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Compare and contrast

Liberian govt vs ebola

They've established isolation centers and have retrieval squads working. This isn't pretty: the WSJ calls it "A Grim Picture", but it is a good start. What's needed is more of this, not less, and ways of doing it without government sponsorship.

THIS is the grim picture: isolation broken, patients brought out, and soiled blankets stolen. In the community preliminary estimates (reported last week, so probably based on 3-week-old info) claimed 1.8 new infections for each existing one.

Ebola without hope

People are taking the old traditional approach to epidemics: head for the hills and leave the sick to die. As long as this is true--"The villagers who abandoned Fatu and Barnie have meanwhile themselves been shunned by neighbouring towns also in fear of the spread of the virus, Wile said."--it will probably work. If they get to take refuge in other towns, it will backfire.

That doesn't make it any less heartbreaking to read about. Protocols and supplies to help family take care of their own might have meant that the sick didn't have to die alone, but there wasn't enough time once the scope of the problem was known.

If I were a villager without resources, would I be willing to stay and tend the sick knowing I'd probably die too? Christians used to.

What

The Skyla ad shows the power of imagery. They are able to accomplish instantly what Lovecraft required shovelfuls of adjectives to do.

I'm trying to imagine in what universe that ad would not be deeply creepy. Stepford Wives creepy. She lavishes human love on a hollow shell (like the Stepford husbands). Is she the duped or the duper, or both?

I like to hope that it is just a blunder on the part of the ad men. It is frightening to think there are people who'd think it normal or attractive. Did I miss something? Is Portland really full of pod people?

Hat tip to Donald Sensing

Why are doctors and nurses dying?

When dealing with Ebola, doctors and nurses in the city wear protective gear. Yet they fall sick too. Why? Can’t the layers of rubber or vinyl protect them?

Yes, but…

The first problem is diagnosis. Not everybody showing up has ebola, and you don’t ship people into the isolation ward for triage. That first step can be tricky.

Think about the body’s natural defense system. Never mind the inner ones for now. Most of the body is covered with skin, which isn’t very permeable to start with and which is covered with an armor of scales of dead skin cells. There are perforations—hair follicles, sweat glands, oil glands, and the occasional nick or scrape. The mucous membranes are much more vulnerable, but they cover a much smaller area and produce secretions that at least potentially can sweep out some of the detritus. Even the lungs, which have to be permeable to gas molecules, are only approached by channels lined with cilia and mucus to trap and eject foreign particles.

Any of these systems can be overwhelmed. Smokers overwhelm their lungs’ defenses with persistent smoke (not to mention the gases) and as we all know too well that viruses for cold and flu frequently succeed in arriving in our membranes and starting to work.

In addition, the systems can be compromised. In particular, one essential practice—hand washing—can reduce your dead skin layer and the more aggressive cleansers, accompanied by the scrubbing requited to clean out folds and pores, can inflame the skin over the course of a day—meaning, among other things, that the skin is more permeable.

I almost hesitate to mention this, because not washing is a terrible option. The health care workers are between a rock and a hard place. If they don’t wash, they risk infecting themselves and other people; if they do, they may still infect themselves. Wash. Scrub. Damn the torpedoes.

The calculus differs for somebody taking care of his cousin back in the village. There’s only one person to care for and then no more (one hopes), but any protective gear is entirely ad hoc (cloth dipped in bleach, perhaps?) Because the number of times he needs to wash is smaller, harsher chemicals are OK—in fact probably required since his gear will leak.

It differs again for someone just going about his business in the city. Unfortunately how much it differs depends on the local risk, and I don’t know the details—as fast as I can tell nobody does.

Look at that protective gear again. It should block fluids very effectively. But there’s a reason most good ideas never make it to commercial production: corner cases are common, and so are Murphy Conspiracies.

Look at the suits.

1. They are stored folded. Are the flexed folds as strong as the rest?
2. The suits are kept in high heat and humidity. How fast will that deteriorate the material?
3. Africa is home to many molds and mildews. Which infect the materials?
4. What will chlorine bleach do to the materials?

Any one of these insults is probably within engineering tolerances. But with 2 or 3 in combination, would you guarantee the integrity of the material?

Most of the time all is well. But a nurse makes dozens of contacts with patients in a day (cleaning the up is no small job!). The probability that her suit or glove leaks is small, and the probability that an exposed bit of skin will serve to infect is not 100% (but with everybody sweating so much I’d not bet the exposed area would stay small); call their product ε. In a simple statistical model the probability that she will be infected is 1-(1-ε)^N where N is the number of contacts. Suppose she has 50 contacts in a day, and each probability that something seeps through to infect her is only 0.1%. The chance that a single day’s work will infect her is about 4.9%. (Beats 100% without protection, though) Numbers are pulled out of the air for example's sake. DO NOT QUOTE THEM!

For comparison, suppose somebody has only one patient to deal with (5 contacts a day) but has cruddy gear with a 1% failure rate. The daily infection probability is the same. Since the patient will probably die in a day or two, the chance of getting infected himself is about 10%. On the other hand the nurse, working day after day after day, will almost certainly get it sooner or later.

Of course, back in the village, our caregiver probably doesn’t know how to disinfect, and was probably exposed already when the patient first got sick; so it isn’t a fair comparison—he’ll almost certainly catch it also. Best bet is to have the village scatter for a week or three and nobody be allowed into any other village. That’s easier to do in the tropics than in climates with winter.

In the “slums” of the city, everybody is cheek by jowl. Also, malaria is endemic, so feeling sick is nothing strange (more people have malaria than ebola—and quite a few die from it too), so rubbing up against somebody sick is likely to be an everyday event. Plenty of contacts can happen before the disease becomes dramatic.

I’m assuming that transmission is by contact. That isn’t guaranteed. There are several claims made about ebola that we need to revisit.

The first is that a person is not contagious before symptoms appear. How do we know that? Skin swabs? We need to know that a person has been infected, and be able to search the samples for presence of the virus. If monkeys could be infected you could try to infect them with human sweat taken at various times of the incubation period, but that’s a lot of monkeys to test if you want to be sure there’s less than even a 10% chance of infection. DNA testing of the swabs? It would be very nice if this was true, but there's not always a hard and fast boundary between symptoms and no symptoms.

Another is that it is not airborne. At the simplest level it certainly is: if a patient sneezes up your nose you’re hosed. So how far can the droplets go in tropical humidity without drying out enough to kill the virus? How long does the virus last when dried out? I assume it deteriorates over time, but it can survive for a couple of days on surfaces. And "In the laboratory, infection through small-particle aerosols has been demonstrated in primates, and airborne spread among humans is strongly suspected, although it has not yet been conclusively demonstrated"

I assume that they spray bug killer all over the hospitals and environs, but flies don’t die instantly. The hospitals try to bag up corpses quickly, but there’s a lot of mess to clean up still. The surface of the mess is probably covered with sprayed bleach, so a fly would probably have to swim to pick up live viruses, but there’s still a window of opportunity for fly-borne transmission—or is there? Most diseases haven’t figured out how to use mosquitoes for transmission yet, so that’s probably not an important vector—but it might be wise to check.

At this point quarantine is probably the best way to handle outbreaks, but what kind of quarantine may depend a bit on the answers to the questions I brought up. I have no good idea of how to do quarantine in one of the high-density slums.

I'm not an ebola researcher, and my knowledge of Liberian isolation wards is based on descriptions I've read. I assume the dedication to the protocols is being kept high.

War solving problems

The T-shirt read "Defeat is not an option." I understand the power of a positive attitude, but that still seems pretty silly.

Victory is not always an option, but defeat always is.

I regularly hear "War never solves anything." (I work in Madison, what do you expect?) Sometimes it does, of course, but by and large it is true that war doesn't solve problems. But the slogan is an exercise in missing the point. So what if it doesn't solve problem X? That doesn't mean it isn't necessary sometimes. The lawn doesn't stay mowed, the flu isn't defeated forever, and in this fallen world there are people who now and then will try to kill you--and sweet persuasion doesn't work with all of them--or even most of them. And fighting back doesn't always come to any conclusion beyond "Not this time."

Pundits warn us that "Israel didn't win in Gaza(*)" and "Israel can't win in Gaza". I suppose pundits don't get paid if they don't say something everyday, but it isn't exactly a surprise that wars are generally inconclusive. (Maybe to those whose knowledge of history is from cartoon books...) If you succeed in exterminating your enemies, that's generally a complete win (except for the bit about losing your own soul), but generally sides are well enough matched that there's a return bout a few decades down the road. "We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they've hardly bothered us since then."

Of course the aftermath of a war is critical too. The US won the first and second Iraq campaigns, and then helped win the first revolt, but under Bush we bobbled the reconstruction and then we elected a president who gets bored quickly with responsibility and dropped the ball completely. And so we lose--and so do a lot of other people. It isn't fair to them, but a lot of things happen to us because of what other people decide--good and bad--no matter whether we deserve them or not.

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(*) What is it about Gaza and not Syria or the Assyrian Christians or Yazidis--no riots in the streets on their behalf and they're getting hit harder.

Sleep

"Nature requires five, Custom gives seven! Laziness takes nine, And Wickedness eleven."

Hours, that is. Every few years a new sleep study gets into the news and we're breathlessly informed about what we really need. Last time I looked at this segmented sleep was the topic, but there were plenty of "You need X hours" reports before that.

I think we all know that the total amount of sleep people need varies with age, and some people get by with dramatically less. The question isn't really "What's the mean of the distribution for my cohort?" but "What do I need?" And, of course, "When?" Siesta, anyone?

Camping is instructive. Unless there's some kind of get-together, I don't stay awake for long after the fire goes out, and I tend to wake up pretty early; at least relative to when you wake up for a 9 to 5 job.

My ancestors came from Europe, where they'd lived for thousands of years, with remarkably few electric lights. I'd think that would be long enough to get adjusted to the fact that nighttime isn't of fixed duration. Sometimes night is 8 hours, sometimes 16--or even worse. Segmented sleep aside, it isn't very plausible that people would sleep the same amount all through the year.

So why would there be an ideal amount of time for a block of sleep at night?

Phooey. I'm going to bed.

Differing dreams

I wondered this evening if music ever appeared in dreams, and looked it up: apparently so, especially among musicians.

I wonder if this is something "trainable" or reflects a personality trait. I never dream of math or physics (or discover a benzene ring in my sleep), so what's in the dream isn't just a matter of what the interests of the day were.

Vision, always. Speech, usually--but not other noises as a rule. Touch--in only one category. Taste--never.

We've heard aplenty about the meaning of the contents of dreams. Does what kinds of senses are involved in a person's dreams tell us anything about him? (I'm not looking for stresses or pathologies here.)

Virtuality

Virtual Data Centers are all the rage these days. Let somebody else handle the backup and migration and hardware management: all you have to see is what the machines do: appear to be your web server, etc (and see the check you write each month...). Sometimes that's handy: we use a lot of virtual machines to handle tasks that don't need a lot of horsepower (DNS service, DHCP service, etc). I'm supposed to be exploring the possibilities of virtualizing some heavy processing as well, for when somebody needs to run a version of their code that only runs on an OS we don't support anymore. Haven't started yet. Of course this is all in-house.

When something goes south, it is nice to be able to threaten the hardware yourself instead of sitting on a help-line to somewhere in California waiting your turn.

Think about it. Don't conservation laws require that for every virtual data center there must be a virtual anti-data center?

Imagine the possibilities in anti-data...

Interpretation

Some people like to take verses out of context as proof texts for this or that rule. Everybody either knows some of these folks, or thinks they know about them (lumping all "fundamentalists" into the same pot).

And so the mantra is "context." What does the context of the verses say? Read what comes before and after and see how that clarifies things.

It usually does. But some sections of scripture are a bit jumbled. Take Jeremiah. The history and the collected prophecies aren't in sync.

And Exodus. Exodus 20 is of utterly different tone from 21-23, though it is written as though it is all one continuous narrative. I think you have to look back to Exodus 19:16 and not just to Exodus 24:4 "Moses wrote down all the words of the Lord"

Distinguishing isn't always very obvious. Jesus was pretty clear that some of what Moses wrote wasn't quite Plan A. He was also clear that some other parts definitely were, including an expansive reading of Leviticus 19:18 about loving your neighbor ("Who is my neighbor?")

A huge problem is that if you claim to be able to distinguish Plan A from Plan B, you invite termites to stay; and according to their several besetting sins they'll imagine warrant to dispose of rules on money or sex or whatever. There's clear enough warrant for Christians to dispose of the Levitical rules for worship, and some rules are tied to the people and the land, and some are obviously simple sanitary rules, but without a deep understanding of the rest of scripture you won't be able to escape the temptation to de-weight the uncomfortable rules. And thinking you have such a deep understanding is probably the clearest sign that you don't.

One trivial example is the "We wear clothing of different kinds of fabric; why should rules about who we have sex with be any more binding?" That kind of sloppy analysis hardly requires refuting--and it is probably just a slogan in the mouth of someone who wouldn't be persuaded no matter what you replied. (Quick reply: the second ties in with the Big 10, the first does not and is fairly obviously related to ritual purity and a metaphor for being single-hearted. OT ritual purity is not an issue for Christians, the metaphor is fine but not critical, but human relationships are the same now as then.)

More sophisticated analyses explain why charging interest isn't really charging interest, or that it isn't really bad, or that we can't avoid it so may as well give up. Renting money has certainly been an extremely powerful tool and we've reaped substantial benefits, but although correlation isn't causation, it seems to have had some some less happy side effects on the value of money over time. I'm not an economic historian, and maybe the side effects are worth it. Still.

So what's the best approach? An official Magisterium? An open bazaar, trusting that the truth will eventually prevail? Strongly urging all would-be interpreters to humbly consider the wisdom of their ancestors? That last is not a popular attitude these days, but it seems like a promising approach, provided we explain what our ancestors actually thought and don't just filter the past through the fad du jour.

Motherless Monkeys

The Isthmus describes some of the controversy around proposed tests of macaque monkeys and infant stress, apparently with a focus on depression. I'm afraid I don't trust WisconsinWatch to accurately describe the purposes of animal research. Even non-ideological popularizers are less than fully reliable, and I've tried from time to time to re-analyze stories. Unfortunately I don't always have the time to devote to the exercise.

This is old ground, the detractors say. I'm not 100% sure about that.

On my thesis experiment, one of the researchers told us that one of his wife's college friends had a student job that among other duties involved cleaning up some of the labs where this kind of research went on. I gathered that he thought this was the cloth-vs-wire surrogate mother experiment, but I don't think the dates work for that--he was only about 10 years older than me. At any rate, the cleaning lady was softhearted, and would take baby monkeys out of their cages and cuddle them--and apparently never got caught at it.

Hmm. If the monkey was disturbed and would run or bite, I'd bet she wouldn't cuddle it much, but if it wasn't so bad off, I'd bet the contact would make it happier. I think I see a way results could be skewed with nobody having a clue.

Science behind the scenes

Correcting the quote:

'No one trusts a model except the man who wrote it; everyone trusts an observation, except the man who made it.' Harlow Shapley

I heard a variant of this saying (model=>theory, observation=>experiment) which was attributed to Einstein, but this one seems more common. I can't find the original source, though.

UPDATE:
"A hypothesis or theory is clear, decisive, and positive, but it is believed by no one but the person who created it. Experimental findings, on the other hand, are messy, inexact things, which are believed by everyone except the person who did that work."

Harlow Shapley Through Rugged Ways to the Stars

Ebola and the researchers

Tales new and old from the research front:

• There remains some residual reaction to the virus after 12 years, suggesting survivors might have something like antibodies
• Are there forms of the virus that offer partial immunity (like cowpox vs smallpox?)
• Can animal tests be used for faster approval for human tests? (2009)
• Animal tests of something similar (2012)
.
• One group claimed that ebola works so fast the immune system can’t always react in time (2003). I'm not sure that's quite the whole story.
• I get the sense this report was released a little early. It sounds like they weren't quite finished studying the protein, but since it is in the news...

I have a feeling we're going to discover more in a few months about immunity: do people who have recovered get the disease again?

Ebola continues

The lead doctor at JFK hospital in Liberia died of it, and a Liberian flew to Lagos and died of it there. Two Samaritan's Purse missionaries have caught it. In Liberia they're taking some actions:

All borders of Liberia will be closed with the exception of major entry points including the Roberts International Airport, James Spriggs Payne Airport, Foya Crossing, Bo Waterside Crossing, Ganta Crossing. At these entry points, preventive and testing centers will be established, and stringent preventive measures to be announced will be scrupulously adhered to;

A new travel policy by the Liberia Airport Authority covering inspection and testing of all outgoing and incoming passengers will be strictly observed;

Restrictions on public gatherings such as solidarity marches, demonstrations, promotional advertisement are to be restricted;

Hotels, restaurants, entertainment centers and video clubs are to play five-minute film on Ebola awareness and prevention;

Government vehicles will be commandeered, as appropriate, to provide needed logistics support to the health delivery system;

Without those kinds of border assurances I'd bet that within a week or two EU or US airports would stop admitting Liberians/Sierra Leoneans/etc from anywhere. Even with border checks, they'll probably stop soon anyway, or only allow in after a week's observation. The Xray machine at the Roberts airport didn't work and the baggage search wasn't particularly efficient; will medical checks be any better?

Sierra Leone's Sheik Umar Khan treated over 100 ebola patients before contracting the disease himself. That suggests a 1% failure rate of the systems they have in place: bleed-through, airborne spittle, a stray fly that got past the screens, needle sticks, sloppy laundry--something. The safety suits are horribly hot: you last 40 minutes or so in the tropics, and I assume getting them off and on is tricky. (BTW, if you look at the pictures of the isolation units you see open concrete block, but you don't see the screen over the holes. They're not crazy, it's a camera lighting problem. And even with the "window" blocks, it gets hot and stuffy indoors.)

I'd put trying to understand how the system failed as one of the top medical priorities; something the US/EU should throw effort into ASAP for their own self-interest. That 1% doesn't seem high, but with hundreds of patient contacts the probabilities start to look ugly--and you lose your doctors and nurses. Top priority is border control testing, of course, and third would be trying to get tribal-custom friendly protocols for caring for the sick and dead back in the villages.

That last idea is scary. Just suppose that they worked up some cheap and easy protocols like my WAGs about making an isolation hut of mats, some sort of easily draining "bed" of rags and leaves, soaking all rags (and the deceased's body later) in bleach, and setting fire to the isolation hut afterwards and burying the ashes. Some such protocols might help reduce the transmission rate, and if they were custom-friendly and in the native languages and if you had teams go out to explain how to do it and distribute bleach...

Now your team visits a village where it turns out somebody has ebola right now. You have to demonstrate the procedures that you know aren't nearly as effective as the hospital's. They're better than what the villagers will do otherwise, but will they believe you if you refuse to do them yourself? That's going to take some courage.

UPDATE: It looks like Canada is not taking this seriously.

At least better than X?

Matthew is good at making me uncomfortable. In chapter 23 Jesus lays into the Pharisees: “For you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence.” I don’t go in for robbery, though I’ve some extra pounds that testify to two of my self-indulgences. Some translations have extortion instead of robbery—I don’t go in for that either. I don’t quite understand the reason for the accusation—perhaps some of them were taking advantage of their reputation to supplement income with fees for blessings or fees for intercessions for other people’s shortcomings. I don’t go in for that either. So I’m half home free here. But half clean isn’t clean, is it?

Widows and orphans, the destitute, the ill and the mad—even a slight familiarity with church history rings up countless examples of giving and exhortations to give up lots of our own stuff to help these others. Not so much in the churches I’ve been in, though. “Give ‘till it hurts, and then give ‘till it feels good”, yes; be one of the poor yourself, no.

From time to time I wonder what Jesus would say to us (evangelicals). I have the nagging sense that He would think we weren’t taking the faith very seriously. As a group we’re OK at evangelizing, but not always so hot on other sorts of spiritual disciplines, which are enjoined on us in order that we be fruitful. And God takes fruit rather seriously.

Standing up to say “Hey, at least I’m not like them” probably doesn’t cut much ice; unless it happens that it does.

It is a bit more comfortable to puzzle out how the problems and twistings in the early church map into modern groups. Bishop Spong seems to meet John’s criteria for an anti-christ, for example, and there is no shortage of people accumulating ear-ticklers as teachers, especially on issues of sex and mammon. There’s no point in naming names here: the devotees will just get huffy and claim fidelity to a purer gospel, and everybody else knows who they are anyway. Paul is pretty down on them. At what point do they “go too far and … not abide in the teaching of Christ,” though?

Precise examples are a bit hard to find. Trying to buy the gifts of God is clearly past the line. Beyond that...

The Nicolaitans aren’t easy to find reliable information on. Ephiphanius is nice and dramatic, though a little late and apparently getting his information second hand at best. He reports that Nicolaus was one of the 7 deacons, who decided to try and achieve purity by abstaining from sex with his wife—unsuccessfully. In reaction to his failure he announced that one could not have eternal life without having sex every day. Apparently he or his followers went on to honor gnostic emanations of some degree whose nature exemplified and whose service demanded sexual acts of one kind or another. Ephiphanius delays the description of their “mass” until his section on gnostics; it is blasphemous enough for a Black Mass and you’ll sleep better without reading it.

No group I know has gone quite that far in practice, though several elevate sexual expression to almost the holiest category they have, and seem to consider abortion one of the highest human rights.

So though it isn’t hard to spot anti-christs and false teaching (at least the kind that doesn’t happen to tickle my ears), I can’t safely say “denomination X is like the Nicolaitans and at least I hate their practices."

So I’m not going to get any compliments for being better than denomination X. Still on the hook…

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Ephiphanius includes a version of the Blood Libel. That’s been used for false accusations for thousands of years—but I’m not sure that its inclusion makes the report less credible. The claim that Jews used the blood of Christian babies is an obvious lie. That some individual with a taste for the diabolic would go in for something like this is believable—we’ve seen similar things in our own crime reports. The exact expression of this hunger for wickedness will depend on the culture, but the overall shape will probably be much the same. I don’t believe all the Nicolaitans went in for this sort of thing: it is a bit too far out. That some did, maybe even an entire inner circle, isn’t incredible. Some inner circles are pretty horrible.

Some days are like that

Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing,
So I my life conduct.
Each morning see some task begun,
Each evening see it chucked.

Serendipitous wording

I'm fond of puns, especially accidental ones. I picked up a book by Deimling(*) at Half Price Books in an effort to try to keep my mind sharp, and discovered that the store tag gave it the name "Nonlinear Fun"

The first example that comes to mind...

1. lonely lad sitting on the porch swing
2. lad and lass cuddled on the porch swing
3. lad and lass drumming fingers on the arm rests as her young brother regales them with his day's adventures

Or if you are a devotee of that esoteric art of bridge:

1. 1 person drumming his fingers
2. 2 people drumming fingers
3. 3 people drumming fingers
4. 4 people in a lively game kicking each other under the table

The change in fun is not proportional to the change in the number of people.

On the serious side: somehow the third helping doesn't give quite the same satisfaction that the first did. We're not very fond of temperance; we even have an industry set up to try to drive it out of us. ("It's OK to go a little wild" sponsored by Ho Chunk Casinos) But fun isn't linear...

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(*)I'm only on page 13. He seems to be working to prove fairly obvious things, and letting knottier things slide, and all without examples. I like examples. He probably does too, but the traditions must be upheld, I guess.

A Long Defeat

There are some interesting meditations on Tolkien's description of history here and a follow-up here. The Cross doesn't seem quite as central as it ought to be to the kind of Christian spirituality I usually run into.

Rubber Duckie

I hope you've seen the video of the "rubber duck" comet.

I can't imagine that being the result of two random comets colliding: they'd blast each other to bits unless their relative motion was very small. Some suggest it used to be much bigger and blew out stuff on an earlier pass by the Sun, excavating odd shapes (and a waistline) in the process. Could be. The thing shows divots that might be the effects of an earlier fly-by.

I wonder how much bigger it used to be. Suppose a big soft blobby pre-comet swung by something heavy fast enough for tidal effects to break it up. Quite a bit would be lost, but some of the residue might coalesce again, maybe into a couple/three clumps. Say 3. They orbit each other, and the "chaotic" motions of the 3 bodies bring two close enough to impact. I'd naively think it wouldn't be a harsh impact--the bits might stick together. Then swing it by the Sun a time or ten and it might look a lot like the duck.

Ecocriticism

A Texan99 post at Grim’s Hall led me to look up Ecocriticism. “Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation.” I’d never contemplated the notion that string theory might have something relevant to say about the relationship of Tom Sawyer to the Saharan deforestation. There's a word for that.

Going on:

Such anthropocentrism is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker asserts, shows that a "comic mode" of muddling through and "making love not war" has superior ecological value.

From this I gather that Meeker holds that mere biological survival is more important than any moral struggles (but isn’t that a moral statement?), and that “making love” has “superior ecological value.” I thought these folks didn’t like babies very much, though. (Bumper sticker seen yesterday: “I hope we live long and die out”)

Some are—let me just quote again: “All ecocritics share an environmentalist motivation of some sort, but whereas the majority are 'nature endorsing', some are 'nature sceptical'. In part this entails a shared sense of the ways in which 'nature' has been used to legitimise gender, sexual and racial norms” So if nature tramples on other PC pieties, even nature has to be deprecated. There's a hierarchy to be maintained.

To be accurate, the article does not mention string theory, though they take on the mantle of "the sciences", nor does it mention the ongoing ecological problems resulting from Saharan deforestation. But if they can read in meanings the author never intended, so can I.

Ministry to sex offenders

I was stunned to see this story:
here or here: a pastor tried to set up a ministry to sex offenders with a shelter for them. The state said no.

I gather he strongly believes in ministering to the rejected, and in the healing power of God. Yes, but… Maybe I’m missing something, but this doesn’t seem to be in line with the injunction to be “as wise as serpents.” I didn’t see anything in these stories (or a third story I can’t find the link to) that suggested that he had collared experienced people to guide his planning.

I have no experience in this field, but my “prior” in predicting the results is that people with problems this deep will reinforce each other—and probably cover for each other. (The reports mention some abusers—I don’t think this is talking about guys nailed with “sex offender” for public urination.)

There were no reports of problems over several years, which is good. I hope.

Is this as crazy as I think it is?

Font question

Everybody knows that spending hours in front of a computer screen gives you eyestrain, enough that although sitting down to a printed paper is a welcome relief, my eyes still tend to glaze over at the columns of text. Equations catch the eye well enough, but the actual definition of ω is buried somewhere in that uniform sea of letters.

I remember the Liberian Star (circa 1964) and its mixed fonts without fondness (I think they used one set of letter bins for headlines and another set for text body, regardless of size): I prefer the simplicity of having a single font on the page. It does make the page easier to read.

However. Suppose one allowed a tiny amount of "hair" in the font--the length of the serif, its exact angle, that sort of thing. Not so much that it wouldn't be obviously the same letter from the same font, but enough that the eye could catch the difference. There might be 5 very close versions of the letter t, which the display engine uses alternately in the body of the text.

Would that make the sea of letters less uniform, and easier to navigate?

Creating a new font for this sort of thing would be pretty easy (creating a good one is quite a bit harder!); the hairy part is the display engine that picks which version of k to use. A unicode test page wouldn't be too hard for a pro to whip up, but it would probably take a pro to evaluate it quickly--otherwise you'd need a lot of pages and a lot of amateur eyeballs. I don't know what to look for: I only tend to notice that I get tired reading something, and not notice the fonts or lighting.

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UPDATE: See Grey-Text for another description of the problem.

Sports

I gather there's been a little excitement recently in Brazil.

My Better Half grew up a Cubs fan (one with 90% scar tissue, as George Will said), though she's learned to root for the Brewers. Some of the rest of the clan work up some desultory enthusiasm for the Packers if they do well, but mostly wait until SuperBowl parties to watch anything. Middle Daughter has been watching events from Brazil, though.

I didn't grow up in the US, but I think my lack of connection to sports is more temperament than environment. I can get involved enough in a softball or basketball or football or ultimate Frisbee game if I'm playing (Less than mediocre in all of them, though), or stay interested if I know somebody on the field, but otherwise I have to work to pay attention. I've a vague home team loyalty, of the "I hope the team my friends like wins" sort.

I used to have a kind of snobbish superiority about that: "I'm above such trivia." "I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me."

But sports enthusiasm gets people involved with each other, cheering for something together, joining in some facsimile of community. That's not a trivial thing when almost all other amusements isolate/atomize us: slouching in a seat watching cat videos or playing Angry Bird, or headphone-isolated into your own playlist. And we move around so much that no place is quite home (cosmopolitan=homeless); except for the place the home team has in the heart. We need something to bond us--sports are better than nothing (at least until we go all Blues and Greens). Not a very profound bond, but not nothing, mixing the generations in a way that even churches often don't.

I don't disparage sports anymore (I try not to, anyway), though I haven't tried to work up an interest in them yet.

One of those headlines I can't quite believe

"Liberia: JFK Nurses Abandon JFK ER Ward Over Suspected Ebola Death"

And you shouldn't either, once you read the story, which refers to the ER staff, but doesn't actually go into any detail about how many left or where they went. It does say that a "case management" team went to handle matters. I suspect that most of the staff have a better idea of what the risks are than your average reporter. Quite probably some left in haste, but I'd guess that most didn't. I admit that panic can be contagious, but I'd still bet most people stayed around, though maybe not in the ER. ("We should sanitize the place." "Great idea! You go first.")

Back in the villages they have been hiding people with Ebola. There's a long tradition of kidnapping people to use body parts in magic. It didn't happen often--there was much more fear of it than actual instances--but it happened often enough to keep the fear alive. So if people in scary garments take your cousin away and you never see her again--what do you suspect, and what do you warn people about? It doesn't matter if the people telling you about the risks are important people--a Senator was caught trying to cement his power with some human sacrifice magic a few decades back.

So nobody really knows how many are sick.

A more pleasant trip

Researchers at Yahoo have developed a GPS algorithm that allows users to choose a route between two points based on beauty rather than the time or distance it takes.

...

In order to determine the most "beautiful, quiet, and happy" journeys researchers used UrbanGems, a website that asks users to pick between photos of areas in London and Boston that they found to be the most aesthetically pleasing.

Very interesting idea. My better half prefers driving the less boring routes, and such a system would make her journeys more fun. Need more gasoline, though.

And if this was tied to police databases (even incomplete ones like Chicago's), it could help you pick a safer route. Although IIRC somebody got in trouble with a smartphone app that did that--some spokesmen were afraid visitors would avoid large chunks of town. Of course if visitors wanted to buy drugs it might bring them in.

I assume there already exist path-finders that minimize trips that include particular landmarks. (Maybe not always absolute minimum; the traveling salesman problem can be hard if there are a lot of points) If you weight the connecting roads by beauty (which is seasonal), you could have a very nice trip planner.

Scrabble

"Why Germans don't play Scrabble"

Actually I'd think it would make it easier: just slap another word on the end of the existing string. Of course you'd need extension boards...

Drug delivery

Bill Gates helped fund a "programmable contraceptive delivery chip", BBC reports. My office mate noticed the story, and suspected that the claim that "Communication with the implant has to occur at skin contact level distance," might not be strictly accurate--and that going into a nightclub with the equivalent of a TV-B-Gone would appeal to certain types of people.

The obvious next step is to use this sort of design to keep the bipolar and schizophrenics on their meds. I don't know the legal details, but suspect that the rules might be modified if there were some track record of success. And if the rules are modified with our legislators' customary brilliance, then things would start to get messy: for ADD, maybe? I can't wait to see what'll be in DSM-6... Of course the devil is in the details--in particular in the volume of medicine required. Insulin pumps need to be recharged regularly, I hear.

The programmable feature is dangerous, but I can imagine that fixed dosages might be a problem too--illness and medication interactions. For some people I suppose it is probably worth the risks, but I've no experience. I can imagine somebody trying to gouge out implants.

Workers in the vineyard

The parable of the workers in the vineyard in Matthew 20:1-16 makes no economic sense, and it would tend to annoy the people you would want to have working for you tomorrow. Jesus used it to emphasize “The last shall be first and the first last,” but in what seems to be a rather trivial way. I suppose it is a good rule that if Jesus says something that looks trivial or nonsensical, I should try to figure out what I’m missing.

In Matthew 19:21 He tells a man “If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” Sounds like leaving everything behind to become an apostle is the epitome of completion (also see Mary and Martha and dinner prep). In Luke 9:59-62 He calls people to ignore burial responsibilities and not look back for anything.

On the other hand, in Mark 5:18-20 the previously possessed man who begs to follow Jesus is told no: his job is to stay where he is and tell his story.

Further, in Matthew 10:40-42 Jesus says that merely receiving a prophet as such will receive a prophet’s reward. That starts to sound a lot like the parable of the workers in the vineyard.

Perhaps 1 Corinthians 12 ties it together: “And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.” The reward of the apostle John is also the reward of the healed demoniac, not because each is given the same thing, but because they share together in the same body. Which leads to interesting possibilities with "On the contrary, it is much truer that the members of the body which seem to be weaker are necessary."

The 10,000 Year Explosion

The 10,000 Year Explosion How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending

The authors’ thesis is that things changed people in the last few thousand years. The invention of agriculture, with its increased human and population densities, increased the disease load and selected for disease resistance: not immunity, but relative resistance. When Europeans met isolated tribes (e.g. the Americas) the difference in disease resistance was illustrated dramatically. On the other hand, sub-Saharan Africa has an even vaster disease load, and most Europeans succumbed pretty quickly before modern medicines.

They note that racial differences are not just skin deep (the pros can tell the race of a skeleton with pretty decent accuracy), and that these differences have to have happened in the fairly recent past, implying fairly rapid evolution.

They go into detail about the Ashkenazi with their genetic diseases and higher IQ (IQ measurement seems, at least in recent years, to be pretty reliable) and their possible connection. I’m not sure they have adequate historical documentation—I recall reading a few years ago that most Jews in England about the time of Shaftesbury were poor: not middle-class or well-off lenders with lots of children (selecting for smarter people). So I'm a bit dubious about their model. But, there it is: an endogenous population that started out not obviously smarter than anybody else in that era, and now they provide a disproportionate number of Nobel winners and other geniuses.

The book is informative, though I have a few nits to pick: Southern AmerIndians developed agriculture (and the implied agricultural science/technology) quite early—why didn’t they have commensurate disease loads? Because of a lack of animals? Other things I know to be a little oversimplified, though that may be for lack of space.

The painful part was the “might have” and “could have” throughout. Still, if you're not familiar with human genetics, give it a read.

Ebola

This is getting closer to home. I don't recall spending any time at the ELWA hospital, but we've been by it.

Kits are being distributed, and instructions, but it is hard to get information or reliable bleach supplies upcountry were people don't speak very good English. I wonder if they've got some plans for quick and dirty isolation units in villages far from hospitals. Maybe the village can throw together some kind of shelter made of mats that they can burn when the patient is done, with triple layers of fabric to tie it together (burned or bleached later?). If the local folks get a clear understanding of the nature of the risks they can probably work up some mostly effective kludges. Not hospital quality or reliability, but orders of magnitude better than nothing...

Ebola is horrible and frightening, but malaria and dysentery kill more, and probably will still be the big killers even if ebola spreads.

Those who come after

may differ from us as radically as we from those before us.

C.S. Lewis The Allegory of Love

'Love', in our sense of the word, is as absent from the literature of the Dark Ages as from that of classical antiquity. Their favourite stories were not, like ours, stories of how a man married, or failed to marry, a woman. They preferred to hear how a holy man went to heaven or how a brave man went to battle. We are mistaken if we think that the poet in the Song of Roland shows restraint in disposing so briefly of Aide, Roland's betrothed. Rather by bringing her in at all, he is doing the opposite: he is expatiating, filling up chinks, dragging in for our delectation the most marginal interests after those of primary importanc have had their due. Roland does not think about Aide on the battle-field: he thinks of his praise in pleasant France. The figure of the betrothed is shadowy compared with that of the friend, Oliver . The deepest of worldly emotions in this period is the love of man for man, the mutual love of warriors who die together fighting against odds, and the affection between vassal and lord. We shall never understand this last, if we think of it in the light of our own moderated and impersonal loyalties.

We must not think of officers drinking the king's health: we must think rather of a small boy's feeling for some hero in the sixth form. There is no harm in the analogy, for the good vassal is to the good citizen very much as a boy is to a man. He cannot rise to the great abstraction of a res publica. He loves and reverences only what he can touch and see; but he loves it with an intensity which our tradition is loath to allow except to sexual love.

AVI described creating a time capsule and realizing only a few years later that some of it seemed irrelevant already. My Better Half is the family historian (she can remember names, I can't), and tries to do a core dump of what she knows of the remoter ancestors. But there's too much detail about nearer kin; and who knows what aspects will fascinate the great grandchildren the most? My father: WW2 Navy (didn't see action--spent his tour mustering the rest back home), accountant, missionary, teacher, business manager--analytical, efficient, very wide interests; pick an aspect; it is going to be a "capsule" summary.

What will our descendants think of us?

At the BBC Tom Chatfield wonders "What our descendants will deplore about us? His musings are pure "Spirit of the Age" stuff (they'll be vegan, etc) and not very reflective. He asks other people for input.

Lovelock worries about food and energy shortages. Raworth thinks they'll deplore our linear thinking about climate change, economies, education, etc. He seems to mean that we shouldn't be measuring things in terms of cost and benefit, or have border controls. Seeger believes they'll think poverty and animal abuse are evil. Krznaric thinks they'll bemoan the loss of social cohesion due to urbanization and that they'll develop training in empathy. Bostrom worries that we'll overlook some major disaster and get wiped out. Pinker seems to think we'll nuke ourselves. Armstrong wonders how we can rebuild after a disaster (like the Manual for Civilization?).

I wonder what the future generations would admire.

Take the Roman empire. For centuries after the Western part collapsed, people looked back on it as the golden age for law and legitimacy and trade. I don't know how much they blamed the Romans for their civil wars and horrific economic and political screw-ups, and how much they blamed the "barbarians" who "overran" them. If the generations after Western Rome fell were like a lot of the people I know, they'd tend to think that the way things are now, however bad, is more or less normal, and dream of times it was better--but not assign a lot of blame.

The modern West would look like a Golden Age to most people: almost everybody has food, water, leisure, and (outside of a few centers) some security and the rule of law--and the means to support large populations.

Our more thoughtful near-term descendants might have some things to say about us, depending on who and where. Farmers on land that now gets water from elsewhere will complain about our lack of care of the land. People worried about bandits will wonder how we managed to squander our social capital so completely. Others will wonder why we let the "barbarians" in. The descendants of the "barbarians" will probably wonder why we let things go to pot. Historians may wonder why we went in for so many civil wars. (If you think of the West rather than the nations, we've had quite a few. Today's the anniversary of the trigger of one of the dumber ones.)

I say "barbarians" to emphasize the parallel with Rome. Civilized/barbarian is the sort of category division people tend to use--the modern West is unusual in officially deprecating it. There's also the distinction "our tribe/dubious tribe/enemy tribe." It takes a lot of faith to claim this will never come back, especially since it never entirely left.

And, Chatfield and the Spirit of the Age to the contrary, I don't think they'll admire our sexual mores. The future belongs to those who show up, the descendants of those who think barrenness is a bad thing.

Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes

Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes Cultural Studies in the Gospels by Kenneth E. Bailey.

Executive summary: read it.

You don't need something like this to follow Jesus. The Holy Spirit can point you at what needs doing in your life, and in the end what you do matters more than what you know.

Nevertheless, looking at the parables from within the Middle Eastern culture sharpens the picture somewhat. For example, in Luke's parable of the talents the people don't want the master to rule over them: read "beginnings of a rebellion." The three servants are to use their master's money in an environment where the master isn't well liked.

Imagine a scene in which the Shah of Iran, in his last days in power, summons ten of his servants and tells them "I am going away to take a little vacation. I have $5000 for each of you. I want you to open shops in downtown Tehran in my name... Never fear, I will prevail and return."

The servant who buries the money seems pretty rational--and not loyal enough to take risks for his master.

Bailey is a bit skittish about punishments (as in the fate of the rebellious people here, or the murderous tenants of the vinyard), but let that slide. The situations Jesus was in or described are often more startling than at first appear. Find the book and read it.

Easily solved problem

So hippos like Columbia rivers? I suppose it makes sense, and the story suggests that they are breeding and spreading rapidly.

There is an oddity or so in the story:

The respected El Colombiano newspaper recently reported that children in a school near Hacienda Napoles are sharing a pond with the animals, and having direct contact with hippo calves at home.

"My father brought a little one home once," an unnamed girl told the paper. "I called him Luna (Moon) because he was very sweet - we fed him with just milk." Another child, a boy, told the paper: "My father has captured three. It is nice because you have a little animal at home. We bottle-feed them because they only drink milk. They have a very slippery skin, you pour water and they produce a kind of slime, you touch them and it's like soap."

Elsewhere I read that mother hippos protect their calves; which is sort of what you expect. So maybe the newspaper was exaggerating just a little. And that "little animal at home" gets a bit awkward pretty quickly...

Though Valderrama asserts that the ideal solution is to relocate the hippos, the obvious solution is (for some bizarre reason) labeled as "radical:" "barbeque them." Once the hippos have done enough damage, or killed a person or two, the local folks will take the hint and, no matter what the distant elites may command, supplement their diet. (That may be the subtext of the story of the three pet hippo calves.) Hippos taste like pork.

Pheromone stories

Had Enough Therapy said

For a woman, of course, hair matters. It matters enormously. The reason is simple: something like 70% of a woman’s pheromones—her sexual attraction hormones—are in her hair. That is why some women let their hair grow out.

?

The nearest thing I could find about this was this article, which although it says " produced by the skin's apocrine sebaceous glands, which develop during puberty and are usually associated with sweat glands and tufts of hair" and that these appear everywhere on the body, does not include the scalp among the 6 main sources. There's a 1984 IRC paper everybody references, but I can't get at it online and UW doesn't have a paper copy (not that I have time to go to the hospital to read it).

Other sources speculate that long hair makes a good pheromone delivery system (and then quote each other), but I couldn't find any references (not counting sites trying to sell shampoo or other confections) that would substantiate that.

It sounds nice and plausible, but looks unsupported.

IRS story

"News outlets Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." There are, after all, celebrities waiting to be written up...

Vanity

Plates, that is.

I saw a dark blue Wisconsin "Milwaukee Brewers" vanity plate Friday with the letters GOP4CK (Green Bay Packers, of course). This efficiently illustrates loyalty to two teams at once.

The DMV censors proposed vanity plates that have offensive language or seem likely to cause problems. One hypothetical example offered (dunno if anybody ever actually tried it) was KKK 1.

Would they have rejected a "Milwaukee Brewers" plate with the legend GOCUBS on the same grounds?

Human skull and fists

The story that human skulls evolved to withstand human fist blows and fists evolved to hammer human skulls was all over the science news recently. It seems unconvincing on at least two counts. (I'm not an expert on skull impact damage; they may be all wet there too.)

1. Remember Travis? For all-out fighting, a somewhat different skull shape is more useful--one that has projecting jaws and attachment points for muscles strong enough to bite off someone's face. He could hit, and kick, but also bite.
2. We've had a couple of concussions in the family (fall, auto collision). If the average hominid skull took so many blows that it would evolve some stronger structures, why wouldn't it also evolve a few cushions inside the skull to keep the brain from rattling around so much? They'd be just as useful--maybe more so. Such would certainly have saved us some trouble.

Color me dubious. Very dubious.

Purifying water

It looks like Kamen's plan is better. I was tinkering with a low tech BFI approach that used a couple of large tanks and lots of tubing (focusing on local construction and repair), but he went with an electrical system. Harder to repair, but with Coke's delivery infrastructure that doesn't matter so much.

Nice to hear.

Kindness practice

Through Grim I found the Atlantic article on Masters of Love.

Short summary: a happy marriage is built on habits of small kindness, two of the key ones being "scanning the partner for what the partner is doing right" and "turning toward" (responding positively to) interruptions from the partner. Their example is when the husband says "Look at the goldfinch!"

It is not so much a matter of some people being better than others at this, than that some people practice these kindnesses, and that the kindnesses grow.

The "turning toward" point makes me a little uncomfortable. I always listen and respond, and try to be positive(*), but I've had a long habit of multitasking while responding, so I may not look away from the stove or the newspaper or the computer when answering. I suspect that's not quite as welcoming as it ought to be.

Not too late to work on that...

---

(*) Well, I try to make being accurate as positive as possible...

Manual for Civilization

I thought XKCD was joking about the contents of the Manual for Civilization project of the Long Now group. I looked it up. Urk.

Some of the contributors suggested for technical works, to rebuild the physical infrastructure (Backyard Blacksmith for some starters, and The Drill Press and Minerals for Atomic Energy for later; Merck Manual). Some thought of history (how come Gibbon and not the Durants? They had a much broader sweep), literature (Shakespeare, Hobbes), and so on.

But Munroe isn't exaggerating that much. Asimov: Foundation Trilogy; Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49; Bright: X: the Erotic Treasury; and others like these show up too.

It seems as though some want to reboot the culture of the modern West, or at least the last several years of it. The Iliad and Gilgamesh are there, but not the Bible. It is kind of hard to reboot Western Civ without the Bible. It is hard to develop a culture without a religion too.

Earlier this year they had this breakdown:

• 484: Mechanics of Civilization
• 420: Cultural Canon
• 225: Science Fiction
• 299: Futurism

Do I need to point out that a "Futurism" category is worthless for restarting a civilization? If the collection serves its intended purpose, the future is not what was expected.

Alexander Rose's post has a graph of technological progress that is triply wrong: it leaves out interactions with India and China, doesn't notice the technical collapse during the Roman empire, and has a hole for the "Christian Dark Ages" that is incorrect and slanderous. However, he has some good book suggestions (Slow Sand Filtration).

The Great Books set makes a nice shortcut for a lot of western culture, especially if you overlap both editions. They too left out the Bible, though it is included in their guided readings, because they said they expected every home would have one.

A Canticle For Leibowitz, anyone?

Mosquitoes

BBC reports that scientists have bred mosquitoes that crank out 95% males.

Flooding cages of normal mosquitoes with the new strain caused a shortage of females and a population crash.

The system works by shredding the X chromosome during sperm production, leaving very few X-carrying sperm to produce female embryos.

In the wild it could slash numbers of malaria-spreading mosquitoes, reports the journal Nature Communications.

From the paper: "Resistance in female mosquitoes was often swiftly selected for, indicating the prevalence of natural resistance alleles." Surprise! In other words, the crash didn't work for long.

If you can achieve this sort of thing with sprays (without unintended side effects), you might get a short-term crash, but you can't exactly release these into the wild and expect them to outbreed the natives...

A second try?

So far I have declined all opportunities to go to high school reunions. A recent report by family members who did go hardened my disinclination: there'd have been nobody there I knew and the main focus of interest was the booze. And noise--I gather the purpose of a DJ is to prevent conversation.

At a wedding some years ago, while fantasizing about cutting the power cord for the DJ's mixer, I tried to come up with some icebreakers people could use in the sudden silence. The one I liked best was: "If you could go back in time and talk to your senior classmates for ten minutes, what would you say?"

That leads to "what else would you do?" and, recalling that I would be mentally older than my parents were at the time, heads straight into Something Wicked This Way Comes territory. You haven't read that one? Do. Now.

But speculating just for fun: what would I do if my current mind took hold of the senior class me, and I got the chance to try the rest of my life all over again?

Plus side: I get to fix some dumb mistakes. I made a lot of them. Some fixes are fairly generic and easy: get serious about exercise. Read less and listen more. The thing is, one of the mistakes was a choice of school: the right choice was over a hundred miles away. Changing the school makes a whole raft of other situations never appear. One of those situations was meeting my wife. Would I be able to stick it out wasting a couple of years? Worse yet, our age difference would be huge: would the intoxication be quite the same? Would other women be more like my Better Half as she is now than as the earlier version of her would be like the current version?

You'd think I'd be able to avoid the mistakes with the kids, and know the problems much earlier, but the kids would be different kids.

Minus side: I already know that stuff. Getting the necessary college degree would be horribly boring. Yes, I could be a star pupil, and get a better crack at the top jobs, but that might be over-reaching a bit.

I'm a researcher. We try to find out new stuff, right? If I already remember it, what's the point? Maybe I would take a whole different career direction: math instead of physics, or maybe a different branch of physics that I haven't kept track of so well, so that life would have a few surprises for me there.

I recall enough of the shape of history to avoid the big pitfalls, buy generally the right kinds of stocks (nothing in the mid 70's I didn't have any money then anyway, Cisco later), and be materially comfortable, but not rich. I don't think I could change history in any important ways.

And I think that after fixing the first major gaffes, I'd go on to make a whole new set of screw-ups. Maybe if this "going back in time" deal were iterative it might work: each time get a little farther along before screwing up too badly. Of course, what I think is the best life probably doesn't match very well with what God thinks.

Watching you

I wonder if Orwell ever dreamed that there'd be no need to plaster telescreens on every wall since we would happily carry them with us. You do know that hackers figured out how to start that little camera on your laptop, right?

What do we owe?

I take it as obvious that the family, tribe, and nation rely on successively more attenuated affection. In “tribe” I include your church, whether this is a classical religion or a modern ideology. Modern ideologies direct your responsibilities to the institution rather than to your neighbor, but otherwise both ideology and classical religion demand similar loyalties and provide a framework worldview.

Within a family you readily sacrifice to provide for and protect each other. If a son is crippled in an accident, you don’t leave him on an ice floe, you try to arrange responsibilities in the family so he can be cared for and still have a role. The infant will have a role one day, and the aged and infirm served their role already; in between you try to find something for everyone. If it isn’t possible you suck it up and support them anyway.

OK, sometimes Uncle Ted makes you want to throttle him, and there are sots and shrews. But by and large the family works well. A nuclear or a blenderized family is not very robust dealing with problem characters: the extended family is stronger here.

Within a tribe there’s still sacrifice to provide and protect, but this is neither as intimate nor as strong. You’re fine with cutting food up fine for your aged mother, but not so keen on doing it for somebody else’s mother. That may not sound very Christian, but last time I looked the world wasn’t populated by perfect saints. Within a Christian church you might find more people willing to do this than average, but still not very many.

In a tribe you inevitably find parasites and predators. Shaming only goes so far. The tribes may have to exile or destroy, and you may have to help. But don’t let an outsider try that.

A nation is also characterized by “We’re all in this together,” but the factions and interest groups are much more prominent and the sense of responsibility substantially less. Trust is less too. And the sense of solidarity can evaporate, leaving a civil war or an empire (held together only by force).

That seems fairly elementary. It is almost as obvious that none of these institutions coheres without some understood framework of right and wrong, responsibilities, and fairness.

If we use “just” to mean rewarding or punishing someone according to the benefit or the offense, a well-run home is not particularly just—and they want it that way. The parents work the hardest, but the 13-year old boy probably out-eats them both. The same offense results in different punishments for the 10-year old and the 5-year old. Things are tailored to the individual.

This kind of tailoring is impossible at even the tribal level. The best you can hope for is uniform rules. You can try rudimentary tailoring to circumstances with jury nullification and letting judges decide sentences out of a range of possibilities, but this doesn’t address rewards at all.

Here, and more especially at the national level, we have the problem of what we owe to the less-than-excellent. Within the family we try to provide support and a role—people need both. But on the larger scale you have to use rules rather than tailoring, and any set of rules is going to be incomplete and problematic.

There’s no dodging the issue using faith in education and early nutrition. Those can help people who suffer from some deficiencies, but we are always going to have the dim as well as the bright. That’s life with the bell curve.

The bell curve and the knowledge-based society

I'll borrow the terminology from Brave New World, but in my own variant. Let Alpha represent that section of the population with outstanding gifts in something: raw intellect, musical ability, or other art. Beta is those who are good at something, Gamma the average—which is most of us. Delta are those who need guidance to work, and Epsilon those who need guidance to live.

I take it as given that the value of an individual does not depend on their gifts. Their economic value does, but history shows what horrors results when economic worth is mistaken for human worth. Our culture has plenty of problems with this already.

I also take it as obvious that top-down social changes rarely work. My focus will be on what individuals and communities can do, not what sorts of scrambled legislation the feds may disgorge on us. You, your family, your church, your neighborhood—those are the real centers of change.

Whatever we do or don't do will have unintended consequences. Knowing upfront what some of the bad consequences might be would be very useful, so I want lots of eyes on proposals.

Begin with illustrations. You really want your doctor to be at least a Beta, but the truth is that with modern technology and resources quite a few Gammas can be adequate—provided they spend the time to look things up. Teachers, likewise. Some jobs like cleaning and simple repair a Delta can manage quite well. Researchers are Alpha or Beta, and similarly planning administrators should be—though as Scott Adams reminds us they often aren't even close.

What we owe: encouragement in virtue

The most gifted Alphas aren't always the most productive or fastest—other traits besides giftedness determine whether their gifts ever flourish. That's a whole other set of issues.

One of the most important variables (after health) determining how useful the gifts prove is how virtuous the person is. Recall that laziness is a vice, and that seemingly radical claim becomes obvious. It turns out to be easier to encourage people to become worse than to become better, but all the same we should try to make sure we don't encourage vices. As a case in point, our schools promote slogans encouraging respect, but substantial subsets of our pop music (e.g. much rap) encourage disrespect.

You probably know plenty of people who have screwed up their lives with stupid choices. Some will say “Their life, their choice” and in some sense that’s true, but we owe them some warning about what won’t work, and some model roles that usually do. Choices about intoxicants and sex seem to cause the most damage. The broader culture is willing enough to offer guidance about drugs, but serious suggestions about disciplining sex are considered offensive.

I know how difficult it is to run counter to the culture: within the church, and even within the family, it is hard to persuade people that the classic sex roles actually work very well in courtship and marriage.

The rich can afford their vices, for a time anyway; the poor have no such margin for comfort. They are, in fact, endangered by the vices of the rich.
…
But when the poor emulate them in vice, as they emulate them in most things, the result is disaster: not a man at the club, mooching a claret from his friends, but a man in the ditch, or behind bars.
…
So in Dickens we have the miserable corpse-robbing thieves at Old Joe’s pawnshop, and they are but Scrooge himself, and his money-hungry class, shorn of top hat and watch fob and man-of-business etiquette.

You can probably come up with more than one set of parallel lives, where each made similar choices but the impact was much worse on the one with less money or less intelligence. You can rely on the old man’s money: perhaps, but it is cruel to pretend that everyone can.

What we owe: education

We owe each other is the opportunity for education appropriate to one's gifts.

This doesn't mean a college degree. I'm not sure what a college degree means now. Credentialling for some kind of engineering skill, mastery of some body of knowledge, successful apprenticeship (MD or researcher), familiarity with the liberal arts, or certifying an OK IQ and patience—pick one. Some of those are suitable for almost everybody at some level: the liberal arts for example. IQ certification would be cheaper than college if that's the purpose.

Continuing education can be inexpensive when self-directed—we have lots of resources already. Entertainment is a much more popular substitute. This is exactly where family, friends, and church have impact—by example and encouragement. Maybe one group will be reading Herodotus and another Treasure Island: each learning according to his ability.

If I recall correctly, one of the works of mercy is to instruct the ignorant—perhaps your church has some adult education program? A lot of people need repair to their education, or something more suitable to their gifts. There are a lot of ideas floating around universities (e-learning, etc), but I suspect that changes will have to be driven by people outside the incentives to maintain the status quo.

What we owe: home

The next thing on my list is a “home” or the opportunity for one. Some small fraction of us are too crazy or too addicted or too vicious to fit in, and I don't pretend to have any answer for what to do with them in general. This group is outside the scope of my discussion.

A “home” does not mean independence, or solitary life. Most of us live with family among mutual responsibilities and care. Ideally those not capable of independent/solitary living, and most of those who are, should live with family. The luck of the draw means that some have no competent family, or a toxic family. We need some additional arrangements for mutual living and support that allow for some degree of mutual responsibility. The most obvious grouping is a grouping of siblings, but since some families are problematic, a grouping of friends should also be made straightforward. These arrangements will not always be of equals: one might have guardianship of another, for example.

Here I seem to break my rule about no top-down solutions: this probably requires some changes in statutory law. However, experimentation starts at ground level.

Some distinctions are fairly easy. First order responsibility for children falls on the parents, and fallback responsibility on near kin. Thus in a partnership of siblings, children of one are owed second-order (fallback) care by the others, but in a partnership of friends, children of one are not owed fallback care by the others. Designing asymmetric partnerships will involve some trial and error: I leave to your imagination how someone like Manson could abuse them. (In fact he needed no outside support to dominate his clan, so maybe the worry is moot.)

There's a complicated problem when a Delta has a family to support, and the income is not steady or large. We have to have inexpensive housing available, and neither zoning nor builders are our friends in this. Builders put inexpensive housing in high-density environments that seem to make crime easy, and zoning drives up the complexity and cost of housing.

What we owe: work

People need to be needed. We need some work or role to play.

Here we run afoul of the Spirit of the Age which dreams that a “knowledge based economy” is the wonderful wave of the future. That's great for Alphas and Betas, sucks for Gammas, and leaves Deltas in the trash or moldering on the dole with no purpose. (Epsilons always need help anyway.)

Exceptions abound. Erdos, one of the finest mathematicians of the 20'th century, was never independent because he could not understand something as simple as taking a shower with the curtain closed to keep from flooding the floor.

A bas der Zeitgeist, then.

What roles or jobs can we imagine in our families for our own Deltas? That's usually fairly simple—there's almost always some set of chores you can find. I've seen this happen automatically, though if the family is so relatively rich that they have servants this might prove hard to arrange.

Expand a bit. What can your church do, not to provide subsidies, but to find or arrange for work? Network freelance opportunities? Encourage members to hire within the church? Repair jobs, maintenance jobs, construction jobs? Freelance gardening? At one church I was a member of one such man was the moving committee. When someone needed to move this man called up a team of volunteers and vehicles and arranged it.

Will you spend a little extra to have local tailoring or local music from your fellow church members? Economies of scale price out the small local guy, and exposure effects mean you're more likely to hire a DJ playing known songs—unless you know the hardware store owner or the pianist.

And that is exactly the point. Is knowing the people personally—enough to care about them—enough to make a difference in how you spend your money? In a church or neighborhood, maybe. I don't see how this can scale beyond that small circle, though.

How will people react?

Freely ye have received—freely give: whether native gifts or charity?

If the role/job comes impersonally, you can't easily work up any gratitude. If it stems from superiority rather than “you're one of us” it will rankle. I can't guess how anyone will react; people are funny that way. But unless Gamma and Delta people are valued as people just as much as Alpha or Epsilon, we'll have a sense of inferiority/superiority dividing us. It will be even worse if different populations have different Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Delta/Epsilon distributions since this will be taken as evidence of bias.

It might be better if there wasn’t a sense of gratitude because there was a sense of belonging.

Castaneda's witches

Some family discussion that touched on fake interviews reminded me of Carlos Castaneda. I read his books back in the day. They were fun, but less and less plausible as the series went on, and as the previous link or the Salon story show, don Juan was fictional. Apparently Carlos spent his time in the library instead of in Mexico.

At any rate, he dropped from sight, and I had other things to keep track of.

In the meantime he died, apparently followed shortly thereafter by at least the three top women (called the "witches") in the secretive cult he established. One was found and is assumed to be a suicide, and two others vanished and are probably suicides.

From time to time I've read claims that it was considered to be an honor to be selected to die as part of the entourage of the dead king or Viking, and that some sati were voluntary.(*) It is easy to assume that this claim was self-justification by the perpetrators, but stories like Castaneda's, or Heaven's Gate's, or Jim Jones' tell me it isn't always fake.

At least, it isn't "fake" in the sense that some of the victims really believe that it is an honor, and choose their fate. They're wrong, and in that sense it is fake. I'd guess this, like most evil, is a twisting of some natural impulses, here probably the impulse to serve twisted out of all proportion.

I wonder if there are some commonalities among the people who follow into such a death cult. Some people have personalities I can't imagine blending in, others: well, it's a stretch, but maybe...

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(*) This isn't related to martyrdom. The martyr's ideal is not that he die for the faith, but that his would-be executioners repent and accept the faith. I admit that some martyrs seem to have regarded it as a shortcut to heaven; a lot easier than living out a righteous life.

Journalism dictionary

If you have ever wondered what jargon from the newsroom actually means, that link explains some of it. For example: "Jump: The part of the story where everyone stops reading."

What is a senator?

A headline today said that Michelle Obama was being considered as a possible senator; rather like Hillary Clinton before her.

How does being the President's wife qualify one for the office of Senator?

You or I might naively think that there is no connection: a Senator is supposed to deliberate with the others on the proper nature of legislation to be enacted, and to represent his State's interests as far as is consistent with the good of the Union. Being related to a powerful person has no obvious bearing on this.

But the Powers That Be (PTB) seem to have a different understanding of the nature and role of a Senator. It is not actually necessary to have any connection with the state you represent (Hillary didn't). Nor does it require skills in law or negotiation or modeling outcomes of proposed laws. Reading a teleprompter is the only skill you really need.

Although there is nominally some power associated with the job, it seems as though the PTB regard it as an honorary appointment, offered to a loyal courtier. Since most of the seats are securely in the hands of one party or the other, a party decision suffices to appoint the favored person to office.

Given the character and (lack of) qualifications that some of the "appointees" have shown, I gather that the PTB aren't worried about their pets actually doing any damage; suggesting that the PTB think the centers of power are elsewhere.

Are they right about that? They should be in a position to know, but history is full of self-deluded elites, so I can hope they're wrong. But as devotees of Peter Singer spread I wonder how long before we have a triple-crown winner as senator. It would be a great honor for the jockey, of course. Perhaps honoring each other's flunkies is part of a status game among the backers?

When a cotter pin falls off a truck

the street is blocked off. The picture was taken with my cell phone from my office; sorry about the resolution. Nifty little robot, though.

1493 by Charles Mann

One advantage of being too sick to either go to work or focus well enough on it from home is that I have time to read.

Mann's model in 1493 is that Columbus and successors effectively put Pangea back together, with plants and animals and pests and people moving back and forth around the world again, with consequences wonderful and horrific.

AVI already reviewed it recently, so I won't retread the old ground.

Mann goes into detail about African/maroon pockets of rebellion with a lot of history that got marginalized along the way. A few points might need a little tweaking...

In Haiti after the successful revolution he suggests that an embargo caused the economy to collapse. Other narratives say that working in the sugar industry was never popular and efforts to goose the economy by compelling people to go back and work in the business hit serious resistance.

His description of the difference between African slavery and American plantation slavery leaves out a little detail: slaves in Africa were sometimes used for sacrifices.

In other curiosity, the importation of slaves into South America was larger than into the north, but seems not to have generated proportional african ancestry populations. From Roll Jordan Roll, p 5.

Of all the slave societies in the New World, that of the Old South alone maintained a slave force that reproduced itself. Less than 400,000 imported Africans had, by 1860, become an American black population of more than 4,000,000.

Part of this is accounted for by racial mixing which is much larger in (e.g.) Brazil than in the USA, but even so the modern proportions seem to match the importation proportions so poorly that I have to assume a large fraction of the slaves in the southern hemisphere died before having families, probably not long after arrival. Although West Africans have a relatively better tolerance for malaria, it still kills a lot of them.

(FWIW, other sources noticed that the vast number of African slaves imported into the Middle East seem to have left little impact. Those sent to the mines probably died, and the men kept for domestic servants were probably mostly eunuchs, but that leaves quite a few women who should have made some mark on the gene pool.)

The description of Chinese money policies has some horribly familiar parts (inflation by printing more paper money: and then doing it again, and again without learning a thing--yes, I'm thinking of you, Bernanke) and some novel (new emperor mints coins with his name and declares all old coins worthless), and then the reactions got weirder.

Go read it.

Feral dogs

Something was niggling at me about the population drops described in 1491. The Indians had dogs. Unless the plagues hit the dogs too, a massive depopulation should turn loose lots of dogs, some of which would organize into feral packs which are, I gather, not easy to get rid of. They should have been a nuisance to the anglo settlers moving in--and to the surviving Indian tribes as well.

Maybe the intervening years let wolves wipe them out (and breed them out), or maybe the sick were served dog meat and so there weren't a lot to go stray. Or maybe the surviving tribes were methodical about trying to wipe out feral dogs. Or the population crash was usually slow enough that there weren't excess dogs. (In some places it was quite fast.)

Network

I finally realized another reason Wyoming roads seemed different. Around here, you can look out and in the distance see, or maybe just hear, another road. Until you're out in the North Woods, you are immersed in a network. If some road breaks, there's a way around somewhere, and you're never quite alone. But when there's only one route it feels more isolated, even with the same amount of traffic.

1491 by Charles C Mann

I'm a little late to the party, but finally got around to reading this, in the second edition. I'd heard a lot of details of one aspect or another (the great earthworks in the Amazon, for instance), but never all in one place.

His thesis is that the American Indians were here longer than thought, and had made greater changes to the land and built greater civilizations than the usual histories allow for; that what the later colonists found was often the residuum of a collapsed culture.

Reading about some of the earlier collapses (e.g. the Maya) got me wondering if the African rain forest holds monuments from similarly forgotten collapses. They'd have to be earthworks: stone would have been discovered already and wood vanishes very quickly. I wonder how cheap it is to do remote sensing of the jungle floor. I have a stone sculpture of a type Liberians sometimes find in the fields: they have no idea who made them.

I gather people have been experimenting with teosinte since 1896: has anybody tried a full-fledged replication program? They claim modern breeders could get a proto-maize in 10 years; I'd love to see them try. Granted, it would cost a bit. But the practice would be useful: next they could try with some other old crops, to get easily harvestable yields from something like maygrass.

One of the key claims in the book is that disease destroyed up to 90% of the Indian population in a few years. De Soto and LaSalle might have been traveling through different lands if you just go by the description of the people. That rate seems pretty high: dang few diseases have mortality rates that large. If one disease after another rolls over an area you could do it, but the toll from the first one would reduce the contact rate and the spread of subsequent diseases. But maybe...

The claim that part of the Amazon was planted as an orchard is interesting. The devil is in the details though. Do the trees ripen at different enough times, and can storage be reliable enough in a rain forest, to sustain people all year round? I've lived in a rain forest, and pests are ... well ... serious pests.

Fire, fire, fire. Poor Smokey the Bear. Whether by calculation or convergence on a working strategy, North American Indians seem to have kept the landscape smoking a lot. And in the Amazon too, which of course puts environmentalists in a bind: do we preserve the habitat as it is, or as it was, or in some wild guess as what it would have been if there'd never been any people?

I'm a little vague on what happened between the era he describes in the 17'th century with Indians and colonists living nearby, and later observations where the most common description of Indians is "drunken." Possibly the colonists had already set up a society that demanded a revenue stream, and people outside the system couldn't maintain property. I dunno. Family tradition says that Grandpa's house in Mississippi (a haphazard telescope house) contains as its oldest portion the home of an Indian; and if so the Indian in question had fairly decent housing for the time. (Don't ask; Katrina did a number on it.)

If you haven't read it yet, do. I ordered 1493. And somehow I have to see if I can find hickory milk...

Conjecture

I'm not an economist by trade, and don't know if this has already been studied, but after keeping my eyes open a few years I'm pretty sure the following statement is true.

Given any two competing businesses, an arguably neutral regulation can be devised that penalizes one in relation to the other.

The implications for lobbying are obvious.

Examples abound.

Alms

I wondered if the Land of the Pure (Pakistan) was as enthusiastic in their zakat as they are in being more anti-infidel-than-thou. The latter is cheaper, as a rule, and if you get a mob together there's virtually no risk involved.

It seems that the zakat is collected by the state at a rate of about 2.5%: not exactly voluntary. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations put the US voluntary donations to charity at 2.2%, not counting "charity" funded through taxation. I'm not sure if the quantities are exactly comparable: the ultimate usage patterns may differ. And a simple search didn't turn up any numbers for voluntary contributions in Pakistan over and above the legal requirements.

Interesting that the numbers are so similar, though...