Commenting 10 years after

A few years back someone quoted an astonished stockbroker as saying that he hadn’t realized that the stock market could fall broadly. It hadn’t happened before in his career.

I’ve not had to search out 9/11 commentary. It turns up everywhere, and quite a bit of it is piffle. Pundits portentously write about "the day America lost its innocence" or "that changed the nation" or other grand statements. Since saying what everybody knows already doesn’t seem to warrant a pundit’s paycheck, they look for deeper meanings or twists and counter-intuitive conclusions: "Did Ben Laden win?" Short answer: No

A nation has no memory—it only has a history. People have memories, and many people watching the horrors had never seen war before—and for them it was a kind of loss of innocence. But not for the nation. It was not even close to the worst wartime calamity we’ve faced. The Civil War provides the stars for that prize hands down, and King Philip’s War is up pretty high on the list too (though technically we weren’t a nation at the time).

I am surprised how little has actually changed (except for air travel). Starting from the bizarre decision to cut taxes in the middle of a war and urging us to live normal consumer lives (or else the terrorists win), things go on as they have. No sacrifices were necessary, uniting against the enemy didn’t last very long among the political partisans, and nobody seemed to keep any strategy in mind.

The follow-up attacks mostly failed, except for the "Muslim starts shooting people" variety. There’s no striking animosity towards Muslims in the US.

Perhaps it is good that there’s not much change—I don’t want animosity towards Muslims, though I think suspicion of anything and anyone funded by the Saudis is in order. (Lobbyists and imams both) I don’t think we could maintain a fever pitch of excitement for as long as this war is likely to take. This is going to be a long war, with intermittent campaigns and attempts to use proxies. I expect us to be pretty much out of Afghanistan within the year. Nation building isn’t working very well and the Pakistanis outmaneuvered us. And Iraq should keep winding down. But that doesn’t mean the war’s over. This isn’t going to be a war of tanks and jets, except sporadically(*)

But the absence of strategy is bad. We know what we want—not to be attacked by Muslim jihadists anymore—but not what needs to happen to achieve that. We snagged a lot of AlQaida, but it was only one instance. We scared the bejabbers out of a number of Muslim governments and from this distance it looks like they cracked down some, but that wasn’t going to last in any event, and the "Arab Spring" is reshaping governments in not always happy ways.

And there are still a couple of big holes in the ground in New York. Assume cleanup took a year: after 9 years we haven’t been able to make use of some prime real estate in one of the most important cities in the world. Something is broken here, and I don’t think it is Ben Laden’s doing.

(*) UPDATE: That prediction didn't work out very well, did it? We'd be a lot better off if it had.

"Why Muslims are still mad at America"

Steven Kull uses the results of a 5-year study to go into some depth about a point I touched on seven years ago: A substantial part of the animosity is religious. They think we are anti-religious, and in particular anti-Islam.

We attribute goodness and part of our power to using a secular state; decoupling church and state. That is anathema to many Muslims all by itself, even without the aggressively anti-religious propaganda of recent years. And the philosophical underpinnings of our culture are from a particular religious framework inconsistent with Islam.

I haven't seen any signs that anybody in Washington gets the picture.

Ease of use

Youngest Son is a cadet in Civil Air Patrol. He told us tonight that so far driving a plane is easier than driving a car. (No takeoff/landings yet.)

40% with mental disorder?

Reuters proclaims today that Nearly 40 percent of Europeans suffer mental illness

Europeans are plagued by mental and neurological illnesses, with almost 165 million people or 38 percent of the population suffering each year from a brain disorder such as depression, anxiety, insomnia or dementia, according to a large new study.

With only about a third of cases receiving the therapy or medication needed, mental illnesses cause a huge economic and social burden -- measured in the hundreds of billions of euros -- as sufferers become too unwell to work and personal relationships break down.

"Mental disorders have become Europe's largest health challenge of the 21st century," the study's authors said.

Forgive me for being skeptical. Or don't forgive me; I'll live. The kindest thing I can say of this is that it is overstated: 38% disabled? The text doesn't actually doesn't say so.

Lumping insomnia and dementia together is dishonest. Insomnia is too common a condition, with too many benign causes, to be mentioned in the same breath with dementia.

I have seen before conflation of sadness with depression, and of normal worry with crippling anxiety--treating them as a spectrum and tagging them all with the name of an extreme. I judge that this work does the same. Given the quotations from the researchers, I suspect that much of the misrepresentation comes from them.

So who benefits from this scare piece? Read the article for one clue. The other beneficiary is Reuters. So maybe you shouldn't bother reading it.

Apropos of nothing

Is bacon grease a "sooie" sauce?

Yes, I used to live in Arkansas. How did you know?

Mists of Everness

As I wrote earlier, I found the conclusion to The Last Guardian of Everness. This 2-book set is a fantasy novel with a few SF touches set in modern America. And because it is set in modern America you inevitably learn about the results of dragon/fighter jet battles. If that disconcerts you too much you won't like the book. I found it a bit disconcerting myself, not least because I think he overestimates the capacity of their weapon pods. And there are (also inevitably, and only obvious because of the American context) a few comments on the political scene--relevant to the story, though. And political or religious comment is par for the course in the genre; sometimes even overwhelming--yes, I'm talking about Katherine Kurtz.

The story mixes Oberon, Prometheus, fallen angels, Lovecraft and even a touch of Lewis and Wagner with Celtic legends and Freemasons of the USA and the Grail. Several of the characters start the second volume dead.

A gripe or three: The mouse intro is a huge tone change. I don't think he plays fair with the problem of the ring. The modern battles don't ring quite right. And the kelpies don't come off quite right either.

Recall that Everness is the border between real and dream--otherwise some things seem unmotivated. Acheron is rising (think R'lyeh meets Dis) and time is running out. Sound the horn for the end of the world, or not? Who is who, and what mythic figures are they presenting to the world?

My eldest would have probably figured out a few of the forgotten secret names quicker than I.

One measure of the quality of a story is: do you want to find out what happens next? I did. And I recognized myself in one of the characters.

What does your car say?

I wonder if the supervisor saw the man's car before he hired him at the lumberyard. His vanity plate says QTN TYM.

On another, a spot of irony: One of those "COEXIST" bumper stickers, next to another that says "Recall Walker." I guess they just can't get along...

Libya Continued

Don't count chickens before they hatch. The rebels haven't won yet. Even if Q!daffy meets his Maker tomorrow, they still won't have won--unless their goal was partition.

What a mess. If Libya was a military problem for us, we should have seized the hour when the revolt first started and the regime was still fragile, instead of waiting for permission from the Arab League (promptly withdrawn as we knew it would be) and the UN. We couldn't have put much in the air quickly, but just knowing it was coming would have made a huge difference. If it wasn't a military problem for us (as I suspect), why should we have gotten involved in an Italian effort? They're the ones who need the oil deals. (Or are we not supposed to notice that?)

Granted, Q!daffy was a menace to his own people--that's the reason given for intervention. But one of the points of having nations in the first place is to limit complexity and conflicts. The price you pay for this is sovereignty--within a country they do what they like and you only quarrel if they threaten you. Complain, posture, sanction--but not drop bombs.

Q!daffy's mischief-making in other lands earned him retaliation, so this isn't unjust--but that's not the justification given for NATO's intervention.

There are many spellings of the villain's name, and I'm trying this to see how it looks

A bas les moustiques!

I think I got that right. At any rate, some places are seeing a mysterious decline in the number of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, which does not seem to correlate fully with the use of treated nets.

Prof Meyrowitsch added: "Other scientists are saying they can't test their drugs because there are no children left with malaria.

"They observed this in communities with no large interventions against malaria or mosquitoes. It may be the same scenario that the specific mosquitoes that carry malaria are declining very fast now"

The rainfall has been a bit chaotic, but I can testify that that doesn't always help much here in Wisconsin, and the study's PI speculates that there's a mosquito disease of some sort awing--"a fungus or a virus, or they're may have been some environmental changes in the communities that have resulted in a drop in the number of mosquitoes." Or maybe there's an invader in the water--some wasp that likes mosquito larvae, for instance.

Good luck to whatever it is.

The Last Guardian of Everness

by John C. Wright

I'd read a little of his stuff on the web and decided to try one of his books. This one is fantasy. The name soup at the beginning is a bit hard to deal with, but skim over it and go on. He owes a huge debt to Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath--the youth's adventures are in that exact tone, until things start going south. Wright upends fairy-tale conventions about youthful adventurers, and mixes selkies, kelpies, storm giants, witchcraft, Eden, unicorns and Camelot into the plot as well (with a hat tip to Zelazny?).

The family charged with watching for trouble from within the dream-castle (moved from England to New England) has only two faithful watchers left: the grandfather and the grandson Galen. A warning comes, and you've three guesses which one sets out to learn what's going on. A crime repented too late, various treacheries, and overwhelming odds run up against layered defenses understood almost too late.

Wright goes into some detail about what selkie culture would be like--they are seal creatures that like to take human form by donning a human skin (and unlike the Wikipedia variety, skin humans to get their collection). Who is who, and who can you trust?

I didn't read the cover blurb carefully enough. This turned out to be book 1 of several. I guess I'll have to locate the others.

Race in Science

The news was full of reports about breathless claims of racism in awarding science grants. Careful reading past the headlines would tell you this was in the National Institutes of Health. But where were the details? Forbes has details. Look beyond the headline and read the story.

While the data showed no racial disparity in award rates for grant proposals that earned high priority scores through peer-review, it seems that mediocre proposals from white scientists were 10% more likely to ultimately receive funding than mediocre proposals from black scientists.

And then when you look in more detail at the proposals you discover that the disparity has other origins.

Bill Frezza's observations are mine also: far from being old-boy bastions of racism, science in academia courts minorities and has special mentoring programs for women. I was on the committee to select the previous department chairman, and was startled at how many people said "We should have a woman this time." (We did.) To be fair, the group I was tasked with interviewing are, like me, not professors; and often our circles aren't as wide. So we typically have frequent contacts with people in the research group and not so many out of it. Outside the group we often have to guess based on reputation, or on a kind of fairness: "High Energy provided the chairman last time, and Plasma before that, so maybe it is Nuclear's turn." Hence the "this time" yardstick.

You are expected to deliver--the peer reviews I've worked with looked at the material, and were not informed of the race of the person submitting the paper. In some fields you know everybody anyway, of course.

Recent books

Yes, I have been reading. I detected a serious absence of knowledge about church history in ours, and have been putting together some lessons on the subject. So far I've read The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700) Jaroslav Pelikan, The Early Church by E. Glenn Hinson, and Early Christianity which are essays in honor of Freund. Freund's book is a bit too fat to survive travel in my pouch for bus reading, and I've not gotten very far.

Hinson's is more readable so far, though Freund is not bad. Jaroslav introduced me to much in Eastern Christianity I was not familiar with. His style is a little confusing sometimes, and there's been more work done on churches farther east since the book was written, but I found it interesting anyway, and you might too. A scorecard of who's who would be helpful, though.

One thing I've taken away from these is that the later Christology debates, including Chalcedon, were generally a waste of time. Not that the participants were stupid--some certainly weren't and the subtle points make my head ache. But ask the question: "Can you use the same word nature when referring to both the divine and the human without using caveats?" I didn't see the matter traced out, but I suspect that the developing interest in apophatic theology in the eastern church was at least partly driven by the head-splitting arguments about the nature of God. The west, merely trying to stay afloat, did not have the luxury of debates over fine points, and the lack of Greek in the west kept them out of the loop.

I notice that those discussing the very early church establish their bona fides as impartial scholars by stating or implying that Jesus had no interest in reaching the Gentiles. This differs somewhat from a statement that Jesus' mission was to the Jews--especially if you hold Trinitarian beliefs ("It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us").

More bailout details

We now have more details about how the bailout worked. Followup to last year's comment about my guess about AIG.

Telescreens

Is somebody having a little joke here?

A new type of Internet-connected television, due out before the end of the year, has built-in software and hardware that send data about what is on-screen to an Internet server that can identify the content. Web pages being viewed using the same Internet connection as the TV set can then tap into that information. The system can identify any content onscreen, whatever the source, whether live TV, DVDs or movie files playing from a computer.

I suppose this is technically feasible, but I'd think it fairly easy to spoof. And do you really want the world knowing you're watching Jackass? If you give the TV to somebody else they miss out on a critical little feature:

The first time the TV is switched on, it asks users if they would like to opt in to the data-sharing service. If they say yes, it prompts them to accept a terms-of-service agreement. Individual sites and apps must ask for, and be granted, permission to access the data the TV makes available.

Probably there's a reset somewhere, and it might even work. I suppose some people do surf while watching, and maybe want to see if there are pictures of one of the actors on the web, or want to see if the restaurant the hero smashed up is real. I'd think that attitude is either "induced ADD" or a sign that the TV show is boring. More likely the surfer is just somebody in another room.

---

Can you think of uses for this technology? How about keeping tabs on people watching Al Jazeera? It wouldn't be too hard for next year's model to build a snooper into the TV's ethernet controller. Not a fancy one, but something that scans the local net in promiscuous mode and watches for key words. You could even remotely reprogram the key words you are looking for. The modified system would not quite be a 1984 telescreen, but in the same family.

Given how good firms (and government agencies) are at keeping secrets, it wouldn't be long before the modified system was cracked. Spy on your neighbors?

It sounds stupid enough that somebody would probably build it.

Assuming this first generation system isn't simply a practical joke...

On the lighter side

NPR polled for the hundred best science fiction and fantasy books.

Let's see: I've read 9 of the top 10, 14 of the top 20, 20 of the top 30, 30 of the top 40 and about half from there on. Some clearly deserve the slots (Tolkien, Ringworld, and so on) and some are pretty mixed (the whole Dune series? not just the first?), and some I wonder about (a book by Moorcock is on the list? seriously?). Quite a few recent authors show up--I wonder how many would still be on such a list 30 years from now.

If people are still making such lists 30 years from now, I'd suspect "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "The Handmaid's Tale" will be nowhere as their respective politics ages away, also "2001" where the movie was better than the book.

Your guesses as to which will be absent?

Mobs and Riots

The "flash mob" thugs can always be where the police aren't. Without massive proactive cell-phone surveillance there's no way to be ready--and even that wouldn't be useful for long. The mobsters are clever enough to come up with new code phrases, or buy cell phones via proxy, and all the surveillance would do is provide evidence for conspiracy charges against those the police were actually able to find. And that word "proactive" should make you nervous. It will worry people who happen to look something like the current groups of thugs.

So to first order--forget the police. They cannot stop the attackers and will probably never catch any but the very careless.

As usual, the problems are both acute and chronic and efforts to deal with one aspect will make dealing with the other problematic.

So how do you deal with the acute problem--the threat of a mob of thugs breaking your head or robbing you blind? There are limits to what you can do with dogs or concealed carry--no doubt sometimes helpful but not a general solution. Situational awareness: yes, know who's around and where retreats and impromptu weapons are; that can help. But without a group willingness to join together to fight back you're still going to be alone against the mob. Unless people will run to help when they hear a cry for help, the odds of a short-term good outcome are poor. Do we have that? Can we get it?

Also poor are the odds of a long-term good outcome. One contributing factor to grand lawlessness is the lack of social constraint on petty lawlessness, and a big factor in that lack is the absence of a sense of "we're all in this together." Remember the broken-window effect in New York? Successful petty crime and a lack of any push-back or cleanup breeds a sense of invulnerability in the criminals and potential criminals--"the winners are the destructive and violent, so let's be winners."

I suggest that a willingness of honest citizens to band together both to fight off attacks and to present a united front against petty offenses is good in the short and long term. I'm not sure the surviving thugs will reform in the medium term.

The devil finds work for idle hands, and one classic approach to dealing with youth disturbances is to try to get the youth employed. This won't work well with the older thugs--and I'm afraid from what I've seen over the years that "older" here probably means not out of grade school. I'm not sanguine about the odds for older youth because: well, who's going to hire them? There aren't a lot of jobs to start with, and most employers like the help to show up and actually work--and the ghetto doesn't train you to do either. And the jobs there are aren't going to pay enough to match what Americans of all stripes think they're entitled to. Even with a thorough-going "moral cleanup" I fear we have a lost generation in the pipeline there. A sense of envy, of entitlement, and of despair don't motivate a lot of Horatio Algers. Add consumerism pumped in by ubiquitous ads and nihilism and hate from the music--it is an uphill climb.

Its been climbed before, though.

The racist aspect to the flash mobs is an ugly complication. It won't help race relations if situational awareness demands that we start keeping a wary eye out on the movements of black teenagers in the vicinity. Undoubtedly other criminal groups will find the flash mob technique useful (department stores circulated warnings about gypsy gangs with similar tactics years ago), and that will somewhat dilute the racial factor. Just like in Britain--the initial rioters were black, but the followups are ghetto youth of all races, attacking and looting for the joy of it.

For some reason that doesn't encourage me.

Recalls

It may come as a surprise to some, but in this hotbed of recall mania I was paying no attention to the recall elections. First--our Senator/Representative was perfectly safe and under no recall threat whatever. Second--I knew one man who was recalled, and remember what he thought of recall elections. They should be for substantive things--not political maneuvering like hiding in Illinois, or unpopular votes.

To give a flavor of the rhetoric: the paper quoted a local 'expert:'

"The revolution has not occurred," said UW-Milwaukee political science professor Mordecai Lee, a former Democratic lawmaker. "The proletariat did not take over the streets."

One could just as easily say that the counter-revolution by the Praetorian Guard didn't quite come off.

Debt Deal is Meaningless

AP reports that the spending cuts proposed don't appear in any substantive way until 2014. By the rule I proposed in April, this agreement is a lie--the spending reductions are not real. The first announcements told me the reductions were going to be trivial: \$1T in 10 years=\$100B/year which is chicken feed for the feds. But if they aren't even going to kick in until 2014, they aren't real, they're only promises--and the lifetime of a Washington promise is less than one budget cycle.

They're not serious.

Greek Fest 2011

We spent an hour and a half at this year's Greek Fest at Assumption Church. It was too hot for Youngest Son to have much appetite, but the tour was fascinating. It was given by the man who painted the icons, and he discussed church history and ethnic churches and the structure of the layout from the point of view of the icons. Christ Pancrator is at the top of the dome (symbolizing heaven), and Old Testament figures are in the barrel of the dome. The gospel writers are in the pendulants, and Mary in the front arch. But the saints on the walls at ground level are commissioned by members of the congregation, and will be different from church to church. The iconostasis is a reflection of the curtain in front of the Holy of Holies--and so on.

Very interesting--I'm sorry my better half (and Oldest Daughter) weren't there; they'd have enjoyed it.

The food was good, and spelling turns out to be important--there's quite a difference in edibility between a balaclava and baklava.

Austerity Budgets

The UK prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple tells about what austerity budgets look like in Britain. He knows the health service best, and explains the counter-intuitive effects.

Unfortunately, it does not follow from the existence of immense waste in the public sector that budget cuts will target that waste. After all, most of the excess is in wages, precisely the element of government spending that those in charge of proposed reductions will be most anxious to preserve. It is therefore in their interest that any budget reduction should affect disproportionately the service that it is their purpose to provide

This is not mere theory; he describes the practice too:

I have seen it all before, whenever cuts became necessary in the NHS budget, as periodically they did. Wards closed, but the savings achieved were minimal because labor legislation required the staff—the major cost of the system—to be retained. Surgical operations were likewise canceled, though again, the staff was kept on. To effect any savings in this manner, it was necessary for the system to become more and more inefficient and unproductive. It was as if the bureaucracy had reversed the cry of the people at the beginning of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, "More bread! Less taxes!," replacing it with "More taxes! Less bread!"

The implications are obvious.

Parenthetically, kudos to a man who can cite Sylvie and Bruno. It is not as good as the "Alice" books, but it is worth reading nonetheless.

Earplugs aren't the answer

Since Youngest Daughter works Sunday morning she wants to go to the Saturday evening service, which is "Contemporary:" aka ear-ringingly overamped.

Aha I thought--just pop in earplugs the way I do when I run monitors! No more pain!

When I run monitors I keep my mouth shut. True, the earplugs brought the guitar and drums down to reasonable levels, but I forgot that the sound of my own voice was going to be entirely bone conduction, and trying to sing was an exercise in "can I guess the notes I'm straddling?"

Debt Ceiling Kabuki

I recommend Elizabeth Scalia on the subject. The other day she quoted Day as saying we love God only as much as the person we love least, and concluded from that that politics was poisonous to the soul, since she found she didn't like anybody in politics.

Yes, I read Friedman's column decrying "equal blame." I can't be bothered to fisk it.

Economics

I can't resist this quote. Peter Berger says that Bernard Lewis wants to write an essay on economics, starting thusly:

"In the history of human thought science has often come out of superstition. Astronomy came out of astrology. Chemistry came out of alchemy. What will come out of economics?"

When you consider that Keynes is still taken seriously, you have to wonder if there ever will be a real science there. A graffiti on a warehouse in Madison claims that "Debt = Money." (All you need is the Philosopher's Stone.)

Where is King Canute when you need him?

"What we’re trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We’re trying to save life on this planet as we know it today."

Nancy Pelosi, 28-July-2011

And lest we forget: "this is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow"

For those who forgot, King Cnut was mocking his flatterers when he commanded the tide to halt.

Social Acumen and Spatial Skill?

A study by Johns Hopkins seems to suggest that social skills (being able to put yourself in the Other's shoes) correlates with accuracy in predicting another's physical perspective. (Hat tip to Terri)

There are obvious questions about causation here, and whether there's some kind of feedback between the skills.

My observations tell me that one can have poor social skills and superlative map skills, though.

Doers and not hearers only

Ruminations chapter 2:17-23

Now you, if you call yourself a Christian; if you rely on the gospel and boast in God; if you know his will and approve of what is superior because you are instructed by the gospel; if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of little children, because you have in the gospel the embodiment of knowledge and truth—you, then, who teach others, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the gospel, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? As it is written: “God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.”

and on worship

Butter and Margarine

You may know that Wisconsin used to ban margarine. It is the Dairy State and protecting its citizens from evil imitations was a live issue. In the debates back in '65, a blindfolded State Senator was unable to tell the difference between butter and oleomargarine. I can. You probably can too. Read the link and find out the rest of the story.

Some cities are girding themselves to ban margarine again--this time because of the demon trans-fats. The more things change...

Prayers for Norway

Horrible crimes. Pray for comfort for the wounded and the families of the dead, and for God's mercy on the dead.

When I heard of this, the first thing I wondered was "Why the youth camp?" If he's bombing government offices, wouldn't the more logical targets be racing out of the buildings nearby? A second bomb, or a rooftop sniper post would seem more in line with an anti-government attack. What sort of twisted man goes over an hour out of his way out to shoot kids afterward?

Later reports seem to explain it. The youth camp was an organ of the Labor party--sort of as though the Democrats ran a Boy Scouts. Government ministers spoke at the camp, and I gather some of the youth were interns. So he must have thought of it as a target composed of the political elite, not a "terrorize the people" target.

I suppose I could check this by reading his manifesto, but I don't want to give him that much honor. He showed himself vile; I don't want to hear his excuses.

Update: People who were nearby helped the swimmers despite the gunman.

About that Higgs result

You could easily see exclusions in the final plots (called "Brazil" plots because they reminded somebody of the flag), and some limits, but there was also what looked like a little spike on the low mass side in one class of analyses, for both CMS and Atlas. The quiet mutter was "2.8σ, imagine if CMS and Atlas were able to present a joint result, maybe we're starting to find the Higgs?"

Well... If you look at some of the distributions that went into the final result, you can see nice looking colored histograms that come from the monte carlo, and little black crosses representing the data. And one of those little black crosses is on the left hand side of the peak representing background expectations. That means in the lower mass region, where we tend to have lots more data. Let me emphasize that again: until you start applying cuts on the data (muon isolation, jet Et > some value, and so on), that region of the mass plot has many orders of magnitude more data than the right hand side (high mass). The plot doesn't look like a hill in the middle of a field, but like an insane ski slope falling from left to right.

The monte carlo (random number estimators of the background, in this case) distribution we show rises very sharply on the left and falls more slowly on the right, and that lonesome data point is sitting where you don't expect much of anything--hence you get a spike in the final plot. The "gentle" slope is on the right and the cliff is on the left--and there's a datapoint out past the edge of the cliff. 10 events when you expect 8 is a yawner, but 1 when you expect 0 seems dramatic.

But this is very sensitive to how well you modeled your background. Suppose you goofed, and that sharply rising left side should really rise more slowly--meaning you expect more events at the low mass end. Now you see 1 event when you expect 1/3 (for example), which is nothing to write home about.

Expecting 1/3 of an event means something like this: If you triple the beam time you expect 1 event, or if you do the same experiment 3 times you expect to see 1 event--at some confidence level. Taking such small probabilities into account is important. Suppose there's a lottery drawing with 100 tickets. You have 1, Joe has 10, Ann has 15, and so on. Your chance of winning is 1/100 (pretty small), Ann's is 3/20 (not huge), and so on. But when you add up all those small probabilities you get 1--which in this case means somebody will win. (The experiment has no such guarantee, of course.)

So what could go wrong in the background modeling? All sorts of things, many of which are shared between CMS and Atlas, such as the parton distribution functions. "Partons" are the generic name given to quarks and gluons inside a nucleon. They appear and annihilate with amazing ease, and the fraction each one is likely to carry of the total proton momentum is the distribution function.

Little things can make a large difference when modeling large backgrounds. Recently CDF announced an anomalous peak where nobody was expecting one. D0 said they didn't see it, and a joint team is working on reconciling the difference. Rumor has it that the issue may be a difference in "jet energy corrections" for quark jets and gluon jets, and that the peak gets a lot smaller if you re-estimate the corrections.

Jets from an energetic gluon tend to be a little wider than those for quarks of the same energy, and since we use the same cone size for all kinds of jets (we don't a priori know which is which) the gluon jet will be measured slightly low. The corrections are needed because jets are extremely messy things. The E/M (electron and gamma) energy is typically measured very well in the E/M calorimetry and not so well in the hadronic calorimetry, so you need to correct the hadronic energy component a bit to get the correct total energy. There are also losses due to neutrons escaping from the hadronic calorimeter--you don't know what they are so you have to include some kind of average correction term. And there's random energy from other stuff in the cone that you have to subtract out.

Update: I added some plots that I swiped the links for from Dorigo's site, which actually come from his work area. He's a very good source about CDF and CMS work.

Edging ahead

CMS is reporting results on the Higgs search and Bs and a number of other topics. For some searches the Tevatron is now officially in the dust behind them (not for all studies: qqbar initial states are much easier with proton on antiproton). Lots of hard work went into this race.

Last US manned flight?

The last shuttle landed safely, and there's nothing planned, and given the NASA culture and funding profiles, there's not likely to be. That leaves the Russians and perhaps the Chinese, neither entirely stable and neither friendly. The EU has no interest, and Spaceship 1's children have a long way to go--and would you invest in a venture that relied on NASA's funding to buy your flights?

Perhaps it was inevitable--space is a hostile environment, expensive to get to, and there are fewer projects that require human intervention. With the economic doldrums ahead I suspect that resources for innovation and exploration will be hard to find even for the robotics, and nearly impossible for human flight. And if you wait long enough the experts die and you have to start from scratch, if you can.

There are worse legacies than a history of explorations and the knowledge they brought. They won't make tourists gasp a thousand years from now like the pyramids do, but maybe they'll make schoolchildren dream.

"I always knew I would see the first man on the moon. I never dreamed I would see the last." --Jerry Pournelle

For Youngest Daughter

If a chia horse dries up and turns brown, do you have a Botany Bay?

Do they pay attention at all?

The Sun Prairie farmer's market is rather small--typically less than 30 stands. One stand in the far row offered "Free Range Eggs" for \$4.50/dozen. I'm still trying to figure out how that works: it sounds rather Sisyphusian and suggests extreme negligence on the part of the hens. The claim they really meant to make is quite unverifiable, but never mind that and take a look in the near row. Two stands less than 20 feet apart offered "Organic Eggs", one for \$3.50/dozen and the other for \$2.50/dozen. The stands were on opposite sides of the row, so each could see what the other advertised. Decisions, decisions. Should we ask if they'll match a competitor's price?

We went with "None of the Above" because we'd already bought some from a farming friend for \$2.25/dozen.

Negotiations

Canadian Mark Steyn writes lively and lucid articles. He writes on politics, culture, and music; and is always interesting. His home page is here

Nothing good is going to come from these ludicrously protracted negotiations over laughably meaningless accounting sleights-of-hand scheduled to kick in circa 2020. All the charade does is confirm to prudent analysts around the world that the depraved ruling class of the United States cannot self-correct, and, indeed, has no desire to.

How to stop an elephant

If he's raiding your crops: try beehives built into the fences. I like it.

Faithfulness

I would be a poorer Christian, or perhaps not a Christian at all, if I had limited my contacts and reading to purely Christian influences. Lewis Carroll played a major role in my conversion with a stray couplet in a poem you’ve never read (because it isn’t very good ).

In fact I was somewhat allergic to "Christian books." I remember getting a book for my birthday that seemed like a fine enough story about a boy's adventures, but then in the last few chapters he was convicted of his sin and became a Christian. The terrible let-down and the ulterior motive to the story left me far too suspicious—when my father brought home a trilogy about The Lord of the Rings I immediately suspected similar chicanery and didn’t read it for many months.

The trilogy was immediately glommed by Dad, Mom, and one of my sisters. Dad got to read the books in order.

Over the years I’ve run across many illustrations about the importance of faithfulness and leaving the results to God. You’ve heard the story of the monk planting fruit trees who was asked "What would you do if you knew Jesus was returning tomorrow?" He answered that he would keep planting trees. Isaac dug wells that kept getting stolen, and Kipling lauded the man who could "watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools." It isn’t dramatic, and nobody sees except God. Time and chance happen to all rewards on the earth, and we don’t see the judgment of the Eternal One yet.

But this perseverance without tangible reward is hard to picture and even harder to value. I had trouble with it: I wanted just endings. I might read some dark stories for fun, but in real life I wanted the blameless to be vindicated and rewarded before the world.

At some celebration a few years back on the Capitol Square there was a trio of Buddhist monks taking turns making a sand mandala. It is fascinating to watch, and many of us watched for a long time and came back and watched and came back. They use long metal funnels with little corrugations, filled with colored sand, and rub a rod over the corrugations to slowly spill sand out the tiny end. The 20 inch mandala took, I am told, more than a day. They meticulously dripped sand here and there according to the pattern, and when they were done—I was told they dumped the whole thing. They believed that the making of it was the "prayer" (or Buddhist equivalent), and that once it was done the image was of no importance.

I hold no brief for mandalas and do not believe one earns merit by making them. But it remains for me a vivid image of obedience and faithfulness. Keep planting trees, keep digging wells, keep doing what you’ve been called to do no matter how ordinary or unapplauded or unrewarded it seems; because the reward comes from the One who sees the faithful doing and not from the lackeys of fashion who throw some bones your way, or the small group clapping for the completed image.

I’m trying to put together a (highly condensed!) set of lectures on church history. My organizing image was going to be a tree, with branches here and there for the different groups. I wanted to show where churches came from and how we were related, but the theme of faithfulness thrust itself on me. There were centuries without new guidance, centuries of trouble, when the best you could do was keep trudging on. Moses tried to start a private revolt, and had to high-tail it out of town. And out of town he stayed for 40 years: 40 more years in which the Israelites had to keep enduring slavery. Why? Unless the faithfulness itself is of value, it seems wasted time, or worse. The church endured long stretches of persecution and disdain, and long stretches of chaos around it or decay within. There were times of renewal and growth too, when it was easy to see God at work. Does that make the people living during the other times less valuable? Perhaps the image of the tree is good in another way: you’d just have a pile of leaves on the ground if not for the unglamorous faithful trunk and branches. That trunk is what makes a tree a tree. Perhaps the years of endurance are like the strong wood that holds the unity of the body together.

We love the fruit and the laurel wreath, but we also love the beautiful wood.

That’s not altogether comfortable. I like the flowering and the excitement and I want the vision, and I want people to start saying "well done" now. (Jesus warned us about that last bit.) But I start to see, thanks to a sand mandala, the glory of faithfulness.

Iron Law

Don't ask what brought it to mind, but if you've never read it go read Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. 7 sentences, and obvious when you think about it.

Buried landscape?

Oil prospectors sonar-searching the sea bottom may have found an ancient landscape buried 2km below the seabed. Have a look at it yourself. The color scheme guides the eye--perhaps too much; I get a little suspicious when things look this good. But they've taken core samples and found pollen in the layer, which is suggestive. The story didn't say what the density difference was, or what was supposed to make the different rock textures show up. I'll have to get ahold of Nature Geoscience somehow.

Reading faces?

This article on use of machinery to pick up on non-verbal facial cues and tone changes, and whisper warnings in your ear. ("He is bored and confused"; "she is angry")

See what you think.

Opera or Musical

Youngest Daughter and I have a running (lighthearted) argument about whether Rogers and Hammerstein wrote operas. She claims they are not, and now she has the weight of a New York Times writer behind her, claiming that musicals are focused on the lyric and operas on the music. You would never bother to listen to "Anything Goes" if you didn't speak the language, but would happily listen to opera in Italian even if you only knew the word "ravioli."

Anthony Thomson is partly correct, but I wonder how he would classify Gilbert and Sullivan? Wild guess: "Despite tradition, it isn't real opera ™".

Scope

Sound recording and reproduction and duplications technologies are amazing. An artist can provide the 32'nd run through that turned out perfect, and let that represent his work forever. A poor child from Middleofnowhere can hear the greatest performance ever of Aida, even if the singers died before she was born. Never mind the dreck--great stuff is available cheaply almost anywhere.

The unfortunate side effect of this is that each new musician competes not just with the others in his town, but with musicians around the world and for decades before. Should I listen to the Sun Prairie outdoor concert's rendition of part of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or hear the definitive performance (with no dog barking) from the finest orchestra? Maybe I'll buy the CD of a friend, but am I going to hear about the wonderful singer in Eau Claire? More likely I'll hear about the national names, even if they're only marginally better.

The stars, be they lucky or just a hair better than the rest (or puffed to prominence) have global scope for their talent, but the less celebrated are much more confined. A singer who a century ago would have been a star in her state is probably only known in her own hometown now.

The stars can rake in bucks from sales (not as largely as the distributors, of course), but the "almost as good" bands make what living they can from gigs--everybody else needs day jobs. The star's global scope is "nice work if you can get it" but it takes the oxygen out for everybody else. (It isn't like that in all fields: Starbucks innovation and global scope opened the field for plenty of competitors.)

I can sigh and count it as the cost of bringing high culture to the millions (and low culture and pure puff), or I can agitate for local music, or I can try to come up with some government scheme to enforce on everybody. Just for laughs, let's think about the latter.

Practical government schemes are those that benefit either big contributors, big voting blocks, or bureaucrats. The only big contributors in this mix are the music distributors, so you'd want some regulation that compelled the purchase of a lesser-known group's CD every time you bought a Lady Gaga CD. That's intrusive, benefits the powers that be, lets the enforcers feel like they're doing good, and requires an additional bureaucracy--win win win win. But it would probably accelerate the growth of MP3 pirating, and so might not be all that helpful.

One "impractical" scheme is local, as befits the problem. Require that dance halls and bars beyond some size provide 14 hours of live music per week (no karaoke) to keep their liquor license. Gigs for locals aren't as good as million seller recordings, but it keeps locals working. It is also intrusive, raises costs of visiting the establishments, and who knows, maybe some people don't want live music at a bar, because they can ignore canned music but have to acknowledge a band in some way. (I want to keep talking and not have to stop to clap when the song is over.)

I don't really recommend either approach, of course. If tastes change to more public music local groups will benefit. If the economic equation changes due to new technology who knows what will happen--but music is already dirt cheap and people feel entitled to get it that way. It is very hard to ratchet back a sense of entitlement.

I've heard Verdi's Requiem on LP, CD, and live. Live was much better. But I've only heard it once that way, and that will probably be the only time I ever do.

Gardening

Lessons learned:

1. The temperature rises fastest on days set aside for gardening
2. "One for the cutworm, and one for the crow; one for the taxman, and one to grow"
3. Plants have amazingly creative names, none remotely descriptive
4. Everything looks alike
5. To tell a vegetable from a weed--give it a yank. If it breaks or comes up easily, it is a vegetable

Black Widow Males

This BBC post on black widow spiders has the headline: "Male black widow spiders sniff out cannibal females." I don't know if the headline is due to the author (Victoria Gill). (The science page headline is "Black widows sniff out cannibals") I hate this kind of juicing-up of stories. What the researchers found is that male black widow spiders, by tasting a female's web with their feet, can tell roughly how well-fed the female is by some chemical quality in the silk she spins. They were more interested in the well-fed ladies.

Well-fed has two effects--the female is less likely to want to eat him (hence the headline), and she is also likely to produce better eggs (not mentioned in the story). He wants a good quality mate, right? That's the theme in when researchers describe other creature's mating habits. But the reporter wanted an angle...

America

We took some Chinese students to see the Token Creek parade: "The biggest little parade in the world." It is about 3 blocks long. They started with the pledge, and then America the Beautiful, and then the Star Spangled Banner. It struck me how much of "America" is prayer. The unsung punctuation makes it hard to hear, but each verse ends with a petition. Except for the dangerously impossible "alabaster cities" (not possible in this vale of tears, and those who've believed in secular utopias have proved to be the bloodiest enemies of mankind the world has seen), the song is a humble one. "Lest we forget, lest we forget..."

True, this was not designed as a Christian nation (and union of church and state corrupts both). But without that underpinning it will not be a nation at all--but an empire instead. We are too diverse to be held together by tribal bonds.

DSK

I hear some of the French are cheering that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is free, and likely won't be charged at all. As soon as he was safely in trouble, women came out of the woodwork in France to accuse him, suggesting a significant lack of innocence on his part. And now the woman turns out to be a liar (about her asylum application, about events of the day, etc) and likely a prostitute as well. We heard a bit of soul-searching from France about how men in power behave. I think it is now time to ask some hard questions about Sofitel, and about Local 6, and about the professional asylum scammers.

One of these things is not like the other thing

On the Amsterdam to Detroit leg of the return trip, our seats were fitted with personal entertainment systems: watch your own movies. I had earplugs in. I've tried to watch movies before, but you lose so much of the quiet moments thanks to engine roar that it has never been worthwhile. But, just to see what was there, I flipped through the menu and shut it off. About 4 hours later, something nagged at me: one of those was one I'd wanted to see: "Of Gods and Men." The menu offered details: French with English subtitles. That could work....

I fiddled with an earbud and started it up. 8 French monks in Algeria discover that the brutal Islamist revolt is likely to target them. Should they accept a government guard? Should they leave, "fleeing to the next town?" Should they stay and accept the same dangers their neighbors do? Martyrdom isn't high on their list of preferences, but the village needs the medic monk, and they've been part of the community for decades: invited to parties and helped out when things break down. And the government is corrupt and almost as brutal as the Islamists.

The movie takes you through their debates and worries, up to the end that we all know because we read about it, because it is a true story. It is a captivating and moving work (see it if you can--one scene is pretty graphic though).

At the end I was reflecting on the real pain and real uncertainty they and their friends endured, when I saw the title of the book one woman on the plane was reading: Things are Going Great in my Absence, How To Let Go And Let The Divine Do The Heavy Lifting; a pop-Hindu self-help book. No pain or hard decisions, just fluff... God preserve us from drowning in fluff.

Teaching

I have always hated hearing a parent tell his child "God says 'Children obey your parents' " when a dispute arose. True though it is (and the kids would be wise to follow that command), when the father (or mother) called God in on his side at such a time it seemed to me to take God's name in vain. It is disproportionate and offensive. The time to teach that law is when all is well and the kids are already obeying. Then the command is learned happily and with its promise from the Lord, and not as a tool in the hands of the mother.

The man who flashes a fat roll of large bills and tells me "Thou shalt not covet" is not warning me for my benefit but for his. The parent also seems to be teaching for his benefit and not for the child's.

The same principle applies to the admonitions that a wife should submit to her husband. The SBC made an issue of it and--quelle surprise--apparently a non-negligible number of men decided to use it as a club with which to browbeat their wives.

Suppose we let women teach such a rule, and men keep their mouths shut on the subject. And likewise, women not pester men to lay down their lives for them, but let men warn other men "Why don't you do right, like some other men do?" We accept such rules from Paul, who was inspired, single, and with no ulterior motives in any given relationship today. But let the teaching and explanation of such things be done in ways that do not tempt us to abuse them.

I will not at this point take up the question of whether Paul's rule is to be interpreted strictly and absolutely, taken as a general rule, or as "guidelines" (a la Pirates of the Caribbean), or ignored because it isn't fashionable. "Paging Junia..."

---

I gather from The Internet Monk that some of the fringe types are taking A Full Quiver as gospel. I read the book years ago--at this late date I have no idea who gave it to me. The thesis was simple and not terribly controversial: children are a gift from God even though the world measures them as burdens in dollars and time and loss of favorite recreations. And some secular cults begrudge them the food they eat and complain about the CO2 they breath out

The authors hammered away on the point, and I don't recall much recognition of health issues. I suppose that sort of one-sided stance is inevitable, and perhaps even appropriate, when addressing some grave problems; but it makes the book a lousy pastoral document.

At any rate, I read it, and put it away somewhere and out of mind. At the time I thought vaguely that there was a difference between being open to children and trying to sire as many as possible. The former is more explicitly a servant's attitude, and I'd think more likely to welcome adoptees. Couple the latter with the non-negligible absolutist "wife obey your husband" population and you have a recipe for cooking up unhappy marriages--and unhappy children. And I gather that has happened, though at what rate I couldn't say--sampling bias rears its head again, and the Internet Monk is no use for that kind of analysis.

I wonder what these families would have been like without the book to give the attitudes shape. No doubt some would have been train wrecks in any case--some people shouldn't marry and others should pay attention to warnings from family and friends. But I suspect some mean well--or as well as most people--and were led astray by poor teaching or pastoring, with the result that fragments of doctrine assembled into something false. And false teaching has consequences; in this case reducing a woman's role into "more kids now." (I wonder what they make of Prov 31?) (Michner The Source Urbaal: "if he had different gods, he would have been a different man.")

Higgs

Lederman's name for it is just plain wrong. You might call the Higgs a "Priest Particle" though: you can't have mass without it.

My version of a joke going the rounds

Views of Travel

If you haven't read AVI's description of how different a trip looks to adults and to the children, go read it. If you ever traveled as or with a child, you'll recognize yourself.

I knew we'd all have different views of our big trip to Montana, and I knew memory was slippery, so I took notes every night and asked my wife to take notes every night and insisted, begged, and offered bribes to the kids to take notes. After the trip I wrote up my and my better half's notes, and then asked for the kids'. That was over 10 years ago, and I'm still waiting. Every now and then they let slip something they did or saw, but ... I wanted their stories seen through their eyes recorded so that their memories of the trip wouldn't be shaped by my story. Memories can fade a bit, but black and white stories don't. I'd like to hear their descriptions of the emergency visit to the doctor, or waiting on a crumbling precipice while I went to find rope, or wolfing canned stew before the thunderstorm hit. The floor is open :-) I can try to write up the tale you told of trying to kill a wasps' nest with a cousin allergic to bee stings

Self Improvement

For the compilers of the little book before me are great on philosophy and ethics. ... Under the title of "How to Think" there are twenty-four rules of which the first few are: "Empty Your Mind," "Think of the Best Things," "Appreciate," "Analyze," "Prepare Physically," "Prepare Mentally," and so on. I have met some earnest students of this school, who had apparently entered on this course, but at the time of our meeting had only graduated so far as the fulfilment of the first rule.

And on vegetarianism:

The body is a sort of magical factory where these things go in as vegetables and come out as virtues.

Or this

For after all, blame is itself a compliment. It is a compliment because it is an appeal; and an appeal to a man as a creative artist making his soul. To say to a man, "rascal" or "villain" in ordinary society may seem abrupt; but it is also elliptical. It is an abbreviation of a sublime spiritual apostrophe for which there may be no time in our busy social life. When you meet a millionaire, the cornerer of many markets, out at dinner in Mayfair, and greet him (as is your custom) with the exclamation "Scoundrel!" you are merely shortening for convenience some such expression as: "How can you, having the divine spirit of man that might be higher than the angels, drag it down so far as to be a scoundrel?" When you are introduced at a garden party to a Cabinet Minister who takes tips on Government contracts, and when you say to him in the ordinary way "Scamp!" you are merely using the last word of a long moral disquisition; which is in effect, "How pathetic is the spiritual spectacle of this Cabinet Minister, who being from the first made glorious by the image of God, condescends so far to lesser ambitions as to allow them to turn him into a scamp." It is a mere taking of the tail of a sentence to stand for the rest; like saying 'bus for omnibus. It is even more like the case of that seventeenth century Puritan whose name was something like "If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned, Higgins"; but who was, for popular convenience, referred to as "Damned Higgins." But it is obvious, anyhow, that when we call a man a coward, we are in so doing asking him how he can be a coward when he could be a hero. When we rebuke a man for being a sinner, we imply that he has the powers of a saint.

But punishing him for the protection of society involves no regard for him at all. It involves no limit of proportion in the punishment at all. There are some limits to what ordinary men are likely to say that an ordinary man deserves. But there are no limits to what the danger of the community may be supposed to demand. We would not, even if we could, boil the millionaire in oil or skin the poor little politician alive; for we do not think a man deserves to be skinned alive for taking commissions on contracts. But it is by no means so certain that the skinning him alive might not protect the community. Corruption can destroy communities; and torture can deter men. At any rate the thing is not so self-evidently useless as it is self-evidently unjust and vindictive. We refrain from such fantastic punishments, largely because we do have some notion of making the punishment fit the crime, and not merely fit the community. If the State were the sole consideration, it may be inferred a priori that people might be much more cruel. And in fact, where the State was the sole consideration, it was found in experience that they were much more cruel. They were much more cruel precisely because they were freed from all responsibilities about the innocence or guilt of the individual. I believe that in heathen Rome, the model of a merely civic and secular loyalty, it was a common practice to torture the slaves of any household subjected to legal enquiry. If you had remonstrated, because no crime had been proved against the slaves, the State would have answered in the modern manner: "We are not punishing the crime; we are protecting the community."

Or about humans being the only creatures that laugh:

We may come upon him in some quiet dell rolling about in uproarious mirth, at the sight of a violet. But we shall not find the violet in a state of uproarious mirth at Mr. Moore. He may laugh at the worm; but the worm will not turn and laugh at him. For that comfort he must come to his fellow-sinners: I shall always be ready to oblige.

Rediscovery

The turtles I've had experience with were all armored pretty thoroughly, so it was something of a surprise to discover that a foot-long snapper didn't slide when I tried to shove it out of the middle of the road with an ice scraper. (A 3 foot long scraper, of course!) Pried it over (briefly, they're quick)--and the bottom of the thing was mostly leather.

Yes, I tried getting it to bite onto the scraper--it kept letting go after about a second, so I couldn't lift it. Maybe it didn't like plastic.

It would have been nice to have a smart phone and a data package--I'd have searched the web and found out how to pick them up. Though I'm not sure I'd have cared to try the experiment for the first time on one so large.

Adding capacitors

The New York Times ran a story about a battery powered model car in Imperial College. In order to add extra capacity and smooth out battery charging, they incorporated capacitors in the sides and hood. Cute idea.

But, can't you just see fender-benders lighting up the road when a crunched door capacitor shorts out? Or hailstorms turning the hood into reactive armor? I don't know about London, but we get some pretty good-sized hail here from time to time, and if you are storing enough energy to move a car around you'll get some lively pyrotechnics when it shorts. The first vandal who tried to key the car would get a little surprise. (Ever dropped the wrench when trying to take the cable off a battery post? I did...)

Chesterton and the EU

From The Well and the Shallows:

Authority ruling men must be respected; it must even be loved. Men must in the last resort love it; for the simple reason that men must in the last resort die for it. No community or constitution can survive and retain its identity at all, that has not in the minds of its subjects enough of an ideal identity, to appear to them in certain extremes of peril as the vision of something to be saved. It is on that ideal, inhering in the reality, that every state will depend when there is a struggle of life and death. Men must feel something more about England than that she is commercial, something more about France than that Frenchmen are practical and careful about money, something more about America than that she happens at the moment to be monstrously rich, before any healthy and humorous human being will kill somebody else or be killed himself, and go out from the sunlight and the sane loves of this world, for the sake of any such abstraction. It will be found, therefore, that the practical theory fails at the most practical moment. It is useful while there is question of whether the commonwealth shall continue to be rich, or continue to be imperial, or continue to be monopolist. It is useless when there is question of whether the commonwealth shall continue to be. The materialistic state, cemented only with money as with mud, will fall apart under the blow of any people who have love or loyalty to their leaders or their cause; for the simple reason that those who care most for money care more for life. One may like or dislike the Fascism of Italy, the fiery nationalism of the Poles, the deep Catholicism of the Irish; but there is no doubt that their ideals can be idealized. They are conceptions for which real men can be worked up into a real rapture of sacrifice. The images under which they are presented to the world, and especially the world of their worshipers, the golden or the silver eagle, the breastplate of St. Patrick, the Roman salute, are things that do in fact lift up the heart, and were made by the mind so that they should uplift the heart. In short there is in them poetry; and that poetry is the most practical thing in the world.

This was written when he had only the beginnings of a glimmering how nasty Mussolini would be. Hitler was a much more obvious evil.

I have been asking for several years what the foundation of the EU is: does a Frenchman consider himself French first and EU second, or vice versa, or does the EU not figure prominently in his mind at all? Aside from the purely economic advantages of being in a single economic sphere (assuming honest accounting...), the only things I have seen so far that unite Europeans are a desire to push back against America and a disdain for the death penalty. I'm not sure these are adequate bonds to weather the inevitable storms.

who says essayist says egoist

Chesterton on blogging again

He predicted the self-absorption of the typical blogger: The Well and the Shallows.

But anyhow, I will affirm, on the same model, that who says essayist says egoist. I am sorry if it is an alliteration, almost a rhyme and something approaching to a pun. Like a great many such things, it is also a fact.

.... If I go out of my way to tell the reader that I smoke Virginian cigarettes, it can only be because I assume the reader to be interested in me. Nobody can be interested in Virginian cigarettes. But if I shout at the reader that I believe in the Virginian cause in the American Civil War, as does the author of The American Heresy, if I thunder as he does that all America is now a ruin and an anarchy because in that great battle the good cause went down--then I am not an egoist. I am only a dogmatist; which seems to be much more generally disliked. The fact that I believe in God may be, in all modesty, of some human interest; because any man believing in God may affect any other man believing in God. But the fact that I do not believe in gold-fish, as ornaments in a garden pond, cannot be of the slightest interest to anybody on earth, unless I assume that some people are interested in anything whatever that is connected with me.

Three Cheers for the Danes

2 miles is a good start!

UPDATE: I must be fair; the expensive government programs they sneer at were what made their work possible. Few are the individuals who can afford to explore and research with no hope of return in their lifetime--at their best governments can.

Coiners

Malebolge, pit 10.

Chesterton and the Internet

From the wonderful title chapter of The Spice of Life read this prediction of the Internet and its flame wars:

If you consider what are the things poured into him, what are the things he receives, then indeed they are colossal cataracts of things, cosmic Niagaras that have never before poured into any human being are pouring into him. But if you consider what comes out of him, as a result of all this absorption, the result we have to record is rather serious. In the vast majority of cases, nothing. Not even conversation, as it used to be. He does not conduct long arguments, as young men did when I was young. The first and startling effect of all this noise is silence. Second, when he does have the itch to write or say something, it is always an itch in the sense of an irritation.

Bird sightings

On top of the van, claiming that vasty territory for his own: a red-wing blackbird strutting back and forth, calling out over and over with a flutter of his tail feathers on the last chirp.

A ratty-looking teenage robin walking around with his mother nearby on his maiden voyage from his nest (in a crook of the downspout) to the garden. A dove, that famous symbol of peace, left off wandering under the bird feeder and jumped to attention with the right wing open at the ready, lunging with stabbing pecks at the teenager, though never quite closing--the meaning obvious: get away from the spilled birdseed or die. Mama robin didn't move and the teenage robin seemed bemused, and eventually hopped away.

Ducks landed in our backyard to mate. Don't ask me why--there's no pond here, though the garden had just been thoroughly watered.

The wren lands on every high place in the back yard and loudly asserts his claim--most often on the lattice by the porch. Probably figures we're the big trouble-makers and and that we need a stern reminder.

"Walkerville"

Madison agreed to allow a "tent city" (all tents supposed to be down by 7am, sanitation restrictions, etc) to allow the professional protesters to have a convenient place to stay where they won't run up huge hotel bills. I predict that enforcement will be a bit lax, and that I'll have to find a slightly different route to work.

Clever Romans

Without refrigeration, how do you transport fish long distances?

How about building a large fish tank in the ship, with piping that a small pump could use to suck oxygenated water from the ocean into the tank.

OK, the tank is hypothetical, but the piping is there--not as suitable as other means for pumping out the bilge but adequate, using a small hand pump, to maintain good water in a 4m^3 fish tank. Apparently the Romans transported live fish at least once (Pliny the Elder: to introduce a valuable species into a new region), and there'd be obvious luxury markets for live fish for ornamental purposes and for fresh exotic fish dinners. Mostly dinners.

Camping

I'm 99.9999% sure that without some media bigwigs wanting a story to mock Christians, I'd have never heard of Camping's predictions.

I heard his radio station once while driving in Illinois. The first thing I heard was a program with a perfectly orthodox exegesis of a chunk of 2Kings, then a little Christian music that didn't involve distortion pedals, and then a dead serious elaboration (without explanation or attempt at proof, BTW) of the contention that the Spirit had left the church 10 years before and so should all true Christians.

I tuned in something else at that point. As I drove along I wondered if this was any weirder than praying to Mary(*), or more dangerous than the "say this prayer and walk down this aisle and you're safe forever." I still haven't decided, but it was obvious that this fellow's followers would be hurting.

I had no idea of the name of the host and no inclination to find it again, but I discovered last week whose it was.

I think part of the Camping affair is that we don't treat prophecy seriously enough. I don't call for rocks outside the city, but it would be good if someone who claims to predict the future and fails repeatedly (like Camping) or proclaims what God actually intended by some calamity (like several people we all know who "explained" 911 or Katrina) could be formally denounced as false.(**) Warn members against people who claim to know the future--"test!"

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(*) I remember hearing on the radio during Lent a prayer to God to please listen to Mary when she prays for us. My first (and second) thought was: If He's already affectionately listening to you, why not talk to Him instead of trying a carom shot?

Yes, I still listen to Relevant Radio. I learn a lot, and a lot is bemusing, and some is off (I turn off Hail Marys). There seem to be a lot of subcultures involved here. Their afternoon talk host is a noisy sort who likes his own voice and talks about "powerful prayer" in a magical way, and their morning host is a mild-mannered convert who makes the guests do all the talking. Some of the speakers are pastoral sorts, some more scholarly, and some seem a little misinformed. And I gather that Marian devotion is optional.

(**)Of course some denominations tend to use such systems for political denunciations--which is itself a form of false prophecy, and certainly is taking God's name in vain.

Dyscalculia

In typical breathless fashion we are told that "Students who struggle with math may have a neurocognitive disorder called dyscalculia". There's even a research paper written about it (be still, my beating heart!).

They use MRI studies of the brains of people doing or struggling with math, and find differences. Given how plastic the brain is, it would hardly be a surprise to find differences between people who have trained pathways working and those who don't.

Seriously--why must the first impulse on discovering something in the human condition be to medicalize it? It seems positively diabolic--any weakness means you must be handed over to the doctors who, even if they cannot cure, will at least charge.

Air France Flight

So now we know. As expected, the pitot tubes must have iced up--but then the copilot did something even I know not to do. It isn't the most important rule in flight--I think "Land wheel side down" is tops on the list--but "if you stall, nose down" is something I thought was drummed into pilots from the start. But he nosed up. And apparently the other copilot did the same (or at least he didn't get it right either), and the pilot didn't have time to take control.

Of course if I were in the cockpit I'd have had to spend a dozen minutes figuring out what did what and have been below the waves long before I figured out how to get the thing into manual mode.

At this point I start wondering about the user interface. I have to assume the pilots were competent, and tolerably familiar with the controls. If so, then what they thought they were doing didn't match what was actually happening. Either the instruments lied to them, or their operation was misleading. If you are trained to use a computer interface that hides the details of the flight model from you--where you can say "Go there" and it goes--that interface hides the breakdown of the model from you. Did they have an interface that would tell the computer to tell the plane to "climb" by pointing up?

Or, pilot's union protests to the contrary, they might have been stoned to the gills. Flights are supposed to be boring...

SF Fans

At dinner tonight Youngest Daughter described the three new bunnies at the barn, and Better Half suggested they have the names Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Youngest Son interjected: "I get the reference. That's from Silent Running."

Can blogging be permanent?

Seizing on a notion at the end of one of AVI's posts, I got to thinking about how you could make something more connected, and perhaps more useful, and (fond hope) more permanent from blog posts. Otherwise, as AVI says, "each passing year sends them further down the chute."

To make posts somewhat less ephemeral requires that we organize them differently.

Some bloggers put a "best post" list in the sidebar--simple but limited. Suppose we took the time to evaluate our posts and make weighted indexes like that for all of them we thought worth the light of day.

It might be possible to generate various tree views easily if Blogger allowed categories to have 3 values: name (already there), relevance to this post ("this is tangential" you would record as near 0, "main subject" record as near 100), and your own estimation of the quality of the work (0=please don't look at this, 100=I think I'm Shakespeare). Assign default values of "50"--only the name is necessary. A 4'th number might be a relative organizer not related to quality; as in "read this first, this second, etc."

If the reader clicked on a subject category you could show a list of posts you think the best you've done in that subject, organized by quality. Or you could display a tree of posts, with the list from the selected category as the trunk and things you think more or less related as branches. Or you could create a "book" of posts, with some kind of sidebar showing where the current post is within the book.

If you find your thinking has evolved on a topic, instead of deleting the old post you leave it here for history's sake and display a "see this other post" link whenever the old link is in a list.

There's no getting around the need for time and thought if you want it organized--no google algorithm will help us.

The reader must be able to bypass any of this for a "show the most recent" view. Always be kind to faithful readers.

A different approach to malaria?

Instead of spraying insecticide, perhaps we could spray water with bacteria? As usual, more research is needed to verify the effect and see what the side effects might be.

Old Man River

Those 100-year floods come fairly often, don't they? The gaussian distribution isn't a good fit for the tails, I guess--underestimates them by quite a lot.

One of these days will come the inevitable, and it might be smart to think about where the new port ought to be. It would be even smarter to start figuring out how to channel the river to prepare for that day, and have facilities ready for a controlled relocation, but that's probably politically impossible. Too many oxen will get gored, and the inevitable corruption surrounding a new port city (especially in Louisiana) would make it too easy a target to shut down. And can you hear the unending laments that we must not lose a historic American city? They might even call it a "great city," though aside from the port I'm not sure it has been that in a long time. Even the great New Orleans culture seems more nostalgic than lively. I might be missing something, since I don't live there, but from the reports I've heard Katrina disrupted the critical mass.

Ancient meals

We have a few cookbooks detailing medieval recipes. The authors reconstructed the dishes as best they could from the old manuals; trying to figure out what "well mixed" might mean in this context or what in the foggy blue morning some untranslated ingredient name could be. There are some Roman recipes around, though they also suffer from the same weights-and-measures/ingredient-name problems.

We have some notion of what the entertainment was at the king's banquets, but not so much on how the less money-heavy dined. Such is history, I suppose; nobody generally thinks to record what a family reunion dinner is like: though we do have Bruegel for a wedding. It's only 500 years old, but is probably close enough to stand for the previous few centuries.

One little missing detail that makes a huge difference in how everybody felt the next morning is "How was the cleanup done?"

German

Some years ago we got Rosetta Stone German for Youngest Son. He swiftly went beyond it, and since I'm supposed to go to Berlin in June I figured I should try to get some use out of it myself. It is sort of an elementary courtesy to take a stab at the language of the land you're in.

And now I've got a sore throat. Germans seem to be inordinately fond of consonants, and unwilling to be French about them--they pronounce every single one. Except for CH which sometimes seems like a cross between Y and SH, and sometimes sounds like they're gargling rattlesnakes.

And those drills--I grant that they're well thought out and useful, but I'm going to dream of landing in Berlin and seeing bus routes that read "Das weiss auto ist blau." Or "Das schwartz Obertail isst Pferden." Or something.

Achieving School Safety

When I came to pick up my sick son at school, the office desk bore a sign that read We ID For School Safety. I think it would be more effective to SuperEgo For School Safety.

Bin Laden

Assuming the reports are true, then this is good news--an enemy leader dead, a hint that the Pakistani military was sympathetic, the possibility of uncertainty among the enemy about whether there was a traitor, and so on. Of course the ISI will be angry, and we'll be told that Laden is now a "martyr," but since he was already a rallying point the martyr business doesn't actually change anything.

If I'm to take Job 31:29 at all seriously, I can't break out the fireworks. The people who've been searching for years may celebrate their success as they please; their effort and blood have earned a commemoration and a "well done." But I'm on the sidelines and in me the same celebration would be blood lust.

So--good news, good hunting, and may the Lord have mercy on the wretch's soul.

Aura

Not disruptive.

Large Experiments

When an experiment takes a decade to build, or involves more than a couple hundred people, or the people are spread out over wide areas, understanding is lost.

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When I was a graduate student, it was still quite common for a student to build part of the apparatus, write or help write the software for unpacking the data, and do analysis and simulation.

Now the subdetectors are generally too big for one person to build, and so you need engineers and a team of technicians and an experienced supervisor (at least I hope you get one!), and it takes several years to do.

So what does the graduate student do? Write software. Simulations, analysis, monitoring, sometimes data acquisition. It has been startling to see some of the reports students present at the local group meeting. Their professors are experienced and on the ball, and correct them appropriately, fortunately; but most of the students had no feeling for what noise and failures would do to their ideal projections ("find a Z-prime signal in the first month"). A week or two with a prototype chamber and readout would give them a lively distrust for the answers computers come up with.

And, of course, the time to build takes so long that it now takes several generations of graduate students before they start seeing real data—and the unlucky ones have to find something to write up for a dissertation in the meantime. Something is missing when students only sample the output end of experiment. I know it seems ideal: come up with an idea, somebody else funds it, builds it, runs it, and you get to just analyze the results. Still, the friction tells you something important.

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I do not know why it is so, but you share much more information face to face than over a video link, and of course far more than with email exchanges. There is no substitute for sitting down in the same room with a colleague and a sheaf of notes and maybe a laptop or two to show diagrams on.

My colleagues are on several continents. Just the trip from Wisconsin to Fermilab is an impediment to real ease of communication; being in different time zones cuts hard into the sharing. The rule has always been that the experiment site/headquarters is the place to be.

I’m glad CERN’s wireless service in the cafeteria is slow. It has always been a famous place to talk and learn, and frequently much better than the Powerpoint presentations in the working groups, and it is sad to see people hunched in isolation.

In the working group meetings, everyone has a laptop. Some with less than spectacular eyesight, or with some question about one slide or another, are reading the presenter’s slides. Many are answering email or writing presentations of their own, or some analysis project. Some I’ve seen buying airline tickets, reading the news, and the grad students often read online comics (amazing what you can see from the back of the room). Rarely are the presentations self-contained—they are almost invariably updates on existing work. If you show up as a newbie you will be at sea for the first few meetings.

And that is a serious problem. Because experiments like CMS are so large you need many teams of people to manage the subdetectors and figure out how to process the data and work around the problems. So typically a scientist will be an expert on one aspect of one or two subdetectors, and have only a general notion of how the others are performing. It doesn’t help to show up at meetings for the other working groups—there aren’t enough hours in the day, and they don’t have time to explain everything from scratch at every meeting. CMS has tried to deal with this by selecting people whose job is to communicate to other subgroups—but it really helps if you are at CERN. And most of us aren’t. (Especially not me after that last budget cut. And the Tevatron shuts down 1-Oct unless it breaks early.)

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IceCube had a collaboration meeting/inaugural celebration this week. They’d finished drilling and installing all 86 strings of detectors in Antarctica, and everybody was happy. I found the plenary talks wonderful—they explained what was going on, and the meaning of the historical datasets that I’m trying to get into the data warehouse, and what they’d been trying to do and were planning to do next. Reeder noted that it was quite an accomplishment to build such a large detector and have the top people all still speaking to each other, and apparently still liking each other. And on time and on budget.

Halzen had a wild idea, and enthusiasm and drive and a skill for explaining what it was about to funders, politicians, and the man in the street—and now the largest detector in the world is buried in the ice and being used to attack dozens of questions. OK, it will take years of data collection to detect some of the types of signals they want, unless a star in our galaxy decides to cooperate and go supernova for us, and there are still no unambiguous extraterrestrial neutrinos. But still.

The place to be is not the South Pole (although most folk want to have been there—except Halzen himself). I don’t know yet if there is a center—I’ll learn more as I work here. Germany, Sweden, Belgium, New Zealand, USA? I wonder what difference it will make to be so decentralized. Perhaps the apparently somewhat laissez faire physics coordination comes from being a distributed culture.

Aura

For the record.

Beating back malaria

Researchers hope to breed mosquitoes which are not infected by malaria, in hopes that these, spreading through the wild, will displace the infectable ones. No infected mosquitoes means no infected people. Similarly, fewer infected mosquitoes should mean fewer cases.

They were able to get a gene to spread to half the population in several different (captive) environments. That's good; other groups have developed some malaria-resistant mosquito strains. One can hope.

There's a slight fly in the ointment, though--minor compared to the hope of getting rid of malaria, but not entirely trivial: Unless the gene gives the mosquito an advantage, the gene will likely disappear. Better mosquitoes?

The group thinks they found a way around this; they use a (already known) gene that makes a chemical which, when the cell repair machinery starts up, cuts at that site on the DNA and uses the location as a template. So the gene always winds up present, no matter how the gametes divide. So we don't get super-mosquitoes. One can hope.

Laser Sparkplugs

BBC reports on a new proposal to use lasers as more efficient sparkplugs. They are now tiny enough that they can fit, and the light would cause more efficient ignition all along the laser path and not just right next to the spark.

Except: three things come to mind: shock stresses, heat stresses (they claim the ceramics are more robust than normal lasers, but still), and carbon/ash buildup on the optics. Can you imagine how often you'd have to clean your plugs if your rings got scored and you started burning oil? I'm finding it harder and harder to get at the spark plugs, thanks to space-saving engine compartment designs.

High Speed Passenger Rail? Not so fast

From the Economist:

America’s railways are the mirror image of Europe’s. Europe has an impressive and growing network of high-speed passenger links, many of them international, like the Thalys service between Paris and Brussels or the Eurostar connecting London to the French and Belgian capitals. These are successful—although once the (off-balance-sheet) costs of building the tracks are counted, they need subsidies of billions of dollars a year. But, outside Germany and Switzerland, Europe’s freight rail services are a fragmented, lossmaking mess. Repeated attempts to remove the technical and bureaucratic hurdles at national frontiers have come to nothing.

Amtrak’s passenger services are sparse compared with Europe’s. But America’s freight railways are one of the unsung transport successes of the past 30 years. They are universally recognised in the industry as the best in the world.

Apparently passenger lines mung up scheduling for freight, and I've heard that passenger lines never were profitable for the railroads even in their heyday. I'd not bother with a passenger line to Milwaukee--its faster to drive, and if I didn't have a car I'd take the bus (cheaper).

Singleness of Purpose

We don’t multitask well, say the experts. I’m afraid my experience supports their claims. And Feynman found that some people could talk and mentally count at the same time, and others could not—he was one who couldn’t.

Some tasks partition well enough that we can come close to multitasking. When a knitter is expert enough she can concentrate on talking while her hands do the automatic motions.

Some tasks go together naturally—listening to music and joining in with song or dance, for example. Eating with friends makes the food and conversation better.

But…

Gandhi is said to have believed so strongly in the dignity of work that he respected the effort that went into the making of each pencil—respected it strongly enough that he would not throw away that piece of work until the nub was too small to hold in his fingers.

Back before the University in its infinite wisdom redid the windows (it now gets colder in my office than it used to) I could pick up some radio stations and I’d sometimes listen to music while I worked. And then one day I realized I was missing half the detail while concentrating on something else. Sitting in a concert hall and doing nothing but listening brought out aspects I’d never heard before in a piece I’d heard dozens of times.

Apple pie can be great. Apple pie a la mode is a good contrast of flavors and textures and temperatures. Apple pie a la mode with chocolate drizzle and candy sprinkles? We’re not just talking diminishing returns here; the complex dessert is worse than the simpler one and the pie maker could justly complain about what we’ve done to her creation.

In order to hear consistently above the background noise of the road or the waiting room, music needs to be flattened dynamically. That leaves us with less to listen to in the first place. With some musician/singers in the family, and from listening to practice at church, I know the care that goes into getting each bit right—often my untrained ears can’t tell the difference—and I wonder what they think of their effort being treated so carelessly.

"Money can’t buy happiness," nor even rent it for long; the thrill passes and you need a bigger one, and a bigger—the handful of M&Ms isn’t enough anymore, you need a 8-oz bar, or perhaps even the "TurnGreen" 24-oz of chocolate stuffed with caramel and peanuts and coconut and drizzled with white chocolate, leisurely devoured while soaking in a whirlpool and listening to your favorite band and watching videos on the big screen and getting a neck rub.

’Tis the gift to be simple. One of the things we enjoy in children is their focus on the moment. Their "moments" don’t always last long—long term dedication is more of an adult attribute—but they’re often thoroughly involved while it lasts. It seems like a useful discipline to cultivate—doing one thing at at time. Life militates against it, of course. Creating this post lasted considerably longer than I expected, partly because people wanted to talk to me and they take priority. And I remember what life was like with little kids running about. But when I have the time to enjoy something, I don’t need to make it as complicated as the rest of the day.

Budget Cutting Rule

If a proposal promises $$BIG in savings but postpones serious cuts to some other year, that proposal is a lie.

150 Years

Despite my hectic schedule I've seen many articles on the grim anniversary of yesterday. So many things might have gone differently. The war would not have lasted nearly so long if Pinkerton's estimates had been more accurate, or McClellan had contemplated Eccl 9:10--and the fallout would probably not have been so bitter. The Confederacy could even have won, and that quite easily--by holding fire. Lincoln didn't have the backing to invade to retrieve secessionist states, and they could have waited him out.

Of course if the South had held fire and successfully seceded there'd still have been war--probably several, especially around World War I when the European powers would have had proxy battles among the various "American" and Mexican countries.

And of course both main classes of commentators are correct: the war was about slavery, but the soldiers weren't inspired to fight by economic theories but by home and family, as usual.

Trump?

I don't seek out the political news, but the breathless headlines that Trump was high on the list of Republican candidates for president were hard to avoid.

Do we really need another vanity presidential candidate? Given the precedent, I'm not sure Trump would take the job unless he was promised not just a Nobel Peace Prize but the Physics Prize and an option on getting to be the next pope.

1E-8 Caesar

Sometimes aspects of democracy can be irksome. If you take your role as responsible citizen seriously you have to study the problems of the city from within the limits of this world, since the city is not a creature of eternity and must not wait for divine justice. This mixes a little uneasily with attempts to discipline yourself to turn the other cheek. Your duty requires that you spend some of your time thinking like Caesar, when maybe you want to think like Christ.