Abandoned ship

I wrote earlier that an abandoned ship washed up on shore of Liberia and got no official reaction for 2 days: This at a time of nominally heightened security.

Updates to the story involved arresting looters and discovering that the control room had burned--at some point. (The area is heavily Muslim, btw.)

But all is well--we hope. One of the putative owners showed up, saying he'd bought the oil tanker (transporting groundnut oil) on the installment plan, and that after it started leaking in the engine room the crew got off using one of the lifeboats and were picked up by a fishing trawler. The Nigerian tanker is registered in Panama, ironically. (Instead of Liberia)

Nice to know it probably wasn't pirates. Or arms smugglers.

Japanese Destroyer Captain by Tameichi Hara

When I heard of this I bought a copy for Kindle, figuring that my Better Half would find it useful in putting together her father's memoirs (submarine quartermaster in WWII). As is often the case in our clan(*), somebody else wound up reading the book first. This time it was me.

Hara rewrote the book on torpedo attacks for the Japanese Navy, and as the blurb says, became a very successful destroyer captain. As the war wore on, successful came to mean surviving more than it meant actually accomplishing the official mission.

He is quite frank in his judgments. He tries hard to explain what went on during naval battles (which this novice found quite helpful). And he tries to explain how he managed to survive "a hundred sorties."

If you have any interest in the Pacific war, read it.

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(*) Christmas afternoon has often been a quiet time, with everybody perusing everybody else's book haul. If you have to drive back to Wisconsin the next day, you have to read in a hurry.

Precondition

Suppose that we add a new condition for eligibility for public office: The candidate must spend at least a month living in an isolated community with a Trappist-like(*) vows of silence and obedience. That includes living without electronics, and with minimal writing.

Granted, quite a few politicians would simply burst under the strain. I think we could afford the loss.

Think of the salutary effect when the survivors realize that the world won't end if they can't get their oar in. And that things don't get radically worse when they are obeying other people rather than having other people obey them.(**)

The higher the office, the longer the stay required.

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(*) Yes, I know Trappists don't actually vow silence. Close enough, though.

(**)Some politicians are capable of learning.

Listening to speeches

AVI wrote that most of his interaction with popular culture is text-based--would that make it hot media?

The first thing I thought of was "I haven’t watched or listened to a Presidential speech or debate in decades. I skim the transcript. If that."

That’s partly because I hate to waste a half an hour when I can get the same information in 2 minutes. Partly it’s because I discount their claims and promises by 90% or so—don’t listen to the magician’s patter, watch his hands. ("You can keep your policy.")

I’ve delivered addresses that were compelling, and others that were fumbling, with equally sound data and reasoning behind both kinds. (At the equivalent of 3am my time, I rarely perform at my best.) I don’t put quite as much weight on presentation as on content, at least when listening to the pros. With acquaintances, yes, I pay attention to tone and posture—but pols and other actors practice sounding convincing.

I wonder if one side effect of this detachment is a lack of perceived relationship. When I read a speech I don’t feel that Obama is addressing me the way I’m told the fireside chats made people feel that Roosevelt was talking to them. I didn’t feel attached to Bush either, or to Clinton, or to Bush or … But some people seem to feel more than just a simple tribal connection.

On reflection, I don't think that lack is a real problem. There is no personal relationship between us--why kid myself? Perhaps David Warren would argue that there should be--the king should have a small enough kingdom to make that at least remotely feasible. But for better and for worse we intended to design a government with replaceable rulers to whom one makes no lasting commitment beyond a pension.

Alert and watchful

Liberia has gotten a few warnings that Boko Haram or an affiliated group is interested in launching attacks, and the government has been making noises about increased security.

And so, of course, an abandoned tanker went aground and nobody noticed for two days. (Apparently local folks noticed, but the authorities didn't get around to showing up.) "A source at the National Port Authority (NPA) told the Daily Observer that the NPA was not aware of the situation because “Robertsport does not have a seaport.”"

Apparently the ship went missing three weeks ago. Nobody was found aboard--the port authority thinks the owner ran out of money to pay the crew and they all skipped out.

Or else pirates killed the crew, but officials don't dwell on that possibility.

Confederate Monuments

A monument to Confederate soldiers was to be removed from a University of Louisville campus, but a judge blocked it until a hearing.

When I was 20 I’d have been gung ho for removing it—the Civil War was about slavery and I don’t want to honor that.

I’m not 20 any more. The Confederate powers-that-were wanted slavery, but seriously, did the soldiers actually say "Ma, I’m going off to fight the Yankees so our neighbor Jeff can buy himself a slave if he ever saves up enough money"?

One of the points of the war in the first place was "these Southerners are part of us." You can get away with damning the soldiers because of the cause of their rulers, provided you don’t want to be part of the same tribe with them afterwards.

I get the impression that those calling for the universal destruction of all such monuments (*) aren’t interested in living together afterwards.

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(*) Though you can melt Jeff Davis down for scrap and I won’t mind.

Lake of the Woods

We stopped off at Lake of the Woods on the way back home today. It isn't a big place, but it is pleasant, the museum is nice and hands-on, and there turns out to be a botanical garden in the place--not there 30 years ago. A path leads by a bench installed in honor of an ex-Stalag POW who founded about 4 different businesses in Mahomet, a gazebo and an arbor that the clematis hasn't climbed up yet, over to a lily pond aswarm with tadpoles and an artificial waterfall.

Along the way I saw a slab-throne covered with colorful small tiles, with the images of pendants on the arms. I wondered what they could be--was this something for weddings, or what is something Marian--what did those pendants mean?

I found a small sign near it: "Throne Rococo Nouveau." In other words the decorations didn't mean anything. I found that somehow disappointing.

Volley

While I'd hate to be facing this thing when it let go, it looked like a huge pain to load. The Tredegar Iron Works was an interesting place to visit, BTW.

I'd love to see somebody actually exercise the thing; uncranking the back, loading each of the barrels, buttoning it up. Without special tools it must have taken a whale of a long time. A different version with only 15 barrels is loaded and fired below:

Arms cache

The picture is not of "a huge quantity of both AK and M-4 ammunitions" but the report seems encouraging. I was morally certain that the warlords had not turned in anything remotely close to all their weapons. It looks like one of the LURD caches was discovered in an old well.

Prince Johnson's (one of the old warlords, with quite a record!) comments about Boko Haram waiting in the wings are less happy. I hope he is just shooting off his mouth.

Stability

St. Benedict devised a rule requiring vows of stability, conversion, and obedience. "Conversion" means "renewing your mind" on a daily basis, and "obedience" we understand (and typically resist). By "stability" he meant that he didn't want the monks to be peripatetic and unruly beggars, but there's much more to stability than that. One aspect is reliability: you are always there when you are needed.

A Mennonite Benedictine oblate Gerald W. Schlabach quotes Scott Sanders:

The national culture is wrong when it tells us that "the worst fate is to be trapped on a farm, in a village, in the sticks, in some dead-end job or unglamourous marriage or played-out game." "People who root themselves in places are likelier to know and care for those places," he insists, "than are people who root themselves in ideas." In our hemisphere, people rooted in ideas rather than places have been the ones who have committed the worst abuses against land, forests, animals and human communities — and hardly without shedding their bigotry. Those who do not value their own places are unlikely to value others', he argues. For unless one is "placed" one merely collects sensations as a sightseer, lacking the local knowledge that grounds and measures global knowledge. "Those who care about nothing beyond the confines of their parish are in truth parochial, and are at least mildly dangerous to their parish; on the other hand, those who have no parish, those who navigate ceaselessly among postal zones and area codes, those for whom the world is only a smear of highways and bank accounts and stores, are a danger not just to their parish but to the planet."

I like to say that "cosmopolitan ≅ homeless."

Do I need to emphasize the importance of stability for children? Consistency and faithfulness in parents must be really big deals, because the lack of them shows up in all sorts of misbehavior in the kids.

I know the economic machinery likes to use portable atoms, but sometimes we should try to dig in our heels.

That word .. I do not think it means ...

Am I the only Firefox user who wondered, during its February campaign, whether Mozilla understood the meaning of the word "privacy?"

Education erosion

AVI has some interesting thoughts about the "erosion" of the core curriculum.

He links to an essay by Patrick Dineen, who asked students how many things from Western Civ they knew about.

I went over Dineen's list; I count 21 questions (e.g. who was Saul of Tarsus, have you read Paradise Lost). I'll grade myself harshly--if I knew roughly what something was but hadn't read it (e.g. Federalist papers) that's a no. Reasonably bright, voracious reader, with no TV, lots of books in the house, and not many nearby friends--I knew about 15 off that list when I entered college. (And also some things from STEM that Dineen apparently doesn't think are part of common culture--but they are.)

ACS was populated by children of embassy staff, aid workers, missionaries, visiting engineers--fairly right-side of the distribution. Most of my senior class wouldn't have done half that well on his list--say 6 items or less (there were exceptions). Everybody in class was doing an equivalent of the Grand Tour--which is an education hard to ask yes/no questions about.

My sample is from 43 years ago, with a less flexible curriculum (4 years English/Science 3-4 Math, Language, Social Studies, PE--that sort of thing). Perhaps there has been, as he asserts, an effort to dry up our connection to our past--some replacements leave me glumly suspicious--but it would be tough to prove it by my senior class. Or, as AVI pointed out, by Lewis. A long checklist will show us all badly wanting. like those "100 books every literate person should read" lists

Perhaps it is inevitable that the endless writing of many books(*) will attenuate any core. Among the waterfall you'll find books of equal caliber with the ancient ones. Over time, and certainly while they're in fashion, these new books will have great influence too. So why pick the old ones? (**)

I think "for historical reasons" is precise and accurate. If we are to be of the West, with any confidence that being Western is a good thing, then the history of Western culture belongs in the core of education. But St Johns College spends 4 years learning the core--that's way too much for the rest of us. How much can we pare down and still keep a sense of the flow of it all?

I think we can get something, but don't expect more than a sampling--Dineed asked for too much.

I know the arguments that we are now a multi-cultural society and the curriculum needs to reflect this. I get the claim, but I deny the strong version of it: we have to put first things first. Other cultures should enrich, but not supplant--I really don't want to live in the Balkans. Or, I gather, California, which seems to be halfway there already.

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(*) guilty of writing but not publishing

(**) Maybe for the footnotes, he said: not entirely facetiously. Aristophanes' Greece is pretty alien to us--different values, different tribal markers, etc. The Great Books are multi-cultural already!

Wooden skyscraper

London may get a wooden skyscraper.

The obvious worry for most people is, of course, fire. However, timber buildings are famously good at standing up to flames – columns and beams will char in an inferno, and that charred surface can actually stand up longer to heat than exposed steel. While steel heats up and buckles, wood first loses its water weight, then chars and resists the flames.

Umm.. When I look at the picture, I see a wooden chimney.

Brides?

The NYT link will decay (via Maggie's Farm) has an article on "The Sexy Bride Look" and the gown designers behind it. I suppose they want this to be another "thing," and one bride said "I thought I was going to die at the end of the night with the corset, but I loved how I looked."

The pictures struck me as a bit odd. The gowns are flattering and all, but they are worn by models, not brides. Not one of them looks remotely happy. Risk; flee.

You have to take symmetry into account

XM25: The article loosely describes a new kind of grenade launcher designed to have the projectile explode where they want it.

The U.S. Army is introducing a new shoulder-fired weapon that has the potential to change infantry tactics and revolutionize infantry warfare in a way unseen since the Battle of Königgrätz in July 1866. That battle, which marked the beginning of the end of the line infantry attack, saw Austrian troops carrying muzzle-loaders outgunned by Prussian infantrymen carrying breech-loading needle guns.

It's big and heavy, though apparently effective. They puff it nicely: "No longer will our Soldiers have to expose themselves by firing and maneuvering to eliminate an enemy behind cover. Our Soldiers can remain covered/protected and use their XM25 to neutralize an enemy in his covered position."

Maybe so, if you have enough of them. But I assume that the other side will have some too. Then what happens to your protection? Maybe it does mean new tactics, but it won't be quite as pretty as they make out.

Finished reading The Gbandes

A bit more from The Gbandes by Benjamin Dennis:

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There’s an aspect or two of polygamy I hadn’t thought of.

”Where there are young ladies, there will the young men go.” For this reason, a chief who has many wives will also have many young men in his service. Such young men are supposed to keep their love affairs with the chief’s wives a secret as a sign of respect for him, although he is very much aware of their activities.

There are one or two wives who are absolutely reserved for the chief.

If they get caught they have to publicly humble themselves and pay a fine to the husband.

Another aspect, among the Gbandes, has to do with marriage order. If a man marries an older sister, he can go down the list marrying younger and younger sisters without a problem. But if he is careless enough to marry the youngest first, the older sisters are automatically his mothers and ineligible to be spouses.

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About dance: “It is usually an acrobatic celebration in which the accompanying musicians must follow the dancer rather than the dancer’s following a set musical pattern or rhythm.”

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Witches essentially become infected with witch-ness, and are typically unaware of it themselves. Dr. Dennis notes that eating from a joint pot, or drinking from a joint bowl with a common ladle, are therefore hygienic practices intended to prevent a person from accidently ingesting “witch-ness” and becoming a witch—and thus becoming a danger to others and himself (witch-ness can kill the witch, too). Sorcery is a trait acquired deliberately, as opposed to witchcraft. Cremation (done for those found after death to have been witches) precludes reincarnation.

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The mother and often the father take the name of the firstborn child: e.g. “njee-mother.”

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Ancestral spirits sometimes transform into the shape of strangers to test the character of their descendants in how they show hospitality.

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These elders firmly believe that Western types of laws are unenforceable by their courts because those laws are based on individual rights. The Gbandes consider this a calamity for any society; for them, there can be no individual rights per se, only individual rights based on tradition and approved by the group. Only the group has rights; but since these rights become rights supported by every member of the group, they become individual rights because of their reciprocal nature. …. Western peoples are looked upon as makers of many laws as well as breakers of many laws.

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Theft (which does not include eating other people’s food without permission when you are very hungry), is potentially a capital offense; “He who steals is one who is also capable of killing and lying.” These days (and despite the author’s protestations, I suspect earlier as well), theft from non-Gbandes isn’t so bad. Selfishness and lying are also grave offenses. Rape could incur burning (no reincarnation) or banishment (cut off, destroys your identity). Laziness also ranked as seriously evil.

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A culture that focuses on reciprocal duties doesn’t blend well with one that focuses on contractual duties, with one person always in partial authority over another. Once his objectives are met (earn money to buy X), a Gbande would not always consider it his duty to keep showing up to a job—after all, he has other things that need doing.

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I was a bit disappointed that although Dr Dennis deprecated non-African descriptions of African history, and though he said that the Poro taught Gbande history (and he went through the Poro), he didn’t include any history in the book, with the exception of the story of Prince Haale who offered himself as a sacrifice to spare the people from a strange disease, and whose sons have been chiefs ever since.

It was beyond the scope of his book, but I wonder how the cultures (Gbande and quasi-Western) interacted, as each side influenced the other. People at the borderland pick up a little from across the way. I have a gut feeling that the bad characteristics, or those that present badly in the opposite culture, will tend to be picked up first—human cussedness at work. Maybe one place to look is at the Indian/French interactions in North America: If you can find a non-PC analysis.

Starshot

Project Starshot sounds interesting. If you didn’t see the proposal, the idea is to use postage-stamp sized probes attached to light sails, powered by an array of lasers producing O(100GW). Their numbers said they could get the probe accelerated to .2c, which would make the journey to Alpha Centauri a 20-year trip. The acceleration phase would take minutes. Once the infrastructure is there, you can fire off thousands of them.

Yuri Miler introduced the program, then handed off to Hawking, who spoke of using technology to transcend human limitations. Freeman Dyson said the interesting part of space exploration isn’t the planets but the other objects—which is an important point for this project, because the chances of getting close enough to a real live planet to get any info are essentially nil. Druyan started talking about how prescient Sagan was, and I had to be elsewhere (missed Loeb). Jenison had a touch-feely talk about the world learning to work together (I suppose the proper rituals must be done), and Warden spoke of exploring our own solar system first—which is a very good point, and a project that might actually be completed.

You’d have to fire off thousands. When accelerating these things you are essentially balancing a small sail (size not given, but it will be flexible!) on a pillar of light and trying to get it aimed to better than two tenths of a milli-radian—if you want to get as close to the star as Pluto is to the Sun. It sounded a bit like using a shotgun to try to hit the 200 yard bulls-eye. But maybe my intuition is wrong.

They plan to beam back the images captured by the probes. Assuming the sails are still in good enough shape to gather energy from the star, beaming it back seems a little fraught. I’d think you’d need to fire off a cloud of re-transmitters behind them. I don’t have the numbers for signal strength, or for the background rates, so I can’t estimate whether that makes sense or not.

Even if there’s something important to look at, the probes won’t be slowing down to chat. At .2c, they’d cover the distance between the Earth and the Sun in 40 minutes. All decisions have to be made on the spot (9 years to get a reply back from Earth!).

On the other hand, it might be handy to send various kinds of probes through the Solar System on the cheap. True, you won’t get gorgeous pictures, or get anything in orbit, or get anything to land. But getting out where the comets live, if the camera resolution is good enough, might give you enough parallax to spot more of the beasties. There are lots of things one could try.

UPDATE: An official list of issues

Gbandes

From the book by Benjamin Dennis (I'm not finished reading it):

The grandchildren are thought of as the grandparent's parents who have been reincarnated. Therefore, as children, they occupy the same position as the grandparents, but a little higher than the grandparents because they are supposed to be their seniors. However, the older a child becomes the more he takes on his own identity and the further he becomes removed from the position of seniority. When he becomes an adult, he occupies a position of less respect or honor.

And seniority is a really big deal.

A Gbande proverb: "He who is wise is one who listens to his wives."

Dating things

Our group went over Proverbs 31 last week. We were unanimous that we'd all found ourselves a "virtuous wife," and wondered what differences there would be in a list of attributes for a "virtuous husband." Probably not that many, though from the list I gather that the wife is the administrator.

Some scholars try to date the gospels very late. Try to imagine yourself writing about Jesus as He talked about "not one stone left on another." Could you resist the temptation to add "and so it is to this day?" Me neither.

Ecclesiastes never mentions games. (We laughed at the idea of what the Preacher would say about basketball. I know people who've watched Star Wars a dozen times, but who watches basketball re-runs?) By the same rule, that makes it pre-Hellenist. "Runners race to reach the end, and they end where they began; this also is vanity." No way he'd have omitted it.

It must be there, just unconscious

Princess Ojiaku wrote "The studies just keep coming. Unconscious racism is pervasive. It starts early. And it creates a deadly empathy gap" She cites study after study purporting to show a lack of empathy between races (but not, oddly enough between white and purple). It all sounds fairly interesting, until I hit

Some of the best evidence comes from Peking University, where scientists used fMRI to scan the brains of Chinese college students as they viewed images of Asian and Caucasian faces with either neutral or pained expressions. Before viewing the images, some students were primed with rapidly flashing statements specifically about death, such as ‘My body would rot after death’. Others were primed with negative statements unrelated to death, for instance, ‘The coming exam makes me uneasy’.

Later, researchers examining the data found that Asian students who were primed with thoughts of death had greater empathetic response to the pain of other Asian faces than to white faces in two specific regions of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the nearby mid-cingulate cortex, reflecting work that came before. The study, published in NeuroImage in 2015, documented the powerful impact that thinking about death, otherwise known as 'mortality salience’, has on the empathy gap between races, a chasm with obvious relevance to police on call.

If that strikes her as the best, in view of what's been learned about priming studies lately, I harbor deep doubts about the accuracy of the rest of the studies. And the further claim that tribal differences don't seem to matter just adds to my skepticism.

Does anybody know much about the methodology and reproducibility of these things?

Dumpster diving

Neel Patel wrote Dumpster Diving Outside the Large Hadron Collider. He seems astonished that scientists would be scrounging for cast-off equipment. Umm. We've been doing that as long as I've been in the field. "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp." There's never quite enough money to instrument as much or test as much as you hope. There's always one more thing that needs checking.

Voting

When my daughter and I arrived, there were 5 lines, for different chunks of the alphabet. Two were empty, one had one person waiting one had two, and A-F had 35. (It looked as though the registered voter binder was bigger for A-F than the rest, too.) Lots of signs said that they weren't there to debate the law but to administer it, and please have your ID handy. Everybody did. My jaw did not hit the floor.

We had plenty of time to strike up conversations about the weather, the tattered basketball on top of one of the gymnasium fans, and the groups of middle school kids brought in to see the zoo.

Wisconsin presidential primaries: pick a party on the ballot and mark whoever you like. Or dislike least. Seesaw: back-room deals to pick candidates based on favors rendered and promised isn't very pretty, so let the voters decide. But which voters, and on what basis ("if you do read the newspapers you are misinformed")? That doesn't look very pretty either, especially when the voters pick a candidate that doesn't have much to do with the party (and thus won't get much done). So add super-delegates that are party stalwarts. That kludge makes voters unhappy too and some may sit out the general election in protest. Nothing is going to work perfectly, and I have a suspicion that we'll be drifting back to greater party control soon, and then years afterwards, assuming we still keep up the formalities, back to voter selection.

Back in '03 I tried to figure out a plan for a binding "None of the Above" on the ballot. I still think it is worth a shot.

As we left, a woman with a slightly grumpy two-year-old on her hip came out of the gym. "No, they didn't have any suckers for you," she told him.

A little space for liberty

Apparently at least one Dell call center in India gives technicians a little freedom to express themselves. The name one woman goes by is "Wishbringer," and she tells us that she is an "XKCD/608 certified technician." (That would be this, I think.) I like it.

Hijacker selfie

Maybe the "selfie" with the hijacker is a bit tasteless, and as the "purists" note, it wasn't a "true selfie," but the idea seems like a stroke of genius.

Somehow or another the man, and presumably others, engaged the hijacker in conversation; even getting him to pose with the man. The vest was a fake and the hijacker despondent, so it was easy. If it had been real -- calming the hijacker is on the todo list.

I wonder if that was Innes' intent. Shall I give him the benefit of the doubt? that silly grin...

I'm not one of the Twits, so I missed most of the furor

Alawite surprise

I figured that with his Russian backers clobbering the Syrian rebels(*), Assad's star would be on the ascendant. But Alawite leaders issued a statement partly distancing themselves from him.

They wanted to make clear, they said, that members of all Islamic sects in Syria were "brothers and sisters" - and that the Alawites "should not be associated with the crimes the regime has committed".

The document claims that Alawites are not Shia, and

The leaders also acknowledge that Alawites have incorporated elements of other monotheistic religions into their traditions, most notably Judaism and Christianity, but say they should "not be seen as marks of deviation from Islam but as elements that bear witness to our riches and universality".

That doesn't sound like a group confident of their tribe's leader.

But maybe I'm wrong, and this is really a peace gesture from Assad. I don't see how it would work, but there are plenty of subgroups I don't see. (Our government seems just as blind: we trained "moderates" who promptly joined the "radicals." Maybe Assad knows some radicals he could cleave off.)

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(*)But not ISIS. It should be interesting to see if the Russians covertly support the Kurds, to attack the Turks, who have apparently been supporting ISIS under the table. The Great Game is complicated.

Privatizing education in Liberia?

The date seems wrong; I expected to see 1-April.

But it seems to be real: Bridge International Academy may be taking over elementary education in Liberia.

The approach seems to be: large classrooms, teachers reading from scripts prepared for the group. I gather they incorporate testing and "teacher" (5 week training) evaluation as well. Cost/pupil $6/term.

Bridge’s model is “school in a box” – a highly structured, technology-driven model that relies on teachers reading standardised lessons from hand-held tablet computers. Bridge hires education experts to script the lessons, but the teacher’s role is to deliver that content to the class. This allows Bridge to hold down costs because it can hire teachers who don’t have college degrees – a teacher is only required to go through a five-week training programme on how to read and deliver the script.

They seem to be doing this already in Kenya and Uganda.

This sort of thing makes me itchy: one size fits all, centralized, not sure about transparency.

In addition, the programs have to be assembled for pupils speaking a dozen languages. I'd also wonder about how the company plans to enforce its rules: if (e.g.) a teacher takes a couple of months off, how do they find out dash the supervisor small and what can the company do about it if they find do find out?

Two things suggest that this might be a good idea anyway.

1. The Ebola outbreak was the last straw for Liberia's never great primary education system (they had a civil war, too).(*) This program can't be very good, but it could easily be an improvement, helping a larger fraction of the youngsters get an education than otherwise.
2. The government is handling the school fees, which are a big issue for poor families. Of course there may be incidental expenses that are still burdensome, and the money the government is spending has to come from somewhere. Roads, electricity, and clean water are also kind of important too.

I hope this works.

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(*) A few schools were OK, but most kids didn't get much of an education, and the teachers often didn't have much education themselves.

Lemuel

We hit Proverbs 31 yesterday, and I snagged for a few minutes on "Give strong drink to him who is perishing,
And wine to him whose life is bitter." Every working day I see people on the street whose life is bitter because of wine and who wrecked their world with strong drink. And other drugs. I should add to it?

Lemuel's land didn't have morphine drips, but it did have bone cancer. Obvious, of course. I miss things sometimes.

Low bid

UW got the maintenance contract for IceCube for the next 5 years. Rumor has it we were the only bid--that two other groups had asked about how we ran the facility and decided they couldn't make any money on the job--but the NSF won't tell us that. There'll be some belt-tightening, but things should still run OK.

I told her she should have asked to use the cherry-picker truck behind her. The back rows are hard to see.

Percussive maintenance?

Magnet therapy, orgone, monkey glands, theraputic touch, Thync: this time for sure!

Something about DIY brain-zapping seems just a trifle ill-advised. Given the differences in shape of faces and skulls, does the Einstein wanna-be have any notion in exactly which areas of the brain those currents are going to flow? A mm or two here or there for the maximum current density, what difference does... oh. Yes.

I gather that there can be real effects from brain zapping with low currents, so perhaps it isn't entirely fair to compare Thync to orgone. But do-it-yourself?

If it makes a difference, flee. If it doesn't, try a peppermint. It probably won't help, but it'll be more fun.

Escalation

I'm trying to figure out how this works:

It started when Wilkins, a black man, allegedly pushed and choked a 19-year-old white woman, with Wink, a white man, coming to help the woman.

"His assistance actually contributed to escalating matters, with his use of a contemptuous word to describe an African American," said police spokesman Howard Payne.

Officers moved in to break up the fight while Wink allegedly kept yelling "White power", besides other racial epithets.

I suppose technically intervening to stop the woman being choked was an escalation, but throwing around insults seems a relatively mild escalation compared to choking or punching.

I wonder how it actually happened. Reporters aren't always reliable sources, but then neither are police--especially when filtered through a reporter.

The Fellowship by Philip and Carol Zaleski

We have a poster advertising a Bodleian exhibit of Tolkien's paintings for The Hobbit in our bedroom, a souvenir of my mother in law's trip to England about 30 years ago. It is possible to look at that daily and not think "Did he paint other things too?"

Of course. That's not the focus of The Fellowship, of course: The topic only comes up a few times. But that's one of the little details I'd not known. Like the little detail that Swann proposed an opera based on Perelandra. No, I can't imagine how that would work. Even setting aside the distracting costume problems, how on Earth do you make music for that?

The book ties together the lives of Tolkien, Lewis, Williams, and Barfield before, during, and after the Inkling flourishing (it kept on with different members for years). They were none of them perfect (poor Williams, trying to do magic...) -- very far from it -- but they were dedicated to literature and to writing to catch the imagination.

Barfield is the odd duck here. He had to drop out to spend 30 years in a law firm. As the others died off he came back into a role as a link to the rest and a writer and lecturer. In pre-Internet days I learned of his participation in the Inklings (and the claim that he was the brightest of them all) and figured that if I liked T/L/W so well, I needed to read Barfield. I trotted down to the university library and brought home a book of his and sat down to enjoy -- what in blazes is this?

Anthroposophism was his thing, and evolution of consciousness and challenges to the nature of knowledge and I gave it up as a very bad job after about a chapter and a half. I gather from The Fellowship that Lewis didn't take Anthroposophism seriously and that this wounded Barfield deeply. I fear that I would have been less tactful.

I didn't know how painful writing LOTR was, and it hadn't occurred to me how old they all were by the time the last book came out.

The authors consider some of their contemporary writers to have been better stylists, but ... The local NPR station plays "art songs" sometimes. I've never liked them. Plenty of skill, but something's missing.

You don't need this book to appreciate the Inkling's works. But if you want to know about them this is a good choice.

Aiming

If you haven't read this article about "the replication crisis in psychology", do. It's pretty clear and concise.

A visitor noticed that one ranch fence was riddled with bullet holes, each beautifully dead center in the target. He congratulated the owner on his marksmanship. The owner said "Truth to tell, I shoot first and draw the target second."

Privilege revisted

I don't know if I’m alone in judging the "white privilege" slogan to be incompetent when it isn't dishonest. I think I get what the honest folk are driving at, but as someone said a long time ago, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. No doubt it gives the lecturers satisfaction to prod their audiences into feeling guilty, but I believe they'd get more mileage from a different approach.

Suppose I were to address the folks I work with, and try to persuade them that they needed to support special support and outreach campaigns. That would hardly be a gigantic challenge—a large chunk of them are reflexively leftist, though probing suggests this is largely cultural rather than ideological. Some lean a bit libertarian, though.

I think I’d try something along these lines.

---

Colleagues: You are the 1%! Not in terms of money, of course. Few of us are dripping with extra cash. But in terms of intellect you are all easily in the top 1%. Philosophy, Physics, and Mathematics are the three fields at the University attracting the highest IQ—and in this sort of business, IQ matters. You are at a world-class project at a world-class university: the cream of the cream of the crop.

How did you get to where you are?

There are three factors that gave you your success and position: Heredity, Opportunity, and Virtue.

That last one probably startled you. I’ll explain it in a moment.

First is Heredity. You were born with gifts other people don’t have in anything like the same proportion. Those capacities for mathematics and analysis aren’t the only gifts worth having: I can’t compose music worth beans, for example. But as pretty much any parent of more than one child knows, babies are NOT the same. You and I didn’t earn those talents; we were born with them.

Second is Opportunity. If you were born in the USA or Germany or Sweden or Japan and a few others, you basically won the world’s lottery. You may have to spend a little time in the third world to realize how many opportunities our ancestors provided for us that we take completely for granted. Here you can find books, schools, teachers—many for free for anybody—for just about anything you might want to learn about in the world. There are even opportunities for people with physical or mental handicaps—some of you are too young to know how rare and new that is.

Third is Virtue. Don’t be afraid of the word. Self discipline is a virtue that you must have if you plan to develop any skill at all. You needed some fortitude to get here, and some wisdom in organizing your life to reach your goals. Turning raw talent into ability takes dedication and time, and hope. You had them. But recall this: you had to learn those virtues, and you have to keep practicing them. If you are anything like me, you have quite a way to go in developing them all.

Your position in the 1% comes from 3 factors, only one of which you have any control over.

You can easily find people who weren’t born with equal gifts, or who had the bad luck to grow up near terrible schools, or who have suffered some trauma that made it hard to use opportunities, or whose parents didn’t teach them virtues. Some of them come to college. Now they have the opportunity, though they may have some catching up to do. Nor you nor I nor any university can change their talents.

What ought you do to help them achieve what they are capable of?

There’s an old French phrase: noblesse oblige. You have been given a great deal: talent, opportunity, instruction—what responsibilities do you have to those less well off? I do not ask what claim they have on you—there is no agreed-on basis for any such claim. I ask what responsibilities do you have, to God or to society, to those not as blessed as you?

One answer, especially applicable to academics, is that we have a duty to help instruct others. I don’t mean just as a professor, I mean volunteering in schools and giving clear answers to people in everyday conversation. Many, maybe most, of us do things like that. (I get a lot of Is the multiverse real questions, do you?)

Another answer, that especially relates to college student who come with disadvantages, is that we can offer hope. I listed that among the virtues earlier. I didn’t mean the Christian theological virtue of hope, I mean natural hope, the companion of fortitude. Without hope, who would take advantage of the opportunities presented?

You don’t teach hope in seminars, or with youtube videos and pretty posters. You teach it one on one, just like you teach the rest of the virtues. You get to know someone, and encourage them. That easy, and that hard. Who has time? I have a family to take care of, and a commute, and the daily work. I don’t meet very many students outside our group. I do meet neighbors, and random strangers. So do you.

When I say teach hope, I don’t mean be unrealistic. I once had the unpleasant duty of explaining to an enthusiastic friend that his plan for a new career was not going to work at all, in large part because of personal failings. Look together with your friends for what they can do, and ways to do it.

Noblesse oblige, 1%. What is your duty?

---

Does that sound more appealing?

UPDATE:

Let me be explicit, and fold injuries into the talent category. Physical or psychological injury may prevent you from actually using your talent. If that's fixable, it probably needs a pro.

Liberian stories

Patrick Burrowes has a collection of Liberian stories, together with comments of his own on the scene. This is from the selection of "Dilemma Tales," tales where the storyteller asks his listeners to figure the ending. In his collection of stories the question at issue seems to involve precedence.

Two rich women who lived in the same town fell in live with a poor man who lived in the forest.
The first woman built him a fine house and garden, and put cattle and goats in the nearby fields, and sent a messenger to bring him in.

The second woman into the forest to find the poor man; she gave him rich food and wine, and brought him back to town.

Which of these two rich women deserved to have the man?

This story, The Deadly Oracle reminds me of Clumsy Hans.

Aspergers and emotions

I read the NYT review of Switched On the other day, and didn't quite know what to make of it. John Robison underwent "transcranial magnetic stimulation" to see if that would have any effect on his Aspergers. Apparently it did, and the book is a description.

I'd like to know more, and am on the on-hold list at the library. A few questions come to mind after reading the review.

• What exactly is this supposed to be doing?
• What exactly became of the other patients and why is he different?
• Did his newfound emotions map correctly onto what they were supposed to? He said that most people seemed sad to him now--not sure that's an accurate observation.

Anybody know more?

We need reminders

Joe Garagiola died yesterday. My wife (the baseball fan) remembers nothing but good about him as a player or as interviewer: professional and humble. His first book said something to the effect that "Not only was I not the best catcher in the Major Leagues, I wasn't even the best catcher on my street!" (A friend named Berra lived on the same street.)

With the news headlines full of criminals and politicians and pundits, I can forget that we have some decent human beings among us.

Another:

Decades later, the Orthodox theologian Father Thomas Hopko described the impact of that election this way: "One could have gone to Syosset and become a metropolitan, or go to Dallas and become a saint."

During a 1999 visit to Knoxville, Tenn., the lanky Texan folded down onto a kid-sized chair and faced a circle of pre-school and elementary children. With his long white hair and flowing white beard, he resembled an icon of St. Nicholas -- as in St. Nicholas, the monk and 4th century bishop of Myra.

As snacks were served, a child asked if Dmitri liked his donuts plain or with sprinkles. With a straight face, the scholarly archbishop explained that he had theological reasons -- based on centuries of church tradition -- for preferring donuts with icing and sprinkles.

A parent in the back of the room whispered: "Here we go." Some of the children giggled, amused at the sight of the bemused bishop holding up a colorful pastry as if he was performing a ritual.

"In Orthodoxy, there are seasons in which we fast from many of the foods we love," he said. "When we fast, we should fast. But when we feast, we should truly feast and be thankful." Thus, he reasoned, with a smile, that donuts with sprinkles and icing were "more Orthodox" than plain donuts.

We might do well to spend a little more time figuring out what makes people good.

Who remembers these?

I remember seeing these from time to time when I was growing up. Sometimes I got them, sometimes I didn't--I was young at the time.

AVI suggested somewhere that The Two Cultures would be useful to read (it's around here somewhere, I think--haven't gotten to it). Everybody knows the gist, though. And yet I wonder--many of the STEM folk I know are pretty widely read. My former supervisor studied Ukrainian on the side (and ran a small farmette and also owned and managed an apartment building in Aspen). We ran into the new manager of IceCube at the opera a couple of months ago. And I remember reading parts of the self-evaluation the University required of its various departments some years ago, and being more favorably impressed with the literary style of the Physics Department's than of the English Department's section.

People don't know what's solid and what's fashion outside their fields. I can't be bothered to read Derrida. Or to try to plow through Joyce's Ulysses--the ROI looks ridiculously low. (The original was fun, though.) Lewis' rule of thumb that old books survived because they were solid seems like a good one, but it leaves you out of touch with the modern fashions of one culture.

On the other side, though in the opposite direction, people who try to keep up with bleeding edge science as misreported in the media don't get a good feel for what's solid in science. (Multiverse anyone? I get questions about it all the time, and give the same answer: Nah, not real.) I wonder if that difference in direction is significant: classic vs current?

I shouldn't give the wrong impression, though: those STEM folks know more movies and anime than seems possible given only 24 hours in a day.

Lead in the ink?

Researchers think some of the charred scrolls from Herculaneum used lead in the ink. With a fine enough beam and good detectors, one might be able to reconstruct the writing on the different layers of the scroll without trying to unwrap it. It would take some doing: the letters are not uniform, they're on curved surfaces, and the scattering from all layers mixes together. But it looks interesting. I'd guess that if they get the go-ahead, it might take another 10 years. I assume they'd have to build a rig that would slowly move the scroll to and fro through the beam--too hard to pan the beam.

The abstract is here: you can't get the article without a subscription.

Technology that distances

If there were a human being on the other end of the phone, I might answer their canned questions, though generally I include plenty of caveats. If it were a human being standing in front of me, I might invite them in for a discussion.

But a robo-call that demands that I punch buttons to shoehorn my judgements for the convenience of their machinery? Forget it.

I've gotten 4 calls in the past 2 days, all wanting to know how I plan to vote. It probably doesn't help my attitude that I've been sick as a dog for the past 4, but I've a long-standing habit of hanging up on robo-calls.

Cultural appropriation

From Powers of Mind by "Adam Smith":

Ram Dass had become an archetype, a metaphor himself. Kids followed him to India, around India. The Indians were a bit bewildered. "The young Americans," they said, "dance and sing kirtan all day." Kirtan are religious chants and songs. "But they're so young. Don't they know the stages? First you're a student, then you go into a profession or business, then you become a householder, then your household grows up and doesn't need you any more, and then you go do kirtan all day."

A little injection of "Come, follow me?"

This n that

There's been news about a "diphoton resonance" at 750 GeV/c^2 in LHC experiments. The latest news from the Moriond conference is that the signal is still there, though it still doesn't rise to discovery level. What is it? Nobody knows. There are hundreds of theory papers (many appearing within days of the initial announcement) explaining it as this or that, but for now we don't know which, if any, is correct.

One big problem is that we only have one decay mode to work with: into two photons. Pretty much everything proposed expects that the particle (if such it is) will decay much more frequently into other things--but the backgrounds are gigantic. Decay into two photons is rare, but much cleaner. The other "decay modes" will take quite a bit more analysis to tease out, though some modes should be understood by the end of the year.

It is unexpected. It may be nothing very out of the ordinary, but everybody hopes not.

---

Is dark matter found in ultra-heavy particles, with masses comparable to a human cell nucleus? Answer: they don't know, and we don't have any handy way of testing that.

They suggest some indirect methods based on the Cosmic Microwave Background and what the Universe was doing at a very early era that we don't understand very well.

---

It looks like the cosmic rays we get on Earth come from quite a wide variety of sources. Most are protons, but some are heavier nuclei. The spectrum of energies shows several kinks in slope, as though one source pooped out and a fainter one took over. Currently we think quite a few come from a nearby supernova--which, among other things, would imply that the energy spectrum was different 20 million years ago.

Primes

"Lemke Oliver again found that primes seem to avoid being followed by another prime with the same final digit. The primes “really hate to repeat themselves,” Lemke Oliver said." It doesn't matter what base (> 2) you use. In base 3, primes can end in 1 or 2 (not 0--that would mean they were divisible by 3 and therefore not prime). On the average, a prime ending in 1 tends to be followed more often by a prime ending in 2, and vice versa. It isn't a huge effect, but it needed some explanation, and the team found one.

If you want details, this should more than satisfy your curiosity.

AVI discusses a First Things article about curiosity as a temptation. The researchers who found this feature of primes are certainly deeply curious about primes, but this is their life-work, and probably their calling. I would never be more than a dilettante in that field, and more likely merely a curious onlooker.(*)

So how much time can I spend on learning about such things before it becomes a failing?

---

(*)The last thing I investigated turned out to have been solved more than two centuries ago. I'm a bit behind the times. (I didn't solve it.)

Leagues

From The Collapse of the Third Republic by William Shirer:

Middle and upper-class youths, many from the universities or just out of them, formed the phalanx of the various leagues that in January had taken to the streets. The most active and effective of these was the royalist Action Francaise, whose storm troopers were organized as Camelots du Roi. Their spirits roused by the daily dose of inflammatory articles by Charles Maurras, the poet-philosopher of Action Francaise, by Leon Daudet, who possessed the most vituperative pen in Paris, and by Maurice Pujo, leader of the Camelots, in the daily newspaper L’Action Francaise, they staged their first big demonstration on January 9, the day Parliament reconvened after the holidays. They were repulsed by the police before they could get to the Chamber, though on the Place de la Concorde, just across the Seine from the Palais-Bourbon, they were able to haul the Minister of Marine, Albert Sarraut, out of his car and rough him up before he was rescued by the police.

So far our leagues have mostly been from the left (Move On, BLM, various campus groups etc). I’m not sure if there is a classic right wing here anymore—left/right may not be the right classification. AVI noted that the "right," at least so far, tend to hunker down and the left tend to take to the streets. When the "right" starts taking to the streets in the same aggressive way(*), I’ll know to stick a fork in it. But of course it only takes one side to make a fight.

---

(*)The TEA party demonstrations have, in all instances I’ve heard of, not just been peaceful, but cleaned up after themselves—in stark contract to Occupy.

Flashback

I got on the bus the other day, and sat down in the back, stretched, and looked around me. Of the five people nearest me, all were reading books. Paper and ink books.

I don't think that's a sign of the apocalypse; maybe the antipocalpyse?

Adventures in self-discovery

I decided to try my hand at a generic Facebook political image: one size fits all. After scaling and sliding pictures and text this way and that, I have come to the conclusion that I do not have natural artistic composition skills. Which might explain the snores during PowerPoint talks.

Visiting head of state

The Dalai Lama seems to like Madison, or perhaps Deer Park in Oregon. He comes here fairly regularly, about ten times so far.

I had domestic stuff to deal with and drove in to work late. Parking was special event parking rates--he was at the Overture center (a block from our offices). On the way by, there were 4 huge bus/trucks parked by the center, and on State Street a small crowd of all ages in Tibetan clothes with a Tibetan flag, handing out literature to people who were not wearing dark glasses and a hat and walking briskly.

Above it all a plane circled pulling a banner that read "DALAI LAMA STOP LYING." The news report doesn't say who dunnit, but I'd guess there was Chinese money in the loop somewhere.

I wonder about the big buses with blanked windows. Were they for the Lama and security? If so, I wonder if it seems ironic to him...

Cognitive dissonance

Our betters explain to us that income inequality is a bad thing. Then they sell state lottery tickets.

Enjoy it while you can

Since we live in an umpteenth generation warfare world, what do autonomous drone aircraft/submarines mean to us in everyday life?

I know of three classes of drone aircraft: slow consumer loitering-capable, slightly faster consumer non-loitering, and high performance military gear. There’s probably plenty in between I don’t know about, and if there isn’t now there will be if somebody sees a need.

I assume jamming will work fine against completely remote-controlled drones, so fixed sites (isolated military bases, etc) can protect themselves pretty well. Not so random civilians.

Obviously drones are handy for assassinations. Top figures (e.g. heads of state) probably get pretty good drone spotting and interdiction coverage, and if not they will soon. Threats to the rest of us could be serious, though. Consider a loitering drone, completely remote controlled, that waits for the police chief to take out the garbage. Or if he’s willing to assume that kind of risk, waiting for one of his kids to appear. Yours truly thinks it reasonable to automatically shoot down drones inside city limits, whether Amazon likes it or not. And yes, city defenses would have to get waivers from the Migratory Birds Treaty Act—you couldn’t help nailing a few.

Most of us aren’t, outside of a civil war, likely to be assassination targets—and during a civil war partisans would probably run out of drones pretty quick and rely on the two-legged varieties.

---

Consider a military airbase inside the USA or friendly country. When they are far from cities, the approaches are over easily controllable area that can be laced with whatever detection and interdiction hardware they please. Non-existent neighbors won’t care about spectrum jamming or the occasional rocket landing on the roof.

We already have technology for trying to spot and scare off birds. This can be beefed up and given some teeth. Slow drones are being attacked with net guns; I assume automatic shotguns would work too. Higher altitude drones are harder to get at. Using one’s own patrol of interceptor drones might be the solution. Note that this works against autonomous drones as well as remote-controlled. Even so, there would be some non-zero breakthrough rate, and one could always overwhelm the defense somewhere.

---

Civilian airports, or military/civilian, or military that suburbia has surrounded, are a different problem. They can’t arrange for defense in depth. What could happen to them?

One simple attack is to have drones with explosive payload home in on the biggest radio signals. This could knock out jamming, but could also take out the local radar. Semi-autonomous drones could also damage the radar system, and in those places that still use a traditional control tower, make hash of that also. That makes the facility harder to use.

Hitting an aircraft doesn’t sound terribly easy, but loitering drones could stack up (no, not right over each other) in the descent path and let an aircraft hit them. The closer in to the landing field, the shorter the window the pilot has to hit, and the more likely your two dozen drones are to intersect the aircraft.

You could knock drones down if a fast jet buzzed the flight path, but that’s kind of risky for the buzz-er and leaves the air pretty turbulent for the next plane trying to land—another big risk. Maybe a few helicopters with nets could try to wrangle the drones? The next generation of drone software could include “big slow thing evasion,” which wouldn’t get them out of the way of jets but would with helicopters.

In any event, you can see that landing passenger jets every 90 seconds starts to look hard.

So, how do you deal with this sort of problem? The safe solution is to abandon the fixed investment in the existing airports and move them to the boonies, with fast transport to and from. Airlines would scream bloody murder. (And, as best as I can tell, the military bureaucracies aren’t always very good at hard choices either.) The usual approach (clamping down on sales of whatever technology) isn’t likely to be of much use, but it will be tried.

So, air travel becomes slower and more expensive, and more risky.

---

OK, how about sea travel? Autonomous loitering drone submarines could be coordinated to attack enemy ships, provided communications weren’t jammed. Suppose communications are proactively jammed. Drones would have to be able to ID their targets, and would tend to act alone, though possibly launching sub-drones (aka torpedoes?) to attack from multiple directions.(*)

Suppose ID isn’t easy, or this is a chunk of the ocean where you don’t care who gets hit. Daesh et al don’t much care who they hit. Then what you create is like a mobile mine—search out anything big and attack it.

Last time I checked, that kind of risk made transport costs soar. Luckily, loitering drone submarines are, and are likely to remain, expensive. Mobile mines could be quite a bit cheaper, but moving through the water takes a lot of energy, and moving on the surface exposes it to detection.

Hmm.

---

How about trains? If you armored them a bit? A drone with explosive payload can always take out a track, and if it is timed right so the train can't stop you could derail it. (I assume the tracks are instrumented, or will be.) Countermeasure: armor the train and slow it down, and add some drone knock-down flanges on the side (oopsies going through tunnels...).

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Yes, of course I am assuming that some of the enemy will have infiltrated, and will not distinguish military from civilian targets. Why would they do things the hard way?

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(*)I figure that sea battles will be pretty complicated. Where are the enemy drones, where are yours, how do you coordinate search and destroy, how do you keep your own screen of defenders—all in seawater and bad weather. With both aircraft drones and submarine drones, all partly autonomous. Sort of like fleet battles, but with more moving pieces.

Ancient Acoustic Architecture

Byzantine church acoustics: "look at the walls and realize that they were looking at things acoustically. It wasn’t just about the architecture. They had these big jugs that were put up there to sip certain frequencies out of the air ... They built diffusion, a way to break up the sound waves by putting striations in the walls. They were actively trying to tune the space.”

Go have a read. I'd never heard of those chambers being used in a church before. I knew amphitheaters had resonators, though.

Connections

David Warren again.

I nevertheless noticed a mistake. This was Blackwell’s assertion that the “technology” used in mass politics is “neutral.”

...

Our “ideas with consequences” — such as civic freedom and autonomy, voluntarism, subsidiarity, personal responsibility, “traditional values,” and ultimately the Love of God — cannot be readily communicated to a mass audience through mass media, because a mass is not a man.

As is often the case, he puts things better than I do. I remember seeing public service announcements a time or three when I was a teen, and thinking--"that's not going to do much good." People laud Facebook as a means of connecting people (and true enough, I hear from people I'd not otherwise hear from), but the connection is so tenuous that people write things they'd not dream of saying in person--there seems to be no governor on the engine.

One mark of a good friendships is that you are a better person because of your association with your friend. Can I be a better person through PostIt-Note friendships?

More black holes

Although IceCube didn't have a clear signal to report that was coincident with the LIGO event, the Fermi gamma ray telescope did, sort of. They weren't pointing at the area at the time, and their resolution isn't so good off-axis. Still, seeing something at that moment and in that direction is very interesting.

The thing is, the LIGO event is supposed to have come from 2 merging black holes. When those giant eggbeaters started swirling round each other, you'd expect them to have splattered the accretion disk all over the kitchen, so to speak. There should have been nothing left around them.

So what caused the flash of gamma rays?

I asked Markus about what happens when black holes merge if one is charged, and he pointed me to an article by someone whose general relativity fu is much better than mine, who had a paper out 4 days after the announcement.

Black holes have mass, spin, and charge--and nothing else. You could think of feeding a black hole a diet of nothing but electrons. The result would be a charged black hole. After you fed it enough electrons you wouldn't be able to stuff any more in--the electrostatic repulsion would be too huge, bigger than the black hole's gravity. That maximum charge is obviously pretty big--I won't bother with numbers.

Zhang's paper points out that if one of the black holes was charged, its rapid orbit would twist up magnetic flux lines, and the merger would cause a pulse of radio waves. If the field was intense enough, you'd get gamma rays. Alas, the charge required is gigantic: about 1/10,000 of the maximum charge.

It is pretty hard to see how anything would accumulate that much charge. Over time, if your star is positively charged it will attract electrons, and if negatively charged will attract protons--and things will even out. (Having two fast black holes might change things a little--if there were enough matter left to work with.)

Must be something else.

Disposal

I suppose it makes sense--sort of--but it still seems weird to me that used razor blades were just shoved through a hole in the cabinet to fall inside the wall. That way there were no sharp surprises in the trash, and the blades were gone forever. Sort of.

The bathroom cabinet looks like an old style, but it must be a new one because it doesn't have the razor blade slot.

The razor blades were in the wall, though: O(50) of them. How do I know? It turns out copper pipe can develop pinhole leaks, especially if the plumber was a little careless with the flux.

Drywall cutters look nice and low tech, but they work like a champ on drywall--and on fingers.

Atlas Shrugging?

The video is nicely plotted. At the end, a much-poked and shoved robot flees outside. (Well, actually just goes through a door using the crash bar, but the visual narrative suggests escape.)

Anyone who spends much time with computers immediately wonders: "How many bugs are in the code for the three laws?

If you haven't thought of that before, try the exercise: a robot is in the kitchen with you. How do you implement the First Law: no action or inaction will allow a human to be harmed? What does the robot do with you and the stove, or the grater? Your fork? How does it know what is likely to represent harm?

Looking for attention?

Most physics professors are not in the habit of stripping during lectures.

A few years ago there seemed to be a rash of female violinists and cellists circulating publicity photos with strategically posed instruments. I think that died out, but it suggested there was fierce competition somewhere.

Distractions in Church

I alternate weeks handling the sound system and slides with a young fellow--8'th grade, I was told. This is the hymn-based service, with no drums or amplified strings. The sound settings are pretty much "Set it and forget it" during rehearsal, and all you have to worry about is keeping the slides in sync.

He has had some issues keeping the slides in sync with the music, and with keeping the right mikes on. One person suggested that I train him a bit, but I declined. There's nothing much to learn here except to be attentive to what's going on.

I just wrote "what's going on," but the whole service is about "who's going on."

I recall one service in which I was running monitors. The singers needed monitors rather badly, because the drums and electric guitars make it impossible to hear yourself, even 20 rows back, let alone on the platform.

All monitors were muted while the minister led us in the introduction to the Lord's Supper, and then while the elements were being handed out the musicians were supposed to sing. The minister said "Let us bow and pray." I did. That's what the moment is about.

The musicians started up, but turned uncertain pretty quickly. After a few moments I figured out what what I'd forgotten and lit them up again.

Maybe the youngster is spacing out. That is easy to do. I've done it myself many times. Or maybe he's "spacing in" to the meaning and the who, and is distracted from the world and the machinery of the service.

The more complicated we make the service, the more workers there must be and the more the workers have to pay attention to the timing instead of the word.

Reading in bed

Someone described the condition of a friend in the hospital as being not even able to read. That brought the following to mind. Unfortunately he is not in good shape. Maintaining concentration is probably impossible when he'd not in the induced coma, so the following would be useless for him.

When you're flat on your back after (e.g. shoulder) surgery and you'd like to do something more than watch the boob tube, it is frustrating to realize you can't hold a book in position. E-books might change that.

There are several possibilities. You can mount a flatscreen monitor on the ceiling, and use a tablet at your hand with some kind of bluetooth interface to the monitor pickup, which would then control the monitor. This would allow other things besides just books, of course. You could fumble through your email, browse the web, or setup your own boob tube feed. However, room lighting might make it less than ideal. Room lighting (and the greater expense!) make projection on a screen on the ceiling even less attractive.

It would be easier to mount a swing-arm type of holder (with stiff springs!) to the headboard, for your e-reader or tablet. If you can lift your arm, it should be fairly easy to control. If you can't, a tablet should be within easy bluetooth range of a corresponding device you could have at your side. You'd need help with the orientation in that case, but since you'd probably also need help getting out of bed that's likely available.

Yep

Day without Latinos

A couple of bills before the legislature were the reason for a large rally yesterday. It was billed as the "Day without Latinos and Immigrants."

I gather one bill forbade local officials from giving drivers licenses or other state documents to undocumented aliens, and the other prohibited cities from prohibiting questions about citizenship.

The police said 20,000. I only saw about a thousand heading there, but I only see one side of one street. I could hear the rally loud but not clear. Loudspeaker distortion makes speakers unclear even when they're using English. There were lots of families with little kids, a few American flags, even fewer Mexican flags.

Going to school in the capitol city has its advantages. If there's some kind of protest the teachers feel they must sympathize with, you can get a day off school, and with luck you don't have to bother with the protest.

BTW, if you're here legally, the bills don't effect you at all. I assume the idea was to show solidarity with the tribe, try to build some political muscle, and because your cousins are all here illegally.

We ate at the Great Dane today. They had a nice slick poster in the window explaining how they stood in solidarity with their Latino employees. I looked around--maybe they were the cooks. Definitely not the waitresses, bartenders, bus-boys...

FWIW, everybody showed up to work yesterday. Americans, Germans, Belgians, Chinese, Spaniards and all.

Swag

A firm brought by some replacement disks for a disk array yesterday, and wanted to meet with our new filesystem manager. It turned out to be a sales pitch. I didn't attend.

At conventions sales teams hand out swag at their booths; something to remember them by. They don't always get the memo that folks working for the University or gov't have some rules about accepting gifts. They sort of get it--the stuff they hand out when they come by isn't such expensive gear that anybody would benefit financially: pens, coffee holders, t-shirts and whatnot with their name on it. But we have had offers to go to Super-bowl parties, or to have them pay for lunch. Nobody takes them up on it, but I assume it must happen in the business world.

This group left behind a t-shirt and a little ring-notebook, both emblazoned with the company name (it's only a year old). I'm a troglodyte who uses paper and pen sometimes, so I looked at the notebook after the meeting broke up. It featured trendy "green" recycled paper, but I think the recycling must have been somewhat deeper than just the pages. The calendar in the back was for the years 2011, 2012, and 2013.

Trust

The Wednesday morning study is going through the book of Proverbs. Proverbs has a number of warnings about what happens to people in general, and especially to rulers who try to get rich unscrupulously.

It struck me as a bit ironic. Money is a promise that somebody will give you something when you ask for it--in other words it represents trust. So the villain, untrustworthy himself, wants to reliably trust other people. Why shouldn't they reciprocate?

The picture doesn't change much if the villain collects stuff instead of money. He can't maintain it all, and has to trust other people not to make off with stuff when his back is turned, or be ready to penalize others who do.

When Ceausescu's minions didn't trust that bad things would happen to them if they stepped out of line, they got into a firing line.

The cross

"And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself."

Not just to him, but to a cross. Our cross. The only gateway for us.

I'm not sure we have any choice about pain: Just in where it leads us.

Conspiracy Theories

Is it paranoia if they're really out to get you?

Harry A. Greaves Jr., former Managing Director of the Liberia Petroleum Refinery Corporation (LPRC), whose naked body was found behind the old Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs in Monrovia, died of drowning, according to the just completed autopsy performed by two pathologists from the U.S.-based Nebraska Institute of Forensic Science.

A more recent report says the marks on the body and condition of it were normal for someone tossed about in the surf. The ocean currents indeed are quite treacherous. The owner of Thinker's Village told us he tended to lose a guest a year to accidental drownings.

So nothing to see here, right? He'd been making waves complaining about a privatization deal and what the National Oil Company had been doing with all the money they spent, but it's just a drowning. (So far nobody has discovered any oil, but it isn't just the oil companies spending money.)

Funny thing. Liberians aren't big on swimming. An alleged girlfriend said she was with him when he decided to go swimming, so maybe the object wasn't the backstroke. Or maybe the tale involving the mysterious car and the second body is accurate. Or maybe none of them.

The truth often shows a certain elasticity there. (A little like the internet) Government officials sometimes indulge in extra-legal action, and a matter has to be obviously far removed from any personal or financial interests of theirs for there to be a presumption that they tell the truth. And you don't always know what their financial interests are.

Under the circumstances, conspiracy theories seem reasonable. Even if almost all of them are wrong.

LIGO

Those of us who weren't in the Supernova room watching the feed were probably watching at their desks. There were some funny moments: "This isn't a Hollywood movie, this is a real simulation!" got a lot of laughs around the room. So did the banter about theorists as they introduced Thorne (and a book of his I'd never heard of, though we all read Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler). And we enjoyed the Russian reporter playing to stereotype by claiming that LIGO was invented in 1962 in Russia.

Sorry, I can't resist this oldie. "What is a theoretical physicist? That is a kind of physicist presumed to exist but which has never been seen in the lab."

The big news was the chirp. I was startled at how clear it looked. Look for yourself at what the two detectors saw. You can see the backgrounds that each detector found, and then the signal. I won't try to duplicate the references and animations.

Yes, I read the paper, but most of the details that need explaining are in other papers (like what they mean by "resonant optical cavity, formed by its two test mass mirrors, that multiplies the effect of a gravitational wave on the light phase by a factor of 300". I think it means the light bounces back and forth 300 times but I'm not sure.) Noise is the big issue: reducing it and trying to measure what they can't reduce.

A few details from the paper:

1. There were 2 events that might be interesting, one much less clear
2. The data was from a 16-day period, not the whole 4 month time. I don't know if they only used part for analysis convenience or because of detector issues. Can we expect 20x this per year? I hope this wasn't just beginner's luck.
3. The event was from just before the official start of the run!
4. They aren't up to full sensitivity yet. They expect another factor of three, which would expand the volume they're sensitive to by a factor of 27
5. Similar systems are coming online shortly. It might be possible to pinpoint (for some definitions of pinpoint) the source, and if it is close enough maybe use optical telescopes to find out exactly where.
6. With the festivities 1.3 billion light-years away, and from a merger of black holes at that, IceCube wasn't likely to find any neutrinos from it, and we didn't. (If we had, we'd have probably had a representative at the announcement ourselves.)
7. "Each test mass is suspended as the final stage of a quadruple-pendulum system, supported by an active seismic isolation platform." That last bit means the platform moved its top to try to compensate for seismic movements of its bottom. The first part means they hung a pendulum from a pendulum from a pendulum from a pendulum.
8. Did you notice what they estimated from the before/after fits? 3 solar masses turned into gravitational wave energy! (plus or minus half a solar mass) I wonder what it would have been like to view it from a few light-years away...

Note that the Michelson-Morley technique that was used to prove there was no ether, which was the starting point for Einstein's Special Relativity, turns up again in a verification of Einstein's General Relativity. This time they used lasers ( and Einstein wondered if stimulated emission were possible. He just keeps turning up...)

Celebrating

I've never been to the Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans--and from the pictures I don't think I'd enjoy it that much. not terribly fond of crowds, don't go for alcohol But the food is a different matter. Red beans and rice, etouffe yikes goes the blood sugar...

When I was a kid beignets were a rare Sunday treat. They require a fair bit of minding if you want to make enough for everybody. (I've never quite figured out how to get them to puff up hollow reliably--that was always great for scooping up extra powered sugar.)

Last night I figured we should do something for Mardi Gras for a change. I now know that a gas burner works very much better than an electric burner for cooking beignets, that you have to roll and cut very quickly to keep up with your frying, and that you and everything else will wind up thoroughly garnished with powered sugar. I'm still not sure how it got in the bedroom rug.

Basis Faces

"Eigenface" is more euphonious, but I like basis faces better. It seems clearer. But people would giggle, so maybe Sirovich and Kirby had the right idea.

They are used in face recognition. The idea is that these represent patterns you can build an image of a face out of: 0.15 FaceType_1 + .36 FaceType_4 + .06 FaceType_17 + ... gives a pretty good approximation of the original face.

Some patterns have asymmetries of one kind or another. Look at the lower right face below.

You need that sort of thing for real faces. Abe Lincoln was kicked by a horse and his face was never quite symmetric afterwards.

The "Eigen" in eigenface comes from a German word meaning self or own or characteristic. Transformations that shift and twist will generally turn a vector in one direction into one of a different size pointing a different direction. Some vectors are left pointing the same way, though--and they're obviously special. For linear transformations these vectors are called eigenvectors. For each untwisting vector, the ratio its size changes is the eigenvalue.

If you are using tiny images (100x100 pixels), you have "only" 10,000 pixels to compare. When you are looking for patterns among these, the number of combinations is pretty large: 10,000 x 10,000 for starters. Manipulating vectors 10,000 elements long and a matrix 100,000,000 elements big isn't entirely trivial. The two teams mentioned in the article came up with some clever ways to deal with the problem to make it tractable.

And it turns out that many faces can be described with only a few "basis faces". Wikipedia links to the FaceMachine java applet which generates faces with only a few (I think 6) bases, but unfortunately the java is old enough that my browser won't let it run. YMMV.

My office mate took linear algebra over a decade after I did; this was one of the things developed in the meantime, so his class learned it and mine didn't.

Homeless court

Not a peripatetic court, one for the homeless.

The man, longtime homeless, has amassed roughly \$30,000 worth of citations in Madison Municipal Court in a cycle of repeated tickets, arrest warrants and jail.

We design a lot of our punishments for a rooted citizen, not for someone who can keep neither job nor home. "In 2015, 18 homeless people were issued a combined 119 arrest warrants and owed a total of \$254,148." These offenses included "public intoxication, trespass, public urination, retail theft."

By "public intoxication" they don't mean just being quietly drunk--they mean being obnoxious or disruptive while drunk. The police aren't hanging around looking for reasons to arrest people. I've waited for a bus in the middle of some noisy conflicts with no squad cars summoned. The homeless get cut a lot of slack, no matter what the advocates say.

But the statutory fines are meaningless to a homeless man, unless you seize whatever cash he has on hand to pay part of it. (I wonder if "Can you spare a couple bucks to help pay my fines?" would collect more than the traditional "Can you spare a couple of bucks for lunch"(*) or "Bus fare?")

But now, due to the efforts of Municipal Court Judge Dan Koval and nonprofits Dane County TimeBank, YWCA Madison and Operation Welcome Home and other partners, the man and others are getting a chance to get court fines reduced or dismissed through a pilot “homeless court” if they stay out of trouble and get help improving their lives.

Last year, Koval had an idea for a restorative justice court that would concentrate on issues confronting people who had a lot of cases in Municipal Court. The concept, he said, is similar to such courts for juveniles, drunken driving, drug offenses and veterans.

The city allotted \$10K last year and \$10K this year, and expects "three people to move through the court process in the first six months of this year." Law is expensive, I guess, at \$1400/case. I wonder what will characterize the people who do stay out of trouble. And what we can do about the rest. And if anything will "work."

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(*)I've been giving out coupons for half-pies at Teddywedger's, but only one on one. I need to ask the owner how they've been coming back. As an experiment I gave 2 a few times, with the suggestion "bring a friend," and I wonder whether they went twice or sold them or actually had breakfast with a friend.

UPDATE: He went twice.

Not always happy-clappy

As she founded and visited convents, Teresa often traveled the rugged roads of Spain. One time her saddle slipped, and she found herself head down under the belly of a donkey as she crossed a stream. Complaining to the Lord of her treatment, she heard him reply, "Teresa, whom the Lord loves, he chastises. This is how I treat all my friends." She replied tartly, "No wonder you have so few!"

I haven't heard of many youth retreats that deal with St. John of the Cross, have you? Generally the kids come back all excited and enthusiastic; not many come back quiet and thoughtful.

People come with so many problems--you need to comfort them and not scare them away. But the big picture does include Gethsemane. We don't escape the world's pains.

The friend who had a house fall on him in New Orleans two weeks ago is still in the ICU, and may soon be healthy enough for a tracheotomy. (The rest of the church team that were inside the house were pretty much OK; he was standing outside.)

Appendix D.13

Could we have saved Columbia?

Well, not the Columbia itself, but maybe the astronauts? Read the article. My guess--probably not, or not all. The initial planning itself would have taken a day or so, and changes in plans add extra delays. If we'd tried, it would have been one of the great "wing it"s, and it would have seriously pushed the limits of how long the Columbia crew could stay alive.

Too soon old, too late smart

The unshoveled slush at the side of the driveway froze, and so I took the bag of salt out and started sprinkling salt. There wasn't much left, and I gave up on the scoop and started reaching in the bag and grabbing handfuls. When the bag was empty, I realized my hand was filthy with salt--not what you want on doorknobs and such.

So I reached over and scrubbed it a bit in the snow.

Anybody remember enough chemistry to know what happened next?

Yep. There was enough salt still there to melt the snow on my hand--but the heat to do that had to come from somewhere and the handiest source was me. My hand hurt so badly from the cold I was afraid I'd done it some injury, and I probably would have if I hadn't gotten to warm water at the sink very quickly thereafter.

A word to the wise...

Illusions

The buzz last week was Barna group: Porn perceived as "'Being less risky than actual sex' ... among both teens and older adults". Creating your own reality?

He shook his head. "No," he said, "our handicaps are all different, and the race is equal. The Pharisees can even catch up the woman with the mites. Those who do not insist on Gomorrah."

She said: "Gomorrah?" and the chill of the word struck even through her contemplation. She remembered the unanswered question of her vision: What of them that have not? As if the answer had been reserved for these lower circles, he gave it. He said: "The Lord's glory fell on the cities of the plain, of Sodom and another. We know all about Sodom nowadays, but perhaps we know the other even better. Men can be in love with men, and women with women, and still be in love and make sounds and speeches, but don't you know how quiet the streets of Gomorrah are? Haven't you seen the pools that everlastingly reflect the faces of those who walk with their own phantasms, but the phantasms aren't reflected, and can't be? The lovers of Gomorrah are quite contented, Periel; they don't have to put up with our difficulties. They aren't bothered by alteration, at least till the rain of the fire of the Glory at the end, for they lose the capacity for change, except for the fear of hell. They're monogamous enough! and they've no children--no cherubim breaking into being or babies as tiresome as ours; there's no birth there, and only the second death. There's no distinction between lover and beloved; they beget themselves on their adoration of themselves, and they live and feed and starve on themselves, and by themselves too, for creation, as my predecessor said, is the mercy of God, and they won't have the facts of creation. No, we don't talk much of Gomorrah, and perhaps it's as well and perhaps not."

Metadata

The NSA admitted to recording phone metadata on a vast number of people. Not the phone calls themselves--that would be a gigantic heap to try to filter--but the "who contacted who" and when. That can give an outline of a network, and if one person in that network is of interest you can identify others in that subnet that are also of interest. Then you can drill down and try to tap the phones.

One pundit brought up the old problem that security and encryption have generally been add-on afterthoughts, and opined that from now on encryption should be the default. OK, cool--though there might be a few gotchas with unpacking things later if the file undergoes a little bit rot. At least in theory it should be possible to ship email around with public key encryption, handle payments with the same key, and generally be able to identify yourself with the same password everywhere. It makes life a little simpler, no?

At some point the secret part of the key has to be validated. There are ways to manage chains of trusted keys. But I wonder about the round-trip for validating a password. What sort of metadata can you collect? Financial transaction information wouldn't be part of the query, only who you were dealing with.