Ethnic division

AVI has a post with a question on "racial consciousness" in the US, and what changes are in view. He thinks there's a rise in "white consciousness" and worries that it will be bad for the country. I incline to agree, but think it needs to be subdivided a bit further than race. Red white≢ blue white; hispanic subcultures are not the same, and so on.

We have a problem: what is an American? The legal definition involves people living within certain borders or descendents of same or those who successfully apply to be citizens. But that definition by itself is a fairly frail reed when you want to provide the sense of "we're all in this together" that you need to keep a nation together. If you don't have that sense, you don't have a willingness to defend each other or sacrifice (in taxes) to pull each other up after disasters. (We also need to understand what we mean by a good citizen--Grim has been discussing that.)

Quite a few people (at least 2%) are sufficiently uninterested in the "all in this together" that they molest other citizens. We say "they're just bad people" and lock them up, but the attitude, though not usually criminal, is widespread.

So how do you get unity?

You can appeal to tribal loyalties; we're all basically white, or Protestant, or something. Except that we aren't, of course, so appeal to tribal loyalty splits rather than unites. That doesn't stop people who see temporary political advantage, and we've already got problems with ethnic tribalism.

You can appeal to ideology: we're the people that believe in liberty and democracy and that this country has the best exposition of liberty. Except that we don't teach that very much anymore, and without breaking a sweat I can find people who don't believe the country is good and others who don't value constructive liberty (though they're fine with liberty of entertainment).

You can point out enemies abroad and say we have to unite to oppose them. Except that never works for long; eventually somebody always sees political advantage in allying with the enemy.

So we stick with the legal definition and cross our fingers that nobody presses the matter too hard.

We're being pressed hard. It has been worse (1861), so there's no guarantee of failure, but it looks bleak.

To try to avoid further splintering we have a kind of compact that we won't talk about certain topics which highlight differences between ethnic groups. We seem to fear that the harsh light of knowledge will not bring peace but a sword, so we don't want to know certain things, and if we're compelled to see them, we construct a narrative that makes it less harsh.

What is likely to happen if we do notice that ethnic crime isn't driven by "poverty" or "an oppressive system" but their own subculture?

I suppose the first question is what can we do about it if we find that it is true? Cultures don't change in a flash, and having a government in the censorship business is not safe. We can stiffen rules of behavior, require schools to teach rules of civics and manners, quit worrying about disproportionate imact, demand a single language, and so on.

That isn't going to make the subculture feel any more a part of the rest of the country. It will almost certainly make it worse in the short term, and we already have plenty of demagogues hard at work to take it from there. It will put the rest of the country into an asymmetrical relation to that subculture, which isn't so good for "we're all in this together." A lot of people from other subcultures will take that as an opportunity to consider themselves personally superior, and we know how that plays out.

Is that going to be worse than what we have now? If we keep pretending and kicking the can down the road will the problematic subcultures and their demagogues fade away? I don't believe the trends point to a "fading away," but apparently a lot of people do, or want to.

I'm certain, though, that nuance and careful analysis will go out the window either way: if we keep pretending then there is no analysis and if we stop pretending the shouting will drown out the thinking.

"Multiple media used tied to depression"?

Quick quiz: if the study had found no correlation, would anybody have heard of their study?

I can't read their article (the UW doesn't have an online subscription), and so I can't say anything concrete about their methodology. There were 319 participants and when interviewed Becker spoke of a "clear association."

Participants were asked how many hours per week they used two or more of the primary forms of media, which include television, music, cell phones, text messaging, computer and video games, web surfing and others. For the mental health survey, the researchers used well-established measures, although the results do not reflect a clinical diagnosis.

The headline suggests otherwise. Clarification: I mean the "not reflect a clinical diagnosis I wonder if the same person wrote the story and the headline.

"We don’t know whether the media multitasking is causing symptoms of depression and social anxiety, or if it’s that people who are depressed and anxious are turning to media multitasking as a form of distraction from their problems," said Becker.

I vote for option 2. I know that when I'm stressed I often do a lot of "context switching," doing a little of this and jumping to do a little of that.

Putting the cat(fish) among the pigeons

In southern France catfish (which can grow to 4-5 feet long) lunge out of the water to catch pigeons by the river Tarn. I watched the video: it looked as though they didn't always get a firm grip on the bird; but not for want of trying. Since catfish can live out of the water a little while, this isn't quite as difficult as it would be for other fish.

Startling, and somewhat disquieting. "The Coming of the Terror" by Arthur Machen, anyone?

Courtesy, Part 1

I don't know if I can parse out meaningful distinctions between etiquette, courtesy, and manners, so I’ll have to lump them. However, I don't want to bother with meaningless rules like those for how to set the table.

To be clear: the table setting in the West is arbitrary and meaningless. I understand that in Japan certain placements of the chopsticks are associated with funerals and funerals only, and that it is therefore bad luck to use them that way at any other times. Setting the sticks properly is a kind of courtesy in which you avoid inadvertent injury to your companions. It therefore isn't as arbitrary as which side of the plate your desert fork sits by, which has to do with a formal dining scheme that almost nobody knows much less uses. Quick quiz: are you supposed to change the fork-holding hand when cutting food? Answer: I don't remember either, and I couldn't care less.

The implementations of courtesy vary: shake hands or bow? Some of this probably comes from what the culture value. Respect? Bow. Acceptance as equals? Shake.

There seem to be courtesies of respect, of benevolence, and of separation. These are due to peers, superiors subordinates, strangers, and the commons.

Maybe I should clarify. We don't have a lot of official social ranks here (children and parents form a universal exception), but unofficially there are plenty. Our ideal is that we are peers outside the context of our organizational or economic roles. But think about how you and your boss act when you come in for a performance review. You stand, he directs you to sit down and make yourself comfortable. You do, but don't slouch as you might at your own desk. Little courtesies.

We have customs of courtesy to the commons as well: you probably remember "Don't leave a mess for somebody else." You don’t know that "someone else," they're simply other people who share the same common good. It is an application of the silver rule that proscribes doing to others what you don’t want done to you. You don't want people slowing your bus trip by walking in front of the bus when they get off, so you don't do it yourself. I'm not sure every culture has a courtesy of the commons. I know plenty of people who don’t, though some are fairly courteous to people they meet.

I gather that in crowded New York this is a kind of courtesy of separation, where rather than demand that everyone entering your personal space spend the energy to acknowledge you, you pretend they are not there. (Or maybe I'm wrong and they're just very rude.) I never was any good at pretending the Talibe weren’t there, so I wound up essentially saying "no" to them—which is terribly rude.

Rudeness, or the perception of rudeness, seems inevitable when different customs of courtesy intersect.

But. . .

It isn't obvious that the courtesies of different cultures always have parallels with each other. I don't know of anything in Arab culture that resembles the Western chivalry to women. The American courtesies of welcome are very important, but those of hospitality hardly compare with the Arab's.

Of course sometimes courtesies are relevant only within the tribe, and often must not be extended to enemy tribes; something you can see in history books and pre-election family gatherings.

You might expect that in a "diverse" society people would learn each other's courtesies, but it seems instead that we lose them, or perhaps only display them within our tribes.

If they matter, and I believe they do, then what?

Courtesies must be taught--the fact that there are no universal procedures proves that. To get along we need to train all our children in our own courtesies, and in the confidence of them (ignore Connelly and Heesacker, though that is kinder than they deserve) and learn what those of our other cultures are. What are the specifically North Mexican courtesies (and are the peasant ones different from the upper class?), or Inner City Black? Anybody know? That Mexican link says courtesy is important but doesn’t say how it works.

When I was riding the bus to work last year, a rowdy bunch of high-school kids boarded. The girls were making rude gestures over the heads of the unsuspecting passengers before them, and one of the boys was emboldened to start to almost dump his soda on them. I turned and told the girls to settle down and be polite. They snarled that they had the right to do what they pleased, which I of course denied. Nobody else made a move or a sound to support me or chastise the girls. I'm not sure why nobody else spoke up; perhaps because they couldn't be bothered, or they figured I'd already done it, or they thought I was out of line, or because they were afraid to because the kids were black.

Benevolent Sexism

This article is all over the net. "Why is Benevolent Sexism Appealing?" by Connelly and Heesacker. Since all that people cite is the abstract, I thought I should delve a little deeper since I have access to the paper.

"Despite benevolent sexism's negative consequences for women and its perpetuation of gender inequality, women and men alike might be motivated to possess benevolently sexist beliefs because they are associated with increased life satisfaction through diffuse system justification."

Let me see if I can unpack that. I'm a layman in this field (this is from Psychology of Women Quarterly), but if I assume some distant relationship to English I can guess at the jargon.

• "diffuse system justification" ≈ something is indirectly suggesting that the world is running more or less OK ("In general you find society to be fair")
  
• "increased life satisfaction" ≈ people feel good about themselves and their lives
  

  In terms of validity, the authors found that the Satisfaction with Life scale was positively correlated with happiness and positive affect and inversely correlated with negative affect. In addition, Lucas, Diener, and Suh (1996) found that the scale was positively related to other measures of well-being, including self-esteem and optimism, among students.

• "benevolent sexism" you have to read the article, and a few others apparently, to figure out. It is held up in opposition to "hostile sexism" ("Women seek to gain power by getting control over men" was the given example) Their definitions come from Glick and Fiske, whose abstract has to be seen to be believed.
  

  Abstract: The authors present a theory of sexism formulated as ambivalence toward women and validate a corresponding measure, the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI). The ASI taps 2 positively correlated components of sexism that nevertheless represent opposite evaluative orientations toward women: sexist antipathy or Hostile Sexism (HS) and a subjectively positive (for sexist men) orientation toward women, Benevolent Sexism (BS). HS and BS are hypothesized to encompass 3 sources of male ambivalence: Paternalism, Gender Differentiation, and Heterosexuality. Six ASI studies on 2,250 respondents established convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity Overall ASI scores predict ambivalent attitudes toward women, the HS scale correlates with negative attitudes toward and stereotypes about women, and the BS scale (for nonstudent men only) correlates with positive attitudes toward and stereotypes about women. A copy of the ASI is provided, with scoring instructions, as a tool for further explorations of sexist ambivalence.

  Perhaps I'm missing something, but it looks as though the Glick and Fiske dislike "Paternalism", differences between sexes, and reproduction. Paging Darwin on line 2.
  

• "gender inequality" ≈ the sexes are not equal, or the sexes are not identical in all roles. Both concepts appear and blur together.
  
• "negative consequences" refers to alleged ill effects "such as heightened feelings of incompetence and self-doubt", which would certainly be an ill effect if the finding was justified. I cannot access the full report, but I'm skeptical, since it contradicts my own observations. But read their abstract yourself:

  Four experiments found benevolent sexism to be worse than hostile sexism for women's cognitive performance. ... Experiment 4 showed that impaired performance due to benevolent sexism was fully mediated by the mental intrusions women experienced about their sense of competence. Additionally, Experiment 4 showed that gender identification protected against hostile but not benevolent sexism. Despite the apparently positive and inoffensive tone of benevolent sexism, our research emphasizes its insidious dangers.

  I added the highlighting. They seem to be concluding that holding the door for a woman is worse for her job performance than accusing her of being manipulative.
  

The first five sentences of the famous paper are:

In 2010, Blayne Bennett, president of the Network of Enlightened Women (NeW) at Arizona State University (ASU), appeared on the local morning news show, Good Morning! Arizona. Bennett promoted her chapter's Second Annual Gentleman's Showcase, an event honoring the 10 most chivalrous men at ASU. A "gentlemanly act" ranged from opening a door for a woman to lending a "damsel in distress" money for printing. "I get to read the nominations people submit, and I get a huge grin on my face the whole time," Bennett told the program's host (Beardsley, 2010).

When asked what might be contributing to a lack of chivalry on campus, Bennett responded, "The radical feminist movement has really kind of put us in a Catch-22. . . . Men are told that if they're chivalrous, it could be demeaning to women. . . and women are told we need to be really independent and self-sufficient. . . . But when we asked the campus, we got a different answer. Women want to be treated like ladies."

Connelly and Heesacker's view of the world is much grimmer than Bennett's: "Given that women live in a hostilely sexist environment, benevolent sexism's flattery might be particularly effective in coaxing women to accept the status quo." and "By highlighting how a warm female nurturer complements a strong male provider, benevolent sexism implies that society is fair and functions as it should in part because of balanced and seemingly well-designed gender roles."

However, this reasoning does not imply that benevolent sexism is beneficial overall or should remain unchallenged. Fischer and Good (2004, p. 439) argue that the anger and distress caused by awakening feminist consciousness are inherent in "the longer term, growthful process of developing a healthy resistance to injustice." Although questioning sexist attitudes and behaviors may detract from some aspects of subjective satisfaction, only by challenging such prejudices can we hope to create an egalitarian society free of intolerance and its many harmful consequences.

Happiness must be secondary to living a good life, in other words. Oddly enough, I agree with that sentiment, but I object to their implicit definitions of a good life, which has no reference whatever to virtue.

Let me grab a famous razor and guess that kindnesses that make everybody happier are probably good things. Since I'm skeptical of the alleged ill effects, and I noticed that happier men and women seem to reproduce, no matter whether you study the matter from the point of Christian chivalry or "survival of the fittest", this pair wrote rubbish, to describe it kindly.

Brothers raising each others' children

I'm trying to remember where I read about this. There was a Nigerian folk story, and I recall reading about it somewhere else.

The idea is that after a few years the child is sent to be raised by his uncle and aunt(s), and the uncle reciprocates.

It isn't quite the same thing as sending the kids to be raised by the rich uncle--that's not so uncommon; I know at least one such.

I understand that the noble Brits of the Middle Ages used to send their kids to be sort-of servants to the higher and mightier so they'd learn manners and how to be good companions/side-kicks. That's not quite the same thing either.

Does anybody remember anything like this?

Even in distant lands, some things don't change

From the Heritage in Monrovia, via AllAfrica I learn that student protests are alive and well as University of Liberia students stormed the General Auditing Commission's offices to demand the reinstatement of 40 employees dismissed in a "peculiar and dehumanizing" manner who were "breadwinners for many people."

"What Mr. Kilby has done to poor people who are mothers and fathers is bad because many of those dismissed suffered to acquire the kind of education they have only to be declared redundant in such malicious manner," Mr. Williams among other things stated in a rather dejected tone.

It can be recalled that when he took over the GAC as its new head, AG Kilby vowed to restructure the Commission, a pronouncement his critics termed as 'witch-hunt'. The GAC administration has said the prevailing economic situation and its accompanied budgetary constraints prompted it to initiate what GAC called a cause saving and restructuring review of the operations of the Commission. This process, the administration averred, has resulted into both staff and logistics reduction across the board.

To hear the other side:

AG Kilby admitted that he has hired four new directors from the United Stated States of America and promoted four persons internally within the GAC.

Among other things, he added: "These are people who we feel will accelerate the process of trying to clean up the back-loge we have because they have 20 plus years experience who can get on governmental accounting and get us going forward."

Four new directors? Directors? Does he mean "auditors?" American auditors would be terribly expensive, but also far less likely to have family or crony ties. He probably means Liberians who were living in the US. I'm not sure the words he uses mean what he thinks they mean.

n his formal communication dated November 14, 2012 and addressed to the Acting Chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Accounts, Audit and Expenditure, Senator Isaac Nyenabo, a copy of which is in possession of this paper, AG Kilby begged for the committee to give him more time to enable him package 'meretriciously' documents requested by the Committee, an excuse the committee accepted for fairness in the hearings.

The students were yelling "Ah...o say! Kilby must go back to where he came from. Kilby die today we will bury him today." What was the grievance that earned such a threat?

In a followup story we learn that

Mr. Kanneh wants President Sirleaf to immediately dismiss Mr. Kilby for undermining her government's promise of creating 20,000 jobs annually for young people in the country.

According to Konneh, SUP, in collaboration with the Liberian student community would ensure that Mr. Kilby is dismissed for proving the president's vision on the contrary.

"We are calling on all youth groups in the country to join us in this fight to denounce this wicked act of Mr. Kilby. If you refuse to join us the next group could be your husband, wife, brother, sister and uncle," Mr. Konneh noted.

Sinecures for new graduates are scarce. (Most graduates are in business administration not entrepreneurs! and law.)

An editorial claims that "out of a budget of a little over US\$6million, US\$5.3million is being expended annually on salaries, lest to mention the over 25 janitors at the GAC some of which receive US\$1600.00 on a monthly basis while auditors are paid US\$400 to US\$700." and that the audit reports from his predecessor were mostly denounced by the EU funding agencies that wanted to see where their money was going.

I'm sure you can think of several events in the USA in the past few weeks that have the same focus.

Is there any "there" in the EU?

I've wondered off and on whether there was any developing sense of EU/pan-European identity, something that would help the nations hold together in mutual sacrifice in a crisis. Since I only met scientists and engineers, and since the elites run the European newspapers just as ours do here, I really have no clear picture of what the common man thinks.

From The Global Journal you find an interview with Professor Jürgen Habermas in which Fukuyama asks him about this directly.

But isn’t the weakness of current European identity due to the fact that it has been described in such largely negative terms, i.e., to be a European means to be against war, against national selfishness, etc., instead of in positive terms, e.g., "I am proud to be member of a European civilization that represents X or Y" as positive values? And if so, how do we define those values and what kind of education project is necessary to give them meaning?

Jan Werner Müller, a younger professor of political science at Princeton university, recently rebutted the frequently heard accusation of the "failure of European intellectuals" with an argument that I find convincing. The expectation that the intellectuals should construct a "grand European narrative," a European "identity," with the aid of a new founding myth remains captive to a "nineteenth-century logic," he argued. After all, the now well-studied history of the "invention" of national consciousness by historiography, the press, and school curricula during the nineteenth century, in view of its horrible consequences, does not provide an inviting example. We in Europe are still coming to terms with forms of ethnonational aggression – as is shown, even within the EU, by the example of Hungary. This is why I think it is sufficient to cite a couple of concrete demographic and economic statistics to remind ourselves of the diminishing weight of Europe in the world and to ask ourselves whether we must not pull ourselves together if we want to remain in a position to defend our cultural and social forms of life against the leveling force of the global economy – and, most importantly, to maintain a certain amount of influence on the international political agenda in accordance with our universalistic conceptions.

That's scary. Habermas seems to miss the point. Whether "European intellectuals" ought to be the source of the "grand narrative" isn't quite the issue: I'm not sure that class has done a bang-up job of designing "narratives" in general and some of the narratives of the last century were pretty vile. But the point isn't that "nineteenth-century logic" is passe or that Mussolini's mythic vision of Italy was evil. The point is that there needs to be some positive center for identity or there's no cohesion, and that the positive vision needs to be taught somehow, either implicitly through the culture or explicitly through schooling. It is not sufficient to "cite a couple of ... statistics to remind ourselves." The children must learn what is positive about their land before they understand statistics and start to worry about needing a passport for hitchhiking across the continent.

The tribe and nation are extensions (a little attenuated) of the family. Unless there's some species of love involved, the construct is fragile.

At some level the EU and the US are rivals (explicitly on their part), but we're part of the same culture and same economy and I'm not looking forward to the disintegration of the EU.

Thanksgiving

This evening I read my mail, checked two sites, and looked at Facebook for the first time in a week on my better half's suggestion.

The web isn't a great place to count blessings, as my previous post probably proves. I need a little quiet time for that.

This wasn't a quiet day, which is one of the blessings. 3 of the kids, an old friend, and 5 visitors (Chinese students at UW who wanted to see what an American Thanksgiving dinner was like) plus the better half and I around the table--make that two tables. We had to empty the living room to set up. We have a small house as houses go in this county, but it is bigger than those I grew up in.

I have to fast for the blood work tomorrow, but I'm still so full of lunch that it would be hard to eat.

The email revealed no catastrophes at work, the weather was beautiful and warm (63!), traffic was smooth when I picked up the students.

And this morning I was meditating on the difference between Jesus' "Whoever is not with me is against me" and His message to the disciples "Whoever is not against you is for you." The first is a warning of judgment, but the second is an encouragement and reminder that the power of God works in many ways, and the one who welcomes a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet's reward.

I think it is time for a little quiet and thanks. God bless you all.

When the crunch hits, what then?

You don't need any gift of prophecy to see that there's going to be a very serious economic crunch, and soon. If it is more than a year out I'll be very surprised.

The crunch was coming no matter who was elected--if we wanted to avoid it we should have picked different representatives years ago. I judge that the policies and priorities of the Democrats have made things worse than they should have been, and that too much power was handed to the unelected. Still, some things came from the society as a whole and not the political elite: sky-high divorce rates, plummeting birth rates, borrowing for pleasures and not for production, an eroding sense of integrity (numbers would be hard to come by, but I suspect that the upper echelons of the business world have ethics as bad as in the Gilded Age), lassitude, an irritable sense of entitlement, and so on.

We're very tribal, explicitly parsing ourselves out by ethnic groups (except whites, who aren't supposed to play that game). But because of that divorce rate and family fragmentation, most of those tribes aren't very resilient against calamity: cousins who aren't quite related anymore are not so likely to take you in and share resources when you can't pay rent.

That leaves the churches and Uncle Sam to help out, and Uncle Sam's record of tolerating alternative loyalties hasn't been very good recently. So who gets the big slices of the diminishing pie? California has one answer (the Praetorian Guard), but their big test hasn't come yet. Will benefits to the "hispanics" (which flavor?) or "asian" (which flavor?) or teacher's union be paid first?

Look at India for how affirmative action quotas become entrenched and cheated and battled over--and then look at how immigration offices here are told to automatically waive fees for "hardship" on appeal by particular favored groups. It is no secret that having the wrong ethnic mix can be proof of discrimination, and the circle of associations affected by that presumption seems to be growing larger--it isn't just universities and businesses trying to sell to the Feds. Do you cut back on the number of asian students in order to increase the number of black students? So far, yes, but what happens when the asian-ancestry groups start wielding clout?

I suspect the tribal divisions will dominate the pie-division. I could be wrong on that: sometimes people will band together, especially if there's a common enemy.

Either way--tribal divisions or a common enemy--the state is already on the path to control of the economy, which always means favors for the connected and interminable rules and taxes for everyone else. It needn't mean war, or even civil war (who would be fighting for which territory?), but it would mean loss of liberties.

Who would support such a thing? Besides -redacted to avoid dispute, but he sponsored CFPB-.

You might be surprised, but you might not. The link is to a 1941 article "Who goes Nazi?" about the kind of people who gravitate to that kind of thing. The article (go read it!) shows its age. There are new types that appear today. Think of the OWS types: some of them would be down with a neo-N government if it used their language, and others might fight it. (I suspect that the anarchist type would support it at first.)

One of the article's assertions is that when the barbarians seem to be ascendant, character matters. It matters in the crunch time. I don't remember seeing much about good character in the kid's school books, nor in the large swaths of the pop culture that I can't avoid.

But focus on character turns up here and there in the culture. "With great power comes great responsibility." And the churches are still preaching. And by definition I don't hear much from the ordinary people who don't get the microphone. I wonder what the crunch will show.

Whatever happens, ten years from now we'll be saying "We obviously should have done X."

---

In a science fiction short story I read years ago, a man asked the rhetorical question: why would people fight and die to support one group of parasitical kings instead of another. The why is complicated, but look at the vampires that rule Detroit and marvel at the support they continue to have from the subjects they flatter. Tribalism.

Who picked the vanity plate?

A stubby little grey car of very recent vintage aggressively weaved through traffic this morning, hitting well over 75mph as he shot past me on the right. (Don't ask how I got that estimate, OK?)

The plate said Eeyore 1. Conflicting messages... was he trying to compensate?

Correlation is not causation, but

it would be sweet if the causation suggested by this correlation were true.

Chocolate consumption and Nobel Prizes probably share some boring kind of common factor like a country having enough surplus capacity to allow for appreciation of fine food and for supporting the kind of "impractical" research that leads to the breakthroughs celebrated in Nobel Prizes and undreamed of new industries.

However, I will suggest to the PIs that it might be worth the experiment to see if more chocolate leads to more science discoveries.

Seafaring "cavemen"?

If they've dated tools correctly (a big if) that they found on Crete, then somebody was making tools there 170,000 years ago. That's pushing the boundaries of modern humans; the ones most active about then seem to have been the Neanderthals. There's no land bridge to Crete as far as I can see; and the big refilling was about 5,000,000 years ago. So whoever got to Crete went by water.

I don't trust dates on stone tools very far, but it is wild to imagine a group of Neanderthals on a raft or canoe. Maybe the Neanderthals were the smart ones after all.

---

I gather the latest claim is that humans and Neanderthal didn't interbreed. If the reporter didn't screw the story up again it sounds like the researchers contemplated a kind of blurring between groups, with North African sharing more genes with Neanderthals via a common ancestor than South African. And then then North Africans were the ones that left for greener pastures. Which suggests far less mixing in Africa than I'd expect: wouldn't a group that wasn't averse to migrating migrate in different directions?

Coals to Newcastle?

This short news story from Minneapolis is odd. McHarding Degan Galimah is charged with smuggling arms into Liberia. (Odd name too: Scots-Liberian?)

The warring factions in Liberia quit fighting but never did turn in their AK47s and grenade launchers, which presumably are still hidden in odd corners in the county. Is this a new faction or subfaction needing machine guns? Or are these civilian small arms for the otherwise relatively defenseless (and violent crime is quite common) "middle class"? The picture associated with one story suggests the latter. Big difference.

Fraud

Have you been hearing some of the vote fraud whispers?

I won't link to them. You can find them easily enough. Districts with nearly 20,000 Obama votes and not one Romney vote. Think about that a moment: not even one ballot error? To be so error-free requires a little assistance, though in an all-black inner city area Romney supporters are pretty rare. There were counties in Colorado with more voters than residents. Something wrong with the census, maybe? It probably wasn't military ballots from overseas; they'd be legal residents, and in any event they're often effectively disenfranchised because many states haven't fulfilled their obligations.

Just because you failed to win a state you expected to doesn't imply fraud anywhere.

Was there fraud? You bet. They voted in Chicago too. Did fraud change the outcome of the presidential race? Probably not. I'd guess most of the effort went into local races.

Are we going to hear about any convictions for fraud?

No.

• In an area with almost no fraud, you won't hear about what isn't there.
  
• In areas with a lot of fraud, you also won't hear about it, partly because of shielding by the powers that be and partly because it is part of the water people swim in.
  
• Only in areas with previously little fraud would you be at all likely to hear about it, and even there I doubt there'd be enough evidence to convict anybody, especially if they're careful to do their work without witnesses. Somebody will blab (3 can keep a secret if 2 are dead) but that won't be good enough to convict anybody with any connections.
  

Clowns or sleight of hand?

Donald Sensing seems to know whereof he writes about court martial (not) of Petraeus and Allen. Some of the news reports are frankly unbelievable. 30,000 email messages? No way. The reporter got the number wrong, or the content wrong, or both; and the lie goes round the world while the truth is lacing on boots.

An FBI agent becomes so besotted with Kelley that he sends her shirtless photos of himself and tries to work up the investigation into a big deal. A pair of broke "socialites" hobnob with generals, who offer help in a custody battle.

A biographer seems to be spilling info about secret CIA jails in Benghazi. And somehow she lost her drivers license too?

Who is writing this stuff?

That soldiers, and especially officers, attract women is not exactly startling news. Nor that they reciprocate the interest. I seem to recall an old story about a fellow named Samson who couldn't keep secrets from his lady either.

This story(ies) doesn't seem like a deliberate distraction; not with the Benghazi leak to tie it back in. So I conclude that it is mostly real, albeit seriously garbled in the usual "first reporting" style. Perhaps Petraeus was doing a "Publish and be damned!" and letting everything explode.

He was running the CIA. Neither confirm nor deny.

There's probably no good solution

This is West Washington Avenue looking out the window.

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

The dashed lines outline a dedicated bicycle lane.

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

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

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

Update on excommunication

A German reader kindly sent me some links describing updates on the revolt against paying church taxes in Germany. OK, a few people doesn't constitute a revolt. Yet.

One is an opinion blog post which describes the Catholic church in Germany as non-transparent and sometimes competing with private companies. I'm not convinced he has all his facts straight (I'm tolerably sure most of the USCCB opposes abortion, and perusing a couple other posts on his site suggests the presence of an agenda) but it is another precinct heard from and interesting.

The other is a a 2006 ruling on canon law which seems to this (non-canon-lawyer: I'm not even Catholic) reader to mean that a request to leave the church must be made to the "competent authority of the Catholic Church"; which sort of leaves the German state out of the loop.

Zapp seems to have won his case, which has been going on for 5 years, btw.

I'm not German and have no say in this, but a little friendly advice from across the pond: don't be afraid to try the American scheme in which churches fund themselves with no help from the state. Phase it in. If the Apostle Paul could ask that Christians distinguish themselves in giving, surely mere bishops and preachers can do it now and then too. Not all the time though, please.

Review before elections

AVI's laconic but timely post had me looking up an old post or two of my own. Pre-election I was trying to guess what kind of presidency his would be.

I judge Obama unsuitable for the office, on grounds of character, experience, and philosophy; but I don't believe him to be the devil incarnate. There ought to be some good arising from his presidency, and it would be a useful exercise to try to figure out what it might be.

Most of my subsequent musings were predicated on the assumption that he would be active instead of passive, and are consequently worthless. I also wasn't expecting such a thorough sweep of House and Senate, with results that make drunken sailors look stingy. All in all, he was worse than I expected.

The worst president we've had in these states was Jefferson Davis: nobody else is even close. My grasp of the doings of earlier presidents has a few gaps, but I think there's no question that Obama was the worst of the past century. Even if you are a devout Keynesian and statist, he was a limp flop with a taste for cronyism.

Our national competitors like him fine, but I don't find that a hopeful endorsement.

I decline to predict tomorrow's outcome (OK, I predict Dane county will elect the Democrat to the House. In other breaking news, water is wet.). Polls with 9% response rate are going to have huge systematic errors. They cite 3% or 5% statistical errors, but I'd go with systematic errors of 28%: the 1/sqrt(12) that you get from the uniform distribution. Which is to say I don't trust them at all and the real vote for a candidate could be anything from 4% to 96%. My gut says there are a lot of yellow-dog Democrats (and Republicans) out there, but you couldn't prove there are more than 4% from the polls.

I promised to weigh the campaign material that arrived, but other family members ditched part of it on arrival, so I can only say there were less than about 16 cards. However, we received something on the order of 50 phone calls for either surveys or "please vote for X" in the past two weeks; all but about 4 being robocalls and about a third of them in the middle of supper.

No matter who gets elected, the worst economic trouble is yet to come. And even more certain than death and taxes--"Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket; they are regarded as dust on the scales; he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust."

Putting things in perspective

The Obama campaign is having a big rally downtown today, two blocks from my office.

I would rather go to an Obama campaign rally than have a root canal done. I would rather have a root canal done than have a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

One advantage of working from home is that lunch is easy.

Habits

From Discover magazine there’s an interesting story about turning off habits. Earlier research suggested that infralimbic cortex was involved with habits. A team at MIT decided that slicing and dicing the "ILC" was too crude, so:

They turned to optogenetics. This revolutionary technique takes light-sensitive proteins from around the tree of life, and uses viruses to introduce them into an animal’s neurons. By choosing the right protein, and targeting the right part of the brain, scientists can now excite or silence a chosen group of neurons with astounding precision, using little more than flashes of coloured light.

Working with supervisor Ann Graybiel and optogenetics founder Karl Deisseroth, Smith filled his rats' ILCs with halorhodopsin – a protein that comes from salt-loving microbes, and silences neurons when hit by yellow light.

They then trained them to turn one way in a simple maze. A flash of light could turn off neurons in the ILC, so:

Then, Smith inactivated the rat's' IL, while they were running through the maze. The effect was dramatic: almost immediately, they behaved as if they had never acquired their habit in the first place.

Whoa! Then they trained them for a new habit, and were surprised to discover that the rats not only lost the new habit, they recovered the old one.

So the ILC is responsible for maintaining habits. (Which is scary: some habits are kind of important. Want to relearn how to drive?) Also, apparently habits aren’t forgotten, but remain around like unused subroutines in an old program, until the ILC calls it from a list of possible "actions".

I know we're supposed to cultivate mindfulness, and doing things automatically is deprecated, but sometimes I'd like to contemplate other things while automatically locking up at night. Their methods sounds kind of shotgun.

Misspellings are in the original

All is not lost

Even in Madison.

The city's Vending Oversight Committee considered and rejected a proposal from a (vegetarian) vendor to require all food carts to offer vegetarian options. Sanity from an unexpected source.

I wasn't present, so I don't know if they suggested that he'd be smarter to keep the business for himself.

FWIW, quite a few carts do have vegetarian dishes: there are a lot of vegetarians in the county. I don't eat much from carts, but when I do it is usually an Ethiopian lentil/potato dish from Buraka's stand on Library Mall.

Summarizing marriage advice

Eldest Daughter and Maggie’s Farm both recommended 16 Ways I Blew My Marriage (two of them). His advice: Don’t stop holding her hand; don’t call names; don’t stop being attractive; don’t stop having fun together; don’t stop kissing her, and so on.

Quite a few of these are consequences of some simple principles.

1. You don’t know when you are going to die. What do you want her last memory of you to be? A kiss, maybe? Not being a slob or of angry words?
   
2. She wants to feel she can trust you. Around other women, dealing with the children, etc.
   
3. She likes to feel wanted. Though I’m given to understand that proving this can be overdone.
   
4. Try to keep alert to what she needs. "But the game is on!" or "I’m posting on the blog" don’t quite cut it
   
5. If you give up a sense of entitlement, everything is a gift. Best if both of you feel that way; something to figure out before you get married
   

For better or for worse, an adventure, with surprise traveling companions along the way.

Common culture (low)

I decided to address From Dawn to Decadence again when I heard that Barzun died.

He has some lively lines, and interesting asides.

When secularism came to prevail, Bible reading disappeared among the majority, and with it the background of ideas and allusion common to all. In this role, the only ecumenical replacement one can think of is the daily newspaper's comic strip.

That's a bit dated. The daily newspaper is a little less common than it used to be, and I'm not sure what TV shows everybody watches. I'm told that for news it is FOX vs the rest (except for those of us who get news online), but once the news is over what I don't know what people look at.

We've managed to get political divides, racial divides, language divides--lots of AVI's tribes. I wonder what bits of culture they have in common. I guess some sports bridge the divides, but they provide a rather limited common language.

Language divides aside, do the groups even tend to like the same comics? Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore play to different political affiliations. I found Boondocks pretty obscure, but I suspect I wasn't the target audience. Did anybody not like Calvin and Hobbs? (You're not limited to what your newspaper has; literally thousands of different strips are online and those who've invested in a smartphone can read their favorites after reviewing facebook.)

There's a topic for some sociology students (if they can resist the temptation to survey only college students!): figure out the favorite comic strips past and present as a function of age, political affiliation, race, religion and religiosity, educational attainment...

Although it's a scary thought that perhaps the only things our tribes have in common are a liking for football and Fox Trot. There's not enough for a common language there.

Polls on racism

Althouse has a post linking the AP-sponsored study on politics and racism. From the AP story:

Overall, the survey found that by virtue of racial prejudice, Obama could lose 5 percentage points off his share of the popular vote in his Nov. 6 contest against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. But Obama also stands to benefit from a 3 percentage point gain due to pro-black sentiment, researchers said. Overall, that means an estimated net loss of 2 percentage points due to anti-black attitudes.

"Racial prejudice" vs "pro-black sentiment" Are these things different somehow?

The survey questions are also available, and they include gems like:

RAC11. How well does each of these 
           words describe most blacks?
[ITEMS TO INSERT, RANDOMIZE]
Friendly
   Extremely well
   Very well
   Moderately well
   Slightly well
   Not at all
   Refused/Not answered

How is a rational and honest person supposed to answer that? "I know a few friendly and a few non-friendly and quite a few I've never gotten to know, with more being X than Y" doesn't fit in their grid anywhere.

More CO2

I just thought of another source of CO2: soda. The information below is matched in other places, but I don't have a definitive reference.

The normal human body breathes to eliminate CO2, producing 200cc per minute that has to be eliminated at the same rate.

One can of soda contains up to 1000cc of dissolved CO2, most of which is absorbed into the blood stream by the intestines.

The Lungs are presented with the extra CO2 to eliminate by increased minute volume leading to increased respiratory effort.

A normal individual won't have a problem with this extra CO2, as the extra CO2 absorbed via the intestinal track will signal the central chemoreceptors to "immediately" increase the respiratory rate.

Hmm. If the CO2 is quickly absorbed then as a wild guess that would mean 10 minutes or so of increased CO2 blood levels. Does that mean 10 minutes of reduced initiative? Don't let Bloomberg hear about this aspect of "Demon Sprite!"

It wouldn't be hard to repeat their experiment with the subjects constantly sipping soda, provided the tests didn't last a long time. Blood tests of CO2 level are apparently not that easy, and drinking doesn't play well with wearing a mask to measure breath CO2 levels.

Smoke-filled rooms

Some of those smoke-filled rooms wound up nominating better candidates than the primary system. Whether this is random chance, or a defect in the primary system, or a deterioration in the quality of candidates over the years is an interesting question that I won't attempt to answer. It doesn't appear that the primary system removes the influence of special interests.

At any rate, the observation about the smoky rooms is a bit ironic in light of some recent research on the effect of CO2 levels on judgment. (Yes, they worried about impurities in the CO2 they added to the room's atmosphere.) Received wisdom said there was no impact of CO2 concentration on human performance, but there'd been a partial study that suggested maybe there really was.

At LBNL researchers asked volunteers to take tests in a room that had three possible levels of CO2 concentration: 600, 1000, and 2500 ppm (human contribution is not substantial). They were tested on:

• Basic Activity Level (number of actions taken)
  
• Applied Activity (opportunistic actions)
  
• Focused Activity (strategic actions in a narrow endeavor)
  
• Task Orientation (focus on concurrent task demands)
  
• Initiative (development of new/creative activities)
  
• Information search (openness to, and search for information)
  
• Information usage (ability to utilize information effectively)
  
• Breadth of Approach (flexibility in approach to the task)
  
• Basic Strategy (number of strategic actions)

The results? Some things (Information Search) showed no particular effect. Others (Initiative) showed pretty dramatic changes.

Image above is taken from the paper by U Satish et al. "Funding for this research was provided by Collaborative Activities for Research and Technology Innovation (CARTI), which supports research in the areas of air quality and water resource management. CARTI, part of the Syracuse Center of Excellence located in Syracuse, New York, is supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under award EM-83340401-0." Or in other words, they get the credit for this and not me.

There is strong evidence that in schools, CO2 concentrations are frequently near or above the levels associated in this study with significant reductions in decision-making performance. In surveys of elementary school classrooms in California and Texas, average CO2 concentrations were above 1,000 ppm, a substantial proportion exceeded 2,000 ppm, and in 21% of Texas classrooms peak CO2 concentration exceeded 3,000 ppm (Corsi et al. 2002; Whitmore et al. 2003). Given these concentrations, we must consider the possibility that some students in high-CO2 classrooms are disadvantaged in learning or test taking.

In eight studies within commercial aircraft, mean CO2 concentrations in the passenger cabins were generally above 1,000 ppm and ranged as high as 1,756 ppm, and maximum concentrations were as high as 4,200 ppm (Committee on Air Quality in Passenger Cabins of Commercial Aircraft 2002).

They worried about people wearing respirators, though other work suggests that blood CO2 levels don't change much. Car and pickup atmospheres are hard to predict (vent open, window open a crack, smoking, bad exhaust--who knows?) but they suggest that there might be some effects.

I suggested to my supervisor that our next meeting be on the Memorial Union terrace, to make sure we were as alert and productive as possible.

Italian disasters

As could have been readily predicted, Italian scientists on their disaster body are quitting. That was an easier prediction than earthquakes.

An Italian court had found the six scientists and government official guilty of manslaughter for saying there was little risk.

The devil is in the details. The situation was that there'd been some minor quakes, and an amateur whose earlier predictions had all failed had managed to get attention and was warning everybody that disaster was at hand. By tradition people lived outdoors for a while to avoid aftershocks or the big tremor the small ones were leading up to. The panel assessed the risks and found them small, and apparently insisted on this extra hard because of the amateur. Some people who usually camped in the streets at such times decided to stay home, and got crushed when the quake hit after all.

Nature reports in considerable detail, and describes the famous evaluation meeting. Even Boschi now says that "the point of the meeting was to calm the population. We [scientists] didn't understand that until later on."

In press interviews before and after the meeting that were broadcast on Italian television, immortalized on YouTube and form detailed parts of the prosecution case, De Bernardinis said that the seismic situation in L'Aquila was "certainly normal" and posed "no danger", adding that "the scientific community continues to assure me that, to the contrary, it's a favourable situation because of the continuous discharge of energy". When prompted by a journalist who said, "So we should have a nice glass of wine," De Bernardinis replied "Absolutely", and urged locals to have a glass of Montepulciano.

and

Two of the committee members — Selvaggi and Eva — later told prosecutors that they "strongly dissented" from such an assertion, and Jordan later characterized it as "not a correct view of things". (De Bernardinis declined a request for an interview through his lawyer, Dinacci, who insisted that De Bernardinis's public comments reflected only what the commission scientists had told him. There is no mention of the discharge idea in the official minutes, Picuti says, and several of the indicted scientists point out that De Bernardinis made these remarks before the actual meeting.)

It sounds to me as though scapegoats were sought. And found. And convicted. There's an automatic appeal, but at this point I would not offer the Italian government my expert opinion on the time of day. Too risky.

I can run but not hide

I had no intention of "live-blogging" the debate. I still don't.

But I heard part of it (Afghanistan, Israel phone call, Iran) while waiting for my better half.

For anybody who knows anything about doings in the area, it was painful to listen to. The best you could hear was half-truths. On the Afghan forces question both men pretended the real question didn't exist and lied about the Afghan military's ability. Obama had to defend his record, so he told most of the lies.

I know there are things you can't say when you're president (Afghanistan is really two or three countries, not one.) And you can't expose fallback negotiating positions (though I remember that happening a few election debates ago(*)!). But why not use the opportunity to show your understanding of the complexity of events?

(*)Though I can't recall who did it. I think it was Reagan, but I can't swear to that.

UPDATE: After sleeping on it: it was a newspaper that uncovered and published our negotiating strategy. Reagan was the one who said "The Shah did our bidding," which has to rank as one of the most horrible blunders in any debate I've heard.

Ten Universal Principles: A Brief Philosophy of the Life Issues by Robert J Spitzer

As the subtitle says, this is a survey with particular emphasis on life issues: euthanasia and abortion.

I've been appalled at the sloppy thinking pervading our culture, and have been trying to put together some things to try to help at least the church kids to think clearly through the noise. I heard about this book and figured "Why re-invent the wheel?" (Executive summary: I think it needs tweaking for my target audience.)

The 10 principles are

1. Complete Explanation. The best opinion or theory is the one that explains the most data.
   
2. Noncontradiction. Valid opinions or theories have no internal contractions. A real being cannot both be and not be the same thing, in the same respect, at the same place and time.
   
3. Objective Evidence. Nonarbitrary opinions or theories are based on publicly verifiable evidence.
   
4. Nonmaleficence. Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. Avoid unnecessary harms; if a harm is unavoidable, minimize it.
   
5. Consistent Means and Ends. The end does not justify the means.
   
6. Full Human Potential. Every human being (or group of human beings) deserves to be valued according to the full level of human development, not according to the level of development already achieved.
   
7. Natural Rights. All human beings possess in themselves (by virtue of their existence alone) the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and property ownership; no government gives these rights and no government can take them away.
   
8. Fundamentality of Rights. The more fundamental right is the one which is necessary for the possibility of the other; where there is a conflict, we should resolve in favor of the more fundamental right.
   
9. Limits to Freedom. One person's (or group's) freedoms cannot impose undue burdens upon other persons (or groups).
   
10. Beneficence. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
    

One common thread is that most societies get around applying inconvenient principles by redefining people. A slave is not a full human, savages are primitive and therefore not as valuable as we sophisticates, the peasant is an Epsilon and the magistrate an Alpha, the unborn baby is a lump of cells, and so on. If you insist that a human is a human whether awake or asleep (first few principles) then Roe v Wade is unconscionable, violating pretty much all the above principles, as well as being based on bad science and as far a prior law goes, on nothing but eagerness to permit abortion. Althouse learned that it was also guided by a fear of overpopulation!

He doesn't address the point that Principle 7 (Natural Rights) is in fact denied by many states and political parties. Some people believe that all rights do come from the state/collective, and the observation that this attitude leads to innumerable evils does not dissuade them.

I'm afraid I'm not terribly patient, and I began to get a little tired of seeing the same example each time, but it is useful to see what a train wreck Roe was and how disastrous its implications are.

After running through these principles Spitzer addresses himself to why dialog about this sort of thing has been problematic. He suggests a classification by how people define happiness for themselves, a four levels of happiness scheme that is quite old.

• Level 1: desire for externally stimulated or physical pleasures and possessions
  
• Level 2: desire for ego gratification and control
  
• Level 3: desire for other's good, making a difference for good
  
• Level 4: desire for the ultimate or perfect.
  

Needless to say, the values of one level aren't going to make a lot of sense to the others and what persuades one won’t persuade others.

Spitzer has a side note here on how to try to guide yourself up to Level 3: think carefully about what is important, and write a "personal creed" explaining why you are here and what you intend to accomplish, and review it daily.

He ends the book with proofs for the existence of the transmaterial, starting with one that begins from the nature of doubt. It requires careful attention. He references but doesn’t address Godel's discoveries here. The others are based on the nature of various desires (for beauty, justice, love, etc), all of which demand a transmaterial touchstone.

The book is short (134 pages) and clearly written. It requires a little concentration, and I'm still puzzling over whether it all works for high-school age kids. (Some can easily master all; most will easily master some.)

Cold clouds for missing mass?

I like to go to the Cosmology Journal Club when I can. They discuss papers (mostly the profs talking, I notice) that are in the news. Somebody reads it and presents a summary and attempts to field questions about it (but since he’s not the author, "I don’t know" is a legitimate answer). (I sit quietly at the side and listen and try to figure out what they're talking about.)

This week they finally discussed Do the Herschel cold clouds in the Galactic halo embody its dark matter?. I read the article and sensed some plausibility, but I couldn’t tell if the methods the authors were using were appropriate.

The idea is simple: there are clouds of something emitting light at about 250microns wavelength, which implies (very) cold temperatures, in the view when the Herschel-SPIRE system tried to look at the Magellanic Clouds. Careful analysis shows that they're actually in our galaxy, and a study of their angular sizes suggests a simple distribution radius from the center of the galaxy. We haven't seen things like this before because we haven’t had the instruments to look for such cold clouds.

If they are in fact distributed spherically about the galaxy and if the clouds have about 15,000 times the mass of the Sun then the amount of cold matter is enough to account for the previously unseen mass in our galaxy. An astrophysicist almost a hundred years ago predicted that gas clouds would spontaneously tend to break up into clumps of about 40,000 solar masses, which is comparable to what would be needed here. So maybe the missing matter is solved: Do we need dark matter theories?

Well, the devil is in the details. (I thank the Journal Club for the details; I didn't know any of this except that he was guessing about the mass.)

For starters, the Herschel-SPIRE system looked in a few other directions, and at several other wavelengths—and none of that appears here. Maybe it is too early, since it takes time to do the studies, or maybe he wants that study to be an independent analysis

The astute reader will have noticed that the mass is a guess. The equations in the paper have the proper scale factor in there, but that scale factor can be pretty much anything less than 1—there is no proof that the clouds are anything like that massive.

UPDATE from comments:

He figured out what average mass the clouds needed to completely account for missing mass, and called it M (actually with a bar over the top but I can't do that easily in html). Then in the equations describing galactic gravitation he wrote c*M. "c" is the scale factor here. He doesn't know the real mass of the clouds, which I'll call "m". You can always find "c" so that m=cM (c=m/M). That's the scale factor here; instead of using "m" (the real-but-unknown mass) he uses "c*M" (an unknown fraction of his favorite guess for the mass).

We know the clouds aren't going to be more massive than M--by construction that would make the galaxy too massive. So c<=1. And they aren't empty, so c>0. But whether they mass fifteen thousand suns or a sand-box worth isn't obvious. It is legitimate to do such mathematical maneuvering if you're trying to illustrate some important connections. Unfortunately his important connection is purely hypothetical.

Another question that arose was what the clouds are supposed to be made of: cold gas isn’t going to radiate; you need dust.

UPDATE from comments:
One of the profs reminded us that cold gas won't be ionized, and neutral atoms only absorb and radiate in particular characteristic wavelengths. Only much more complicated (dust-sized) particles can radiate in a spectrum when they're that cold.

Another question is when such clouds form. If after the transition from which we get the cosmic microwave background (when the universe cooled enough to turn transparent to light(*)), then there are some technical questions about how uniform the gas can be, since structures are already starting to coalesce.

In the main author's pet theory the Jeans clouds should further condense into clouds with embedded "micro brown dwarfs" of about Earth's mass, consisting of about 14 degree blobs of hydrogen at nearly the triple point (solid, liquid, and gas happily coexisting). (They’d be too small to search for with "microlensing", since the radius at which their gravity would cause interesting curvature of distant stars would actually be inside the liquid blob. So you’d not see any strange "jumps" when a star passed near one.)

The upshot: interesting observation, but the model proposed has problems and isn’t near explaining the missing matter problem.

(*) When you have a dense plasma, light doesn’t go very far. Only when things cool down enough so that nuclei get their full complement of electrons, and neutral atoms form, does light get a chance to shine.

Mali's Salafists

I was curious what the Malian government would do when the Salafists started destroying shrines in Timbuktu. The answer seems to have been ... nothing. Possibly because the government doesn't care that much, or possibly because the army couldn't get its act together and they know it--the rebels beat them once already.

But the acts aroused a lot of outcry outside Mali. Most of what I heard was from the US, of course, though I suspect any complaint from Saudi Arabia would be muted. The Mali rebels are their kind of people.

This time around I expect to hear serious outrage now that the Salafists have taken to obliterating 8000-year old petroglyphs. I predict that the outrage will be considerably louder than before.

The Salafists will no doubt conclude that we empathize more with stone-age pagans than with medieval "heretic" Muslims, and there's something to that. SWPL said that any religion but Christianity was cool, but any ethical monotheism is going to be less cool to the SWPL crowd than shamans or mantras.

But to be fair to us, part of the matter is that we love a mystery and the petroglyph meanings are a mystery and who the heirs of the makers are is a mystery. Timbuktu's shrines are, to us, merely obscure. You can find out who was who, and what was in the ancient books if you want to.

T.S. Eliot nailed it

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

From "Choruses from 'The Rock'"

I _can_ blame headline writers for this

The BBC made as the off-page headline for this story about creativity and mental illness this monstrosity: "Creativity 'a mental illness'". The actual story headline was "Creativity 'closely entwined with mental illness'"

Anyhow... after saying that writers were at risk for anxiety and bipolar and depression and substance abuse (and photographers and dancers to be bipolar), they report Swedish researchers as concluding

As a group, those in the creative professions were no more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders than other people.

But they were more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism, the Journal of Psychiatric Research reports.

And the article includes the usual celebration:

Similarly, the disordered thoughts associated with schizophrenia might spark the all-important originality element of a masterpiece.

Only if the writer has the discipline to whip it back into order. Otherwise you don't get originality but randomness. I can't recall who pointed out that thousands of poets used laudanum or the like, but only one wrote Kubla Khan.

Beth Murphy (at Mind) pleads for a little sense of proportion:

It is important that we do not romanticise people with mental health problems, who are too often portrayed as struggling creative geniuses.

Too late for this article...

Near-Death

You can't blame the headline writer for "The Scientific Cause of Near Death Experiences" this time. The authors of the paper in question have startling chutzpah: "Only then will discussion of near-death experiences move beyond theological dialogue and into the lawful realm of empirical neurobiology."

But if you look more closely at their paper they have a lot of A is like B therefore A may be B. They do not have a "scientific cause", they have an untested hypothesis in which some of the effects (such as the bright tunnel) are like known effects that might be associated with dying, and others are associated with "brain pathologies" (no explanation of how these brain pathologies arise when the brain is shutting down). "For example, dopamine and opioid systems become
active when an animal is under predatory attack." is invoked to explain a feeling of peace. The UK Medical Council did not get their money's worth.

About the only thing that seems to be new is a breakdown showing ratios of near-death experiences: those who didn't get them, those who did, and those who did even though they weren't at risk.

Check it yourself if you like.

Baumgartner

Congratulations to Baumgartner! You couldn't get me in the balloon, much less stepping out of it; and there's no way I'd have broken out of the tumble--that demanded experience.

Before the kvetchers start in complaining that this was a dangerous waste of money just to satisfy ego, let me counter-assert that we'd never have gotten anywhere if it weren't for people who wanted to do useless things; things like paddle a log upstream or fiddle with electric tubes that glow in the dark.

Maybe nothing will ever come of learning how to jump from space, but I celebrate the urge to explore the limits. And give a thought for the ones who died trying.

BTW, this isn't quite the same thing as teenagers tightrope walking on a bridge cable. Baumgartner planned.

Is the Internet undermining print and radio?

According to Pew more people read news online than read the newspaper for news. I've worried before about how reporting is supposed to be funded if everybody gets news for free, but that's a side issue here.

The received wisdom is that people quit reading papers because the newspaper cost money, but online news is free.

This image is from Pew Research Center.

They don't show numbers from before 2004 for online news, but two things jump out at me here. Rates of reliance on newspaper and radio news are almost the same, and show a long steady drop that began well before there was much in the way of internet news. And the rate of increase of internet news use grew faster than the newspaper use dropped.

I can guess why TV news didn't fall that rapidly: they have the tools to jazz it up and make entertainment of it in ways radio doesn't. Reading about an attack isn't as gripping as seeing the blood, and though you don't actually learn anything new watching a reporter standing in the hurricane you get the race-car thrill of wondering if something will blow him away.

Radio news is succinct: so much so that there's neither depth nor breadth. All Some Things Considered is a bit of an exception to the depth, if you make proper allowances for their bias in material to report on.

But the newspaper allows quite a bit of detail. True, most of the stories tend to be thumbnail reports, and important local trends are sometimes covered up.

Why both newspaper and radio track each other so closely puzzles me. Perhaps both were found wanting and people gave up on news? Since the trend is independent of internet developments I don't see how the net is responsible for their losses.

The rapid rise of internet news readers shows there is a market for news. There's no breakdown for how many different sources or aggregators people used. I'd like to see that, and also what sources they used.

For example, if John Doe watches MSNBC his iPhone, is that TV or Internet? If it is the same program? If it is the same style of infotainment even if it isn't the same program?

Is it news if it is about celebrities trying to get attention?

From the lack of effect on other media I tentatively guess that a goodly part of the rise in internet news is really a rise in TV-affiliated infotainment.

We have no TV (years ago I learned that the information density in TV news was very low). We subscribe to two newspapers: a county daily and a local weekly. I listen to the radio for about 30 minutes a day (15minutes to and 15minutes from work), only about 2-4 minutes of which is news. The vast majority of news I find online, because it is there and not available in the paper or the radio.

Nature imitates art; or funny honey

Yellow/orange is so last year.

You've probably seen the pictures of the French blue and green honey produced when bees dumpster-dived M&M residue at a factory that reprocesses waste from a Mars chocolate factory. If these were clean candies and dyes that might be fine, but this is undefined waste and who knows why any particular batch was chucked. So the beekeepers can't sell the honey.

Different pollens give slightly different flavors, though it looks as though, contrary to popular myth, bees don't make intoxicating marijuana honey. Apparently the pollen doesn't have any THC, and bees allegedly don't pollinate it anyhow.

If the truth be known, I can't always easily distinguish one variety of honey from another. The note of sugar tends to overwhelm my palate. (Not that that's a bad thing...) There are subtle differences, but perhaps the fact that I don't have words or images for them makes it harder to recognize them and file them in memory.

But I think I could tell blue from red.

Sanity in Falun

By now everybody has heard of the school Swedish chef Annika Eriksson and Katarina Lindberg, the bureaucrat responsible for telling her to make the kids' food worse. In trying to follow up on this I found stories from France to Indonesia: all sourcing the same news story above.

And then what? There was a storm of unhappy comments on the news site above and presumably elsewhere as well, and Katarina was forced to back down, though she is, naturally enough, trying to spin it as a misunderstanding. Figuring out the real issue isn't rocket science, though: the Swedish students put together a Facebook page in support of the cook which referenced

Sweden's "Jantelagen" ('Jante Law'), the name for a typically Scandinavian value system which emphasizes the collective over the individual, sometimes resulting in the devaluation of success or achievement.

BTW, I got nowhere trying to google the story until I tried the bureaucrat's name. It turns out the chef's real name is "Britannica Eriksson." Modulo some c/k spelling shifts.

Tagging art

A man scrawled a slogan on a Rothko painting at the Tate museum. He claims to have "added value," presumably because even if the painting is restored his actions add a bit of extra history to the piece. His explanation involves something incomprehensible about "yellowism" about which the less said the more sane we all are.

Over at Althouse several of the comments have pointed out that it is difficult to ruin a Rothko painting because it never had any artistry to begin with. (I summarize.)

It is hard to contradict them. From an artistic viewpoint, this is no worse than the tagging on an alley wall.

Probably the painting's dollar value was nothing more than a counter in the "what can I invest in" game played by the ultra-rich. But a lot of sheep have persuaded themselves that the painting was wonderful, and he was trying to slime what they valued--not to demolish idols and save souls (or at least the soul of the art world), but to make himself look important. I don't know what he thinks in his heart of hearts; I only know what he is reported to have said.

I think I could face a major collapse in art prices with equanimity.(*) I have my own "Rothko" in the garage where I wipe the paint out of brushes before soaking them. But this fellow is vile. Maybe he is crazy too. It is possible to be both.

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(*)Our holdings are quite small and represent things in the heavens above or the earth below or the waters under the earth. Or dragons painted by EldestDaughter.

Punishment and society's scale

While driving away from MiddleDaughter's neighborhood the other day I was relieved to note that the four main drug dealer families(*) in the cul-de-sac were gone. But I couldn't let well enough alone and took to wondering: what became of them? They're not in prison, just evicted. So some other unhappy neighborhood has to deal with them. It's a game of musical houses; who gets stuck with the crooks when the music stops? Or like Greyhound therapy for the mentally ill street people who won't cooperate.

In theory the crooks will eventually make a mistake and wind up in prison, though if assault isn't good enough to do the trick I don't know what will be. Then they will be safely tucked away where they can't harm the general public. Penitentiary was supposed to give them a place to be sorry for their crimes, though in practice it seems to work best as a "keep them away from us for a while" facility.

I'm not going to try to figure out what's ideal.

But centuries ago punishments were much more draconian. There wasn't any prison in the villages, so you were fined or whipped or modified or executed; no sitting in prison for 10 years. You stayed locked up until you were punished. A criminal could run away to another village to escape punishment, and that's presumably one of the reasons people didn't trust strangers very much. (Without someone to vouch for you you might not be permitted to stay in town. An innkeeper might do that for you, if he liked your looks and cash up front.)

So to first order a village had two choices in dealing with a bad actor: expel him and hope he goes somewhere else, or apply some fairly dramatic punishment to encourage him to stop being such a villain. If nothing worked and his actions were still intolerable, you can see that there might be a groundswell of support for a permanent solution. If you can't persuade the guy to stop stealing, make it impossible for him to steal. (IIRC small villages weren't typically authorized to hang or whack off hands. I'm just saying they wouldn't necessarily find the punishment disproportionate.)

Of course if the punishment for theft is loss of hand, that's the punishment, and it is apt to apply to the fellow stealing from hunger as well as the fellow who steals because he won't work. So that punishment's going to be seriously unjust sometimes, as well as cruel. Yes, cruel--would you want to be the man who does the whacking? If so be prepared, nobody wants to be around you except the seriously creepy.

(The rich expanded the number of capital offenses if it suited them.)

In England things started changing around 1800. (Follow the link; a sentence of death didn't mean you died.) England had quite a large list of capital offenses, some of which (as linked earlier) weren't that serious. So they started reforming the laws.

There's a chicken and egg question here that I don't know enough details about to guess the answer to. Did there grow a moral revulsion to having so many death sentences, or was the society large enough that it was now possible to "keep them away from us" and reduce the sense of urgency for harsh punishment? Or was there a bit of both? It might be possible to get some idea by looking at opposition to the reforms as a function of community isolation.

If today every neighborhood was stuck with the handling of its own petty and not-so-petty criminals, what would the punishments look like?

(*) No, we didn't see drugs change hands. But at all hours, she saw "friends" of the four stop over briefly with a bag from MacDonalds and share "food."

Corrected which daughter

Hungering for potential

Let me insert a short preface on sex, to make sure we're talking the same language. We understand that because something is popular or common doesn’t automatically make it natural, though it will only take its power from some urge that is natural.

When a woman's eyes and body say "You could have me" she typically isn’t just communicating that she wants a romp in the hay. That's part of the message but trying to spell the rest out in words sounds clunky. Better go with Shakespeare, who wrote (Macbeth: Malcolm is being persuaded to be a king) about the many women who "will to greatness dedicate themselves." Twain complained that most women would rather have a fraction of a great man than a mediocre man all to themselves. The word "have" is key, and it isn’t symmetric.

The man's standard role in that relationship is partly that of protector/provider, which in our twisted-up world means women flock to the rich and powerful. But it also involves expressing something great: women notoriously flock to rock stars too, and to a lesser degree to other artists. (I've not noticed a lot of groupies around mathematicians, though. Perhaps those who can appreciate the more austere arts are more astute, and the more astute women look for great character.) The "you could have me" message is therefore very powerful, since it signals that I am great. Perhaps I'm great enough to have more than one!

I'm a little reluctant to try to describe what the woman's side is like ("sexist pig!") since I'm not a woman. Both sexes serve each other, so it isn't "service", 50 Shades of Grey's popularity to the contrary. FWIW the only people I've seen reading that book are women, so there's some female attraction to it; portraying some natural urge buried in the weeds somewhere that is distantly related to the attitude of the heroine to her master.

There are a lot of things in this world whose explanations don't speak of the power and nuance in the things. The word "home" could be explained as "the place I eat and sleep and am used to being comfortable" but think how much the explanation leaves out! So forgive me if I don't try to tease out a description of what that natural urge will be: it would mislead at best. Here be traps and monsters.

As "Shades of Grey" and the whole rest of the industry of porn prove, the natural can be buried far enough to be unrecognizable, especially when dressed in symbolism. For example if you know of pole dances, they're more symbolic than erotic--those aren't the gestures of a woman reaching for her man. (If you don't, don't go looking: you'll either be perplexed/revolted or enticed, and perhaps both--and you can't un-see a picture.)

End of preface.

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We're in love with potential.

I don't just mean the way everybody loves babies. Babies have lots of potential, but they're also innocent people interacting here and now. I mean money. I mean hatred of commitment. And more.

Money is nothing but potential. Unless it gets used for something in the future it does nothing for me except serve as a scorecard for competition. It is important to have around: you want to be able to buy food tomorrow, and save a little potential so you can get more food when you're temporarily out of work. But we love some of that potential, don’t we?

A college freshman has the choice of many majors: lots of potential. You may have known someone who kept changing majors; never quite satisfied or perhaps afraid to commit the effort to succeed. After graduation, there's a wide choice of careers—and surely you know/knew someone who waited for the right job.

Can you point to someone who is waiting for "the perfect mate" and can't seem to choose anybody who is preferable to their current life of "potential?" Who's afraid to marry because somebody better might come along? Me too: not in my circle of friends but among my children's generation.

The young lady posing on the dock with the come-hither look communicates potential--a potential the wife fulfills; but the young lady catches the eye and the imagination anyway. (Not that the husband is dissatisfied; the attraction appeals, as pointed out in the preface, to masculine pride. And to possibilities.)

The "new and improved" calls out "potential!" This cereal might really be satisfying!

I wonder if those of us who have trouble starting (or perhaps finishing) projects have a similar niggling in the back of the mind: right now it is still full of potential, but when the paint is dry the blobs and nicks may not look so good.

Pop songs rejoice in young love. Lots of potential there. Some country songs speak of family and growing, but pop is pretty firmly in love with potential, and has been so for decades. ("With pen in hand," "Isn't she lovely," and "Tea for two" come to mind quickly as exceptions; so this isn’t 100%--but nearly. If the song isn't about new love it's about breakup; kids don't enter the picture.)

The fall TV lineups used to evoke excitement. The new shows sounded like they’d be wonderful. I remember that the anticipation was generally much better than the real shows. It is probably still the same but I'm out of touch.

Results take work and time, but potential is right there and we can dream of it any time--at least until it ages away.

Flowers for potential, fruit for fulfillment: we're a flower culture. Or at least we've a very large (and barren) flower sub-culture.

My eyes hurt.

Now yours will too.

Dream of how shockingly senseless and alien today's fashions will be in 40 years.

Lovecraft could do it justice

The image changed under me, so I uploaded a new one

Letting campaigning pass by

Fortunately this isn't New Hampshire where one is obligated to meet a dozen presidential candidates every four years.

I was able to work from home, and am grateful for the opportunity. The traffic tie-ups when a president comes to town are miserable--not as disastrous as in L.A., but hard to avoid in a city caught between lakes.

The threatened rain never became a serious downpour, so the thousands that went to do darshan probably had their desire. I had to pick up YoungestSon from MATC, and saw state troopers blocking off access to the interstate as I drove by: we'd left just in time. 10 minutes more and the turn lanes would have been backed up half a mile and started blocking a lane in the construction zone. I guess they wanted the interstate empty for when AirForce 1 flew over it.

"Make way for your betters!"

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No, I didn't watch the debate. I know only a little about Romney (not all good), but by now I know more than enough about Obama.

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UPDATE: This morning I found out the SS was randomizing the route, and the motorcade took the Beltline to the Interstate. A long route, but I guess they like to change things up.

I'm not a luddite, but

The Navaho and Hopi and a dozen other tribes are ticked with Arizona Snowbowl, which plans to use effluent (somewhat treated) to create snow this year. We
are assured that "the treated water meets the highest standards — just below drinking water" and some reports suggest that the snow machines will use a mix of treated and fresh water instead of 100% treated. The story emerged last year but this Feb a judge said it was OK to go ahead with using the treated water in the snow mix.

I tend to de-weight Indian claims of sacred territory. Treat that as a moral failing if you like. Nevertheless I think I'm on their side this time, even if it is the losing side again.

There's no research I know of showing effects on humans, but various studies show deleterious effects on fish and roaches from estrogenic chemicals. What the effects of elavil and darvon residues are is anybody's guess at this point. One also finds caffeine at rates up to micrograms/liter. Those are small concentrations, but when the organism is young small concentrations matter. Slosh the mix on the mountains, pour it down the streams: we're conducting a grand experiment on the waterways; and on ourselves for that matter. I won't go so far as the say the mountains are especially sacred, but I do think this isn't wise.

Does anybody know what work is being done to clean these things out of the water?

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Apparently one can even measure drug abuse rates in a city by measuring residues in treated sewage.

Winners by proxy

The past few weeks I've seen a number of fresh(wo)men (for the first month you can usually tell who's new) wearing Wisconsin Rose Bowl shirts. The last win was in 2000, when the freshmen were 6 years old and probably not following college football closely. Naturally the team that won is long gone. Nevertheless a sense of continuity, or at least the desire for continuity, is strong enough to induce freshmen to part with a few extra bucks to co-celebrate a distant victory.