean?

\I’m told that "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" drew on Cold War themes, in particular the fear of alien traitors among us who look just like friends. Or at any rate, this contributed to its popularity: it touched a nerve.

I’m not in close touch with pop culture, but it seems to me as though every few weeks there’s some new zombie-themed book or movie or game; and I frequently hear about "preparing for the zombie invasion."

We all know (I hope!) that zombies are fiction, but their popularity says something about what people are feeling. In this version zombies are living dead who reproduce by killing or infecting others. One zombie becomes many, and your only hope for survival is to physically isolate yourself, maybe with a few trusted allies, and kill everything outside that comes close, because they are probably zombies. All civilization disintegrates.

The coming of the zombies begins small, with only one or two, but avalanches into a complete breakdown of trust as those we thought were friends become poisoned and band together against us in mindless hatred. In some stories the zombie infection could have been contained at the start if the powers that be had acted wisely or decisively, but they never do.

I take it that zombies are a symbol of something many of us worry about. Not that we’re terrified, or we’d give over symbols and tell the stories straight out; but worried: something is happening, something is coming, and it is very bad. Perhaps the "end of civilization," just as in the stories, is what we see looming.

There seem to be a few parallels in modern society. I find less and less of a "we’re all in this together" feeling. Race relations are in some places better than ever with opportunities galore and a well-off black middle class; but with a third of blacks locked into a ghetto culture, and with demagogues hard at work, I can’t say that I find the black/white climate overall is very good. Hispanic/white and Hispanic/black relations are pretty uneven too.

But I don’t think race relations are the whole story, or even most of it. There’s a universality to the zombie invasion that doesn’t map onto "us vs them" racial splits. Even the intense political/philosophical divides don’t have that same universal threat. It doesn’t make artistic sense to equate them.

Despite the many electronic means of connecting with each other I see less interaction with neighbors than a few decades ago (I’m part of the problem myself here), and although we know more about people we don’t know them as well. By itself that’s hardly a thing to fear, but our inchoate sense of isolation magnifies other threats. Still, that doesn’t seem quite enough to justify the zombie myth.

But if we flip the order of events in the zombie story, the zombies start to make excellent sense. Suppose the economy collapses. Who can you trust? Nobody you don’t know (and in a city that is essentially everybody), and not even all of those you think you know. This isn’t an exaggeration: civilization can quickly break down: it did in Argentina.

Perhaps the zombie myth reflects the fear that we, already somewhat isolated, will be living in an "every man for himself" wilderness if the powers that be continue their feckless course.

Bon Mots

Youngest Son noted that up-to-date New Age types try to find a Spirit GPS instead of an old-fashioned Spirit Guide

Book of Days

by Gene Wolfe

This is a collection of short stories organized by holiday: Arbor Day has a story involving a tree, Lincoln's birthday is commemorated with a story called "How the Whip Came Back," and so on. The longest story is "Forlesen" (for Labor Day), a Kafka-esque piece about work in middle management with an acrid edge that suggests bitter experience with management fads. "St. Brandon" is a wonderful sendup of Irish folk tales.

You won't find many cheerful stories among them, but Wolfe is a skillful writer. I'd say "read it," but with the caveat that when I said that to my better half she found the stories she read depressing.

Double life

You should get to know the head of the Social Security Administration. Really. Go read it.

Morgan Hill

What in the world is going on in Morgan Hill High School? The administration claims they were trying to forestall possible violence, but if they were really that afraid of violence they should have cancelled Cinco de Mayo entirely (and if scuttlebutt is true, good riddance to a fake holiday).

I find no defensible reason for Mexican students at a US school to take umbrage at US students wearing US flags during an unofficial celebration of a foreign sort-of holiday. If they consider that to be "in your face" offensive, they’ve got a whole world of surprises waiting for them. I’ve seen substantially worse than that as an American visiting in Europe, and that’s a moderately friendly region.

Soldier of Arete

by Gene Wolfe

Years ago I read The Shadow of the Torturer and the three subsequent volumes (I hear there are more now), patiently waiting for the appropriate volumes to be returned to the library so I could read them in sequence. I thought it a very good series, and never got around to acquiring the set myself. (An odd contradiction, I know) His name came up recently and I figured I should see what he’d written recently.

Soldier of Arete turns out to have been the middle volume in a series—and it turns out not to matter much. Latro is a warrior, of hero caliber, who often sees the gods—but who cannot remember anything but the current day, and must rely on his papyrus diary as his memory when he has time to read it. The era is shortly after the defeat of the Great King by the Greek alliance. Wolfe has fun with the Greek names: which group is "Thought" and which is "Rope" and so on. Latro is traveling with his loyal slave girl, a mantis, a soiled dryad (shouldn’t have done that, Latro—now Artemis is mad at you), and "the black man" on what initially seems a simple but difficult mission, but gets deeply complicated by his new directive from Artemis. Gods and ghosts and magic are central to the book, and I suspect the confusing ending is related to the missing first volume.

Were it not for the ending I’d confidently say "read it," but I think I need to find the first volume before I can properly judge it. Wolfe is imaginative, has done his homework on ancient Greece and Thrace, and has the chutzpah and skill to pull off a prose passage by Pindar.

May and scrapings

I called Youngest Daughter to look at a bedraggled wet baby rabbit on our sidewalk at the garden border. It was no larger than my fist, and didn’t move a muscle. We’d had a steady light rain all day, and the temperature didn’t get above 46F all day. I set off on my errands, figuring that as soon as we were gone the rabbit would high-tail it for the burrow. I’d forgotten that most of the rabbits in the area seem to favor scrapings instead—and scrapings offer no shelter from rain and cold. It was fallen on its side when I came back with Youngest Son, and is now buried in the new garden I’m digging where the tree used to be. May in Wisconsin…

Bon Mots

Youngest Son noted that in contrast to books, you can tell a pop singer by her covers.

Sometimes by her physical covers too... she may even bald herself or streak if she's gaga for attention.

Worship Servants

The motto of a worship team needs to be "He must increase and I must decrease." The team stands before the congregation and plays and sings the songs they've practiced all week—and instead of looking for applause the way every other musician does they hope the congregation sings praises to the Lord and forgets about the team.

C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you may talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet if at all only in a nightmare.

All day long we are in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in light of these overwhelming possibilities it is with awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal, Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations, these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit -- immortal horrors or ever lasting splendours.

When we look out at the congregation we see saints: priests appointed by God to sing praises and authorized to bring petitions and thanks before His throne. He hears them when they call. There is not an "ordinary" human in the group, and they have assembled to worship God in a special way together; with songs and prayer and blessing and recitation and instruction and a holy meal.

Our job is to shape the service and sing and pray and play our instruments to make it easier for the congregation to pray and sing their worship together. Applause is not a reward but a defeat.

Our brothers and sisters don't always have musical training, so we guide them in songs so they can sing their best. Some are shy to speak out in service or have trouble pronouncing long words—no matter, they are priests and we their servants in worship. Perhaps some have never thought before to pronounce God's blessing on their neighbor—we can model it for them.

That worshiper whose voice drifts between keys is an exemplar of humble service to poor children, and whose holiness I do not come close to emulating. Dare I interpose announcements about potlucks in between his praise to God and the reading of God's word?

No matter whether the culture has the congregants dancing the aisles or kneeling at the mourner's bench—our task is just to make it easier. They do not need us: God hears them just as well when they pray without a leader, or sing a capella without a director.

As for me—I enjoy being the center of attention and praise. So my current job is nearly ideal—the more perfectly I anticipate needs and adjust the monitors, the more invisible I am.

Newspapers

I've said before that I've never seen a science report on a subject I was familiar with that didn't contain at least one misunderstanding--unless it was an entirely fluff piece like some of the recent LHC stories. I don't think I can describe this effects of this better than Michael Crichton. Go read his speech about speculations. The "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" is just a side note, but a good one.

Dissing and Consequences

Everything old is new again. Cyrano’s extreme sensitivity to any hint of insult works well enough in literature, but it isn’t so pleasant to meet it on the street. Once again, reputation is everything on the street. This time around, instead of "honor and the duel" we have the drive-by shooting (another one yesterday). Although I wonder how different it really is: how often did the prickly dandies of old resort to surprise in the alley? Risking your skin for your honor can be a little costly, unless you’re up against a hapless civilian. Maybe part of the mechanical brutality we see is a function of the organization into gangs; but that can’t be the whole reason for the difference since the duelists of centuries past were often members of deadly groups too.

I don’t yearn for the days of duels. A well-trained tough guy could throw his weight around secure that the ordinary Joe would just have to bite his tongue: just like gangsters do today. And the excuse of duels could mask a lot of ordinary murder. But I wonder if duels helped buffer a deadly focus on reputation by requiring that the offendee meet the offender on terms of a kind of equality. There’s probably no way to tell, though.

GM Dissembling

If you just watch the evening news, you might think think this was wonderful news. GM paying back its debt is great, right? Except that it is all smoke and mirrors. It is ironic in a grim sort of way: the banks, ground zero for the collapse, seem to be on their way to getting their loans repaid, and some of them are in such very deep trouble that nobody will talk about it. GM is using borrowed money to pay their debts in order to borrow more.

Juggler of Worlds

by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

200 Years Before the Discovery of the Ringworld

This is a sequel/parallel to Fleet of Worlds and to Neutron Star. The story touches on and slightly ties together many short stories, which starts to get slightly annoying.

The thesis is that civilizations have to use the insane to manage relations with other civilizations: relatively courageous Puppeteers (defined to be insane by the rest of the herd) and paranoid humans. And so we have the interwoven stories of Nessus the Puppeteer and Sigmund Ausfaller the human.

Since Ausfaller (in charge of anticipating and foiling nefarious maneuvers by various aliens) is seriously paranoid, it is hard to make him a sympathetic character, and the book relies heavily on Niven's trademark puzzles. For a change, a character shows some jealousy when his inamorata goes for someone else--Niven hasn't been very realistic at portraying human love lives in the past. This must be Lerner's influence.

The Puppeteers appear as less than super-intelligent, with emotion-driven politics and sometimes surprising carelessness.

I don't want to introduce spoilers, but since the action all happens before Ringworld you know in advance that there has to be some benign resolution to the plots and counterplots and growing threats. Let me just say that the denouement ties together so many threads and puzzles that I don't see much more room for new stories in Known Space, without introducing an entirely new cast of alien characters. The Ringworld series is tied up and early Known Space is now pretty much tied up: pre-Known Space might have a few stories in it, but probably not many puzzles.

I understand that other authors have written some Known Space works (some in the Man-Kzin War series, for example), but I have read none of them.

Not the best, but if you like Known Space you should read it.

Fleet of Worlds

by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

200 Years Before the Discovery of the Ringworld

Niven's “Known Space” series seemed to be tapped out, but four years ago the authors found a section where some new problem could fit. As you can probably guess from the title, Puppeteers figure prominently here: most of the characters are Citizens (Puppeteers) or Colonists (hmm....) most of the latter of whom work on the farm planets. Nessus (remember him?) is one of the main characters, and much of the story comes from his perspective. The time is set a little after the Puppeteers disappeared, and Nessus and three Colonists are serving as scouts for the Fleet of Worlds.

One rather startling new feature of this entry—something I haven't seen in Niven's Known Space before—is the importance of moral concerns. Niven's stories always have some kind of puzzle, and this is no exception—though its setting seems a smidgeon contrived. The Puppeteers are generally believable and the culture seems to work OK. The Colonist's reaction seems a little premature, but justified in the end. Fitting a story into an existing framework and tying up loose ends from other stories is always tricky, but Niven seems to have learned how to do it.

On the whole a competent book, and if you like Known Space you'll probably like this.

Media Woes are Old

"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." Mark Twain

I'd love to read what that wonderful wordsmith would have made of the TV news and news channels...

An economic view of contraception

In an interesting exercise, Reichert looks at the effect of contraception on relations between the sexes using "microeconomic reasoning." He concludes that it has resulted in "a massive redistribution of wealth and power from women and children to men." Have a look and see what you think.

The Party of Death

by Ramesh Ponnuru

A wise man once said that the easiest way to learn to hate a man was to do him some injury. Because most of us aren’t eager to ask forgiveness, we try to justify ourselves—“he deserved it”—and grow to hate the man we hurt.

Ponnuru doesn’t deal with that aspect, but I think it is an important driver in the abortion wars. A person cannot “not know” that abortion kills humans, and the only way to keep from facing that knowledge is to deny the humanity of others, and begin clinging to a utilitarian view of people that measures value by what they can do. That view and its logic unites abortion, euthanasia, human cloning, eugenic policies, destructive embryonic research, and so on.

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Ponnuru tells the story of Roe vs Wade and its lesser-known sibling Bolton, which together make abortion legal through all 9 months for any or no reason whatever. This pair of decisions didn’t arise in a vacuum, but out of a population control campaign and mindset, and they have corrupted the political, legal, and ethical framework of the nation. More than that, once such things are defined as rights there rises a guilty compulsion to spread abortion around the world.

It is not exactly secret among lawyers, even the most staunchly pro-abortion ones, that Roe had no constitutional foundation. Nor is it secret that Roe is not limited, nor that “health” is not restricted to meaning physical or mental health. But these details are not widely known in the general public because of the campaign of lies clouding the issue. I use the word lies deliberately and justifiably.

Ponnuru systematically goes through the many aspects of the debate, from the Cuomo “my personal beliefs cannot drive my public policy” equivocations through the partial birth abortion lies, the obfuscation and illogic, the insane logic of Casey (“the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” was taken as a reason to support killing), and the corruption of history (historians subverted their own research to provide a pro-abortion brief for Webster). The first point he addresses is the silly claim that opposition to abortion is necessarily religious. You don't need to follow any religion whatever to notice that there is no demarcation between a baby with one foot out of the womb and one still inside, and none between either and an adult--all are on the same continuum of development.

Ponnuru shows the cultural and logical links to euthanasia and infanticide. Singer (the proponent of infanticide) is alleged by pro-abortion stalwarts to be beyond the pale, but he was hired by and works without complaint from colleagues who march railing against pro-life speakers at the drop of a hat. The Clintons get applause in the media for “recognizing the painful decisions in abortion” and wanting them to be “rare,” but the record of both is unremittingly and extremely pro-abortion, rejecting even such modest modifications as requiring parental consent for minors. NARAL has evan objected to maternal care programs on the basis that they would discourage abortions.

The abortion issue has almost completely corrupted the Democratic party—Ponnuru tells of of member after member who changed their minds when their ambitions turned national and they wanted the backing of the party masters. The Republican party is nominally opposed to abortion, but in practice not very interested in protecting the unborn. The mainstream media is thoroughly in the tank for abortion, carefully labeling any restrictions as extreme and all opponents as oppressive.

Ponnuru’s analysis of the political situation is excessively rosy, not at all anticipating the election of a President who supported killing infants who survived abortion and a Congress and Senate to go along with him.

The book is not pleasant reading; as it is an expose of the lies and corruption that support this culture of death. Read it anyway.

Did you read the online contract?

Did you buy from GameStation?

You might want to review the fine print. You'll be eternally grateful :-)

And let no-one ever say that computer game manufacturers are soul-less money-grubbers.

I wonder who's toes were trodden on?

I remember reading the Wisconsin story in the run-up to Easter, noting that the headline indicted Ratzinger. The time-line didn't agree with the headline, though—as a story about Ratzinger it was a non-story. About Weakland, maybe; but even that would be a little thin. The Munich story appeared at the same time—I saw that a couple days later—and again, the time-line was odd. The Munich bishop deserved a thrashing, but the outcome had nothing to to with Ratzinger.

The stories were scheduled for the usual Easter news slot for attacking orthodoxy, but the Irish story could still have had legs: it was big enough and dramatic enough. Why try to use such weak material to attack Benedict?

Two or three simultaneous stories focused on one individual. Simultaneity itself is trivial to arrange that close to Easter (or Christmas): newspapers seem to reserve non-breaking stories until an appropriate season. Give them a story a month in advance, and they'll write it up and sit on it until Holy Week. Giving them the story much before that and you run the risk of having somebody on staff actually read it and wonder about the headline.

So, who's toes were being trodden on? You'd think it might have something to do with the US bishop's opposition to the Reid/Pelosi health-care chaos-o-tron, but why would one of the stories originate in Germany? And if local politics were the issue you'd expect the focus to be on the local “pestilent priests.”

But from the beginning of his current tenure Benedict has been the target of an amazing animus. I can't tell if this is personal, or something he represents (that John Paul II didn't??), or if this is driven by some behind-the-scenes politics in the Vatican. Right now I'd pick one of “unreasoning personal hatred” (like that for Palin), or “Vatican politics.” Maybe both?

Hunting with a metal detector

Our neighbor across the street was packing up what looked like a sonar gizmo for fishing. I asked him if he was going fishing; he answered that he was going meteorite hunting on a friend's 50 acres out by the Mississippi where the fireball ended up a couple of days ago. I warned him that the fragment that was found on a guy's roof was stony, so the (now I understood) metal detector wasn't going to help.

Sounds like a fun afternoon. With a little more notice I'd have tried to see if I could invite myself and youngest son along :-)

While I was occupied

We seem to have wound up with a wealth of weirdnesses.

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We get so much information from the little flat panel on the desk that perhaps it is no surprise that telescreens work two ways. Though I thought schools were in loco parentis and not "in loco older sibling."

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What in the name of the Constitution of the United States is Obama thinking of? Publicly ordering the extra-judicial execution of an American citizen is so far off base I don't know where to start. Granted, this is wartime and the guy is reputed to be working with the enemy. But if necessity requires you to resort to such underhanded actions you don't brag about violating the law; you arrange it quietly and pray nobody ever finds out. And if caught, then you can fall back on the Texas "He wanted killin'" defense and hope the jury agrees. But you never, ever pretend that this is legal.

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Tommy Thompson (former governor, pretty popular) was smart. At a Tea Party rally he said that new blood was needed, and that he wasn't going to run for Senate. As far as I can tell (I have only heard reports--been too busy to go to one) the Tea Party folks object bitterly to the insane deficits and arrogance of our "public servants." The Republican rulers by and large are OK with larger and more intrusive government, while the Democrats are enthusiastic about it: neither matches the Tea Party intent. And Thompson, for all his popularity, was one of those status quo Republicans; not likely to ride a Tea Party wave to success.

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It is amusing how much of our amazing technology can be sidelined by a minor volcano. Gervasio warned us today that he was stuck in Spain and not able to attend the big alignment meeting--probably all otherwise open seats on the trains are full with would-be air travelers. I'm supposed to head over in June, joined later by my better half for a 30'th anniversary trip. I wonder if we'll make it. If the volcano keeps burping I foresee a rise in Atlanta-Spain+railroad trips to Europe.

Michael Spencer

A HREF="http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/michael-spencer-1956-2010"> Farewell to the Internet Monk and may God bless his family and rest his soul.

Aura

15:00. Another for the running log.

Good Friday

It wasn't clear until Jesus that Isaiah's suffering servant was the Messiah. I suppose it is often that way—an answer sits unrecognized right before us. Yet it should have been clear.

God who in his unimaginable Now created the world, also sustains it. His will and ours combine to shape this world, and no home is built or threat sounded or murder done without His power sustaining both the builder and the robber. In giving us our freedom He has deigned to be our servant—and because our hearts have turned wicked, a suffering servant.

And so, in retrospect, it seems fitting that to redeem us ungrateful wretches who are ever trying to implicate God in our wickedness, He should join us more fully—take on our sin and implicate Himself. He who knew no sin became sin for us, and having atoned, made us clean. He redeemed us and this war zone of a world, joining us to God.

Here within time the war is still going on and we face wicked hearts and wicked problems, and Jesus said it would get worse. But death could not hold Him and it will not hold the world He joined and won.

Maranatha.