Blinders

Somebody was playing "Cross of Gold" and I got to thinking about Bryan. Some things don't seem to change much.

Faced with powerful rent-seekers, the populist answer was to steal from everybody else using inflation: in Bryan's day by expanding the money supply with an arbitrary linkage to silver, in ours by printing money with no revenue to back it up. These days, because we've got the strongest economy in the world, we've been successful at exporting some of the inflation--which means exporting the theft into poorer countries. So the price of cooking fuel in Africa goes up because our politicians don't like to make hard choices.

I'm trying to understand how this readily predictable side effect fits in with straight-faced progressive talk of "economic justice". One obvious answer is that only the people in their field of view are real, and the those out of the focus--well, that group includes some of the villains(*), so maybe it is easier to discount them. And their favored tools cannot possibly have bad side effects--you must be an evil person for suggesting that The Law of Unintended Consequences trumps their good intentions (an attitude common between groups that bitterly disagree on the tools). And the retired couple down the street whose savings are eaten away--we'll devise plans that help them so they don't need to worry, just have faith in our good intentions.

Something similar appeared in some of the defenders of the Second Iraq campaign(**). There could not possibly be any serious consequences, because the cause was right. Well yes, but... What makes us expect perfection from "least-bad" choices?

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(*)I am perfectly willing to stipulate that some of the accused villains actually are predatory. Not all, though. And I notice that some of those genuinely predatory sorts (one such is Soros) are quite cozy with the populist leaders. And often with the not-so-populist leaders too.

(**) I'm a defender too, though I think I had a better idea of the downsides than some of the commentariat, and believe we blundered away and threw away all the strategic possibilities and arguably leave the situation worse than before.

Healthy eating

The Mediterranean diet is all the rage these days, and it doesn't look too bad--though I'm more of a fish in moderation sort. Beans and nuts are some of the basics of the diet. I'm not sure which category Theobroma cacao falls in but it has to be one or the other--and thus should be a staple.

"Does not commute"

I sometimes talk about science and models of reality. The math may be as precise as you like, but if the application of it isn't right it doesn't help much.

One thing that surprises people from time to time is that the math that best describes the real world doesn't always have A+B=B+A. I like to remind them that putting on your socks and shoes isn't the same as putting on your shoes and socks--the order makes a little difference.

Typically they are unconvinced. So if they are rich enough to wave about two dollar bills, I suggest the standard example.

Lay two dollars bill in front of you face up, each with George's head oriented up as he sadly contemplates the state of the nation. You will apply the same kinds of rotations to both. On the left, rotate the bill 90 degrees clockwise. Then flip it over far end to near and near end to far. Take the other bill and flip it far end to near and near end to far. Then rotate it 90 degrees clockwise. Notice the difference.

What happens if you rotate by 180 degrees instead of 90?

In a closely related example, suppose you start at Indianapolis and travel 100 miles due south, ignoring roads and construction. Then travel 100 miles due east, then 100 miles due north, then 100 miles due west. As we all know, you are not back where you started from; you overshoot because the Earth is round.

In fact the effect is fairly common. Do A, then do B, then do the opposite of A, then do the opposite of B. It isn't always the same as doing nothing. Sometimes you are not back where you started. The difference between where you started and where you wind up tells you something about the kind of space you are in (which needn't be a space with the usual distance dimensions--it can be a space of momenta or something else).

If you have points in a plane represented by (x,y) you can rotate clockwise by θ about the origin with a simple matrix (quick reminder about matrix multiplication)

cos(θ)	-sin(θ)
sin(θ)	cos(θ)

Suppose θ is vanishingly small. Then cos(θ) ≈ 1 and sin(θ) ≈ θ . So you can write the tiny rotation as the identity plus the first order rotation plus higher order terms:

1	0
0	1

+

0	-θ
θ	0

+ higher order terms

So far this is nothing particularly startling. A small rotation mostly leaves the situation the same (that's the identity matrix with 1's in the diagonal), but there's a tiny set of first order changes and even tinier higher order. (If you think .001 is small, how about .001 squared: .000001?)

In 3D, with rotations about the x, y, and z axes, when you play the same game you have 3 tiny rotation matrices, which I'll call A, B, and C, with extremely tiny angles a, b, and c. You start with the identity matrix (1's down the diagnonal) and

A=

0	-a	0
a	0	0
0	0	0

B=

0	0	b
0	0	0
-b	0	0

C=

0	0	0
0	0	-c
0	c	0

Notice that AB is not BA, and AB-BA is not a zero matrix.

In fact, if we just look at the unscaled base matrices, setting a=b=c=1, we see the following:

• AB-BA=-C
  
• BC-CB=-A
  
• CA-AC=-B
  

It isn't as simple as 1+2=2+1, but the structure gives you some interesting symmetries you wouldn't have seen otherwise. Or to put it in layman's terms, that's kind of cool. And if you have a mathematical bone anywhere in your body you'll ask: "what happens if..." (if rotations are in 4 dimensions, if you have 4 similar cycling equations in ABCD, if AB-BA=-C+A, etc, etc).

Hard problems

The headline says "Researchers Reveal How an Expanding Universe Can Emerge Without a “Big Bang”". The team figured a way of having an emergent expanding universe without a singularity. They start with a flat spacetime that is rotating, and small phase transitions can occur which act a little like expanding bubbles. OK, cool. But in the fine print:

In a first step, a spacetime with only two spatial dimensions was considered. “But there is no reason why the same should not be true for a universe with three spatial dimensions”, says Grumiller.

Our own universe does not seem to have come into existence this way. The phase-transition model is not meant to replace the theory of the Big Bang.

Or in other words, the model they show is a 2D+time model instead of the 3D+time world we live in. So you'd think that this is not a huge deal, call back when they get to 3 dimensions. Fair enough.

The linked article tries to explain why this is interesting--the short version is that there's been an influential theory that links quantum field theory to gravity in a "holographic" way. One example given to explain the conjecture was that if it were true, then a solution of the equations on the boundary would define everything inside; sort of like a hologram (2D) that reconstructs to something 3D. Which seems to kind of flatten us out a bit, but it isn't as bad as it sounds.

But: problems that are OK in 2D can be fiendishly hard in 3D. I've been fiddling with a little problem and wondered if hyperdeterminants would help (and if you understand that link on the first read-through you're doing better than I did). There is a closed form expression for the 2x2x2 tensor, but 3x3x3? To quote a paper from arxiv: "The classical case p = 1 is much easier than the case p>=2 mainly because there are only finitely many orbits for the action of GL(V0) x GL(V1)". (I'm calling this a dead end: using their notation I have p=2.)

Or the 2-body problem. The Earth and Moon, in isolation, form a very easy dynamical system; closed form solution, all is well. Including the effects of tides muddies it a lot. Add a third body and not only is there no closed form solution, the system may or may not be stable depending on small changes in the initial conditions--good old chaos.

So I'm not as sanguine about possible solutions as Dr. Grumiller. There are too many surprises.

Of course, once they have a solution, then they have to compare the predictions of that with what we actually see. This has been done (with resulting retuning) for the standard cosmological models, and it has taken many man-years to do the computations and comparisons. Even the unsatisfactory current theories satisfy a lot of constraints that a new model will also have to prove itself against. If we had the accurate Theory of Everything handed to us tomorrow morning, it would still take years--maybe even decades--before we could be sure that it was even as good as what we already have.

Gaming on company time

And getting paid for it. The NSA (and apparently other agencies) found that persons of possible interest (e.g. embassy drivers) played things like World of Warcraft, and so in their search for terrorist communication channels the agency sucked up huge swaths of chat information--which is probably not that informative without an intimate knowledge of the games. I gather that some poor souls had the crushing burden of having to get deeply involved in the games.

WoW et al seem roughly as interesting as watching paint dry, but if that's your enthusiasm perhaps you should consider a career change.

Overoptimistic headlines, CCXXIII

"Study Shows Oxytocin Improves Brain Function in Children with Autism". Giving oxytocin to ASD children 8-16 seems to change what lights up in the brain. OK, so it does--maybe: 17 is a small sample. But if you read the full study you find this problem:

Overall, behavioral accuracy and reaction times on the RMET did not differ for OT (oxytocin) vs. Placebo visits ( Fig. S3). This is consistent with the empirical record, which shows improvements only on some items from the RMET, according to difficulty level, but not overall (11, 22)

So the brain lights up differently, but there was no change in ability to guess someone's mood looking at just the eyes.

"Our results are particularly important considering the urgent need for treatments to target social dysfunction in autism spectrum disorders," Gordon added.

I think that translates as "we know something else that doesn't work, but it was worth a try."

But who knows, maybe high doses with early intervention might have some effect, though it'd be a while before we found out. Be nice if there were a silver bullet or two.

St. Isaac

The writings of the second St Isaac of Syria don't seem to be online (at least not in English), but there are quotations. He was an ascetic, and some of his suggestions illustrate that focus.

• Ease and idleness are the destruction of the soul and they can injure her more than the demons.
• A small but persistent discipline is a great force; for a soft drop tailing persistently, hollows out hard rock.
• Dispassion does not mean that a man feels no passions, but that he does not accept any of them.
• The key to Divine gifts is given to the heart by love of neighbor, and, in proportion to the heart's freedom from the bonds of the flesh, the door of knowledge begins to open before it.
• Be persecuted, rather than be a persecutor. Be crucified, rather than be a crucifier. Be treated unjustly, rather than treat anyone unjustly. Be oppressed, rather than zealous. Lay hold of goodness, rather than justice.
• Before you stumble, call out and plead; before you make a vow, have ready what things you promise, for they are your provisions afterwards.
• If you compel your body when it is weak to labors that exceed its strength, you will instill darkness upon darkness into your soul and bring greater confusion upon her.
• Mercy and legality in one soul is like a man who worships God and the idols in one house.
• If you cannot be merciful, at least speak as though you are a sinner. If you are not a peacemaker, at least do not be a troublemaker. If you cannot be assiduous, at least in your thought be like a sluggard (?typo for "not like"?). If you are not (typo?) victorious, do not exalt yourself over the vanquished. If you cannot close the mouth of a man who disparages his companion, at least refrain from joining him in this.
• A gift free of trials is a disaster to those who receive it.
• Not every quiet man is humble, but every humble man is quiet.
• Flee from discussions of dogma as from an unruly lion; and never embark upon them yourself, either with those raised in the Church, or with strangers.
• The power of love works in two ways: it torments sinners, even as happens here when a friend suffers from a friend; but it becomes a source of joy for those who have observed its duties. Thus I say that this is the torment of Gehenna: bitter regret. But love inebriates the souls of the sons of Heaven by its charm.

I am quite far from being an ascetic, as a slight pudge quickly testifies and 33 years of marriage would strongly suggest. I did not imbibe any appreciation for monastic life, and nor was it obvious why asceticism would be attractive enough that brothers and sisters would drop everything and head for the desert.

But I think I'm starting to get a glimmering. Imagine an era swarming with luxuries that turn tasteless with indulgence, with entertainments that alternate between the cruel and the lascivious, with the public sphere monopolized by the power hungry and greedy, with intrusive bureaucracies, and seemingly everything designed to manipulate you to utterly worldly ends. Now imagine yourself swimming in this, and starting to realize that these temptations and evils already have a home in your own soul. You too sometimes hunger to chase the banner, or to buy the toy that your neighbors esteem, or collect the hoard that will protect you from the rapacious, or try a taste of your neighbor's mistress.

You hear of a man who was able to put all these things aside with self-disciplines no worse than those imposed on wrong-doers. The life in the world is so obviously vile that this alternative, for souls hungering for nobility, looks wise and right.

And, in that era, maybe it is.

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UPDATE: Here's a favorite example of the manipulation mentioned:

Mental illness in the village

One of many things I don't know is how mental medicine works in simpler cultures.

Liberian native physical medical treatments, according to Dr. George Harley, could be roughly divided into 3 groups: "it helps," "it does nothing" (a lot of magical stuff was here), and "it causes damage." I don't have the book any more (I read it 40 years ago), but I vaguely recall that he thought the number of treatments in the 3 groups were roughly equal. The snake society (to which most hunters belonged) had a few rituals and a magic preparation that involved powdered snake heads rubbed into scratches. Harley didn't attempt to test this, but as the link suggests it isn't obviously wrong.

We have quite a few people searching through primitive pharmacopeia for useful drugs.

Mental illness is a bit harder. I see things like "mental illness was thought to be caused by evil spirits," but that doesn't tell me much about treatments. "Magic(*)" OK, but suppose instead of trying to lump treatments we get more specific. Did they distinguish different classes of problems and do their categories correspond to ours at all? What exactly did they do to try to help, and did it help?

I assume they had the pragmatic triage categories: "You are a witch and dangerous to the rest of us. Die.", "We cannot live with you. Go away.", and "Nobody minds Ben Gunn." We, with more resources, institutionalize the first, expel the second (modulo homeless shelters), and try to help (sometimes stupidly) the third group.

Were there any other distinctions?

What did the witch doctors do to help the third group (and those in the other groups prior to the tribe's judgment)? How did they decide on treatments? And most importantly--did the treatments ever help? Figuring that out takes a lot longer than grabbing a handful of bark and flying back to the lab, unfortunately. It means somebody has to spend a long time in the village.

Dalrymple says that unhappiness is being medicalized into "depression," with the obvious consequences that unhappiness is not properly addressed and depression is trivialized. But the description from India of How to Treat Depression When Psychiatrists Are Scarce leaves me wondering if palliation for both can be similar (I am not a psychiatrist!), at least for mild depression. See AVI comment below

I can easily imagine treatments that only work within the psychological environment of the village with its network of obligations and meanings. Even something as simple as a cola nut has a set of uses in a Liberian village having to do with relaxation, welcome, and worship, that would not translate well to anything I can think of in the US--and I only know a little from the outside. So a treatment that works there might not work here.

But if something does work, it would be good to know how and why.

Probably there's already a treatise or three on the subject and I just haven't found it.

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(*) Our categories are also apt to square-peg round-holers. Practitioners can give examples, but any framework trying to describe the borderlands of personal responsibility is going to have misfeatures.
~

Mandela

To be the right man at the right time is more than most of us can expect. Mandela, one-time commander of the armed wing of the ANC, wasn't exactly a saint, and some of the things he said in recent years were sad to hear. But he and his brave colleague de Klerk sponsored a transformation I didn't believe was possible: a peaceful power transition after oppression. And the Truth and Reconciliation committees worked wonders--though the model has failed in other countries. There are still huge divisions and poisons at work in South Africa, notably the totalitarian wing of the ANC, but just to have solved the apartheid problem was a huge accomplishment. Other knots were for the later generations (who have unfortunately not distinguished themselves as well).

He had the endurance and commitment and the drive to peaceful resolution they needed.

Pneumonia is a drag

I'd have been back to work a week ago if not for this stupid bug. Time to go lie down again...

Imitating a style

A year and a half ago Ray Bradbury died. I grew up with his wonderful stories, though I lost track of his newer work about 20 years ago. He could conjure deeply memorable scenes, and his style was clear and easy. Easy to read, that is. About a month after he died I thought I should try to write something in his style, as a kind of private homage. I had a setting and characters that seemed in keeping with his style, and an offbeat ghost problem that I think he'd have enjoyed playing with. I immersed myself in his stories for a while, and then ... getting the balance right is hard.

He varied his style depending on the mood, so maybe that was OK. But I couldn't make the prose go the direction I wanted--as though the style had a mind of its own. Which is probably another way of saying my handwriting looks much the same in small and on the blackboard, even though the muscles are different. Better not to push it too hard.

I don't know how many years of practice it would take to imitate his style well--probably far more than just to get my own to be good. "Imitate the best" was the advice, but it was for learning the details of the craft, not for turning into an imitation Hemingway.

It's better for a story to gather electronic dust than turn out like this Wodehouse imitation, which sounds so obviously bad I wonder how it found a publisher.

Proverbs

While mulling over some questions about what society owes the knives in the drawer who aren't as sharp, I started chasing down proverbs. One handy collection (*) ranges from Solomon to Kipling but includes a lot of what we think of as traditional rustic proverbs. Many deal with working hard and hopefully, using resources wisely, and the effects of companions. In other words, a lot of simple rule-of-thumb advice that even someone a little slow on the uptake can internalize. (Though I remember several folk-tales about simple lads who took things too literally.)

Just for comparison, have a look at this (shorter) list from China. (At least one of the proverbs is the same: Teach a man to fish...) This is much more heavily flavored with respect for study and suggests a somewhat more involved social structure ("Do not employ handsome servants"). This list feels more rustic, and includes some pretty obscure admonition.

I have to include some from Liberia. Liberian proverbs are a little different; much more fluid and often requiring explanation for outsiders. From that last link:

African proverbs usually have two meanings: the literal or primary meaning, and the deeper or real meaning. The real meaning of African proverbs is not always apparent. This is precisely why they are called proverbs. For instance, the Ghanaian Akan, Dangme and Ga expressions for "to cite a proverb," bu abe, means "to bend," "curve," or "twist words," to make them complicated (Yankah 1986). Similarly, the Lugbara (Uganda) term that is used to designate proverbs, e'yo obeza, literally means "mixed words," "twisted speech" or "indirect talk" (Dalfovo 1997). The meaning of a proverb is not fixed, and so it can be modified. The user is free to reconstruct a proverb in order to make it appropriate in the particular context in which it is being used. To modify a proverb, one may delete, paraphrase, elaborate or transfer elements in it. The hearer must be witty to interpret and grasp the meaning of a proverb.

Compare the flavors yourself. I can't describe the differences in single phrases. All represent a useful body of wisdom--including the contradictions that describe life ("Look before you leap", "He who hesitates is lost"). I don't hear these much, though perhaps I don't travel in the right circles, and I suspect we suffer for it.

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(*)It has odd comments sometimes, almost as though the author didn't realize that the Bible was known the whole time English was developing as a language.

Hellenized Jews

I was taught early on that Alexander the Great wanted to spread Greek culture to everybody, and that as a result Greek language and Greek amphitheaters and Greek sports spread all over the Middle East. I learned later that some Greeks had colonized Italy, so that explained Greek influence there.

That's one of the perks of being the conqueror, I guess. Except that the conquered lands were split among warring dynasties, so it isn't quite so easy to see how Greek-ism would be easy to push on the conquered peoples--if you annoy them too much they might defect to the other guys. In your own heartland strongholds, sure, but in the middle of it all? (Antiochus IV was a nutcase.)

So what was so enticing that there would be a significant body of Hellenized Jews?

The previous post may explain some of the enticement. This wasn't an empty "wear the robes of the rulers" fashion trend. The Hellenist culture was high-tech too. The tech was maybe not affordable for everybody, but there were real secrets to be learned, with practical uses as in agriculture and medicine that could help everybody. Some of the rest of Greek culture would come along for the ride, so to speak, and for the Jews that could be problematic: idolatry and immorality.

There are some seriously problematic aspects to modern Western culture too, and some of them seem to spread along with the more technical goodies. That may give a parallel with the past.

Sheer, unmitigated speculation by an amateur. Maybe no secret to the pros.

The Forgotten Revolution by Lucio Russo

The history of science in the West, as those few of us who remember it goes, has the ancient Egyptians inventing some primitive technology, the ancient Greeks inventing math and science but scorning technology as not fit for truly noble thinkers, Romans who developed civil engineering and sanitation, and then a lot of barbarians who wrecked everything until math started being rediscovered and science and technology re-invented and went on to exceed anything mankind had ever seen before.

Name an ancient Greek scientist? Archimedes, Aristarchus, Aristotle, Ptolemy? (Aristotle does not really count, btw) Check the dates. That's quite a range of time.

It turns out that there's quite a bit missing, and some of what we know isn't quite true.

We tend to telescope everything from 1000BC to 400AD as "ancient," giving the illusion that everything happened more or less at once.

The Forgotten Revolution goes in depth to try to find out what happened: how high the Greek science and math rose, and why things starting falling apart.

The answer is very high indeed. Pick those famous "epicycles" that Ptolemy introduced to explain the motion of planets in the sky.

• Ptolemy didn't invent them, some other Hellenists had done so centuries before. (He died in 168AD)
  
• Hellenist math was constructive, and required straight-edge and compass. For anything not perfectly circular, epicycles were inevitable.
  
• Look at this picture and tell me what you see. These are dates of astronomical measurements that went into the Almagest.
  
  

There's a nice spike at times close to Ptolemy, and a long list before--with a 2 century-long gap in the middle. Ptolemy wasn't developing something new, he was trying to retrieve something old. And since little details like known heliocentric theories were left out of the Almagest, it wasn't a thorough review.

Hint. Ptolemy was from the Imperial Roman era.

What sorts of things did the Hellenists have? Lenses, steam engines, gears and (one infers) metal screws, first principles shipbuilding design (so much for a disdain for technology), hydrostatics for pipe design, gigantic lighthouses (probably with a parabolic mirror--hard to be certain), timing of systolic and diastolic pulses of the blood, watermills, and of course differential gearing in the Antikythera mechanism. And mechanical puppets, and something that sounds like silent movies.

Astronomy

Russo is a physicist, and also versed in classical literature. This is rare. Most classicists don't know much math or science, and most scientists aren't familiar with old forms of Greek. So things like this slip by (p106)

The common idea is that Aristarchus was too far ahead of his time to have had a lasting influence on the course of science, and support for it is generally found in the accusation of impiety supposedly leveled against him because of his heliocentrism. The belief that Aristarchus was accused of impiety originates with the seventeen century philologist Gilles Menage who … changed a passage in Plutarch by amending an accusative into a nominative and vice versa.

Russo points out that planetaria were well known, and that Cicero's description of Archimedes' version is consistent with a heliocentric mechanism--not so much with a geocentric one. (Another advantage of having somebody with a technical background peering at the language details.)

More astronomy: Geminus (about 50BC) compiles a list of star positions and "warning the reader not to suppose it ("sphere of fixed stars") to have a physical existence, since the stars are at different distances from us." And "According to Pliny, Hipparchus (died 120BC) compiled his catalog of stars precisely so that later generations might deduce from it the displacements of stars and the possible existence of novae." (Talk about a long-term research program! Halley (1718 AD) recorded differences with Sirius, Arcturus, and Aldebaran.)

AristarchusEratosthenes famously measured the circumference of the Earth. From textual evidence and some references to the verticality of the sun in a band of about 200 miles, Russo strongly suspects that AristarchusEratosthenes (head of library of Alexandria too) had a team dig the famous well in a more accurate spot than merely a handy town, and went on to define his own version of the stadia, linked to the Earth's circumference. This suggests a little funding...

Technology, travel, engineering

How about military technology? The torsion catapult (about the middle of the 3rd century BC) was more powerful and faster to use than the trebuchet of western medieval times more than a millennium later. There's some evidence that a repeating catapult was used, and according to Philo of Byzantium, air piston catapults (thanks to Ctesibius, died 222BC).

Travel? Pytheas (late 4'th century BC) traveled direct to India from the Gulf of Aden--no sticking solely to the coastline; that's high seas navigation. He also got far enough north that the sun stayed up all summer, and even saw the polar pack ice. Herodotus preserves (and disdains) a report suggesting a circumnavigation of Africa.

Civil engineering? Canals, a blossoming of irrigation methods used from that day to this, aqueducts, and so on. Remember the Roman aqueduct system?

Vitruvius' regard for the role of applied science is the greatest of any Latin author. He enumerates the fields of knowledge required by a good architect … writing, drawing, geometry, arithmetic, history, philosophy, music, medicine, law, and astronomy. But consider the ensuing explanation of the uses of this knowledge: astronomy is regarded as necessary, in essence, for determining the four points of the compass, and geometry for understanding the uses of squares and levels….

Vitruvius' work represents the highest level achieved by a Roman technical treatise. As for the rest, Frontinus, the author of the main Latin work on aqueducts, systematically mixes up the flow rate of a pipe with its cross section, thus ignoring, in particular, the role of the slope. The high technological level of Roman aqueducts seems hard to reconcile with such incompetence, but we should not forget that Frontinus was not an engineer but the bureaucrat in charge of Rome's water supply, … whereas the actual designers, builders and maintainers of the aqueducts were slaves, who of course were not in a position to write books.

In the same way we find that, for all productive activities with technological content, Rome had to import either finished goods or workers from the East.

Lighthouses:

The installation of the Pharos was considered so useful that other pharoi were erected at every important port of the Hellenized Mediterranean. But Greek sources contain no overall description or a single technological detail relative to the Pharos, even though it was regarded in its own time as one of the seven wonders of the world. This confirms how reticent our sources are about technological products, in a case where the product itself is not in doubt. Because the only extant descriptions of the Pharos are by Arab historians, who visited it long after it had ceased to function, we know very little of its technology. Yet some conjectures can be made on the basis of its purpose and contemporary knowledge. First, we can imagine that the reflector consisted, as it would today, of a parabolic mirror, all the more so because the relevant theory arose precisely around the time of the construction of the Pharos.

At this point Russo starts to stretch things a bit for my tastes--but maybe he is right:

It should be stressed that modern steam engines are not at all, as is often implicitly assumed, an invention independent of the Hellenist engines; there is a continuous line of descent. Heron's expositions were studied carefully by Leonardo da Vinci, among others.

Apparently Leonardo drew pictures based on the old books, including a picture or so that aren't found in any of the known old books. Heron (1st century AD) seems to have been a compiler rather than a scientist or engineer himself. The dioptera Heron describes used small screws, but Heron's description of how to make screws only works well for big ones, and in his Automata he never uses gears in the descriptions at all, only friction devices. But gears would have worked better in some cases, and we know that centuries before there were precision gears.

This implies that by Heron's time there had been a significant technology loss. There was still a lot to see. Heron says that an early automatic play "merely showed, by way of motion, a face with blinking eyes. … Heron also says that with "still" automata, one can either show a character in motion, or a character appearing and disappearing."

There is some suggestion of the use of acids in mining, and we know they had pumps to raise water 30 meters out of an underground mine; some of the hardware is still there.

Medicine

Apparently Galen was not the pinnacle of "ancient" medicine. Herophilus, for example, had "a water "stopwatch" built that could be adjusted for the age of the patient." He described some mental illnesses, studied the circulatory system (with terms still used), studied the eye with great care, discovered the nerves (sensory and motor both!), and "For some diseases, such as the cholera, it is recorded that Herophilus handed down no treatment: this is perhaps the best proof of how serious he was in his medicine."

Science as such

Russo goes to considerable pains to define a scientific attitude as abstracting details from reality to create models of more or less validity--and making clear that the models are not the reality. It seems fairly clear that this attitude was gone by Imperial Roman times. He argues for its presence in Hellenist times. This is a little tricky, since most of the Hellenist scientist are known only by later references; not much is left.

Russo also complains that a reliance on "homogeneity" undermines science, but another word for that in context is "dimensional analysis." Things like x^2+x^3 were allegedly not dealt with by Greek mathematicians (not clear that this is true, BTW). If x is a distance, the expression as it stands does not seem to make any sense. Given how important constructive techniques were for the Greeks (They didn't have computers, OK? And you can try mapping the measurements from a small construction to a big one by hand, but I'll bet you make mistakes.), it isn't too surprising that these wouldn't have been high priority.

Did Newton base his work on gravitation on old Greek manuscripts? That seems likely to Russo and extremely unlikely to me. Some extraordinarily muddled Roman descriptions of Greek astronomy have triangles emanating from the Sun to move the planets. This, to Russo, looks a lot like Newton's geometric explanation of step-by-step motions of the planets under the Sun's gravitation, and Russo's explanation of how the language could have been garbled is quite plausible. However, untangling that rubbish is harder than figuring it out in the first place, and I think Newton's work was independent.

Newton acknowledges his debt in optics to the Archbishop de Dominis, who used Greek terminology and borrowed from Arabs.

It seems that the development of optics was plagued by amazing bad luck: The "Ancients" knew how to make good lenses but did not know what to make of them and kept them as baubles, later intellectuals--not just Leonardo and Fracastoro, but also Roger Bacon and Gosseteste centuries earlier--knew many uses for them, yet could not build them and had never seen such things. Some medieval manuscripts even show astronomers looking at the sky through long tubes; the incongruity has been addressed by postulating that these were empty sighting-tubes!

Consider that Bacon, in the fifth book of the Opus maius, waxed enthusiastic about the Ancient's ability to enlarge small objects and to bring faraway ones close, using appropriate configurations of lenses and mirrors

What happened?

Disasters piled on limited knowledge pools seems the likely culprit. Quite a bit of this is my interpretation of his data. He doesn't devote as much time as I'd like to seeing what went wrong.

Thebes had the death penalty for spying on their shipyards. No technology spread if they could help it. I don't know if I'm reading between the lines, but the complete absence of details about lighthouse construction sounds as though it was better for your health not to be too specific.

If you have many small pools of knowledge trading finished goods, if not the technology proper, with a big pool of talent at Alexandria, you can keep developing sciences and skills and reverse engineering things for quite a while provided there's peace.

There wasn't. Rome was expanding. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier, and Syracuse wasn't the last place; the Romans kept on.

Euergetes II (Ptolemy VIII) perhaps decided that the Romans would like him better if he moved against Greeks, so he persecuted the Greek population of Alexandria--including the ones from the library. Almost nobody was left, and some of the survivors from the library seem to have headed East far out of Roman reach; some suggest all the way to India.

Do I need to say more? Even if the books survive, explaining what exactly what the most advanced treatises mean demands some humans who still understand. Lose continuity, and the most advanced material is now unreadable--or if readable, not understood. Tell me what the average news reporter would make of the phrase fiber bundle, and compare it to the link. And any complicated technology demands the work of different kinds of experts. Lose any of them, and you can't repair it anymore.

So the Roman predilection for encyclopedic works rather than deep analysis makes sense--they don't understand the hard stuff. Nobody did anymore. And you can only coast so long on an encyclopedia, especially when it get corrupted and larded with superstition.

Can it happen again?

Of course. The barbarians are always with us, both outside and inside. We spread our knowledge far more widely today, so the catastrophe would have to be much greater to hit it all, but the same problem of transmission of the hard details remains. Don't count on Wikipedia being there after a disaster; think in terms of what books the local library kept from the great starving seventy years ago when the burners went through.

Word problems

On another blog I mentioned a method of trying to parse word problems I'd used with several of our kids, and from the dead silence that ensued I conclude that people are too embarrassed to ask what it was. Or something.

Blogger is not terribly friendly when I want to use and re-use many small images, so I stashed the whole thing on another web site. The idea is quite simple: look for key words and keep careful track of your units.

Resisting "Columnist Disease"

'But I must think it one or the other.'

'By my father's soul, you must not--until you have some evidence. Can you not remain in doubt?'

'I don't know that I have ever tried.'

'You must learn to, if you are to come far with me. It is not hard to do it. In Eschropolis, indeed, it is impossible, for the people who live there have to give an opinion once a week or once per day, or else Mr. Mammon would soon cut off their food. But out here in the country you can walk all day and all the next day with an unanswered question in your head: you need never speak until you have made up your mind.'

The Pilgrim's Regress by C.S.Lewis, Book 4 Chapter 3

Reminders

AVI recently posted on the spiritual gift of "Reminding".

He noticed that he rarely learned anything new from Bible reading and studies, and thought it a good thing: reminders are not news but we need them, even when we're not enthusiastic about them. Someone learning new things may applaud the teacher; someone hearing the also-necessary reminders may just grump. The job of Reminder is definitely more like foot-washing...

I'm still learning aspects of the faith emphasized by other branches--finally getting around to it--which is very interesting and edifying and not always very attached to how I live. On the other hand, my familiar daily readings that cycle through the gospels bring me to Matthew 25 regularly. Every time it seems to dig a little deeper: "Pay attention, dummy!"

If we hunger and thirst after new things, the old familiar may seem, and perhaps eventually become, mere rote. (Merton said he knew monks dead from the neck up.) There must be a trick to being thankful for reminders. Maybe experience? The oil level in the van hasn't been a problem since we bought it, but we still need to check it--one day it won't be OK. Hone up the kitchen knives. Sweep the floors, call your mother, mow the grass (come Spring): do the ordinary maintenance that, if we keep it up, isn't so ordinary.

Sometimes I find myself so far afield that I wonder if I need a flapper. Now that I think of it, most of the prophets were doing reminders (linked to an "otherwise here's what's coming" or "this happened because"). And they were highly honored for it (usually after they were dead): I think AVI's right; "one of the higher gifts we should aspire to."

Catacombs

Going to Italy is not in our budget anytime soon. But Google Maps has gotten there already, and no stress on my knee!

Distributed detection of chemical weapons

Cell phones for chemical weapons detection?

The idea seems reasonable enough--if the technology is cheap enough and the drain on batteries low enough, you could put environmental testing into a cell phone and have it relay back the GPS coordinates when something untoward is detected.

One reading isn't any use. I doubt they can get the false positive rate down to anything near 0, and in a city with a hundred thousand cell phones somebody's phone will always be setting off a warning. So it isn't very good for detecting as-yet-unused munitions--they need to be leaking enough so that more than one phone in the area is effected.

That doesn't mean the technology is of no use. If you have a dozen flags up all at once, civil defense can send out warnings, try to isolate traffic, get people indoors--the usual stuff.

But a couple of questions come to mind.

1. Are there chemicals that will give false positives? If so, the usual suspects will make it happen.
   
2. Can the control be turned off by an app? A mole app, if popular enough, could generate false positive patterns, or disable the system entirely so civil defense has less active systems than they think. If their models lead them to expect 100 and they only have 30, what does that mean?
   

You could make a simple compromise radiation detector that just looks for gammas. Most alpha emitters will include beta and gamma in the decay chain somewhere (tritium is tough, though). Pity the poor guy who got radio-isotope therapy. He'd have to stay indoors for a week.

Be sure to wear your helmet when playing in the driveway

Son hit by meteorites?

It could be, though I'd want things checked a bit more closely. How hard did the objects hit the boy? We can estimate how fast rocks that size should be traveling at terminal velocity and see if the injury is consistent. Is it really airplane debris? If it turns out to be just bits from an old satellite that should stir a bit of a fuss.

If it is real, I wonder what the boy's life will be like? Everywhere he goes he'll be the meteorite boy. Sort of like being a celebrity's kid--you have to duck the fame or try something to be known on your own.

I wear hats to keep off the Sun's UV. I don't think I'll upgrade. If a meteorite wants to clobber me I guess I'll just have to worry along somehow.

Imagining a world without antibiotics

You've probably read it already; if not, do so.

I'd be long dead without antibiotics: several bouts of pneumonia plus other kid stuff I've forgotten about.

The drugs have been getting more and more resistant, as predicted. McKenna warns about regularly mixing antibiotics in animal feed--I gather it helps the critters grow more quickly. But it obviously speeds up the rate at which bacteria become immune. There are details..

However, the companies which sell antibiotics report that only 13 percent of all product sold were sold under the “performance enhancement,” or growth promotion, label. The rest is for animals who need medicine to prevent and treat illness! Therefore, looking at the total volume of product sold is not meaningful to this debate. Although everyone continues to harp on this 80 percent number, it is important to understand that there are many more livestock in the U.S. than there are people; most are larger and need a larger dose. Also critical to this discussion, the types of antibiotics used in humans are much different than those used in animals.

My main take-away from this (interested) party is the claim that the antibiotics used in humans aren't the same as in animals. It isn't clear if he means people get one penicillin derivative and animals get another: in fact one of the comments claims "In 2010, 70 percent of antibiotics sold for use in food animals were ionophores or tetracyclines."

Another says "Drug use is rarely effective to'compensate' for poor practices. A large percent of ontimicrobials, has been often stated, are ionophores. Ths effect of this class is to push the rumen microbial fermentation over to a more favorable volatile fatty acid ratio, improving the efficiency. Also, some work out of Minnesota suggests that the growth promotion effect in hogs with other antibiotics may be in fact a similar mode of action. Which seems to also be a common thread in the press lately about obseity and gut microbes in humans." Which is related to the "grow more quickly" that I thought common knowledge.

So things are a little more complicated than met the eye.

Butchering isn't a precision job, and some cross-contamination occurs with the gut bacteria. Even if the antibiotic residue is below the allowed value, the bacteria are still there and itching for a little sloppy meat handling. Or fertilizer handling--veggies fertilized with nice organic manure...

The companies' report of 13% may or may not be very useful. For oral antibiotics, what's to keep you from mixing an old batch into the big feed bin after the sick cow gets well? As long as the residues die away by the time you ship, who's to know?

I've thought that "provide for the common defence" applied just as well to epidemics as it does to merely human enemies. (No, the ordinary cold and flu season doesn't qualify; you're on your own. Think Spanish flu or bubonic plague.) Systematically building up antibiotic resistance seems like an activity designed to undermine the security of the state.

That said, I suspect that the next big plagues won't come out of American farms, but out of megacities. People share diseases pretty easily, and in a lot of the world the antibiotics can be a little old (I've heard of donated drugs arriving pre-expired), or will be taken only until the patient feels better. Another recipe for new plagues.

IceCube

No, my name is not on the paper.

Local paper report

Some other details, and an "interview" with Claudio and Naoko (she had a cute baby later) and Halzen.

Halzen and Karle and Yeck assembled a good team; sharp and pleasant to work with: people who like to solve problems and find things out. And there were a lot of problems. It turned out that the clearest ice in the world had a tilted dust layer in it thanks to some distant volcano, and studying the properties of that took man-years (and is using lots of GPUs even now). And the background rates from cosmic ray showers in our atmosphere depend on "forward-going" charm quark production rates that even the LHC has trouble measuring.

Congratulations to all.

Process theology

The subject came up recently, and I've been trying to learn a little about it.

If I understand process theology's principles correctly, one foundation is that existence means to be in relation. When this is applied to God, it seems to contradict classical theology with its "aseity" although (forgive the proverb) the devil is in the details. The Christian Trinity exists both in Himself and in relation with Himself, and the source of relationship is within the trinity, but you still have contradiction for simpler monotheisms. Some of the P.T. proponents seem to be claiming that God is compelled to create as a requirement of His own existence--in order to exist in relation.

In addition, some assert that God does not know the future. IIUC, this is not the common predestinarian confusions that mix human experience with eternal views of time. Instead they are asking what are the implications of co-creation. I think this simply shifts the paradox to a new corner--which of the infinite set of possible histories do we agree to make. Their pop expression "does not know the future" is not helpful.

Why would we want to try to redefine the ground of existence as relationship? The first thing that comes to mind is the amazing success this sort of thing has had in mathematics. Pick up any advanced math reference, and it starts out describing mappings (morphisms). Category Theory is a hot topic, and a very powerful tool. Spending the effort to make a description of a physics law independent of the coordinate system you pick makes some symmetries much clearer. Analyzing relationships is what much of modern math does.

Of course we exist in relation, but that's not the same as saying everything must. Which is why I thought of math first.

I think the Creator/creation divide is so great that the same terms in the language don't mean the same things when applied to each side (I notice that the Chalcedonian debates were followed by a rise in apophatic theology: it seems fitting that after arguments over fine distinctions there be an admission that sometimes words mislead.) So I'm wary, even though I've written about God as a suffering servant myself.

The process theology field spreads over a moderately wide range, and the theologians I ran into first may not be typical. They seem to elevate the human view of the relationship to be a peer to God's view, which of course makes the current political and social fashion the next step in the revelation of the relationship between God and man.

Typing one-handed

is very error-prone. I remember a suggestion that the superior quality of older letters was partly due to having extra time to think every time you re-dipped the quill. We all know there are several biases to the sampling involved in that evaluation, and if the principle is true my output should be of nearly Shakespearean quality for awhile.

Rotator cuffs are amazingly complex machines, but they have several unpleasant failure modes, and I gather they don't heal as well as simpler systems.

Oswald

In commemoration of the Kennedy assassination, BBC dug up stories of Oswald's life in Russia.

Oswald basked in the attention of being one of Minsk's few foreigners, and its only American. He regularly made social calls to a girls' dormitory, near his flat.

"He would come without warning and knock at someone's door and say, 'Hello, here I am,'" says Inna Markava, an English-language translator who was a student at the time. "And that's it - spend two or three hours.

He thought that he was the centre of the group," she says.

"I remember that we were in the room, sitting, and if he thought we had forgotten about him, he would immediately remind everybody, that he was there, that he should not be forgotten."

The article's author says:

Still it was somewhat unnerving to hear so many good things about a person whose name is associated with one of the most infamous acts of our era.

I think David Stern and I may have different ideas about what constitutes "good things" about a person. "Weird" is the word I'd choose.

---

I gather one is supposed to try to remember where you were that day. I'm afraid I don't remember much at all. Maybe I've forgotten, or maybe I just didn't pay a lot of attention at the time. A friend of mine was vexed that his favorite program (Fireball XL5) was preempted by funeral programming and for some reason blamed the Kennedys. (We didn't have a TV, and my oxen were ungored.)

Round world

When did people learn that the world was round? The Greeks figured it out and taught the West and the Arabs, and I presume the Indians as well. The Chinese seemed to consider it flat until Ricci et al, though perhaps that was due to the representation of the Earth (a grid) in the language, taken mystically (Yin/Yang) or at face value by the unlearned. Though apparently it took a while for Chinese astronomers to buy into Ricci's notions. The Chinese weren't lacking in good astronomers, but astronomical knowledge about the stars and planets doesn't demand that you understand the shape of the Earth.

I read claims that the Maya knew the world was round, but I haven't yet found an explanation, just bald assertions. Once again, astronomy doesn't have to tell you the shape of the Earth unless you ask the right question (Earth's shadow on the Moon).

The lies of Draper and White have been dreadfully long-lasting, and clutter up google search badly enough to make finding information tough.

Supertime speculation

I referred to the science fiction notion of humanity as a psychically linked collective organism in a previous post. If that were the case, we'd be one unhappy organism. When cells in your body decide to go "every man for himself" we call it cancer. And if the super-organism carried our individualist attitudes up to the next level... The world=The flesh=The devil and the church is emergency surgery.

Technological decline

Via Not Even Rocket Science: some interesting notes on Tasmanian technological decline.

Summary of the situation: after rising seas separated Tasmania from Australia, they lost, according to the archeological record, the skills required to make clothing, fire, composite weapons (i.e. putting a stone tip on a spear), fishing boats--in fact they stopped eating fish. Wrapped in a skin and smeared with grease to keep off the cold, they used clubs and sharp sticks. Yet their ancestors back in 6000BC knew better; even in 1000BC they still had bone tools.

The theory proposed is that the populations were small enough that there were not enough apt pupils to maintain the more complex technologies. Knapping takes either instruction or a lot of trial and error. In their models teaching is lossy, and only a few pupils better their master. I'm not sure there's always a best way to attach a spear-point--more likely several good ways that you adapt depending on details of the wood and the point.

Henrich explicitly assumes that human intelligence averages are universal, which is known not to be the case, but it may not matter much for this argument. The information loss model is easily illustrated in the loss of native technologies and stories when European technologies arrived in the Americas. The reason differed, but the operation was the same--not enough people to learn the old ways, and sometimes even the language dies out. The Forgotten Revolution (I'm still reading it) describes how the Hellenists reached heights of scientific understanding not regained for two thousand years--but when political purges scattered the Alexandrian Greeks the knowledge died out. Without a large enough pool of scholars the chances of getting someone with the intellectual horsepower to understand Eratosthenes, much less carry on his work, are poor. You're lucky to be able to teach a little pre-algebra. I assume everybody has read A Canticle for Leibowitz.

That may be the solution, but I wonder if that's all. You can imagine a Tasmanian PETA that persuades the rest that fish are bad. After a while you forget why--but in the meantime you don't need fish tridents or nets, and you forget how to make those too. Disease or poor nutrition (famine) will drop the average IQ of a cohort of youngsters. Their kids may be OK, but in the meantime information gets lost.

It isn't pleasant to think that the things I've worked with will evaporate without a trace--knowledge is supposed to be cumulative--but it has happened before, and can easily happen again. I suppose we need to be "Faithful in his generation", even if those who come after lose it all.

Pehn-Pehn Ban

Recently Liberia decided to ban the motorcycle taxis that have been serving Monrovia. They are cheap, often overloaded, and if you can believe it, even less careful of traffic rules than the taxis and money-buses. The last straw seems to have been when an accident ended with a bus being burned by motorcyclists in retaliation.

As you can guess, there is more than one side to the problem. (The official exchange rate is 85 LD to the USD, but I suspect the unofficial rate is twice that.)

Garloe, who claimed he has been operating motorcycle since 2012, said the leadership has always devised schemes to collect money from them. "We are often confronted by our leaders to purchase various items such as stickers, daily tickets, identification cards from the Union."

"Think about this, we pay L\$600 for stickers, L\$50 for daily tickets that are not even monitored along with L$\500 for
identification card which many of us have paid for and are yet to receive; we do not know where the money is going," the frustrated motorcyclist said.

Quizzed as to what was responsible for the latest restrictions coming from government, he said "maybe, the union's refusal to remit money and fines collected from motorcyclists and the inability of the union to adequately monitor and supervise the sector are some of the reasons they have been banned from plying the main streets."

Adding his voice, motorcyclist Samuel Zeiguah, mirrored the issue from a very different perspective, saying that the ban will not only affect them as riders but will also affect police officers and officials of the Union who are in the habit of clamping down on poor motorcyclists.

"Police officers along with the officers of the five different unions will find it increasingly hard to regularly pay their 'susu', because of the ban. Policeman is going to seriously and surely feel it," he asserted.

I like Samuel's little sarcastic touch.

Turns out there's even more at stake here:

Mr. Bernard feared that this policy could increase the high criminal rate in the country, as many of the 'pehn-pehn' riders may revert in their ugly past, stressing: "Some of these bike riders you see here today are former combatants, and some of them are former armed robbers, who saw bike riding as a means of making livelihood.

So, if you do something that will keep them less busy, you give room to rise in the criminal rate."

Unintended consequences all over the place.

(Source for the quotes is AllAfrica)

All Things Considered

The whole is here, but for your edification:

Real pain, as in the case of being burnt at Smithfield or having a toothache, is a positive thing; it can be supported, but scarcely enjoyed. But, after all, our toothaches are the exception, and as for being burnt at Smithfield, it only happens to us at the very longest intervals. And most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences—things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys' habit in this matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen.

and

For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to have to run after one's hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the well-ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and running exhausts one. The same people run much faster in games and sports. The same people run much more eagerly after an uninteresting little leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one's hat; and when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic—eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing—such as making love. A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no animal could be wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe that hat-hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in the future. There will be a meet of ladies and gentlemen on some high ground on a gusty morning. They will be told that the professional attendants have started a hat in such-and-such a thicket, or whatever be the technical term. Notice that this employment will in the fullest degree combine sport with humanitarianism. The hunters would feel that they were not inflicting pain. Nay, they would feel that they were inflicting pleasure, rich, almost riotous pleasure, upon the people who were looking on. When last I saw an old gentleman running after his hat in Hyde Park, I told him that a heart so benevolent as his ought to be filled with peace and thanks at the thought of how much unaffected pleasure his every gesture and bodily attitude were at that moment giving to the crowd.

The same principle can be applied to every other typical domestic worry. A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of cork out of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated. Let him think for a moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark pools, and let his soul be immediately irradiated with gratification and repose. Again, I have known some people of very modern views driven by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and they could not pull it out.

I can testify to the elusiveness of the free-range hat.

OTC

I don't know why I'd have thought so, but I generally expect pain relievers to kick in as soon as the drug hits the bloodstream, or at least start trying. So ibuprofen seemed like so much candy: it never seemed to do anying at all.

I ran out of Aleve a few days ago, and since I have to stop taking it tomorrow anyway, I didn't bother getting more. The past five days have seen steadily increased shoulder pain. I wonder how much is inflammation and how much is the drug slowly leaving the system. And if it works like that as you stop, I wonder if it took several days to start working too--I just didn't notice because I don't usually stop to notice "no-pain."

Roaches

I'm trying to decide if I care about the robot roach kit. Backyard Brains offers a Bluetooth "backpack" kit you can attach to a roach (some dis-assembly required) and guide it remotely. Critics say it is inhumane and instrumentalist, which perhaps it is. On the other hand what I generally do with roaches is crush them to death. Or perhaps poison them, though I haven't had to do that in decades. Does the Giant Shoe Of Doom cause less stress than being run in circles by a 12-year-old? ...maybe...

"A company spokeswoman told the BBC that the backpack had been developed solely to encourage children to take an interest in neuroscience which, she said, needed to be better taught in American schools." Umm. I'm not sure I believe that. I'd bet they saw a possibility for a new kind of science kit, and didn't figure anybody would worry about experimenting on roaches. True, you have to replace its antennae, but you also have to handle it carefully and feed it and take care of it for a while, almost like a pet.

I don't like causing pain for the sake of pain. I burned ants with a magnifying glass in my youth(*), and tried to emulate the LaBrea tar pits when the ant crawled on a bit of tar filling cracks in the playground. I wouldn't do that today. I don't think the youthful exercise turned me into a psychopath, and I'd not worry unduly about kids trying it out once or twice. Making a habit of it is another matter. I wouldn't try to robot control a mouse just for my own entertainment, though I've no objection to studying mouse brain workings in general.

I'm not perfectly consistent, I suppose. It doesn't seem neatly black and white. I might, if I thought the kid was properly interested, give such a kit--though the $100 price tag is a little much for a one-shot kid's demonstration experiment.

---

(*) It is harder than it looks. Ants move quickly.

I did learn that it wasn't easy to set leaves on fire with the magnifier. It wasn't until many years later, when I was showing my own kids how, that I tried two at once and discovered the hard way that a nice hot fire got going in between the two layers.

Supertime for fun

I went off on a tangent on one of AVI’s posts and thought it might be amusing to pull it all together cleanly to describe a science fiction setting.

Instead of just traveling in time, suppose one also can travel in “supertime.”

You have undoubtedly heard of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where each possible outcome appears in some “world.” This is a modified version of that. The full many-worlds setting isn’t restrictive enough to tell very satisfactory stories in (though see Amber, Flight of the Horse)—you can pull any rabbit you please out of the hat.

The universe has a history from beginning to end. Just before the end of time, a man decides to have scrambled eggs. In another history, just before it all ends he decides to have bacon and waffles. Those two universe histories are otherwise identical, and if they both exist they will be “close to” each other in the obvious sense. Suppose that instead of a landscape the set of universes is a subset of the full many-worlds set—a well-ordered set of histories that progress from one to the next in “supertime.”

Obviously the earlier a decision is made in a history, the larger the “supertime-duration” between the histories. One way to think of visiting the “next” history is to time-travel to the EOT, step to the next history and travel back in time.

Since an ordinary human only experiences one history, the question for the writer is “who is making the supertime choices that changes history to history, and why?” We can round up the usual suspects here: humans make up a collective being and this being is aware of supertime; supertime aliens try to maneuver to some goal; or (why not?) angels and demons nudge history this way and that to a different kind of apocalypse. You could combine the first and third, with the collective humanity being the devil. (You leave ordinary science fiction behind with this option, though).

The next question is “why is the hero interested in the outcome of other histories?” Presumably after he learns what’s going on, he must find or create a more congenial history, retrieve a loved one, stop a villain from fouling up the histories, or something like that. Maybe a villain wants to find a nicer history for himself and compel a swap with his other self, and things go south from there? Changing histories needs to be tricky because large changes mean big jumps which aren’t very close together, so maybe shortcuts cause big problems, and the hero has to help put things back. Maybe if you go far enough back in regular time you'd have trouble getting anything to notice you at all, so most of your work is done in the near future (no going back to prevent the crime). Plan a setting to trap the villain, until the "big boys" take exception?

I wouldn't want the story to go the way of Star Maker--kind of evolving to the Omega Point--it seems a waste of a decent setup.

Art cache

BBC reports about a cache of lost paintings seized by the Nazis.

Previously unknown artworks by masters are among more than 1,400 pieces found in a trove of Nazi-looted art

...

Previously unregistered works by Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Max Liebermann and Henri Matisse were found. The paintings were found in March of last year after Mr Gurlitt was investigated for tax evasion.

The framed pictures were stacked on a shelf, like in a museum storeroom while the unframed works were piled up in drawers, said customs official Siegfried Kloeble.

According to a report by Germany's Focus magazine, Mr Gurlitt, the reclusive son of an art dealer in Munich, would occasionally sell a picture when he needed money.

Maybe I'm too suspicious, but could it be that some of these paintings were unknown because they are recent creations? 1400 is a lot of paintings to make and artists to fake, so they're probably real.

Philistine that I am, I have failed to covet the pictures published so far.

I want one

Laser cutter, that is. Not very portable, unfortunately.

Welcoming climate

My turn at the diversity fest. This was a small group session looking for input on how to improve the climate for diversity. There was just one man among the 9, and the majority of the participants headed small committees dealing with student life.

I asked if the UW had any studies available for why people might be leaving or who was at risk, and was told that we needed to do this, with an explanation flavored with a couple of unhappy anecdotes.

Discussion rapidly devolved from general discussion to suggestions for making diversity training mandatory for faculty (using a "stealth" program), and from that to complaining about their budgets and the evil fiscal conservative student government.

Despite the hints at the start by the facilitator's assistant (?) that voices could get overlooked if some people talked too much, two dominated--one an aggressively aggrieved administrative assistant who didn't like people ignoring her in favor of the degreed, and the other a month-new liason to Indians and Eskimos giving chapter and verse of how the student charged with running a pow-wow was disrespecting her. Neither the facilitator nor the assistant tried to steer the discussion back to something useful.

"Was there enough oversight of students running the student segregated fees?" was the question of the hour. I'm not sure what it had to do with how to make students feel welcome, but somehow it seems like a natural evolution of the project.

It would be a bit much to expect any careful thought about what "diversity" is or needs from such a group. And to be fair, the pettiness was driven by a few of our number (one lady barely said a word).

If I'd tried to redirect the meeting I'd have gotten flack about white male privilege, and I didn't think the chances of getting anything useful were worth the bother. But noblesse oblige, maybe I should have tried--it couldn't have been worse and the noisy ones would have had the joy of seeing their prejudices confirmed.

Words

While commenting on another site about types of useless books, it occurred to me that the language lacks a useful term for one genre, and so I offer autohagiography. Since ghostwriters allegedly do most of the heavy lifting for these works, probably "pseudo-auto"hagiography would be more accurate, but that's more Entish than English.

It is frustrating to try to debate anything important while using words which have more of a family of meanings than a single value. "God" is one obviously overloaded word, and so is "freedom." But I run into the same confusion when I want to know if something is a good movie or not. A lot of the discussion about the ACA is fuzzed because nobody knew what was in it to begin with, but the fact that the phrase "health care" isn't all that precise makes it even worse. (Does it include mental disorders? I gather the DSM-V really muddies the distinctions. Does it include prevention? Prevention of disorders stemming from lifestyle choices? Does health care mean insurance?)

The phrase "gender roles" is another muddy mess, conflating natural tendencies with caste-like rules.

I get it that sometimes word families are good--such as when writing poetry and you want to be allusive. And when I tell my wife "I love you" I mean it in a lot of different ways, and it isn't always convenient to parse them all out.

But the rest of the time discussion feels like trying to make marshmallow sculptures using rods of cooked spaghetti.

Pre funeral last blessing

A man in our Saturday Bible study spoke of a friend who decided to have his funeral before his death, so he could attend. This was taken as a bit odd. Did he want to attend to hear all the nice things about himself, or to let people say their thanks now before it was too late? I pointed out that there was precedent for something a little bit like that in Isaac's and Jacob's final blessings. It seems as though they assembled family together for a final meeting, and didn't necessarily die right afterwards.

I hesitate to recommend the revival of the custom, because I've known a few people who'd use the occasion for a final nasty jab. We don't have the infrastructure of expectations to curb abuses.

Nevertheless I like the idea of having a get-together for a final blessing. It could be a hard to muster the energy to say much, but that's one reason we have microphones. And it could take a long time, with plenty of rests, to talk to everyone. And there could be expectations that everybody get comparable amounts of face time, which isn't remotely reasonable but... And I can imagine expectations that everybody use insincere happy talk. And things get amusing if the dying person recovers to live a few more years (my late mother-in-law was very close to death several times in the years before she died).

Still, if the opportunity is there, it seems a shame not to try.

On a related note, I hope you read David Warren's column about his mother's death.

Thoughts on using metadata to detect conspiracies

The word for today is combinatorics.

When you are trying to track down spies and conspirators, it seems like an excellent idea to find out who they contact and look for the clusters of connections that suggest that "here be the leaders." If you can find strong connections between known enemies and Joe X, he becomes a person of interest.

The problem with this is that anybody with any tradecraft is going to use cutouts and dead drops, and generally make things as muddy as possible. The old hollow tree is pretty low tech, but it works. I suppose (not being in the business myself) that bulletin boards and comment sections would make very good sites for leaving coded messages.

But, says you, that's just what the metadata searching should help with. If NSA knows Muhammad Smith's favorite web sites, they can look at who else shares those and once had a history of going to jihadist web sites.

How many is that? Suppose Muhammad Bombmaster posts sporadically on 20 different web sites, including the Minneapolis Bayou. Jason Wannabe used to visit jihadist sites, but after a few long talks with his new partners he uses a different computers for different jobs. He visits 10 different web sites including the Bayou. Jackson Nobody visits 15, including the Bayou, as do about 5000 other people. Of that 5000, most live in Minneapolis and maybe 5% have wondered what the heck an al Qaeda web site looked like.

So Jason Wannabe is 1 out of 200. Presumably the non-Minneapolis sites have lower percentages of visitors who've seen a jihadist web site, so maybe the rates are 1 out of 10 instead. So you are watching about 400 different people. Not bad so far. But if each of them is in contact (Twitter, Facebook, etc) with 50 other people, you now have of the order of 20,000 people in the second level, and a million in the third level. OK, say a quarter million--there'll be overlap. In fact, overlaps are just the things you'll be looking for to locate conspirators. Most overlaps will be easy to understand, given time; accidental ones are harder to understand because there isn't a reason. (Put 30 random
people in a room. What are the odds that at least 2 share a birthday? Over 70%)

If your criteria for suspicion are loose, you have a lot of false positives on your hands. If they're tight a little tradecraft will flummox you. Trails peter out in a sea of noise.

I figured that if they're tracing phone calls, there are only 6, and maybe 5 links between me and the Boston bomber. I dunno whether he shared any plans with his imam: all the links may be innocent; I know they are from this end...

The initial claim was that this kind of tracking prevented several dozen terrorist attacks. Then the number was rounded down to 1 or 2. I don't expect to hear honest answers--it might give away useful secrets, or it might reveal that they can't do what they say. I'd not be surprised if the number was 0.

On the other hand it is very much easier to do ex post facto analyses and try to find co-conspirators. If A, B, and C are involved you can look at the sites they had in common and the links they shared and sort through only a few hundred people looking for suspicious activity. That's orders of magnitude easier. But it is also a little late.

It remains to be proven that this vast a tool can be used for the announced purpose.

We were told that some of the engineers used the system to "spy" on their spouses/live-ins. That seems like an obvious way to test the system; try to see if it works with someone you know. If you find that it misses calls you know about, you know the system isn't working. And if there are phone calls you didn't know about--you drill down a bit and find out if they're real, and if they are then there is domestic discord.

Of course there's more than just metadata--Snowden wasn't telling us anything particularly new. Nobody can handle all the raw data for everybody, but they can drill down for an individual suspect, and presumably get a lot of information--online purchases, emails, phone calls, and so on. From this raw material you can assemble the detailed links for a legal case, or for further monitoring.

This is also a useful tool if the individual is suspected of conspiring to be a Congressman of the wrong political party. Politics demands some deal making that constituents might not be happy to read a transcript of, and power attracts groupies--after a few years I'd guess that quite a few people would have some dirty laundry. Maybe not even anything illegal (like forgetting to pay sales tax on online purchases?), but enough to worry them into going along. It wouldn't take large numbers.

We just saw the Republicans go down to dramatic defeat and get nothing for their pains--a few got pork for the home district but there's no budget and no debt limit any more (unless there's a supermajority to vote against raising it), which used to mean that the king could do whatever he pleased. Probably still does.

If I'm right about the spy system we put together, we'll see more of this sort of curious business in years to come, because the system is much easier to use against individuals than in tracking spies. There will always be a temptation to use it against political foes "for the greater good" and we don't typically elect leaders on the basis of their integrity.

One-sidedness

I think the devil gets as much, or more, mileage out of simple imbalance as out of temptations to evil. Imbalance distorts our vision and leaves our hearts puzzled and dissatisfied. We're wrong-footed. It lies by what it omits, and lets hazards lurk unseen in the periphery.

Pop music (not including country) has had the focus on romantic love for as long as I can remember. That's nice, but there's rarely any hint of children, and usually not much about work or age. My Little Pony has a nice wholesome approach to friendship, but I don't get much sense of the necessity for judgment and for solitude, or that everything doesn't always end gleefully. Or that there can be plenty of good in less-than-deep friendships. The goth scene seems to focus on loss and pain, but the last time I checked sunrises and Fourier transform could be beautiful no matter which side of the bed I got up on.

Who cares? Everybody knows that romance is only a part of marriage, that friends are sometimes hard to find, and that life is worth living.

Except that what we immerse ourselves in effects us, and if unbalanced will leave us off balance too. If I cannot find deep friendships at work or school even after a few years, should I blame them or me or just call it the luck of the draw? MLP characters can find them in 25 minutes. I've heard people seriously suggesting terraforming Venus and using inertial damping. I'm tolerably sure they hadn't been overindulging in Bill Nye episodes. And plenty of other people have noticed the effects of excessive romantic expectations on the length of marriages.

So how do we defend against imbalance? That's easier in politics than this sort of thing, since we generally don't notice the culture we swim in, while there are political partisans eager to enlighten you. I haven't noticed any striking benefit from multiculturalism in this regard. Maybe there's a PC filter, or maybe we just don't empathize easily. Or both. It isn't always easy to see what's in front of you. It is possible to write a couple of books about the joy of sex and not report on the glaringly obvious--like reporting about the hotels along the Grand Canyon and never mentioning the feature in the landscape nearby.

Rawandan prison

Ex-Liberian President Charles Taylor has asked to serve his 50-year sentence for war crimes in Rwanda, rather than the UK.

In a letter sent to the court that convicted him, he says it would be easier - and less expensive - for his family to visit him in Africa.

He also said he feared being attacked in a British prison.

I don't think those are good enough reasons to want to stay in a Rwandan prison.

The key word I think is stay. Taylor still has plenty of supporters in Liberia, and undoubtedly both large caches of money and munitions at his direction. If sent to Rwanda, how long do you think he would remain in durance vile? Think he'd make it as far as prison before finding a new direction?

Incarnation and texting

I suspect we were put here originally to make love and beauty incarnate and to subdue the wild world into a wild garden. We aren't here just to think about things, noble an activity as that is.(*)

Charles Williams said that in the end, all loves must be physical. Screwtape was content if the patient's love was limited to fantasy--it didn't matter how glorious love was if it never made any difference. I find that my reaction to hearing of someone's illness is to pray for them briefly, think about whether there's anything that should be done, and then move on to other things--but Jesus didn't say "I was sick and you thought about me."

There is something important about investing not just my attention but my body in my works. A text or email message is good, a phone call has more presence, but being there in person means I'm putting my whole self in service to meeting you. (Assuming my mind isn't elsewhere--I remember my school days...) A Facebook "friend" may be the best connection possible between people too far apart, but it is a flimsy wraith compared to flesh and blood conversation. Face to face it isn't just my spirit that is with you, but all of me.

Maybe texting and Twitter are two of the nine rings: they give the illusion of stretching your life to more and more people, but at the price of stretching you thinner and thinner.

---

(*)Thinking of math is good, but putting pencil to paper to develop it is better.

Matthew 25 again

I think I need to revisit my thinking on Matthew 25. The story of the virgins in particular nags at me this time. Earlier, Jesus said "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come." He earlier said "But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say," So the keeping alert does not have to do with preparing your testimony for trials or anything like that. Jesus said that his coming wouldn't be hidden, so watching the sky can't be what He meant.

The parable of sheep and goats says we meet Jesus before he returns, and our everyday reaction to our neighbors is therefore something we need to be careful about. To be alert about?

I notice that my default reaction to some news story depends on what I've been reading/thinking about the previous day. My interactions with people are a little more structured than is probably good for us all, and if they weren't they'd probably also vary. Perhaps the goal is to be alert to what my mind and heart are doing in relation to other people all the time. Put that way it sounds kind of ego-centric.

A friend and I are putting together a series on spiritual disciplines, and I think they play a role here. If we work to put to death the "flesh" and make room to practice the works of the spirit, we change what our reaction is likely to be when the test of the moment comes. We watch by first immersing ourselves in what is good so that we see more clearly what should happen when the test comes.

We cannot just sit back on His laurels and expect that we will be satisfactory servants. The astute reader will notice some overlap between the fruit of the Spirit and the qualities we have to add in order to keep from being ineffective and unproductive.

Gal 5:22-23	2Peter 1:5-11
God's fruit	We put on
Love	Goodness
Joy	Knowledge
Peace	Self-control
Patience	Perseverance
Kindness	Godliness
Goodness	Mutual affection
Faithfulness	Love
Gentleness
Self-Control

I'd read Whitney's book about 7 years ago, and the only change it induced in my life was to cultivate the habit of "never appearing before the Lord empty-handed" but always having something, however small, to give. I also got more systematic in Bible reading, though that wasn't actually related to Whitney's book: it was triggered by waking up too late to catch the bus. In preparation for the series I've been reading much more, old (Practice of the Presence of God) and new (Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Barton--I may report on that one--, Celebration of Discipline by Foster, and so on). I'm now thoroughly convinced that reading a dozen books is of less value than even halting attempts at practice.

"The important things are always simple. The simple things are always hard." Sometimes humiliatingly simple. I was all set to complain that I'd not heard much about spiritual disciplines in church, and then I remembered a little children's song "Read your Bible, pray every day... It will make you grow." Quiet time with God, time of service, simplicity; they were all there, if not fully articulated and explained.

I'll see how well "do as I say" works.

Fullfilling purpose

Imagine you are a car in winter. (Or in a pinch, imagine heavy rain, fog and mudholes.)

You alternately spin smoking wheels and idle as people push on your bumper to rock you out of a snow bank. You inch slowly up the hill, and then realize that you are sliding sideways. The freezing rain turned the unplowed drifts across the road into chunks as rugged as the furrows on a farm. And you realize there is no way you are going to stop this side of the stop light.

And when, after an interminable time, you reach the cleaned and dry highway and cruise into higher and higher gear, you'd feel that this is what you're made for.

Every now and then I know what that's like.

Chicago

The musical is coming to Madison, and the ads are all about. I gather it is about murderesses awaiting trial. The ladies in the ads are far more fetching than the ones whose pictures actually turn up on in the crime section.

I presume there's some selection bias at work in the newspaper photography: the rich and powerful can wiggle out (h.t. Steve Sailer), but there aren't that many of them. And maybe brighter folks can figure some way to dispose of the awkward corpse clandestinely, though I haven't come up with any reliably untraceable methods myself. (Detective stories, looked at closely, aren't always very realistic.) But neither category should contribute much to the numbers, which leads to the banal observation the bulk of the criminals look neither very bright nor very attractive.

Maybe police photography uses the same equipment as the DMV, which generally portrays me as a felonious stranger.