History lessons

Lewis said we needed the perspective of other eras and other cultures in order to see the problems in our own. Things we find self-evident might be quite hard to argue to a Spartan or even to someone as recent as George Washington. Just imagine trying to explain the US political system and debates to Socrates. I'd love to see that tried; I suspect the result would resemble Weston's address to Oyarsa. Who else remembers Steve Allen's "Meeting of Minds?"

Not knowing much history to begin with makes this rather hard, and viewing it all through deconstructionist glasses makes it worse--if I understand Cicero better than his fellow Romans, I have nothing to learn from him.

Sometimes what we learn from the past is that we're not doing anything new. Most people know enough about kings to know that the US president is, by now, a king in all but name; complete with royal tasters. If you've read much about the Louis the Sun King, you understand that Washington DC is full of courtiers jockeying for attention and access. And you can recognize aspects of sumptuary laws in debates about guns and nature preserves and the proper price of energy. Sequestering the royal lands from the lower classes has a similar shape to trying to sequester parks from mere middle-class tourists. (Similar in more ways than one; both can be persuasively argued on the basis of preservation and good stewardship.)

There are plenty of useful old lessons: price controls make things worse, trying to buy off an opponent doesn't work for long, cultures matter, and so on.

But even when we know these things, we also know that we're sui generis: nobody else has ever had a Federal Reserve managing the interest rates to deal with monetary problems so we can safely do things that destroyed other nations. Give the old tool a new name ("fairness") and we forget that confiscation doesn't play out well in the end.

The old rules don't have to apply to me; I'm unique. Some say I am not the center of the universe, but wherever I go, there I am.

We're doomed to repeat history not just because we don't know history, but because we refuse to recognize ourselves there. Which is just human "nature;" we detest vices in others that we cultivate in ourselves.

Mercy

I heard of the Feast of Divine Mercy, and when I looked it up found a mix of good reminders and jarring claims. The "Hour of Divine Mercy" is supposed to be 3pm (the hour Jesus died), an "hour at which mercy is best received." Clearly we need another 23 St. Faustinas for the rest of the clock. And on the Feast day participants in confession and communion are "assured by Jesus of full remission of their sins and punishments." So maybe we need another 365 of her.

On the other hand some of the topics were more than reasonable--reiterations of Jesus' warning that we need to show mercy; suggesting that if we can't do we should speak comfort, and if neither we should pray--for everyone we meet in trouble. I get a little distracted and overlook a lot. Not good.

And when we "overlook a lot" we let the default works of the world act:
"Charge the hungry, Bill the thirsty, Photograph the naked, Shunt aside the homeless, Bury the sick, Forget the imprisoned, Vote on behalf of the dead"

I've said "when I get around to it" too much. There's not much we can usefully (and not harmfully) do for the homeless around the square, but I don't always even want to.

Saturnian rain?

I couldn't pass up this story about rain from Saturn's rings.

Apparently we've known for a while that Saturn's upper atmosphere doesn't glow as brightly as expected. Solar wind hitting the molecules there should ionize some and make them glow; and they do--but not quite enough.

It was proposed some time back that water from the rings might quench the interactions that make the infrared glow, but it was hard to prove.

This team got a detailed look at the IR glow, and found banding that has some resemblance to the bands of the rings.

The team didn't actually detect water, but they modeled how ionized water (solar wind hits the ring material too) would stream from the rings down to the surface along magnetic field lines and make certain regions glow less, producing the patterns they see.

Of course this isn't "rain" in the sense of drops of water. In fact it would either have to be extremely rarefied or else there's some recycling mechanism that sends water back out to the rings somehow (and I haven't a clue how that would work).

The rings are supposed to be 3x10^22 g of ice (mostly), and the area being hit on Saturn is (conservatively) about 1x10^20 cm^2. A million years is about 3x10^13 seconds, so if the rings aren't going to evaporate in a million years then they can't lose more than 10^9 g/second. If they're flying at about 1000m/sec (to be very conservative) then the "rain" has to have a density less than 1x10^-16 g/cm^3.

Unfortunately I don't have the time to estimate how long water would stay present in the upper atmosphere or how much you need to produce the quenching they see. You could use those numbers to get a rough estimate of how much water they need falling in to produce the effect they see, and then we could see how much the rings would be losing each year, and whether this made sense.

Facebook

Facebook reminds me of a car plastered so thickly with bumper-stickers that you wonder if the driver can see out the rear window.

No, I do not want to play Farmville. You not have my birth date. Accepting those cute little "gifts" requires registration with a third party I've no reason to trust. I can't be bothered to redo my picture. And however persuasive you may find them, your emotional slogans don't seem quite eloquent enough to overthrow my own judgments and rush me to your political/social banner.

On the other hand, I'm sorry to hear about your dog, I hope your daughter does well in the audition, and that looks like a terrible accident and I'll be praying for you. My better half says Facebook is the only way to keep in touch with some remote friends and family, so she endures the political rubbish. I swore off Facebook for Lent on the grounds that it was bad for my temper. Perhaps I should have taken it on daily as a mortification instead.

Dentistry

Crown him with many crowns;
Cement and octocaine.
Feel how the dreaded grinding sound
Itself brings deeper pain.
Lament the broken tooth,
Bewail forgotten brush,
Count breaths Lamaze-like carefully
And leave arm-rests uncrushed.

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This will be number 8 (not counting repairs)--not the sturdiest teeth in the world. The vibration of that drill seems to shake nerves the injections don't reach (sort of like the dispersed sensations of tickling, but painful). And yes, I've tried those Lamaze exercises that my better half and I practiced together, but I tend to get distracted. I have not transcended dental medication.

But I'd hate to be without modern dentistry; the alternatives are so much worse and tooth repairs work almost as well as the originals.

Success

Preamble

I assume a few things.

1. The intrinsic value of a person has nothing to do with their IQ or any secular measure of success.
   
2. The law of supply and demand means compensation for jobs anybody can do will be lower. But see Point 1 above.
   
3. A man needs to work, if at all possible. His nature is to need to be needed and appreciated.
   
4. Godel's Unprovability Theorem can be applied to legal and regulatory frameworks. There will always be one more problem the system can't solve.
   

Getting in the door

I'll ignore the dishonest ways of making a living. They're all predatory or parasitic, involving clubs and dark alleys, lying labels, crony government policies and similar destructive tools.

To do a successful job, you have to get the job somehow, and here is where all the usual problems of the world come in. It is easier and more reliable to hire people you know you can trust because they're family, or friends, or trusted by friends. Notice how children of actors seem to have an in in the movie business, and how Ivy League people hire each other?

If you're a Hutu businessman, do you worry that a Tutsi might (feeling no tribal loyalty) be more likely to help himself from the till? Maybe that's prejudice, and maybe it isn't. Tribal loyalty isn't overwhelming, but it can tip the scales when choosing between two men you don't know and don't have good references for.

That seems unfair, and it is; but personal connections, tribal affiliation, and political pull are huge around the world, and even here in the USA where we like to think we're evenhanded. We do a better job being fair, even leaning over backwards sometimes, but some problems are very hard to get rid of; and multiplying regulations eventually replaces personal bias with political favoritism. Before you assume I'm bragging on the US ("better job being fair") without cause, ask how many Germans are professors in US colleges, and then ask how many Americans are professors in German colleges. Or French. Or Italian. Or Swiss.

Suppose you had an ethnic minority that were more skillful in some field than the rest, and came to dominate not just the rank-and-file but also the management, solely on merit. Now the thought experiment: how do you tell the difference between that situation and one in which that minority were selectively hiring only their own tribe?

The problem--not solvable as far as I can tell--is that whatever measurements you try to make to show that the hiring is purely by merit, they will not satisfy the envious counterclaim that "They're biased and if you just gave me a chance I could do as well." The politically expedient solution is to enforce injustice with quotas or penalties--and it isn't just a modern solution.

Raw Talent

I wanted to be an astronaut, of course, but I never had a shot at it. Vision, reaction time--not good enough. I could have worked on being in better physical shape, but I'd never have been one of the chosen pilots.

No amount of training would have made me a pro basketball player--I have neither the height nor the build for speed.

In math, though, I was fast. Some classmates mastered things almost as well, some eventually got it, and some didn't understand in time (by the end of the semester). That last group included some who, if you gave them another semester, would eventually master the material, and others who were so slow that I think by the time they mastered B they'd have forgotten A, and so would never be able to finish.

Just as there are physical gifts, there are mental ones, and there's no substitute for having the raw material.

I gather that twin studies put the hereditary component of IQ at about .8. IQ seems to correlate very well with college board tests, and with a host of other tests designed to eliminate cultural biases. The distribution is sort of like a bell curve, but not quite: nobody is below 0, and on the high end the tester is trying to estimate the intelligence of somebody smarter than him.

So this raw material for analytical skill is distributed in the population more or less like this familiar curve, with most people near the average and a few in the very dumb and very smart tails.

But success doesn't always line up with IQ, even in controlled environments like college. The talk linked by AVI tells us that there's a threshold IQ/SAT below which you typically don't succeed at all in college, but even above that the correlation between grade and SAT is only about .4.

The raw IQ by itself isn't the whole story. The difference isn't hard to find: perseverance and self discipline make up a lot (maybe all) the rest. Anybody around a college can quickly find some bright slackers and some hardworking ordinary guys.

Just as an example, college students more or less divide into the mostly partiers and the mostly studiers. In terms of perseverance you might get a distribution sort of like this.

When it comes grading time, the distribution would look more like the second plot than the first, blurred a bit. OK, blurred a lot. This is a toy model, given just to illustrate the point, not to describe College U.

Putting it together--what's missing?

I'm taking college success as a model for success in the rest of what you attempt. This isn't because college guarantees anything, but because it is a simpler model. In the rest of life accidents and the connections/tribes I mentioned above start to play bigger roles--college is a more controlled environment. Getting cancer isn't as large a risk in college life as it is in middle age careers, and college departments don't usually go under because of cheap Chinese imports.

Despite the differences, the similarities are significant. A job that requires more mental horsepower than you have will not be done very well. If you don't apply a lot of perseverance to your job, you probably won't keep it.

We try to make the playing field level by looking for discrimination, and we try to provide opportunity and encouragement. Despite lots of efforts there doesn't seem to be any way of providing mental horsepower from environmental stimulation; you have what you have.

What remains is for you to use what you have. But to do that requires some disciplines that we don't usually try to encourage. We demand that athletes and music students exercise self discipline, put aside pleasant distractions to focus on the goal, and persevere through bleak times. Athletes especially we demand courage of. We don't ask much of that from the rest.

Virtues

Perseverance and self control are among the virtues; signs of a good character. Justice, courage, balance/temperance, and fortitude/perseverance are one set of classic virtues, to which you can add humility, good will, and plenty of others.

It isn't that hard to see how these traits develop our innate skills and make us better people; I'd say it takes a willful blindness not to notice. But it seems these don't emerge spontaneously; they require training and practice. They didn't develop spontaneously in the kids I've known (ours and others), and they certainly don't grow spontaneously in good old me. I need lots of reminders, lots of reminders.

It's a bit hard to ask our children to develop virtues that we don't try to use ourselves. Easier to go along with whatever the culture's favorite trends are. Justice would mean evaluating ourselves--not fun. It is more pleasant to avoid situations that demand courage. And why not indulge myself a little more--I still have some checks left.

I'm trying to think of which of virtues we celebrate. We deprecate self-control. Vast expanses of advertising are designed to get you to lose that self-control in favor of buying something they want you to want.

"Tolerance" is a current favorite; but it is at best only a half virtue compared to its adult relatives justice and humility.

Any others? We're big on self esteem, but that's not exactly a virtue. We like heroes, but prefer them flawed.

We try to inculcate the civic virtue of respect--unless the reproof is likely to result in being accused of racism, in which case we just pretend nothing is wrong, or else the disrespect is understandable because of the child's problems. Of course a child who doesn't learn at home all the more desperately needs the rest of us to instruct him, but ... I got all kinds of static for reprimanding some black kids whose rudeness on the bus was escalating.

I don't have a clear suggestion here, just the observation that virtue plays a huge role in what we are eventually able to do. Not everything, as I pointed out at the start

Work world and the lower IQ

I keep hearing the same sorts of "We need to become a knowledge-based economy" punditry. Think about it a minute. If the only people working are the ones with lots of knowledge and high IQs, what do the rest of us do: Lounge and rot? Without something useful to do we get restless, and worse. (Sometimes even when we do have useful work...)

Ideally, except for the very lowest IQs, there should be something each person can do, however simple. Just looking around at the streets I think there is still plenty of room for unskilled labor. (It seems that more than half the time the leaves are damp enough that a leaf blower is no faster than a broom or rake.)

Parenthetically, children need to learn the work-related disciplines by doing simple jobs. But when all the simple lawn jobs are taken already by cheap imported labor, where do our children go to learn what it is like to be responsible for a job?

The simple jobs are not going to pay well, quite possibly not enough to live independently. The adverb "independently" seems critical here. Unfortunately I don't have any good schemes for encouraging mutual support or family support. If it isn't there I don't know how to make it appear. And we have a nasty tendency to value the person by how much money or equivalent they can earn.

I'm not brimming with wonderful solutions here. It is easy to say "teach the children about virtue and good character" and "take care of your family" but not so easy to do--though it is probably easier than bucking the vested interests who are importing cheap labor and cheap votes.

But for starters I think we should try a little "rectification of names:" call things by their real names and understand the things that are lacking.

Dark matter hype

Strassler has a good analysis of the results announced by Sam Ting about the AMS results. Jester also wrote about it.

The IceCube journal club talked about it this morning too, and the conclusion was the same.

The paper was billed as evidence for dark matter, as shown by odd features in the ratio of positrons to electrons hitting the AMS detector in orbit around the Earth. The notion is that the features are due to dark matter decaying into electron/positron pairs.

Unfortunately the structure shown doesn't really suggest much of anything, because nobody has a clear enough model of what to expect. Something is odd, but whether this is something like the knee in ordinary cosmic rays or something different is hard to tell yet. The most interesting information was left out (the highest energy region), probably because the uncertainties are much harder to determine.

The detector uses two methods of calculating energy: bending in a magnetic field and measuring how much light is produced when the particle smashes and "showers" in the "calorimeter". The problem is that at very high energies the track in the magnetic field is very nearly straight, and it gets harder to tell positive from negative then. And the shower of particles and light becomes large enough to leak out the back of the "calorimeter." So there are larger and more complicated uncertainties on the really high energy electrons.

The hoopla is fake and annoying. However, the work they did is quite good. They had to figure out which particles were electrons and which were the far more common protons, measure their energy two ways, and do all this in a satellite. It would be easy (relatively) to do this kind of thing with a ground-based machine where you don't have to worry about weight and can just plug into the wall for electricity. To do it in orbit is a tour-de-force.

But it says nada about dark matter. I can't blame the reporters for getting it wrong this time, the press release is full of enthusiastic hints.

BTW, if you look at the low end of the spectrum in their plot, you see a huge difference between the AMS and the Pamela data. That turns out to be easy to understand. What's plotted is a ratio between positrons and electrons hitting the detector, and the Sun has been acting up lately and slinging out a lot more electrons, so the ratio changed.

New Mars Mission?

Apparently comet 2013-A1 is headed in the general direction of Mars, and has a 1/2000 chance of hitting it with nearly dino-killer energy.

All in favor of a NASA emergency mission to nudge the comet to the bulls-eye, raise your hand.

Thought so.

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Yes, I thought April Fools too, but this one is dated 26-Mar.

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And yes, I read Protector too.

Puzzles

With a hat tip to Texan99, a fascinating report on the dynamics of breast milk. There are indications that when a mother senses that the infant is suffering from infection, she automatically ups the immune factors in the milk. Or maybe both are suffering and the reaction is hers? They say they can't prove it yet.

In humans, there’s early data suggesting that mothers produce fattier milk for boys than girls. But that may be only part of the story, as Hinde has found with rhesus macaques. "Just because sons are getting better milk doesn’t mean they’re getting more. It looks like they’re getting very similar total calories."

The macaque male babies get more cortisol than the females, and cortisol in infancy makes them more adventurous later in life.

And one of the sugars isn't digestible by babies--but by some of their gut bacteria. We all knew (I hope) that mother's milk was better than formula (though kids grow fine on formula), but I didn't expect individual tailoring like this.

But one thing: where do the babies pick up the gut bacteria? From the dirt? From mother's skin? They aren't present in utero, are they?

Lots of simple things turn out to be extremely complicated.

Like dirt, if the subject change isn't too jarring. There are so many different organisms in topsoil, communicating with each other directly or accidentally, so many chemicals at work--it is hard even to figure out which are inside the organisms and which outside. Last time I asked a researcher he said they were still scratching the surface. So to speak.

From the same aggregator Texan99 linked to (Rocket Science) is a link to a report on a study of the remains of "governors of ancient Egypt" which concludes that they were often malnourished and estimates only a 30-year average lifetime.

Unfortunately the home site is in Spain and not translated, so picking out critical details is hard. But I'm a little puzzled. It seems a bit counter-intuitive that the upper class would be seriously malnourished as a general rule (unless there were some fatuous diet fads afoot). Maybe the Nile was polluted, but IIRC they made plenty of beer. The team found a disproportionate number of 17-25 year-olds and I gather they drew conclusions from that. But if this was a cemetery for the governors and their families as claimed, perhaps only the folks who died on tour were buried there, and the rest returned to be buried in their ancestral region. They find Nubian bones there too, from which they infer intermarriage (or maybe they found obviously mixed ancestry bones too; I couldn't figure that out). (Years ago I was surprised to learn that pathologists had no trouble making accurate racial estimates from just bones.)

Extremophile genetic engineering

This story suggested they can make fuel from CO2. A little closer look a the article suggests that the editor had a bit of THC in his CO2. Executive summary: an extremophile microorganism that lives by ocean vents was modified to use CO2, provided you feed it some hydrogen. Potentially you could more readily synthesize various industrial chemicals that way; they got one of the big 12 so far.

The abstract isn't too jargon-laden (though I wonder why they say photosynthesis is inefficient), and makes an amusing comparison with "Discovery May Lead to the Creation of Biofuel from CO2 in the Atmosphere." Or you don't want to laugh you can cry. Photosynthesis makes the biofuels. This is a clever way of generating other chemicals. Kudos to Keller et al for thinking of using extremophiles.

Parody

AVI found a song and the original it was a parody of and commented:

It was written as a parody of an American tune, My Nellie's Blue Eyes, which the songwriter found appallingly sweet, sentimental, and trivial. We can therefore suspect that the original would hang around here for decades after.

A song can certainly be incompetent--at some level all are; "the sad incompetence of human speech" never quite does justice to experiences like this:

But he never understood it as now, suddenly, he understood Rosamond's arm when she leant forward to pass a plate to her sister; somehow that arm always made him think of the Downs against the sky. There was a line, a curved beauty, a thing that spoke to both mind and heart; a thing that was there for ever. And Rosamond? Rosamond was like them, she was there for ever. It occurred to him that, if she was, then her occasional slowness when he was trying to explain something was there for ever. Well, after all, Rosamond was only human; she couldn't be absolutely perfect. And then as she stretched out her arm again he cried out that she was perfect, she was more than perfect; the movement of her arm was something frightfully important, and now it was gone. He had seen the verge of a great conclusion of mortal things and then it had vanished. Over that white curve he had looked into incredible space; abysses of intelligence lay beyond it. And in a moment all that lay beyond it was the bright kitchen, and Sir Bernard standing up to go into the other room.

or (same author)

bright as if mortal flesh had indeed become what all lovers know it to be. ... But no verse, not Stanhope's, not Shakespeare's, not Dante's, could rival the original, and this was the original, and the verse was but the best translation of a certain manner of its life.

The "sweet and sentimental" songs don't do it justice, but they at least express something that irony only does at one remove, when irony isn't mocking the experience completely. I wonder if the ironists never had that quick moment of surprise, or if it was tied to something that disappointed and they want to forget, or if they think only things they can repeat are real. They arrange another meal, or another romp in the hay, or another evening in the Grand Canyon, but not the moment of awe; so it must not have been quite real.

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It occurs to me that because Mickey Mouse was copyrighted and not trademarked, American readers are not supposed to click on the links to that Australian site.

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UPDATE: I should have been a little clearer with the title. I'm not deprecating parody as such: I've been generating parodies of one stripe or another as long as I can remember, and still automatically revamp lyrics. (The best I can do is a couple of lines before I have to stop and think a while, though.) (Maybe next Lent) And some parodies (Alice in Wonderland has quite a few) are so much better than the originals that they replace them.

What annoys me is the assumption that sweetness and sentimentality are appalling. Incomplete, yes. Worth mocking in themselves, no.

And yes, I have had a moment or three of the sort alluded to in the Williams quotations, but of course not exactly like them.

Extinctions in the news

Scientists trying to date the end-Triassic extinction (hat tip to SciTech) say they've used uranium in zircon crystals from the rocks to bracket "massive volcanic eruptions from a large region known as the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP)" to be able to say that they happened over a relatively short time scale: 40,000 years. Over a long time, eruptions don't hurt much of anything (except locally), but dump vast amounts of sulfur dioxide in the air in a short amount of time and you can have problems.

Blackburn et al combined different approaches to try to estimate the dating: the Earth's wobble means that sedimentary rock accumulates with a pattern that has a cycle of about 26,000 years. They compared estimates taken from this with the classic U←Pb decay studies of zircon crystals, and came up with an error estimate of 30,000 years for dating the "CAMP" materials. They dated not the main flow, but "feeders" (suitably sandwiched rocks weren't available elsewhere) which are "interbedded with strikingly cyclical lacustrine strata," looking to "compare the time durations between basalt flows estimated by orbitally tuning the sedimentary rocks with differences between the zircon U-Pb dates of the flows.

OK, they found 4 lava flows, spaced at about at, 60, 290, and 650kyear after the extinction event. From their Figure 2 I only count 3; the first and second either don't overlap (their count) or are too close to call (my count). (No, I am not going to try to give you a better picture; I suspect this is pushing fair use pretty hard already.)

It isn't obvious exactly when the extinction event shows up. The definition they use is an aquatic one: when a particular ammonite shows up. Translating that to land-based measurements contributes largely to their 40 kyear uncertainty in comparing the extinction to their measures (not their fault; that's just the way things are in paleontology). But one thing seems pretty clear from their results: "the biologic recovery associated with the TJB was underway even as subsequent CAMP eruptions ... were occurring" later. (TJB=Triassic/Jurassic Boundary)

Pretty impressive chronological work.

I'm a little more suspicious of the dino-killer comet claims. They compare iridium and osmium levels and estimate that the impacter was smaller, and therefore must have been much faster than everyday asteroids--which leaves comets. Except why would comets be enriched in iridium? True, they might collect some from cosmic dust, but I thought they were mostly ices. (The comparisons I've seen so far comparing comet dust and cosmic dust isotope ratios have been for low atomic number. There is a body of literature on comet dust, plenty of puzzles remain for budding cosmicgeologists.)

On the other hand, one estimate for the ratio of volatiles (ice, CO, etc) to silicates etc is about 1:1. I'm not sure where they got the estimate, and am positive it would change with repeated sweeps near the Sun. So if the non-volatiles are half the mass, and those non-volatiles have the same elements concentrations as asteriods, then maybe it works OK after all.

It turned out to be a bit harder than I expected to find some simple numbers on concentrations. From here I read that iridium is O(50) parts per trillion except at the KT boundary where is is O(10) parts per billion (and that it could take 100,000 years for that much to precipitate out, meaning the boundary might be thicker than a thin layer--something I hadn't thought of). Here I read that some chondrite meteorites have iridium concentrations between 300 and 650 parts per billion.

Something about that ratio bothered me. Be generous and let the dino-killer have 1 part per million iridium. A world-wide layer of 10 parts per billion means that the dino-killer contributed 1% of the whole planet's stuff sifting into the future rocks for that era. That seems like kind of a lot. If the thing was an asteroid 10km across, then that's about 500 cubic km, and according to that font of all wisdom erosion is about 75 billion tons/year (they make that 13-40x normal), so about 3 cubic km/year would have been going to the sea back then (wave hands violently). So it actually could account for it if the iridium settled out over about 10,000 years. The numbers seem to be closer to ballpark than my naive impression of them.

And the good old Deccan Trap might have mixed in some extra iridium. I still think a broken asteroid/comet hammering the future Carribean and "popping a pimple" on the other side of the Earth is a satisfying resolution of the volcano/meteor disputes. But maybe Blackburn et al will try their hand at that next and prove the events were too far apart.

Drowning

I swim like a brick, and therefore am not the ideal person to rescue somebody, but maybe someone else would find an explanation of the symptoms of drowning useful. There are also a number of videos on drowning. A local middle schooler is in critical condition after nearly dying in the high school pool two days ago at the end of a class, with 3 life guards on duty.

Maybe a different profession? Or maybe not.

Suppose you spent 30 years as missionary and found one convert. (And you weren't too happy with him) I hadn't known that about David Livingstone, who won only one man in his career as a medical missionary. Although that one man turned out to be a tremendously effective evangelist ...

To be fair, Livingstone wasn't working full-time at evangelism the whole time; he was also exploring. I wonder if he heard a little of what his disappointing protege accomplished; the simple online biographies don't seem to say.

Pressed on my attention...

The phrase "weak as a kitten" doesn't seem perfectly apt. They are small and light, but can cling quite tenaciously to a sweater. Pound for pound I think they're stronger than I, who can more or less balance on my hind legs but couldn't cling to anything to save my life.

And did you ever notice how much the lines in Deuteronomy "Cursed shalt thou be in thy coming in, and cursed shalt thou be in thy going out" and "In the morning you shall say, Would God it were even! and at even you shall say, Would God it were morning!" sound like the flu?

Nixon again?

Nixon has several villainies in his record: the wage-price freeze and his effort to be an emperor: above the law and able to command that crimes be committed for his benefit. Now I hear claims that he sabotaged peace talks for campaign benefit, encouraging the South Vietnamese to back out of negotiations in Oct 1968.

The timetable seemed a little odd (Johnson declared a bombing halt 31-Oct-1968), so I tried to get some more details from sources that weren’t referencing the original news item. The linked article suggests a reason for his worrying about the Pentagon Papers: he wasn’t sure if there was some damning evidence associated with them. Unproven, but could be. But it is also evident that there was some fuzziness: Humphrey and Nixon were both making public statements that undercut the administration’s negotiating position. (And later on the US' fallback plans were published while negotiations were still going on—everybody was getting into the treason act, it seems. That doesn’t seem to go out of fashion: Newspapers and presidential candidates still do that sort of undercutting.)

Anyhow, between Humphrey spooking the South Vietnamese and Nixon encouraging them to back out, it complicated negotiations. Were the North Vietnamese serious? Would it have made any difference? They knew the war was unpopular and had every reason to jerk the US around a little more.

My first guess is that it didn’t make a lot of difference in the long run, but that Nixon was worse than he appeared.

Trying to focus on a constellation

Naviaux et al have a paper out on "Antipurinergic Therapy Corrects the Autism-Like Features in the Poly(IC) Mouse Model", so naturally I was interested. One of the key points is in the introduction, which I reproduce below.

The majority of children with ASD develop disease as the result of interactions between large sets of genes and environmental factors. Common comorbidities in non-single-gene forms of ASD provide important clues to shared mechanisms of disease. Comorbidities include epilepsy [2], GI abnormalities [3], sleep disturbances [2], abnormalities in tryptophan metabolism and platelet hyperserotonemia [4], altered intracellular calcium and mitochondrial dynamics [5], hypoimmunoglobulinemia [6], hyperuricosuria [7], methylation disturbances [8], disturbances in sulfur [9] and glutathione metabolism [10], neuroinflammation [11], cerebellar vermis hypoplasia [12], and Purkinje cell loss [13]. We hypothesized that all of these clinical comorbidities can result from a single, evolutionarily conserved, metabolic state associated with a cellular danger response (CDR). Since mitochondria are located at the hub of the wheel of metabolism and play a central role in non-infectious cellular stress [14], innate immunity [15], inflammasome activation [16], and the stereotyped antiviral response [17], we searched for a signaling system that was both traceable to mitochondria and critical for innate immunity. Purinergic signaling via extracellular nucleotides like ATP and ADP satisfied these requirements. In the following study we tested the role of purinergic signaling in the maternal immune activation mouse model of ASD and show that antipurinergic therapy reverses the abnormalities found in this model.

I left the footnote references in as an aid to counting. That’s quite a constellation of problems, and it would be fascinating, and quite a coup for the authors, if they revolved around a common mechanism.

Their results seemed to show some improvement, but a larger study would be more convincing. One the brighter side, the intervention was at 6 weeks, which is roughly (4-8 weeks) when mice become sexually mature, which suggests that even fairly late intervention might be fruitful. If it all works, of course. We won’t know if this has any bearing on humans for a long time, nor whether this sort of thing addresses the whole constellation.

Still, something to keep an eye on.

Trying to shape opinion or unable to comprehend?

On a CBS site I found the following internet poll:

Are you surprised it's actually illegal for 140,000
 unmarried Virginia couples to be living together?
Yes. How is that possible?

No. There are a lot of outdated laws.

If that's true, I'm breaking the law.
Vote
View Results

So I have a poll of my own to match it.

Was the poll composer

1. completely ignorant that the law might have a reasonable purpose?
   
2. trying to stir up opinion against it?
   
3. trying to show how cool and with-it he is?
   

Francis

Don't be just "a compassionate NGO".

I like it. He's probably seen NGO's up close and knows the qualifier isn't automatic. And without the living center to renew it, even compassion gets eroded away.

I gather the usual suspects are shocked that the pope turns out to be Catholic, and have been busily trying to dig up or innuendo-up as much dirt as they can. By their fruits you know them.

I'm not exactly the best person to be measuring somebody's holiness, but so far so good, and prayers and best wishes for Francis.

Correlation and causation and failure of imagination

The title is invidious: "Half of Michigan Blacks Lose Local Power in Detroit Takeover"

When emergency manager Kevyn Orr arrives in near-bankrupt Detroit, almost half of Michigan’s black population will live under the rule of state overseers with little say in the governments nearest them.

...

In downtown Detroit on March 7, Charles Williams II, a reverend, and about 50 supporters protested the emergency- manager law. He used a bullhorn to promise a struggle in the spirit of civil-rights leaders such as Medgar Evers, assassinated in Mississippi in 1963.

I don’t see how it couldn’t be racially motivated," Williams, 30, said of the law.

My first guess is that Williams is lying, but it is possible that he really doesn't see other possibilities. For example, there's an extremely strong correlation between identification as "black" and the political party you vote for. But if the party must be defended at all costs, then the reflex against crimethink will keep you from contemplating that party members might have caused the trouble, and absolutely rule out even dreaming that the party's ideology itself might have some bearing.

Circle the wagons and unfurl every banner; define yourself in every aspect of life as different from the enemy. And if any part of it is holy, all is.

Karzai and Kremlinology

When I heard the report that Karzai had claimed that the US was in league with the Taliban to try to stay longer, the first thing I thought was "I wonder how that fits into his domestic politics?" I should have wondered if the reporters got the story right. I suppose, given the US reaction, that they did. For a change

I know very little of internal Afghan politics, but if I assume that Karzai isn't just running off at the mouth with random truth and nonsense, then this has something to do with restive political allies or opponents he is trying to out-maneuver.

The exercise at hand is how to figure out what's going on without knowing who or what are the powers at play--sort of like the old Kremlinologists trying to figure out the balance of power from the lineup on the reviewing stand at the May Day Parade.

It isn't exactly a surprise that a lot of Afghans would like the US gone, so accusing us of wanting to stay makes Karzai look like he's standing up against Goliath on behalf of the little guys; that should play well. But there are still quite a few Afghans who benefit from having the US and NGO's around--because we're doing good or because they're on the gravy train. Maybe they take the benefits for granted and also support having the US go, but more likely they're on the outs--unpopular with the rest of the Afghans--and Karzai is posturing against them.

The other accusation--that we're in league with the Taliban--suggests that maybe we've been making some concessions/promises to the Taliban that aren't very popular with the rest of the place.

Or I could be all wet: maybe Karzai's middle name is Biden.

Black smoke

I gather that Obama did not win the first ballot.

I think it would benefit most reporters to spend 6 months out of the first world with only the electronic access the ordinary people have, so they could escape the US media immersion. Maybe that would help them with a little perspective--but maybe not. They write to an American audience, and it is easier to write to preconceptions than to explain what's really going on. Writing about what's really going on might involve trying to understand it yourself, and that can really slow down writing the story.

Yes, I'm thinking of the conclave reporting. I suspect that Catholics in Pakistan are a little more concerned about the Muslim "anti-blasphemy" riots than whether US nuns get to be priests. Even the well-known problems in the curia(*) tend to be taken out of context.

Probably the only reason for some of these issues to be on the radar at all for a bishop from the Philippines, is that the West controls much of the media.

I think they err in making the same person responsible for administration, pastoral oversight, and theological decisions. The jobs require different gifts. Administration requires a certain flexibility, ability to understand machinery, and will to get things done. Pastoral oversight requires more patience and empathy to correct and guide, preferably without a strong-minded "will to get things done"--that generally gets people's backs up. And theological questions need a good understanding, but holiness most of all--and a reluctance to be flexible with the truth.

Some of the commentators I've read/heard have focused on the "will to get things done" and perceived deficiencies in theology (generally about sex and women), and others concentrate on the requirements for holiness and hopes for a good theologian--and both sorts muse about it being time for a third world pope. The symbolism of a third world pope would be striking. Funny, though. I thought the Catholics were big on things not being symbolic, but the real deal.

(*)When asked how many people work in the Vatican, Pope John is alleged to have responded, “About half.” I wonder how many people know the companion quip. The story goes that someone once asked the Pope if it’s true that his people don’t work in the afternoon. “No, that’s not true,” Good Pope John supposedly replied. “My people don’t work in the morning. In the afternoon, they don’t even come in.”

Shortcuts to learning and forgetting?

Returning the brain to "adolescent levels of plasticity": learning languages like a child again?

The authors studied Nogo Receptor 1 (NgR1). Why? (I'd never heard of it before.)

Nogo Receptor 1 was originally identified as a mediator of myelin-dependent restriction of recovery from injury . In healthy brain, NgR1 was shown to be essential in closing the critical period for ocular dominance plasticity by single unit electrophysiology in anesthetized mice after monocular deprivation.

Which I gather means that earlier researchers found that the presence of this receptor "restricted" recovery from brain injury. Or maybe the other way around. And that if you cover an eye of an adult mouse, the open eye doesn't become dominant unless you disable these receptors. (I cheated and looked up the paper they referenced--I couldn't figure out what the Akbik et al were trying to say.)

So they tried to turn these receptors off and see what happened with dendritic spines. Normally small spines (tiny growths on the nerves) come and go all the time: only some of them go all the way and turn into synapses. UPDATE for clarification: Memories and learning are built in the brain using synapses. In adults the rate is smaller than in adolescents. So they used some mutant mice without the receptor (I think--their prose is hard to read!) and then appear to have also tried a chemical method of disabling the receptors:

Tamoxifen treatment leads to efficient ngr1 gene rearrangement and near total loss of mRNA and protein within 2 weeks. Mice with floxed ngr1 alleles with or without Actin-Cre-ERT2 transgene were allowed to develop with endogenous levels of NgR1. At P330, the mice received tamoxifen to delete NgR1 from the Cre subgroup. One month later, dendritic spine stability was assessed over 2 weeks. Even at this advanced age, deletion of NgR1 increases dendritic spine turnover to the level observed in adolescent mice

These are mice, hence the rather young "advanced age". "Floxed" means sandwiching a gene between two recombinant sequences, which makes it easy to remove.

They looked at the effects of different monitoring methods. (Apparently putting a tiny window in the skull stimulates spine development.) They looked at sensory deprivation followed by normal sensory experience, and so on.

The bottom line seems to be that without active NgR1 receptors, nerve dendrite spine generation in adult mice is like that in young mice.

Does that mean they learn like young mice? Well, maybe. It seems logical enough, and they tested some learning (using a rotarod), but that isn't very extensive. One thing they noticed was that memories of painful experiences seemed to diminish faster in NgR1-free mice.

Their conclusions include this little tidbit:

Here we show that NgR1 mutants have a decreased threshold for imprinting experience-dependent plasticity and accelerated learning in a motor training paradigm linked to cortical spine turnover. In the setting of rehabilitation, this suggests that antagonizing NgR1 decreases the threshold to reacquire motor skills via plasticity of neuronal connectivity

Or in English, it might be possible to recover more rapidly from nerve damage, maybe even spinal damage, if the doctor can suppress NgR1 activity for a while.

So should we all start taking suppressants before we start taking German?

Well... Apparently NgR1 slows memory loss. So without it... Come to think of it, adolescents aren't that good at remembering chores.

I'd decline to have them monkey with my NgR1.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question . . . Chesterton

Tribes blue and green

AVI has often written about tribes in America; how they show constellations of features that, though not necessarily related logically, signal membership. The signals extend from music to religion to politics.

I ran across a brief description of the Blues and Greens in Constantinople, and the Nike riots that nearly brought down the emperor. The author wrote

For a long time it was thought that the two groups gradually evolved into what were essentially early political parties, the Blues representing the ruling classes and standing for religious orthodoxy, and the Greens being the party of the people. The Greens were also depicted as proponents of the highly divisive theology of Monophysitism, an influential heresy which held that Christ was not simultaneously divine and human but had only a single nature. (In the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., it threatened to tear the Byzantine Empire apart.) These views were vigorously challenged in the 1970s by Alan Cameron, not least on the grounds that the games were more important than politics in this period, and perfectly capable of arousing violent passions on their own.

I think the answer is "all of the above" and probably some other little fashions as well that never made the history books. What caused the tribes to emerge we'll never know, but they collected emblems to brandish against each other along the way: chariot teams, Christologies, and so forth.

I'd never gotten around to reading Procopius before. His Secret History is sometimes called vicious and slanderous. He certainly has an axe to grind, but when I look around I find that his account is much more plausible than I'd been led to believe. (overuse of "all", "trillion", and apparitions of demons aside) We can find people matching his descriptions of Justinian and Theodora without breaking a sweat--they force themselves on our attention. Not together, and not (yet) with the power the antique pair had, but quite similar otherwise.

For a lighter view of Justinian, check Dr. Boli.

Update: forgot the allegations of philtres. Belesarius' behavior makes a little more sense if his wife Antonina addicted him to something.

Parsifal

Youngest Son (he likes German) and I went to the Met simulcast of Parsifal this afternoon. The singing was excellent, the casting very good (I especially liked the Gurnemanz, but the Kundry was also great), and the sets interesting. Well, the second act pool of blood was maybe a little distracting. The projections on the rear screen were impressive and generally fit quite well.

I grant you that Gurnemanz' speculations on Kundry's reincarnations are Hindu or Buddhist-flavored, and the compassionate redeemer is a concept also found there. But almost all the prayer gestures were Hindu or Buddhist (or the producer's own imagination), and in no scene (including the elevation of the Grail) was there a cross anywhere--except among the constellation of necklaces Kundry wore. When Parsifal takes the spear, he sings about making a sign, but doesn't make the sign of the cross anymore. The background projections show gigantic planets rising at dramatic times--quite a dramatic accompaniment, but not quite in sync with explicitly Christian lyrics.

And... The sort-of mass with fingers touching lips didn't work--distractingly different. And... The flower maidens trying to seduce Parsifal tried hard, but the pool of blood they sloshed in was distracting, and the seductive stroking of the forest of spears was a little over the top--though I suppose Wagner might have liked that part. And... I didn't think his dunking the Spear in the Grail held by Kundry at the end of the opera was quite the right symbolism for the occasion.

I'd heard the opera before, but not seen it and so this was the first time I understood what was going on. The opera has been called "unstageable", and I think I see what they mean. Very often the music moves at a pace that, while beautiful, leaves people on stage with nothing to do but stand there. Making sure they are able to do something moderately interesting, even if slow, makes a difference.

My better half was listening on the radio--the commentator explained that François Girard's changes were supposed to be an effort at "universal spirituality": what they were was meaningless. The Grail guardian story has elements that aren't quite orthodox, and Wagner's take on it was much less so, but how do you do justice to his vision if you take away half the language?

Parsifal's salvation pivots on rejecting unlawful love, which is a bit of a change-up from some of Wagner's other operas where human love is the sanctifying force.

Despite my list of gripes, I'm glad we went. But I hope somebody can explain to Girard that allergy to Christianity is a fault when trying to stage Parsifal.

Spinning black holes

Things get pretty weird near a black hole, and even more so if it is spinning raidly. The problem is that things falling into a black hole crash around a lot before they vanish, and the debris and energy flying around make it hard to see much inside.

NGC 1365 seems to have a supermassive black hole in it, and ionized iron in its vicinity. The spectrum from the radiating iron has some odd features: are they due to the "frame dragging" around the spinning black hole or some interference from the clouds? Two X-ray space observatories, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton teamed up to determine that the clouds don't seem to be playing a major role.

If that is true, and the odd features in the iron spectrum are due to general relativistic effects around the black hole, then the thing must be spinning so fast that at its radius it must be moving at nearly the speed of light. I guess you have to collide two black holes or something equally dramatic to get the final one spinning that fast.

One way you can think of the weirdness is that orbiting the thing in one direction is slower than orbiting in the other; time doesn't work exactly the same way in both directions. Yes, it gives me a headache too.

Nobel dreams

The book Nobel Dreams by Gary Taubes is a good description of some of the characters in the UA1 experiment, most notably Carlo Rubbia. I worked on it for a while as a postdoc for David Cline, but didn't get to know as many people as Gary did in a much shorter time.

Both Carlo and David had their sights on a Nobel prize; Carlo got to share one and David didn't.

I remember sitting at the next table over from the two, eavesdropping on them batting ideas back and forth--it was a joy to listen to. They weren't quite such joys to work for, though.

During one of his brief visits to Madison he collared his two postdocs and grad student for instructions. In five minutes he gave me no less than three "absolute top priority" tasks. My better half is less enthused with him. He wanted me to go to a conference in LA and was nonplussed when I pointed out that that was my wife's due date. A few weeks later we had car trouble and my wife came to fetch me at Fermilab, where she met the good professor for the first time. He greeted her with a grumpy "You don't look nine months pregnant."

A colleague says that DOE should fund Cline to just travel around like a bee to pollinate groups with ideas like a traveling conference meeting. His presentations were enthusiastic, expansive, and whirlwind; he could go through a dozen slides in a minute. If talking about his own team's work he had a tendency to overstate accomplishments. . .

At any rate he left Wisconsin for greener pastures at UCLA, and seems to have devoted more time to novel accelerator technologies. His team announced pictures demonstrating that a laser could be used to accelerate electrons. The novelty here is that the laser has to be carefully focused, and that they have some pictures from the Brookhaven facility to prove it works. (An out-of-the-box laser beam has locally strong electric fields, but the push and pull cancel out. You have to play various tricks to take advantage of the available force, and Lawson and Woodward(*) seem to have proved that most of the tricks don't work.)

The laser was about 3 Joules dumped in a beam spot of 50μ. They saw electron accelerations of up to 20MeV, which is good and energetic.

It is nice to see this. It is a long way from being usable for normal particle accelerators--if indeed it is ever possible. The spread of energies is too large. Cline suggests using electrons accelerated by lasers to heat/compress pellets of hydrogen for fusion. Current methods being tried include using focused lasers to superheat the outer shell to create a shock wave to compress the rest of the pellet, capturing laser energy in a cavity to ditto, and so on. I'd not think electron beams would transfer momentum as well as ions, but there might be other effects--I've been wrong before.

The pictures are a little hard to understand without some explanation. The electrons went into a strong magnetic field where their trajectories bent. The faster electrons had straighter paths, the slower ones more curved. When they came out the other side they hit a detector, and the numbers of hits were counted up. The pictures are oriented such that slower electrons would be bent more and wind up at the top of the picture and faster ones be bent less and wind up nearer the bottom. The right hand pictures show more hits near the bottom: faster electrons.

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(*) Never heard of them before: I haven't worked on laser acceleration and I've only a vague acquaintance with plasma wake field acceleration.

We knew it had to work somehow

but we still don't have an agreed-on model for why.

The Cassini spacecraft has spotted MeV (million electron volt) electrons coming from the shock wave around Saturn's magnetic field. These aren't the "ultra-high-energies" the story claims (those probably come from supernova shock fronts), but they are higher energy than the theory predicts.

This observation is of electrons accelerated where the magnetic field points more or less in the same direction as the shock front. (The case where the shock and the field are perpendicular is already known to accelerate electrons, and there are some models for how--but how well they describe Saturn's environment I don't know.) The shock front in question is from the solar wind hitting Saturn's magnetic field. For scale, the solar wind is mostly protons at about 1MeV kinetic energy and electrons with correspondingly smaller (1/2000) energy. This acceleration is able to bounce sling electrons back with energies as much as 2000 times what the incoming electrons have. (Usually smaller energies, though)

Together with the Fermi LAT spotting supernova remnant gamma rays we're starting to converge on some solid data we can use to test models with. Maybe we'll start to understand cosmic rays soon.

Rules of thumb and science announcements

Texan99 has a question over at Grim's Hall about how a layman can evaluate claims by scientists. It isn't easy to come up with a simple rule, and I thought maybe I should elaborate on my comments there.

Pronouncements in the press tend to be pretty dramatic. Drama is pretty much the only way to get into the news, so sometimes it is the scientist and sometimes the reporter who gooses the story.

Always remember that what you read is typically what comes out after a reporter has digested the information.

Pronouncements fall into several categories:

1. Solidly backed by experiment and theory. Sometimes reality is weird (e.g. quantum mechanics) and you need some experience to understand it; and reality is often inconvenient. Look for humility, stable consensus and eagerness to talk about experimental verification, but those aren't perfect guarantees.
   
2. Within the bounds of a current consensus that works OK. The consensus might be wrong, but that would be a big deal. Sometimes we know the current theory has holes, but nothing has been better so far. For example, quantum mechanics and theories of gravity don't play well together, so string theory (which is supposed to unify them) has been popular for a couple of decades, despite the fact that it hasn't gotten anywhere. The rest of us muddle along with two inconsistent theories and apply each in the place where it works best.
   
3. Badly scrambled: either this is speculative and not really in the consensus or the reporter garbled it. This, for example. The theories about universe bubbles are part of some cosmological theories, but they're quite speculative, they're untestable, and connections to particle physics are even more speculative. The reporter was hunting for something weird enough to print, and I doubt that Hill or Lykken was happy with the story. Look for something that would be hard to test, or which doesn't seem tightly related to the experiment at hand.
   
4. Within a current consensus that doesn't work worth beans though we pretend it does (some fads in psychiatry come to mind). AGW is so political that it is hard to have a science discussion about it, although you may have noticed that the "A" (anthropogenic) and "W" (warming) have pretty much disappeared from the media reports. The consensus didn't work so well... If you don't have domain knowledge of the field, about the best you can do is know a little of its history. If the consensus changes frequently, don't trust it. (Don't trust the pronouncements or the consensus.) But the only way to know the history of a field is to either study it (which isn't easy to do) or live long enough and pay attention. Watch for supporters with vested interests.
   
5. A wondrous new paradigm shift with new science and new vistas. This is very very rare. I can think of "jumping genes," but not too much else recently. Not something you need to worry about most of the time.
   
6. Botched experiment. This is actually rather common, as scientists eager for publication and possible future research grants rush out press releases before the peer review. Hint: is the news about something that has been accepted for publication? If not, be cautious; and even if it has been accepted, know that there are some vanity science publications out there...
   
7. Hollow. We've no shortage of "theories" about healing energies or ways to disprove Einstein or allow perpetual motion. In the physical sciences these are usually easy to spot if you have the habit of trying to be precise about meanings of words or of looking for what a theory predicts mathematically. I'm not so sure how to spot them in linguistics or neurology or psychology. A rule of thumb: if the speaker explains how he is overthrowing current paradigms or going against an intrenched establishment, he's usually full of it. But not always. Sometimes the intrenched establishment is full of it (see above), and sometimes they both are.
   
8. "What a noble mind is here o'erthrown." Doing important work in one field doesn't mean you're going to be right at whatever your hand finds to do. Linus Pauling was a genius, but got a bee in his bonnet about vitamin C and lost track of his own disciplines. Look for simple solutions to hard problems; chances are they're too simple and the visiting expert has left some things out.
   

Just a few possibilities ... You can also win a little by looking for poison citations. Someone who cites Fort, or has research that cites only his own work (Noam Chomsky)--dubious. Each field has its own usual suspects. Perpetual motion or disproving special relativity are obvious ones in physics, but I don't know what their counterparts are in archaeology or embryology. Maybe somebody should make a list.

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder

Bloodlands is about the lands of eastern Europe alternately occupied by forces of National Socialism and International Socialism. Using the more detailed information now available, he estimates that 14 million people were murdered, only a fraction of them in Nazi death sites. The death sites were not really death camps; people were typically killed on arrival so the place didn't have to have much in the way of residences. Camps were usually more for slave labor.

The executive summary is that the Soviets murdered more in peacetime and the Nazis more in wartime; and both mostly murdered by deliberate starvation or by rounding up people and shooting them. The people of (e.g.) Poland or Belarus were caught in a vise: what you needed to do to survive under one would get you killed under the other. And slave labor, killing, and forced migrations didn't end when the war did.

Because the ideology was supreme (though Stalin was perfectly happy to use nationalism when it suited him), peasants didn't matter as much as industrialization, so they could starve--and should. And on the other side, Hitler claimed that international Jewery was the cause of the failure delay of the Russian campaign, so the best way to win was a massive campaign to kill all available Jews.

I'd never realized how devastated Poland was.

If you want the details, read the book. If not, you'll probably sleep better if you don't read it.

I'm given to understand that the Soviets were pretty brutal when they incorporated the Chechens and other Muslim groups into the Soviet empire, but they aren't the subject of this study.

Tribes invading other tribes looking for loot and land and slaves is an old story, as is the plight of those caught in the seesaw. I don't know if it is the sheer scale, the methodical care, the fact that this is within living memory, or the insanity of the ideologies that makes this seem more horrible.

Meteors and coincidences

It seems as though everybody was watching the 150' asteroid, and nobody paying attention to the smaller boomer. One report claimed that the Russians had a little forewarning of it, but apparently not much. Or maybe they were surprised too; I can't read Russian and so there's no point in trying to track the sources.

Given that one came up from the south and the Russian one more or less down from the north, there doesn't seem to be any connection between the two. But there were a couple of other meteors streaking over California and Cuba. Such things aren't that uncommon: I've seen a fairly big one and I don't spend a lot of time watching the sky at night. I gather car-sized ones (the California one) hit us about once a week or so. Two in a night should happen at about the .5%-1% level, maybe better than that if the Cuba one was smaller.

But I'd really like to know where the other two radiated from. Eyeballing the California meteor suggests that it went more or less north--like the big one that missed. (I haven't located any direction for Cuba's.)

Over time small differences in position turn into big differences in orbit, so random chunks of asteroid, even if blasted off the same big one, will flail randomly around the sky in more or less in the same plane as the planets. But who else remembers Shoemaker-Levy?

The image gets clipped in Blogger. You may have to "View Image".

It broke up, and the fragments didn't have time to disperse widely, so Jupiter got a cosmic rat-a-tat-tat across its surface. They're still arguing whether the Silverpit crater was one of a set of impacts from a similar breakup hitting the Earth.

Maybe the new pair are related to the big boy that missed.

Or should I be suspicious? "Once is happenstance, Twice is coincidence, Three times is enemy action. -- Auric Goldfinger" Maybe the Martians want to collect on overdue parking tickets...

Supernova remnants

The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) looks at gamma rays. A lot of them come from radiation produced when high energy electrons move in strong magnetic fields, but some come from the decays of pi-zero mesons. The latter tend to have a "minimum energy" and so their spectrum has some characteristic features that differ from the former.

According to a paper accepted by Science magazine (I can't link to it, but I saw an early copy), the Fermi LAT team was able to

1. Tell where a gamma ray came from
   
2. Tell what energy it had
   
3. Accumulate enough statistics in their sky map to be able to tell that
   
   • Nearby supernova remnants are bright in the gamma ray spectrum
     
   • Their spectrum of gamma rays is consistent with having a lot of gamma rays from pi-zero decays
     

The MAGIC and VERITAS experiments showed that the supernova remnants produce pretty high energy (TeV) gamma rays, but couldn't tell the difference between "bremstrahlung" radiation and pi-zero decays. LAT can, and so we have proof for the first time that supernova remnants generate high energy cosmic rays. That's not a huge surprise, but nobody has a good model for how it works yet--there's always some detail that doesn't fit. Notice that this is the remnant, not the initial explosion. Therefore the high energy particles are coming from something else, likely the shock fronts colliding.

Pi-zero's come from interactions of protons and neutrons (not so much from electrons), and tell of high energy cosmic rays (mostly protons) coming from the area. Where you have pi-zero's you also have pi-plus and pi-minus, and therefore you also have neutrinos.

So, does IceCube see neutrinos coming from supernova remnants? Neither gamma rays nor neutrinos are bent by galactic magnetic fields...

Well, Naoko was just allowed(*) to unblind part of her analysis yesterday (certain important details are left out until we're sure the analysis isn't biased to look for whatever happened to pop up first). The results haven't been approved for publication yet. But I can say that our statistics are far lower than LAT's. Like less than 3 dozen events. True, a couple of them are doozies--PeV level energies--but you just can't do anywhere nearly as clean a sky map with that few events. But it is interesting, and results should be public shortly.

Disclaimer: I had nothing to do with either of the analyses. Congratulations to both.

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(*) That conference call discussion was long. Someone else had a not-quite-mature analysis that overlapped, and which would be much less valuable if the whole of Naoko's analysis was unblinded. The discussions with the mute button on were much franker than those with it live.

Ancient languages

I've wondered about the mechanism of Grimm's Law. If there is a trend away from certain sounds, how did they appear in the first place? (I hope I may be forgiven for doubting that Indo-European was the language of Eden.)

You could perhaps explain it if the shifts appear because of interactions with other languages, but not so easily if they are supposed to be spontaneous or universal.

At any rate, the BBC reported on a new computer model for reconstructing ancient languages. Unfortunately the original paper assumes extensive knowledge of the literature, and about all I came away with is that they have a giant optimization problem and that they used Monte Carlo techniques to solve it rather than futilely trying an analytical approach or even a simplex method. They had too many language variables, and in cases like that the systematic approaches require impractical amounts of computer memory and take roughly forever, so you often get a better answer by randomly throwing sets of values through the "phase space" of the variables.

To be specific, suppose you have a million parameters in your problem. You can generate ten thousand sets of the million parameters with random values, calculate whatever you're trying to optimize for each of those ten thousand sets, and look for the minimum. Then do it again in a neighborhood of that minimum. And again in a tighter neighborhood, and after a while you'll be pretty close. Unless the function is pathological.

OK, fine. The optimization is only as reliable as the assumptions that go into it, of course, and I'm not able to judge those.

They looked at Proto-Austronesian (Polynesian et al).

Eldest Son asked "Why didn't they try it on the Romance languages and see if they could reconstruct Latin?" Good question. That sort of exercise has been done by hand, but it would be a nice calibration tool for the automated system. Assuming the algorithm could work smoothly with only a handful of dialects in each language...

Abdication

I never met Benedict 16, and probably never will this side of eternity. I'm not Catholic either. But I read a little of what he wrote over the years, and he seemed a kindred spirit. His disciplines were quite different from mine, and I gather he is far better in his than I in mine, but something about his approach seemed familiar, though exactly how is hard to make explicit.

I haven't read the stories yet, but headlines were depressingly familiar: "Abuse survivors give their views on the resignation." I wonder if the writer justified his maliciousness or was unaware of it.

I expect lots of speculation on why he's resigning--and I'll join that crowd and guess that he was feeling too tired and fuzzy mentally, and didn't believe he could be a good pastor or administrator if he wasn't thinking straight. That's what would make me give up if I were in his shoes.

John Paul II was noted for his pastoral skills, but apparently was a lousy administrator. Benedict XVI is noted for his scholarship and insight, but apparently is a lousy administrator. Are you seeing a pattern here? Pastor is not the same as Teacher is not the same as Administrator, and the offices are all supposed to be filled by the same man: the same problem so many Protestant churches have, but with a "congregation" and bureaucracy several orders of magnitude larger. Perhaps a different approach might be in order?

I don't believe Dante was right: popes ought to be able to retire. I wish him all the best.

I've been poking around the New Testament and early church history a bit, and haven't some up with any really solid evidence that Peter was supposed to be numero uno in the church. Jesus re-commissioned him as pastor, but pastoring who? He isn't the head of the church in Acts, and the "this rock" was early on taken to mean the gospel Peter announced. The most convincing argument so far is my own (I think): all the gospels agree that Peter denied Christ. Repenting from that would be good training for being the chief. A ruler, by virtue of the "secular" obligations and distractions of office, will often find himself bogging down and denying the spirit he serves. Peter in the courtyard is the archetype of much of church leadership.

And no, I'm not trying to be cynical: power is dangerous, Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is unavoidable and humiliation can be good training.

Be that as it may, there's a shortage of proof that Peter's successor was supposed to be numero uno after him.

Note to self:

Do not drive a pickup in southern California. I don't have a pickup, but a minivan is classed as a light truck, so I need to be careful.

The Whydah

The vessel got its name from the port where it picked up slaves: Ouidah. We hear all the time about how terrible the middle passage was, but it hadn't occurred to me that the economics of the situation demanded that the slave transport ships be large and fast, and moderately well-armed.

In order to make best use of overwhelming force, pirates liked to use ships that were large and fast. So pirates liked to capture these slave transport ships. (Presumably the cargo could be fenced somewhere for a little extra cash.)

And so the Whydah became a pirate ship, as detailed in the traveling exhibit on pirates currently at Milwaukee Public Museum. The ship's bell was found, making this the (so far) only fully verified pirate wreck excavated. (They're pretty sure of some others, but don't have 100% proof.)

A fellow named Bellamy decided to seek his fortune salvaging a foundered pirate wreck (contra the introductory movie!), and then switched to piracy himself when that turned out to have already been salvaged by the time his team arrived.

He racked up quite a list of hits, captured and outfitted the Whydah for his personal use, and when he felt he had a sufficient haul headed his small fleet back to New England to cash in.

The description quoted on this site adds a few details the traveling exhibit omitted:

About the latter end of April, there came upon the Coast a Ship called, The Whido, whereof one Bellamy was Commander: A Pirate Ship, of about 130 Men and 23 Guns. These Pirates, after many other Depraedations, took a Vessel which had Wines aboard; and put Seven of their Crew on Board, with Orders to Steer after the Whido. The seven Pirates being pretty free with the Liquor, got so Drunk, that the Captive who had the Steering of the Vessel, took the opportunity of the Night, now to run her ashore, on the backside of Eastham.

A Storm was now raised and raging; and the Whido ignorantly following the Light of her Stranded Prize, perished in a Shipwreck, and the whole Crew were every on of them drowned, except only one Englishman, and one Indian, that were cast on Shore alive.

They slew their prisoners once they reached shore so these victims would not testify against them. The pirates didn’t elude capture, though, and were tried in Boston by a Special Court of Admiralty. Six were found guilty and sentenced to death: John Brown of Jamaica, Thomas Baker and Hendrick Quintor of the Netherlands; Peter Cornelius Hoof of Sweden; John Shaun of France; and Simon Van Vorst of New York. Carpenters Thomas South and Thomas Davis, who was tried separately, were deemed not guilty because they had been forced to join the pirates. John Julian, a sixteen-year-old Miskito Indian, wasn’t brought to trial, but was sold into slavery.

...

During the prayer that followed, the minister included a “Supplication” for seafarers.

That they may more generally Turn and Live unto GOD; That they may not fall into the hands of Pirates; That such as are fallen into their Hands, may not fall into their Wayes; That the poor Captives may with Cries to GOD that shall pierce the Heavens, procure His Good Providence to work for their Deliverance; And That the Pirates now infesting the Seas, may have a Remarkable Blast from Heaven following of them; the Sea-monsters, of all the most cruel, be Extinguished; and that the Methods now taking by the British Crown for the Suppression of these Mischiefs may be prospered.

Cotton Mather ended his account with the words, “Behold, Reader! The End of Piracy!”

The item in red above is a rather interesting sidelight: I wonder why it was omitted?

Another item makes me a little angry; quoting from the the Field Museum's page again:

All six men repented in the presence of Mather, but they still hanged, the tide lapping at their feet and the skyline of old Boston rising in the distance. Mather published their story and confession in a pamphlet called "The End of Piracy"—a prophetic title soon to be realized.

Note the illiterate interpretation of Mather's phrase. Perhaps this comes from the general allergy to teleology, or perhaps both the writer and editor were ill-read (and enamored of the slave theme of the exhibit).

On a happier note, the exhibit had a life-sized mockup of the ship we toured. It showed artifacts and described how they worked (lots of details about cannon I'd never heard before), had actors representing pirates fielding questions. The exhibit was quite interesting and worth seeing.

But they didn't go into what privateers were and what they were used for, which left sort of a large gap in understanding why piracy would be attractive/acceptable to so many people.

A somewhat more detailed analysis goes into the political use of pirates, and also how they organized themselves, in quite a bit more detail than (and sometimes contradicting) the exhibit.

Most piracy historians agree that 25-30% of pirate crews were African.

These Anglophonic men were usually picked up on the Sierra Leone coast, or were Angolans and Coromantee taken from the cargo holds of merchant slavers. While some historians like Ken Kinkor have made an expansive case for pirates as a race-blind workforce, my research finds a mixed record. While it is clear that certain pirate crews would accept Africans as highly motivated crewmates, others had few Africans who signed the articles. Nearly all made a sharp distinction between Anglophone Africans and “outlandish” people, whom they suspected of cannibalism. Evidence suggests that they would go to great lengths to ransom crewmates from West African communities and crewmen reported that no one could blame them for not deserting on the coast of Sierra Leone because they were scared of the Negroes “who did live in that place.” Others pled that they could not escape because “there was always a report that the Negroes would kill them.”

Men frankly admitted that they were more scared of the Africans of Sierra Leone than they were of pirates; clearly, they expected the Admiralty court to sympathize and forgive them for not running away to prove their reluctance to be pirates.

With such a low opinion of outlandish Africans (and a clear understanding that Africans could be readily commodified as slaves), it strains credulity to imagine a racially egalitarian workplace.

Moreover, African men captured aboard pirate ships never made it to trial in Admiralty courts; one assumes that they were consigned to slavery or summary execution on capture, though more investigation is called for into the fate of these men.

The exhibit repeatedly claimed that black men made up large fractions of the crew, suggesting that this was probably an attractive alternative to becoming slaves. It also suggested that the pirates coveting slave ships and interrupting slave trade was the main reason the British mounted a major campaign against them (no mention of looting of India-bound ships?). That makes for a nice tight "narrative" but misses a lot of what was going on.

One poster described two female pirates, who appear to have been perfectly representative of all (2) female pirates of the era.

Eldest Son burst into song during the tour. The actors professed not to have heard of the opera.

Worth seeing, but do your own research first. I didn't pick the audio tour, and have no comments on that.

School shooting solutions

Don't just stand there, do something! Never mind whether it makes sense or not.

The mass school shootings, tragic and frightening though they are, are rare and have been getting more rare. (Not so the gang shootings in Chicago.)

So politicians posture and pundits clamor, and as the dust settles I see two clusters of suggestions: restrictions on guns and having armed people in the schools. (Nothing much about dealing with gangs, though.)

I will take it as understood that the media misrepresent both the risks and the benefits, and take it as given that many people don't trust the governments with a monopoly of force (and I know of no reason why they should).

But that doesn't mean I'm in favor of arming teachers or bringing in security guards (as a rule. There are exceptions, such as when some children are special targets like the President's kids would be, or when the community is awash with violent gangs).

Suppose the school is "gun free." There will always be some small probability Pr that some student will kill some other student--but those kinds of fights are usually limited (except for gang fights, but we'll not consider those here). In addition, there is the very small probability that somebody will come in and start shooting up the place, call that Pv, and the number of deaths resulting Nv. So the number of deaths with a "gun free" school will be of the order of the number of schools times Pv*Nv plus the number of students times Pr. There are well over 100,000 schools in the US, and about 75 million students (some adult).

Pr isn't big: in 1992-1993 34 K-12 children were murdered at school (or a bus, etc), and in 2009-2010 this was 17, suggesting Pr of .2E-6. Pv is also very small: I get about 6 in 7 years from the Wikipedia article (counting "subdued" as meaning the culprit would have done more if he could), for something less that 1E-5, with an average of about 12 dead per attack. So Pv*Nv is about 1E-4, which times 100,000 schools gives about 12 deaths per year. Add that to the 17 per year, and you get about 29 dead per year (though some of that 17 is gang-related).

Suppose the school includes armed teachers or security guards (who may not be much better than armed teachers). Pv (the intruder) is likely to be smaller, though the murderer may just look for easier targets. Nv (the number killed on average) will be smaller, because the murderer will be stopped more often and sooner. Let me pull wild numbers out of the air (I know of no better ones) and guess that the number killed would be cut by a third and the number of incidents would drop by half. So we'd get of order 2 deaths per year from intruders trying to kill students.

But there's a new factor. Pr may not be so small anymore.

The problem is that now it is easier for a student, or disgruntled teacher, or other staff member, to get ahold of an inadequately secured weapon. Most of the time nothing will happen. It takes continual training to keep attentive when there are no problems; otherwise you slack off. If there are five armed guards or teachers in school, what would you guess are the odds that one of them will be careless with the weapon during a school year? Cynical sort that I am, I'd guess the probability is nearly 1. So now the question is "What are the chances that a disgruntled teacher or bullied student will be around to notice?" 0.1% maybe? OK, be optimistic and say 0.001% That's Pr=1E-5, which we multiply by the number of students (about 75 million). That gives about 750 deaths per year.

The numbers are guesses, so I could easily be off by an order of magnitude or more. My point is that the cure may be deadlier than the disease. (And are you sure you can rely on the security guards?)

Banning "assault rifles" will not change the numbers at all, of course; I doubt that it would be meant to.

Autism "spectrum"

I saw this story "revealing" a link between gut bacteria and autism, and so of course I looked it up. I'd heard the anecdotes about "My son was fine until he got that horrible stomach bug and was never the same afterwards."

Naturally, the real report doesn't "reveal" any such link; though it strongly suggests one: propionic acid (PPA).

Executive Summary: autistic children have mitochondrial disease or some biomarkers compatible with it at a rate higher than the general population. Something like autism can be induced in rats infused with PPA. Surveys of autistic and neurotypical youngsters showed fatty acid concentrations that were abnormal, somewhat (not entirely!--their figure 1 has a logarithmic concentration scale and symmetric error bars? and isn't easy to compare) like that in the rats.

Autistic youth typically seem to have a different mix of gut flora than normal, more of which produce PPA, some of which will presumably go into the bloodstream and help disrupt mitochondrial activity. (BTW, antibiotics change the gut flora mix, apparently increasing the proportion of PPA-makers.)

So, since O(17%) of children with ASD apparently had abnormal mitochondrial fatty-acid metabolism (like those rats with pseudo-autism), and some of them showed no genetic abnormalities to account for it, some subset of autism is possibly due to (internal) environmental disruption of mitochondrial activity.

End Executive Summary.

It isn't clear that this is fixable after the fact, though it would be wonderful if it were (assuming this is actually the issue).

But notice the number 17%. We use the term "autism spectrum" but apparently there are quite a few different genes involved: 15 according to the notes in this paper.

That second paper is worth a look too. The authors looked at copper and zinc levels (copper levels are high in autism spectrum children relative to neurotypical children, zinc levels low in autism and PDD (but not Aspergers). They applied a B6 and zinc supplement therapy, and found changes to more normal levels in autistic and PDD children, and apparent improvement in behavior--but not in Aspergers children. (I didn't see where there was any medium-term follow-through to see if there really was improvement.)

I call this sort of thing evidence that the phrase "autism spectrum" is a misnomer. "Autism constellation" would be a better term, since it looks as though there are multiple causes with similar effects.

Which is kind of discouraging when you want to know "What should I do for my kid?"