Something about the name

On our outing yesterday, Better Half noticed in a restaurant a sign advertising the use of Kronos Foods. Does that make you think twice about eating there?

BTW, Frog Alley Road connects to Pheasant Fields Drive, which connects to Turtle Run and Shallow Waters Circle. Yes, there are houses there. Pheasant Fields I understand an attraction for, but for me Shallow Waters bring mosquitoes.

Cosmic rays and Cerencov light

This Forbes article by Siegal is a nicely illustrated explanation of how these telescopes looking for cosmic rays work.

The devil is in the details, of course. How much energy did the thing have? You can sort-of reconstruct an estimate based on how much light you saw on the ground and what angle you reconstructed the cosmic ray came in at. But--the light produced will depend a bit on the type of cosmic ray it was (proton, oxygen nucleus, iron nucleus, whatever). So you wind up with different numbers depending on what you think the particle was. The proportions of nuclei seen seem to vary with cosmic ray energy, too. We have no way of identifying what a cosmic ray was before it interacts. You can guess--for example there's a strong probability that the very highest energy particles were iron nuclei.

And the interactions in the atmosphere are random. If you happen to produce more muons early on in the shower, they'll carry more of the energy--but not show up any brighter in your detector. Result--you see less light, and think the original energy is lower than it really was. The only really good handles you have are statistical. When you see a lot of the cosmic rays you can get a distribution whose shape will tell you things about the original energy distribution--the outliers won't matter so much.

By the time the shower reaches ground level there's not much left but muons and photons (and neutrinos--lots of neutrinos).

FWIW, the highest energy core of a cosmic ray shower can sometimes (1/few-thousand events can have hundreds of muons) be surprisingly intense and narrow--10meters or even smaller. (muon bundles). And you, gentle reader, were probably struck by at least one cosmic ray shower muon while you were reading this.

Mosquitoes

We had a family rule: "Bugs in the house get stomped; bugs outside you leave alone." We had clear exceptions: fireflies and ladybugs got escorted outside, and mosquitoes were fair game anywhere.

"God in His wisdom made the fly, and then forgot to tell us why." I gather He wanted us to figure it out for ourselves.

JSTOR reports that mosquitoes may actually be good for something. Two things.

MacDonald cites a study that found that mosquito larvae were part of the ecological balance in stagnant water: without them protists multiplied like mad and some bacteria which the protists ate dropped in numbers. They're not sure yet what the consequences of that could be.

And apparently they are sometimes pollinators too.

Only female mosquitoes suck blood and that phase only lasts while they are breeding. Most of the time, mosquitoes of both sexes eat plant nectar, making them important pollinators as they move from plant to plant. Some orchids, for example, rely heavily on mosquitoes, and these rare plants would be at risk without their buzzing partners.

I'm still going to swat them. I've had malaria already, thank you, and I don't want West Nile. Or even a tiny welt.

16" shells

The deadline for submitting proposals is past, and unfortunately "Open Burning and/or Open Detonation (OB/OD) are not permitted technologies for any end item(s) or component(s)."

There might be a loophole there, though. If the detonation were underground... You'd need to keep people at a substantial distance, but perhaps it might be an alternative to Burning Man.

If you insist on being boring, try to imagine how to safely disassemble something full of Explosive D: a combination of picric acid and other substances. Maybe it isn't so boring...

A little here, a little there

Mistakes add up sometimes.

A gas explosion in Fitchburg:

said the first oversight occurred in 2011 when his client, ... had his gas-powered dryer replaced with an electric one, and the dryer installer failed to cap the gas line during the job, ...

The second mistake happened on Aug. 25, the day of the explosion, Rottier said, when tree trimmers working on Grittner’s property needed water and asked Grittner to open a water valve in the basement to allow for that.

But Grittner, according to what Rottier told 27 News, first accidentally opened a gas valve attached to the uncapped line instead, allowing gas to accumulate in the house and some hours later trigger the explosion at 6:45 pm.

Nothing disastrous in itself, but together...

Looking back, I think I've done as many two-step as one-step screw-ups.

Time travel

James Gleick's article in Nautilus about time travel is a good overview of what people have been thinking and hoping about the subject, but he omits Larry Niven's demonstration that past-altering time travel will not happen. (Note that Niven did not argue "is impossible.")

For those not familiar with the argument: If time travel can change the past, then the present also changes. This can happen again and again (see Dinosaur Beach for an excellent story on the subject), until some random grandfather biting the dust prematurely means the time travel method is no longer discovered. A "no time travel" state is the only stable history, and will therefore become the only one that exists.

And he concluded with a flourish—the kind of thing Hawking could get away with in the Physical Review. He had more than a theory. He had "evidence": "There is also strong experimental evidence in favor of the conjecture from the fact that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future."

Of course you might ask whether UFO's were visiting from the future instead of Proxima Centauri.

FWIW, there are some features of quantum mechanics that seem to allow states that are a little ambiguous about time. But even if that's what they turn out to be, at human scales you wouldn't notice. h is small.

Cotton Kingdom

AVI referenced a First Things article about Frederick Law Olmstead, which mentioned some of his books. He was described as an excellent observer, so I looked up Volume 1 of Cotton Kingdom (Volume 2 is hard to find by itself).

FYI, I found it inconvenient to use the laptop to read it, so I downloaded the EPUB version to read on a portable system. It was handier to carry around, but the OCR was terrible: Red River frequently turned into Eed Eiver or Eed Kiver, and footnotes got mingled with the regular text. I wish the OCR programs would put in a symbol for end-of-page--that would help get the lower bound on a footnote, at any rate.

He started in Virginia, and found startlingly poor people and transportation. He considered slavery evil, but testified accurately about what he saw and heard--when it supported his opinions and when it didn't seem to.

Some things happen "off-stage:" he didn't see much whipping, though people talked about it. The poor whites were almost always not just poor but feckless. Most slaveowners weren't rich, and not all approved of slavery. On many farms slaves got financial incentives to perform. Conversations are jarring. Travel was fraught with difficulties: one trip by riverboat didn't leave on time, or the next day, or the next day, or the next day...

Read it.

Scrolls again

The Herculaneum scrolls I wrote about may be even closer to being read. The Ein Gedi Scroll turned out to be Leviticus, which we already have. The Herculaneum scrolls may be the writings of the house philosopher (and probably only of very specialized academic interest), but I'll be interested to find out.

Foundations

Madison is in the middle of an ancient glacial lake, and good solid stone can be quite a ways down. Sand. Builders drive deep pilings when they're building more than a few stories high.

Our home is on the edge of a (I suspect somewhat graded and shaped) ridge, and part of the foundation for the garage wants to move in a different direction than the rest of the place. Not badly--maybe in a decade or so we'll mudjack. Or maybe not.

That leads inexorably to the question: when you're building wide buildings on land that stands a chance of shifting in slightly different directions sometime in the next century, how do you plan the foundation to allow for movement? Cast one giant thick slab and trust it doesn't crack? Or put a buffer layer between the foundation and the construction?

Housing

We took the kids to Old World Wisconsin from time to time. It turns out that it is possible to fit a family in a room not much bigger than one of the kid's bedrooms.

I remember a little about some of the places we lived in before moving to Africa, and I remember visiting some relative's houses now and then. As a general rule, they weren't very big. But now: "Likewise, the median-size home has increased in size by almost 1,000 square feet, from 1,525 square feet in 1973 to 2,506 last year." (Our duplex seems to be less than 800 square feet--military housing from the 60's. We succeeded in making the basement legally habitable, though, so maybe our house is growing too.)

It makes housing a little pricey.

This story is strongly black-and-white--probably the regulators have something to say on their behalf--but it makes fascinating reading. Plausible-sounding rules have far-reaching consequences, and some groups seem hostile to the entire idea of small housing.

Revised micro-housing legislation proposes more expansive changes, including prohibiting congregate housing development in places zoned for neighborhood commercial centers and for low-rise multi-family buildings, such as small apartment buildings and duplexes. Such zones are exactly the parts of the city where most micro-housing was previously built and where it makes economic sense.

The linked article is about micro-housing--apartments, basically. When we moved to Illinois, we couldn't afford a 3-bedroom apartment, and were lucky that the third child wasn't yet born, because rules prohibited renting a 2-bedroom to 5 people.

Zoning rules push for more space between a new house and the street (old houses were grandfathered in), wider sidewalks, wider driveways--more land and more expensive. (The lots our duplexes were built on are now almost too small to lawfully build a house on!) Which presumably helps make apartments more expensive too, though there are some fixed expenses to recoup. In the middle, and especially the lower middle, housing eats up a huge chunk of the income, and leaves a lot of us "one paycheck away from disaster." (Ill health has driven several people out of homes in this neighborhood.) Or a fire, or a tree landing on the roof, or something else that has you paying for both the original house and for a place to live...

At the low income end once you drop below trailer court prices there doesn't seem to be anything left except public assistance.

True, some people don't do themselves any favors (the feckless, the slovenly, and the jerks), but there should be some sink-or-swim ways for them to fend for themselves. There's no place to build-your-own in the city (maybe in Detroit). There are tiny houses. (I'm not sure wood is a good choice for building rental tiny-houses--too easily damaged.) Policing is an issue in collections of small housing--the predatory have to be driven out, and if they're homeless as a result that's sad, but not unendurably so. (Those with serious mental illness are another matter--if it is severe enough there's not much we can do short of locking them in, and for others we can think of halfway homes.)

There's a lady who lives on a corner of the Capitol Square. Over the years she has accumulated a fair pile of blankets and whatnot. She's peaceful and clean and seems to get out of the way without hassle when there's an event on the Square, so I guess people just let her stay. On campus, groundsmen accidentally found a tunnel where someone had been living for at least a couple of years. They never showed up again, so nobody knows if this was a squatter or a student trying to save on housing costs.

This year's "Go Big Read" at UW Madison is Evicted. I gather it focuses on the landlords, if the NYT review is any guide. There may be other players involved.

Fluent in Math

How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math

Anybody want to try to replicate the experiment?

I suppose by symmetry I should be willing to try to become fluent in Arabic (I just didn't have time to spare) or figuring out which colors go with which.

Stupidity?

In the article circulating the past few days, Carlo Cipolla suffers from a slight poverty of language. Part of what he writes about is not stupidity but evil. His evil "bandits" are just one category of evil--other-destructive. Another is self-destructive. Or both. Dante had quite a list.

Touch and autism

Lots of folks on the autism spectrum are uncomfortable with touching (bundling tightly is a different kind of sensation), and a Flemish group had a look at one aspect of touching: namely the difference between what you expect to touch when you grasp someone and what extra sensations you feel. They used hands and touched different fingers. (If I poke something with my index finger, I don't expect sensation on my pinky, and interpret that as whoever-it-is touching back.)

OK, interesting idea. They see a difference in reaction. It's a small study, and I wasn't overwhelmed with the differences, but maybe they're onto a connection there.

Comet busting

Have a look at a comet breaking up. Or at any rate having chunks come off. Hubble got some good pictures. The breakup is slow, and some of the smaller chunks seem to break up to invisibility themselves.

Gaudium et spes

Gaudium et spes (joy and hope) is one of those Vatican-II documents you hear referenced now and again, and I figured I should see what the scoop was.

It is wordy. Very wordy. In some ways that's inevitable, because they were trying to draft something that could be applicable in some way from slums in South America to the super-wealthy of Washington DC. Each section is more or less stand-alone. It would have been much more readable if they'd taken examples and illustrated their religious and social points from the examples.

Some of the things may have been surprises to people ("If one is in extreme necessity, he has the right to procure for himself what he needs out of the riches of others."), but I'd heard of them before. I gather that the emphasis on self-determination was relatively new.

One section was rather startling. It emphasized that men are broken and sinful, and that men's governments are oppressive and greedy and violent, and then went on to assume that international organizations would give pure and righteous correction to us all.

Maybe my lack of surprise for the rest was because I wasn't immersed in pre-Vatican-II attitudes.

UPDATE: Yes, I know they were probably thinking of themselves in the role of "international organization", or of people like or inspired by themselves.

Separating images

This looks interesting: using a kind of dual measurement to try to distinguish two very close sources. Rayleigh showed that two point sources couldn't be distinguished if their angular separation were less than a factor times the wavelength divided by the lens diameter. But their research suggests that if you are not doing direct imaging, it may be possible to do much better. Unfortunately I don't understand their paper well enough to say how practical this is likely to be, but I'll keep an eye on it. Maybe we'll be able to--well, "get a look" is direct imaging. How about "detect" binary star systems? OK, we detect them with doppler shifts and with occlusion effects if we're lucky. You know what I mean.

New particle?

Researchers using older LHC results from Atlas and CMS claim there is room for a new heavy boson that couple to dark matter. So said reports last week. The arXiv article is from last year, and garnered little attention until the authors made statements at ICHEP last week. Um.

As others (e.g. Motls and Dorigo have noted, there was room for a lot of low-significance guesses in the early data. Most of those bumps have gone away with more data. And though the article says the team showed their recent work at ICHEP, the linked papers had nothing to do with their arXiv article from last year--just stuff about what you could do with a new collider. (Since they don't have direct access to the latest LHC data, it's not terribly surprising that they don't have anything new to say yet.) It sounds like they are just touting a little "bump-hunting" from last year that nobody paid much attention to at the time.

I skimmed the paper, and didn't see much that jumped out at me--and I don't think I'll be going back to slog through it.

They're quite correct that there's a big problem with dark matter and normal matter--the latest results are squeezing the most popular models (WIMPs) out of the picture. Me? I suspect that dark matter interacts with neutrinos. That leaves room for them to interact with normal matter in the early universe when temperatures were high, and means that it will be next to impossible to detect their interactions now. Which isn't very encouraging to grad students looking for a thesis, or hoping for a Nobel for discovery.

I'm shocked, shocked!

Apparently policemen have a macabre sense of humor. A dry-erase board soliciting suggestions for dealing with problems caused by the homeless who congregate at the end of State Street wound up including "Burmese tiger trap," "swarms of bees," and similar ideas. The administration is apologizing, of course, and some outsiders said this doesn't reflect the attitude officers on the street show in real life. Well, no, of course it doesn't.

I'm told med students and ER workers have a wacky sense of humor too. I'd bet that most folks working in life-or-death occupations blow off steam with jokes that would freak out peaceful desk jockeys. I work in IT these days, and even on the worst days(*), as one of our guys says, "Babies ain't dyin'." But at lunch some of our jokes might make the system users shiver. We have a team of people who like to help, but when the same (otherwise brilliant) fellow keeps coming back with the same problem, he can expect there to be a little behind-the-scenes merriment. But we'll cheerfully keep fixing the problem.

Prediction: Among themselves park rangers will have wry jokes about bears and over-confident hikers, ambulance drivers will have coarse phrases for frequently visited locations, and firemen will have theirs about places and stupid people tricks.

---

(*)E.g. When we lost an un-backed-up 3PB filesystem. We were saying to each other "Well, they needed more disk space, and now look--3PB of free space!" We got the system fixed, and only lost about 100,000 files, almost all of which were reconstruct-able--not too shabby.

Thief of time

Scanning the news stories about student demands at college, and the latest limit in the search for dark matter, reminded me of a fun book. "Contrary to the headmistress's instructions, Miss Susan did not let the children do what they liked. She let them do what she liked. It turned out to be a lot more interesting for everyone."

For something to exist, it has to be observed.
For something to exist, it has to have a position in time and space.
And this explains why nine-tenths of the mass of the universe is unaccounted for.
Nine-tenths of the universe is the knowledge of the position and direction of everything in the other tenth. Every atom has its biography, every star its file, every chemical exchange its equivalent of the inspector with a clipboard. It is unaccounted for because it is doing the accounting for the rest of it, and you cannot see the back of your own head.
Nine-tenths of the universe, in fact, is paperwork

You have to be careful with your training sample

If you don't choose wisely, your Artificial Intelligence beauty contest judge will wind up famous for the wrong reasons.

"The idea that you could come up with a culturally neutral, racially neutral conception of beauty is simply mind-boggling."

The case is a reminder that "humans are really doing the thinking, even when it’s couched as algorithms and we think it’s neutral and scientific," he said.

In counting aspects of beauty, do you weight a symmetrical aquiline nose more heavily than steatopygy? There's a good chance some other culture disagrees.

The article goes on to complain about algorithm-based law enforcement tactics, but that's a bit different--most people fear violent crime more than white-collar theft, and the unhappiness arises from the fact that the loci of violent crimes tend to cluster, and so do the side effects from policing.

But an algorithm for most beautiful? I remember one day waiting for a ride at Union South, and looking at the people around. One young lady seemed more attractive than the rest, and for want of more noble things to think about I tried to figure out why. I finally realized that she resembled my wife.

Cell phone gun

You all probably heard about the gun that folds up to look like a cell phone. I saw reactions from "cool, I should get one" to "what evil-minded people those gun weirdos are." One thing I did not see was a use case.

• Home Defense? Why bother with a fold-up?
• Concealed carry to prevent a mugging? By the time you unfold the thing, the mugger will have shot you three times and be halfway down the block with anything valuable.
• Parthian shot at a mugger? Do you think a mugger is going to leave you your "cell phones"? Anyway, judges frown on shooting people running away from you.
• Assassination? You're going to get this past metal detectors, and then unfold it undetected, and then get close enough so you can hit the broadside of a barn. Yep, sure. A derringer would be smaller; or use a ceramic knife if you expect metal detectors.
• Because it's a cool novelty? OK, impressing people is a valid use case. Still.

It finally struck me: You conceal it from your boss in a "No firearms" establishment where you have reason to expect random shooters. Chances are you won't be targeted first, so you have time to duck and unfold and fire.

---

I made notes but never actually posted about this one.

Malaria

Malaria Capers is a very interesting history of the disease and its attempted cures, and its use (to cure syphilis). There've been many attempts at a vaccine, and plenty of treatments. BBC reports on a new attempt that shows promise in animals, attacking the parasite in a couple of stages of its development and, the article says, suppressing it for about a month. Pretty good--chloroquine we had to take every week. Over the years so many drugs have shown promise and failed, or begun to fail as the organism adapted, that it is hard to get excited. But who knows? Maybe this will be able to replace artemisinin, or maybe even be a long-term cure.

Race around the Pole

I've never been to the South Pole, but I work with others who have--and some even wintered-over. When IceCube was drilling its 2.5km deep holes in the ice, we had a lot of people in the drilling crew. They stood 8 hours shifts--the system kept running 24/7 (OK, there were a lot more than 24 hours in the day). If you work for 8 and sleep for 7 or 8 hours--what do you do with the rest of the time? Remember that these are clever, adventurous (or they'd not have taken a job at the Pole), creative, and very good at making and fixing things--and repurposing things.

Once upon a time, the Race Around The Pole was a bigger deal than it is now--a recreation for people sitting in the middle of nowhere.(*) It is still an important event--people devise some costumes and run/walk/whatever on this year's track around the South Pole. But a few years ago things had gotten a little competitive.

How about a dragon racing around? And yes, that's a hot tub in the back. I presume the ladies represent captive princesses. Hot water is gold there, btw.

Or perhaps a chariot?

It looks to me like the chariot wheels were made from the leftover spools that held the cable we shipped down.

Unfortunately, although we all cheer for the creativity, funding agencies tend not to have a sense of humor, and I gather word came down to scale it back. Since the drilling's done we don't have as many engineers down there anymore, so it's probably moot. But it would be cool to spend time working alongside a group like that.

---

I got the images from icestories.explorium.edu, but I couldn't link them directly--see them for more.

---

(*) I'm tolerably sure the airlines try to time various in-flight activities to keep the passengers from going stir-crazy. Food, ads, movies, whatever -- to break up the noisy monotony of an 8-hour flight.

Squirrel tastes

This morning while we were getting breakfast together I noticed a squirrel out by the bird feeders eating a mushroom. I'd not realized they did that. Apparently they do. He was picky, though--the relic looked a little ratty and notched when I photographed it later. (Lots of glare, but you can learn something from the fact that the original mushroom was round.)

Ingratitude

Some people seem to naturally feel entitled to the sun, moon, and seven stars. Some of us just act like it because we don't know any better.

Psalm 59:11 Do not slay them, or my people will forget; Scatter them by Your power, and bring them down, O Lord, our shield. I remember wondering about that verse. He's not asking for Divine mercy for his foes (he explicitly asks that they be punished!), but he's asking that they be kept around--presumably as foes still, just not powerful.

History books aren't very powerful reminders. Movies can be, but over time the hunger for new stuff changes the focus. Mad studied this a while back:

WWII then and now, and future.

And after a while you get a generation that does not know Joseph, or in our case doesn't know much about war or freedom or have much idea how hard it was to produce their inheritance.

Asking forgiveness

"Is my gluttony a sin? I'm sorry, and I'll show it by ... giving up broccoli!"

Left to ourselves I don't think we're very good at repentance.

We don't get to prescribe how we "make the first move" in repentance. Voltaire said "God will forgive; it is His job." On the contrary, Jesus mentioned one rather large restriction in a prayer everybody probably knows. The law of Moses specified certain rules for showing repentance and for thanking or preparing yourself for God. There were more convenient things to do than going to the tabernacle/temple, and more dramatic things, and I gather the ancient Jews did both--baking cakes at home for the Queen of Heaven, or burning the odd child for Moloch.

"It is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins," but it was the prescribed work to show penitence and faith that God would find a way to forgive. He did.

Slow quakes

It makes sense that the faults slip slowly as well as quickly, but this is something I hadn't heard of before--an intermediate speed slipping, where a change can happen over "days, months, sometimes even years." We can detect some of these now. The really deep ones are, as usual, harder.

Internet of things

At the IT lunch Friday during a conversation about connectedness our "PoleMaster"(*) mentioned bluetooth connected toothbrushes. We laughed, but he said it was real, and so it was. He said his smart-TV was immune from hacking, being on the far side of a firewall that blocked all packets, and we laughed at that too.

We're not black-hat guys, and I don't know how to hack into your home router. I could probably find out how to crack simple system w/o too much trouble, and I know there's a network of folks who share more sophisticated info (but I'm not known to them, or they to me, so I can't get in). I assume the big agencies know most of the tricks.

So don't worry, I won't be trying to figure out if you brush your teeth thoroughly. Or perusing your song playlist. Or listening to your baby monitor. I'm a nice guy.

Feel better?

---

(*) He's responsible for our South Pole computer systems, and for training winter-overs.

Placebo

Go read the article on the placebo effect. I have trouble remembering names, but even I'd heard of Beecher's study

Beecher concluded that, overall, in 35 percent of cases the condition was "satisfactorily relieved by a placebo," which he took to be evidence of therapeutic effectiveness.

It wasn't my field, but I figured the folks in the field had vetted it and it could be relied on--though I wondered about placebo in animals.

There turn out to be some issues with the study, and with others following it. One obvious problem is that there's no control to study placebos. You can treat a patient, fake-treat a patient, or not treat a patient. The author calls for such studies. One of these things is not like the other things--and a lack of treatment is not exactly comforting. (Comforting can be a big deal in helping. Feeling like you've been rejected may cause problems.)

Plus, a lot of people just get better with or without treatment. The body is designed to try to repair itself, and often it succeeds.

There are fluctuations in severity of a disease or of pain. If you have a threshold (the patient has to be worse than X to start my study), there's a chance that there'll be a fluctuation below the threshold later--briefly feeling better. Or briefly feeling worse--some studies didn't take "getting worse" into account properly.

I'll not say there's no such thing as a placebo effect (and the author is careful not to say that either), but the situation is certainly much fuzzier than popularly believed.

A word to the wise

When the label of a can of foaming insulation says wear gloves, do. It also splatters surprisingly far, so goggles are a wise choice also. I was foresighted enough to wear clothes I didn't care about, but I thought I had the adapter secured on the nozzle well enough. It surprised me with a handful of foam. Even acetone (suggested on the label) doesn't get all the stuff off, so I have an extra layer of skin for a while. With glued-in grime.

Fields of study

BS King has a nice post up. Before settling on a major/career, sometimes you look through many fields: she likens this to dating.

I wanted to be a fireman, then I wanted to be an archaeologist. (Or maybe a paleontologist--dinosaurs were cool. But no, ruins and bones and mysterious people were cooler.) Then a nuclear physicist. Then a particle physicist--that was in high school; Feynman sounded cool. I didn't look back. (Funding ran low, and I'm in IT now.)

My dating career was similarly circumscribed.

I think of fields of study as more like places you go.

In some places you are just a tourist--you go look because it's beautiful. Others are familiar vacation spots--you have some emotional investment too, and you put in the work of camping. Others are places you live for a while and actually help out with something--they require a lot more investment of time and understanding what to do.

I'm a tourist in a lot of different fields--I try to learn enough to get the beauty of them. (I get pushback from some members of the family when I assert that mathematics is an art form too.) Others I know well enough to be able to ask useful questions--generally questions that were posed and solved a century ago--but that’s a camper for you, discovering a "new" trail. In a couple of fields I spent the time to actually find new things--but it does take time. (Oh look, a squirrel!)

A toast?

Ars Technica has a light article about alcohol and astronauts. They include Aldrin's communion wine, though that doesn't seem in the same category as Christmas bottles of Coronet for Apollo 8.

In particular, carbonated options like champagne, beer, or a Tom Collins likely wouldn't be viable.

"Aesthetically, bubbles don't work the same," Stephenson said. "When prepared on Earth, bubbles are more buoyant, and they travel up. In space, there is no up, and they clump in the middle until disturbed. It kind of looks like a congealed mess.”

Beyond looks, the bigger issue would be how those bubbles work within astronauts. On Earth, as Stephenson pointed out, gravity helps keep what we ingest down. Gases then separate and rise, leading to burps. But in space, gases, solids, and liquids can intertwine without gravity to separate them. "You can't burp in space," he said. "Well, you can, but you'd probably throw up at the same time."

A cola would be equally unappetizing.

Fake official letters?

A letter allegedly written by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to the 'Majority Members' (also known as Anti-Tyler lawmakers) of the House of Representatives read in the Thursday, August 18 session, is said to be fake because it lacks the conventional reference code/index (Document Code) and is riddled with spelling mistakes and ink-pen corrections, as well as an unusual signature of the President. It had the right letterhead, but some standard official letter codings were missing, and '"That’s outrageous and un-presidential," the staffer said. "I have seen letters with spelling mistakes and run-on sentences but they are not corrected with ink-pen."'

Science, Part 1

Science is dissection. And reassembly.

The world is obviously quite complicated, often almost hopelessly so.

If you want to understand how things work, you look for patterns. You find many classes of such patterns—some involving complex interactions behind the scenes.

Ask where ice cream comes from. One child will explain the pattern he has found: put 3 quarters in a vending machine and an ice cream cup falls into a tray at the bottom.

That answer may not entirely satisfy you. If you dissect the vending machine you find a finite stack of ice cream cups, and will discover that these need to be replenished.

The origin of the ice cream turns out to be a delivery truck. Or maybe not—on dissecting the truck and tracking its operation you find that the real origin is in a factory.

Dissect the factory and you find you have to start making some distinctions. What you choose to call ice cream has its origin in a vat—and it is made of other ingredients that are not ice cream themselves, and which come from elsewhere.

Looking closely into that vat you learn what mix of air and cream and sugar and flavorings and cold makes the ice cream.

Now you have an explanation that should satisfy you, and answer your initial question.

You can dissect further, but at the price of no longer talking exactly about ice cream. For example you can ask why fats congeal this way, and study that aspect of chemistry, or how the flavors effect the tongue, or how the textures effect the tongue, or how the cold effects the mouth. You could even try to learn if people have genetic predispositions to prefer one flavor over another.

All these represent aspects of ice cream, but no longer represent the totality of it. That doesn’t make them valueless--quite the contrary--but they are no longer big picture studies. Maybe they’ll help improve ice cream, but there’s work to be done putting the pieces together first.

Suppose we take a more traditional example from elementary physics class—the famous soporific inclined plane that trips up so many with its force decomposition diagrams.

Before you place the block on the slope you have to make sure of Rule 0:

"One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full of cider."

Rule 0: Make sure nobody is doing something else with your apparatus. If you put a toy car on an inclined plane you don’t expect it to roll uphill—but it might. Think “wind-up car.” If somebody else has plans for your apparatus, you won’t be able to measure what you want to.

This means that you cannot directly study intentions with science. You have to exclude them as a complicating factor—you can’t do experiments unless the materials involved operate through their own motions with no human, angelic, or divine intervention. Or … “There's a story about a psychologist who was studying the intelligence of a chimpanzee. He led the chimp into a room full of toys, went out, closed the door and put his eye to the keyhole to see what the chimp was doing. He found himself gazing into a glittering interested brown eye only inches from his own. The chimp was looking through the keyhole to see what the psychologist was doing."

Interventions, motives, and goals are not part of the field of view of science by construction. Some careless folk claim that since science doesn’t study them, they don’t exist. Chess doesn’t include the concept of a full house, but poker exists anyway.

When you let the block slide down the slope to try to study gravity and force balancing, you try to keep friction to a minimum, air resistance to a minimum, and don’t use wheels. Once you understand sliding you can study friction; once you know both you can study rolling; once you understand those you can study friction in the axles; then go on to air resistance, and so on.

Study the properties of springs in isolation, of gears in isolation, and ratchets, and so on.

Once you understand these in isolation you can model their combinations, and try to understand the operation of a wind-up toy car. That’s the “integration” part of science and technology. The final system is very complex, but each of the dissected forces is easy enough to understand in isolation. The science lies in the dissection and modeling of the simple aspects. The engineering art lies in assembling these into a design.

Technologies take models—usually fairly high level models—and design ways to use these. Typically an engineer does not care about the crystal structure of a steel beam when he is designing a bridge—unless he cares about the limits of his model and what the effects of metal fatigue and creep are likely to be. Then he does need a deeper, more fundamental, model of matter.

A structural engineer won’t need to worry about quantum effects, but an electronics engineer probably will, if only to understand the limits of his tools.

Remember—you don’t understand your measurement until you understand the limits of your measurement.

Can Kant?

Did Kant like people at all? If his analysis of marriage and sex

In this relation the human individual makes himself into a thing, which is contrary to the right of humanity in his own person. This, however, is only possible under the one condition, that as the one person is acquired by the other as a thing, that same person also equally acquires the other reciprocally, and thus regains and reestablishes the rational personality.

is what he actually thought, then perhaps it is good that he never married. Wikipedia says he did have friends, though. Schiller wrote "Problem: Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure. Hence I am plagued with doubts that I am not a virtuous person. Reply: Sure, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely. And then with aversion to do what your duty enjoins you."

From what I read his "Pure Reason" seems to treat man as a kind of abstract geometry; a formless point with no shape.

Using that kind of model of people as the foundation for morality and duty is an absolute minimum. A morality that deals with real people cannot help but include other rules suitable to the details of the nature of real people.

For starters: "It is not good for man to be alone." Experience with solitary confinement in prison shows that being alone can have horrible effects on people. You can think of others.

Even for the point-like rational beings, when he wrote that one should act according to rules that one would be willing to see as universal rules, he required what is not completely possible. Said "point-like rational beings" have finite intelligence. By Godel, when they devise a set of guidelines for determining the value of rules they cannot prove the correctness of every possible rule governing all the permutations of PLRB interactions. There will always be some interaction that the PLRB's rules won't cover. His prescription is incomplete: both on the face of it and because it doesn't address details of the nature of humans.

Home is the sailor

Or something like that. Canoeing and riding the Badger ferry count as sailing, right? We did a lot of tacking at first on the canoe--going in a straight line requires a bit of paddling coordination--but after a while Hamlin lake beckoned us out of Lost Lake. A local told us later that the lake, deeded to the state by a lumber baron, is required to be lowered a couple of feet in late fall to make lumbering easier--but frogs and turtles tend to freeze out when the water levels drop so far. (Word to the wise--double check that your hand doesn't run dry of sunscreen when prepping.)

Abend Brothers Collision seemed like a nice pun-ny name. Harrisville and Alpena were pretty quiet (and the glass boat tour of shipwrecks was fun), but Ludington was awash with visitors--luckily we motel-ed 30 minutes away, out past Walhalla (we didn't notice any fighting there).

The weather largely cooperated with us. We found that cots are OK for bad backs, but that the tent is too small for cots in wet weather. (It was dry, but I know from bitter experience that pushing against the tent is a good way to get wet in the rain.) No mosquitoes, either.

You don't want to know how many emails were waiting for me this evening.

I never thought I'd see that language in a theorem

In connection with an earlier post, I started reading a paper titled On the Stability of Geodesics in the Brownian Map(*) On page 2, after their first Definition came "Theorem 1. Almost surely, for all x,y etc."

That doesn't sound much like your old geometry course, does it? "Almost surely" is a phrase I'd never seen before. In context, it makes sense. In good old ordinary Euclidean geometry, if you pick any point and any distance R > 0 (no matter how small), you can, guaranteed, find an infinite number of points closer to the first point than R. In the systems they're writing about, though, it's not quite the same--distances are random. For example, if the Euclidean distance between two points is ρ, a random distance might be ρ times a random scale--which could be bigger than 1 or less; it just can't be 0.

In that case, for some given point, it is possible that the scale factor is big enough that the distance is now bigger than R. It is even possible, though infinitely unlikely, that all new distances are bigger than R.

So "almost surely" means something like "it is infinitely unlikely that this is false, but not a mathematical certainty. There might be a finite number of exceptions compared to the infinite number that are true."

Learn something new every day. There's a lot to learn.

---

(*)Sounds impressive, doesn't it? I wish I understood it. Some good advice I ran across once said to read a paper all the way through to get what sense you can, no matter what seems to be missing. Then go back and read it again and identify the parts you need to know and don't, and then look those up, and then read it a third time, trying to work through the proofs. One of these days I should take that advice.

Defining sides

A few years ago I was in LA for a conference, and one evening was eating pizza across from a theater which sported a great temporary awning over the sidewalk and some tents beside it. It turned out to be the premier of a movie, and actors were showing up in grand style.

Last night's dreams reminded me of that, and of fresh reason to be grateful that my parents decided to move us to Africa.

When celebrity culture is in the air, it is a hard discipline to not care.

Some want to be a star and stand in front of the photographers, others want to be bigger than movie stars in their favorite career. And there's the "At least I don't care about such triviality"--but you can hear the frisson of superiority that betrays the fact that they really do care, even if negatively. Their ways of thinking and imagining are shaped by the celebration of the stars.

Perhaps "nothing human is alien to me," but most things have no bearing on my life and don't shape my thinking, and shouldn't. It's the same with you, no doubt--you probably would have to try hard to care about the Blues and Greens whose quarrels afflicted Justinian--you probably not even care enough issue "A plague o' both your houses."

Just because something is current doesn't make it important, and though it is probably against the Blogger's Code, I don't see a good reason to have an opinion on everything. Or even most things. Or even, often, important things.

My challenge is to find those things that I inhaled along the years, and evaluate them in more eternal terms. Everybody wants to say "whoever is not with me is against me," but only God can make that overwhelming claim.

Leaning tower

Fixing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. "Some accuse Burland et al of sterilising their tower - for, part of its old mystique had been the possibility it might collapse at any moment, the frisson that a voyeuristic visitor might witness such a fall. ‘You can’t please all of the people all of the time,’ Burland shrugs."

Education

Ricks Institute was one of the 35 schools with "“100 percent pass rate.” In order words, every student from these 35 schools who sat the WAEC for 2016 made a successful pass." They should have had a Ricks grad proofread.

The Liberian Observer had that as its first story, only following later with the more dismal (but expected--ebola closed schools for quite a while) "Worst Results since 2013" story (35% passed, 48% failed, 17% were caught cheating).

One bright spot from the earlier story is that not only did the usual schools do well in preparing their students, so did some remote schools new to the list. So somebody is learning how to do the job right.

The definition of censorship

The chancellor at UW-Stout in Menomonie said Friday he decided to move two large paintings dating to 1936 from hallways in a much-traveled campus building because they “stood in the way of an effort to create an inclusive and comfortable environment for everyone.”

The chancellor said in his statement that “despite opinions to the contrary, it was never my intent to ‘censor’ these paintings or remove them from public view. I simply wanted to get them into situations where we had some control over who would view them.

The painting reproduced in the newspaper shows 4 canoes on a river: two with French trappers and two with Indians. "Meyer provided quotes from two Native American students who said the paintings “like those in Harvey Hall keep us in the past” and present Native Americans as stereotypes." I gather some people don't care for history. OR else they're trying to see what they can get away with. It seems ironic: the Indians are all reasonably sitting and paddling, but one of the trappers is standing in the bow of his canoe--not, in my experience, the most sensible thing to attempt.

Elections?

AVI had a question. This may or may not be an answer.

Wishful thinking

Doubting at Grim's Hall links to a Foreign Policy article suggesting that Catholic France was likely to rise up in a new crusade.

I don't believe it.

I've read people claiming that an attempt to confiscate guns in the USA would result in a revolution. I doubt it.

I use a popcorn model for most revolts. When the popper really gets going the noise fills the house and the corn overflows the bowl and it's all very dramatic. But it starts out with one lonesome pop. And then another, and then a few more, and then more.

Some revolts are sudden--everybody lives in fear of Ceaușescu until the day when they don't. I can easily see a revolt against political correctness on the same lines: we all hunker down because of the SJWs until a child points out that they have no clothes. They certainly do not have superior morals.

But violent popular revolts generally have to cross a major barrier: the threat of repercussions to me and mine. When enough people cross that line you have the revolt, but before that happens there'll be one guy (an oddball) who snaps, then another, and then a few more, and then people start organizing to protect themselves and the revolt starts to begin. (Civil wars driven by powerful players can play out differently.)

That's what I'm not seeing. There are a few videos of people venting(*), but almost all the violence I hear of in France comes from one side only. Unless the news is censored (and I can't put that past the ENArchs), there are no harbingers of revolt in France.

And in this country, I get the strong impression that lots of people like to sound big, with vague threats of possible disasters. But I haven't heard that legislators or judges are meeting untimely ends at a rate higher than normal.

You can argue that things are going bad, and that we cannot go on forever without chaos. That's true enough, but I think Isaiah and Jeremiah might be more relevant than bloggers writing about guns or what happens when the descendants of the Vikings get mad.

---

(*) And if you equate venting from one side with throat cutting from the other, I'm afraid we have no language in common. God may view things that way from His standard of absolute perfection; you may not.

Randomness

This article on tools for studying randomness is cool. I remember doodling huge curves during boring classes--now I can call them "SLE curves" and pretend I was doing research. (SLE curves=random curves that never cross themselves) Actually the Brownian maps, in which distances between points become random, seems like something I should have a closer look at. I've been playing with an alternative definition of straight lines, and it might be fun to see what happens in Brownian maps.

And a link from that page is about an atypical mathematician and his work on both "stochastic partial differential equations" and a sound editing program for DJs. I'd no notion that anybody was looking at PDEs with a random coefficient, but I guess I don't get out much--I think I can see how they'd come up in music amplification problems. (stochastic means random, in a precise sense) An interesting character, and interesting work--but I'm kind of reluctant to tackle his magnum opus right now. I think I get the idea of the shape of his project, but the abstract had about 8 terms I didn't understand and the table of contents was worse.

UPDATE The Brownian maps don't seem to be metric spaces, exactly, though their "geodesics" get as weird as my "lines" sometimes. Interesting, but it would take quite a bit of study to get up to speed on the subject.

Creepy concrete

I hadn't realized it before, but concrete bends or creeps under stress, albeit slowly. At least when it is outdoors.

The summary I linked is about a study looking at the effect of stress on calcium-silicate-hydrates. You can think of concrete as grains held together by calcium-silicate-hydrates. Put the whole thing under stress, and nearby grains will be pushed in slightly different directions, producing a force on the "glue joint." Add water ("aqueous solvent") and tiny amounts of the calcium-silicate-hydrates will dissolve.(*) Of course they'll precipitate out again too, but they will dissolve more readily from a stressed area, and precipitate out elsewhere. In effect, the grains and the matrix they are embedded in will slowly change shape--to a configuration with less relative force. Creep.

The stuff isn't very water soluble, so the change happens slowly. They still have to measure other factors--this might account for the known effects, or perhaps other things are going on too.

---

(*) You knew that glass was water soluble too, right? And quartz too--just not very. In some studies that matters. And it matters for growing agates.

I wonder what's going on

My stats show that Russians have been reading a lot of my pages in the past few days--and the browser claims to be Internet Explorer. I gather other people have seen a big spike in Russian readership. Maybe there's a search spider that pretends to be IE, and somebody is trying to create a new Google (Lipkiy-gle?).

Or maybe one of their teams of trolls is casting about to find places that need to hear the Party line, or looking for stuff to quote. I've had my material used without acknowledgment before, though not from this site.

A pleasant afternoon

Aside from working our way around the traffic, which had been nuked by a Madison yuppie-fest though to be fair, kids probably liked Ride The Drive, the day was fine and the show was fun. Unfortunately the performer playing Fiametta got laryngitis at the last minute, so she danced and lip-synced to a singer in the pit. That was a mistake--the pit singer couldn't project well enough out of the pit and the show doesn't use mikes. They should have put her just offstage or behind a screen. The Gondoliers has some very contemporary moments, and for some reason this section started me thinking of quantum mechanics:

Casilda. But which is it? There are two of them!

Duke. It is true that at present His Majesty is a double gentleman; but as soon as the circumstances of his marriage are ascertained, he will, ipso facto, boil down to a single gentleman — thus presenting a unique example of an individual who becomes a single man and a married man by the same operation.

Duchess. (severely) I have known instances in which the characteristics of both conditions existed concurrently in the same individual.

You can find plenty of performances on Youtube, but I'd suggest keeping a copy of the libretto handy to carry you through some archaic phrases here and there.

The Death of a Prophet by Stephen Shoemaker

Muhammad's life is very poorly known. The standard biography is very late, and draws on unreliable sources. In fact, almost all documentation about Muhammad and the beginnings of Islam is drawn from unreliable sources. Muslim scholars agreed that 99% of the hadith were forgeries, and chains of witnesses were forged to go with them.

Non-Muslim sources were not subject to such pressures, but they by definition look at the situations from the outside and not the inside, and are much sketchier.

The standard biography says Muhammad died in his wife's house, after carefully making sure Bakr was understood to be his successor. Before he's buried there's a contretemps with Umar, who refuses to admit that he's dead until quelled by a never-before-heard quotation from the Quran by Bakr (or by somebody pointing out that the body is starting to stink, according to a different tradition). In either case, this is before the great push into the north.

Yet there are non-Muslim sources and traces in some Muslim traditions saying that Muhammad was with his conquering troops as they started up the Levant. And these also tend to say that the Muslims required very little beyond tribute and a profession of monotheism--at the time.

Plus there's evidence that the first center of worship, or at least a major one, for Muslims was Jerusalem and not Mecca. I reviewed a book addressing that thesis last year.

Shoemaker suggests that Muhammad died 3 years later than the canonical date, that he had been with armies heading for Jerusalem, which I gather they wanted to capture to "immanentize the eschaton," that he believed the end of the world was coming very quickly, and that when it didn't, a process of re-interpretation and tightening the standards for what it meant to be Muslim meant that later Muslims wound up revising the chronology to put Muhammad's death and the holy place back firmly into Arab land--far from the other monotheists.

He can't prove it. Nobody can, with the data at hand--nearly everything is either a rubber ruler or not relevant. The Quran has very little about Muhammad, for example (and there's evidence that even that wasn't fixed yet), and the relevant sira and hadith are generally flimsy and false.

He argues bitterly that given the mountain of speculation about Jesus, despite a plethora of documents, similar speculation about Muhammad and the development of Islam is not just allowable but reasonable given the scarcity of reliable documents. (He seems to think the Jesus Seminar is scholarly. Composed of scholars, yes--scholarly in approach, no.)

It looks as though the direction of Muslim worship changed, if grave and architectural evidence can be believed, but the why is not easy to prove.

As to Muhammad's death year and place--maybe these were reinterpreted for religious reasons, or maybe Umar suspected something was amiss--and it was, and it was covered up. (Utter speculation on my part.)

I read it so you don't have to.

---

I heard his book on Marian devotion was out, and discovered this one in the library along with it. Twofer deal.

Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion by Stephen Shoemaker

After Chalcedon, when Nestorius was condemned, there seemed to be an explosion of Marian devotion. Shoemaker suspected that the council didn't produce it, but gave what was already there official standing.

The book is not fun sledding. He has plenty of asides complaining about how Catholic or Protestant scholarship has tended to read their premises into the past (no doubt true enough), and he seems compelled to pay homage to current pieties about searching for non-patriarchal Christianity and the value of Gnostic writings. And the attitude that every religious document is equally true/false depending on the viewpoint of the devotee gets pretty wearisome after a while. On the other hand, it is fun to watch him dynamite the fashionable claims that the heroine is always Mary Magdalene.

But he succeeds in dredging up as much as he can describing Marian interest and devotion from an era with little documentation about her: the dark years when persecution meant little was circulated, and the subsequent century when the church fathers mostly wrote about doctrinal issues.

From about 145 AD we have Protevangelium of James, which is an extremely influential pious fiction about the life of Mary. The names of Mary's parents come from this. It mentions a rock that Mary rested on on her journey, over which a large church was later built, and claims that Jesus was born in a cave in between Bethlehem and Jerusalem (contra Luke)--a cave still celebrated in art. There's also an interesting scene in which Joseph, looking for a midwife, notices that time has stood still.

There's nothing about Mary being an intercessor here, but it is very extensive and Mary-focused--and fairly early. Well after the last of the New Testament, but still early.

There are some Gnostic (he prefers "heterodox") documents as well, in which typically Mary is a teacher of secret wisdom. I'd bet Mary's secret name was Sophia.

There's Six Books Dormition Apocryphon in which Mary is teacher, intercessor, healer, and which specifies some liturgical rites for her festivals.

And there are shrines (not always easy to date) and some homilies and the Pulcheria vs Nestorius conflict. All these point to popular pre-existing devotion to Mary as intercessor, as well as exemplar.

Why, then, do the church fathers not mention any of this? Two obvious possibilities: They didn't generally write about liturgy and devotional practice (some exceptions), and some of the devotees were decidedly fringe.

A big problem with all such research is the scarcity of documents. You may have to reconstruct what A said from what B said that C said about A, and maybe correlate that with what D said about what E claimed about A. And documents that do exist are often fragmentary, copies don't entirely match, and so on.

Plus, if you are trying to figure out what the orthodox were doing on the basis of Gnostic writings, I'd think the best you generally get is "well, this was in the air somehow."

BTW, if a document addresses aeons and levels of creation and secret passwords for getting past spiritual levels, I classify it as Gnostic. From philosophical and literary points of view these are entirely different things from the orthodox canon, setting aside claims about infallibility.

Crime gets complicated

A bank robbery involved a Nigerian hiring/bribing security guards with money and passports, an "oxygen tank" to cut window bars and a back door chain (?? why both?) cut by the bribed guards, and a shootout between the rest of his gang and the police (and maybe with some of the bribed security guards, if you want to believe them). The gun Akin used (*) looks sort of like a home-built single-shot pistol firing a shotgun shell. The security guards for the bank were allegedly unarmed.

Don't believe the story as it stands. That's a pretty good rule in general for first reports anywhere, but in Liberia...

---

(*)Given the kind of money he'd have to throw around for bribes, I suspect he could afford better, and that it is in a policeman's pocket now, replaced by the item in the photograph (which looks kind of staged).

Ball lightning

There's an overview here, with a little footage of what may be ball lightning. Or maybe a duck got zapped; I can't see very well. Chris Drudge focuses on Wu's theory that ultra-high speed electrons can be emitted during a lightning strike, and that if narrowly contained these might produce a "microwave bubble." We've known for a while thanks to satellite detectors that thunderstorms can produce gamma rays, so somehow there's a very high energy tail--maybe from magnetic recombination when the strike collapses.

Electrons, being tiny relative to atoms, are able to pass through the metal shell of an aircraft after being accelerated outside of it via a lightning strike. Aaack! I hope this is Drudge's contribution and not Wu's. Microwaves are then emitted by the suped-up electrons inside where they form ball lightning. The electron-microwave-plasma pathway also explains the size of ball lightning, since the length of the electron bunch sped up by a lightning strike matches up with the typical 20-50 centimeter diameter of the resulting microwave bubble.

I'll be looking for the paper. Have a look at the video.

LUX

LUX looked for WIMPs using liquid Xenon. Their presentation is here.

Summary: they didn't find any, and put even stronger limits on their presence than ever before. (No, I have no idea what that 8B point on the figure means.) In the figure below, they say anything below the dark line at the bottom is still possible, but above it--not likely.

I don't mean that kind of WIMP. We've strong evidence for dark matter--stuff that doesn't interact strongly with normal matter, has to be uncharged, etc. One easy model proposes that dark matter is made of massive particles that don't interact strongly, but still do interact. WeaklyInteractingMassiveParticles. Since they interact weakly, maybe they interact via the Weak Interaction? If so, every now and then one of these WIMPs streaming through space should kick a nucleus, just as every now and then a neutrino does.

Several experiments have looked for them. LUX is the best so far in this regime--their curve is lower than everybody else's, including their own earlier (less data) work.

They lucked out, I suppose. The "Brazil" bands of yellow and green (named because of a resemblence to the flag of--guess) represent where they thought their sensitivity would be--they did even better, presumably thanks to some statistical fluctuation.

In one sense, there's still plenty of room for WIMPs to exist: you can always add another decade to the bottom of the log plot and make it look like there's more space. And, though it isn't so obvious, there are some assumptions shared by all the experiments shown involving the expected density of dark matter at this radius of the galaxy. If those estimates are badly wrong the raw numbers on the plot change. (The curves stay the same relative to each other, though.)

Long ago they ruled out interpreting the DAMA (or DAMA/Libra) results as WIMPs.

DAMA assumed that our solar system's orbit in the galaxy intersects a stream of dark matter flowing at some speed and direction. So long as it isn't at right angles to the Earth's rotation around the Sun, the Earth (and detectors flying aboard it) should intersect this stream with different speeds at different points in the Earth's orbit. If dark matter interacts at all with nuclei, never mind how, there should be an annual modulation in the interaction rate according as we hit the dark matter faster or slower. They see an annual modulation. They think it is dark matter. Most people don't, anymore.

So, where is the dark matter? If it doesn't interact at all (besides gravitationally) with normal matter, how in the world did the big bang manage to evolve two different types of matter? MACHOs, anyone?

I tend to favor a model in which the dark matter interacts only with neutrinos. Unfortunately, there's almost no way to test this. A successor to IceCube might be able to do it eventually, but first you have to have a good handle on extra-galactic neutrino sources, good enough to predict what rates ought to be and look for shortfalls--and that won't be good enough for years yet. Or you can hope for a conveniently placed supernova or three.

Robots in finance

Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Co. has announced plans to deploy 100 Pepper robots, made by SoftBank Group Corp., at its 80 branches in October. Pepper will explain insurance products and services, and accompany sales people on their rounds.

This will give Meiji Yasuda the highest number of humanoid robots deployed in the financial industry.

A colleague points out that in Japan robots are more often seen as friendly helpers than threats. Still--a robot insurance salesman never gets tired, never gives up, never takes a hint.

And something about that phrase "highest number of humanoid robots deployed in the financial industry" suggests deep secrets somewhere. Do you welcome our new robot overlords, comrade?

mosquito repellent

Everybody has probably already read that chicken odor seems to reduce the presence of malaria-capable mosquitoes. I was told years ago that mosquitoes home in on CO2 and a few other chemicals--maybe something confuses them too.

But notice: it just reduces the number. And...

I was almost never bitten by mosquitoes in a room with a mosquito coil burning. Whether they drove mosquitoes out I never knew, but the incense drove me out. Chickens running around the house...

Paleo diet, adapted

The "paleo diet" was all the rage not too long ago--I still find relics of the fashion here and there. I was otherwise occupied--studying how to keep blood sugar low seemed more fruitful.

I gather the gist was to eat as your ancestors did.

I don't know about yours, but my ancestors ate lots of preserved food. Preserved beans may not have the same texture and crunch as those fresh off the vine, but it turns out they're available during winter. Were the originators of the paleo diet from California, perhaps? Hmm. Nope, Voegtlin was from Seattle--winters are not exactly cold there, but they're not good for growing.

So my ancestral diet would be fresh food in season, and preserved stuff the rest of the year. Meat as available ("Before food waste, let belly burst"), bread, fish as available... Today: Fresh food is in the fresh food section of the grocery store, fresh meat is in the meat section, and preserved food makes up a lot of the rest. Just what the doctor ordered! Beef jerky and a loaf of bread and a helping of preserved green beans (from a can)--eat like your ancestors did. I'll bet they fixed up things like this. OK, without the potatoes--maybe oats.

Don't get the wrong impression: I'm surrounded by very good cooks and I no longer rely on "bachelor hash." But you can find cuisines in this country based on what you can fix out of cans and dried foods, and they seem as worthy the title of "ancestral style" as anything else. Only the rich get to eat fresh all the time.

Disappointment alloyed?

"Russian track and field athletes will remain banned from the Olympics following claims the country ran a state-sponsored doping programme.(sic)"

Given the dangers from political violence and health risks I wonder if there's a little relief mixed in with the disappointment. The disappointments are huge--most athletes have very few chances at the Olympics, and missing this will mean that some will be too old/injured to compete next time. But I wonder how many have been having second thoughts about swimming/boating in a sewer, or relying on Brazilian security forces to keep terror attackers away.

The sales reps don't explain things well

We hired a new storage engineer the other month, and shortly thereafter lost him when he got an offer he couldn't refuse. In the meantime he helped commission an addition to our biggest lustre filesystem; a new Compellent system. Folklore says lustre likes its component filesystems to be roughly the same size, so this was divvied up into RAID6 virtual arrays. 160 disks *4TB/each *.9 to get TiB = 576TiB. 32TiB is a nice number, close to the size of the other arrays in the lustre system, so he configured 18 of them.

If you know storage you just went "rookie mistake: he forgot about the parity disks(*); you can really only make 15 arrays of that size, not 18." Yep, and usually that kind of mistake doesn't matter--when you try to do something like that the system does the arithmetic for you and you find out pretty quickly.

But the Compellents are clever. They were designed for a business model where you supply disk storage to 1000 machines, each with its own .5TB storage. If you look the machine you're browsing from, you notice there's a lot of "wasted" space; you don't use all .5TB. I certainly don't. So suppose your storage server pretended that it really had 800TB instead. That way your business can supply disk storage to 1500 machines. The space is over-committed, but just like airlines over-booking, most of the time it doesn't matter. If only a handful of users really need that full .5TB, they can get it without any intervention, and the rest don't know the difference. Nice and clever. (The Compellent is even more clever than that: it divides up space in virtual arrays that reflect your preferences for virtual disk sizes and does other cute tricks that we have absolutely no use for.)

We, on the other hand, want to fill up all the space with data, in one giant chunk. So the upshot was that the system pretended to have 25% more space than it really did. We set about filling it all up.

You can see that this is not going to end well.

It got worse. The system supports RAID6 (higher density) virtual storage, RAID10-dual striped (high read/write performance), or a dynamic combination in which the system accepts writes as high performance RAID10, and at some configurable after-hours time spends some time translating the fat RAID10 down to slow RAID6. That's 3 different modes. For the last mode (balance) you can either set a time or rely on a default that looks to be once a week or so (in hindsight).

With that in mind: imagine that you use the defaults--balance (write fat, translate to thin later) and once a week it does translation.

Now start filling it up slowly. All looked OK, no stability problems, so we let her rip.

Um. With maybe 300TiB already aboard, we now loaded about 70TiB in a few days. The clever machine turned this 70TiB input into 210TiB high performance dual-striped RAID10. Now it had no space left to do translations, and decided the safest thing to do was become readonly.

Down went the lustre filesystem. The only guy left on the team who had been learning lustre was still in the north woods with no cell phone coverage. Away went the weekend. We kept 3 pairs of eyes on everything as we learned as we went along.

We spent a lot of time with Dell engineers Monday. One was able to cobble together an array out of the spare disks to start a very slow translation job, while we try to drain one of the logical arrays so we can delete it and make the space to do fast translations. (Goosing that along is the reason I'm still awake right now. I spent a fair bit of today trying to clean up corrupted files.)

It was our configuration screw-up, and we're grateful for Dell pulling out chestnuts out of the fire. But we're going to change some procedures...

---

(*) RAID5 uses N data and 1 parity disk. If a disk fails (believe me, they do), you haven't lost any data. You can pop a spare in and rebuild the array. Problem: the rebuilding is pretty I/O intensive, and disks from the same family often have similar lifetimes. If you lose another disk during the rebuilding process, you've lost all the data in the array. Hence RAID6: N data and 2 parity disks. So if you have 10 4TB disks, by the time you're done putting it together in a safe array you have only 8 effective disks: 32TB instead of 40TB.

RAID10 is nice and fast and robust: each disk has a duplicate. Dual striped RAID10 is even more robust and fast: each disk has 2 spares. But that means that 2/3 of your space is "wasted."

Side effects

The UNMIL has had a large peacekeeping force in Liberia for a number of years now, and it is time to draw down.

When I was there I saw quite a few furniture stores. I was told this was part of a rehabilitation for former fighters--learn a trade and support yourself. Ah. And who buys the Western-style furniture? Oh, mostly foreigners, peacekeepers, and so on. And what happens when the peacekeepers leave and live somewhere else? We expect the economy to have picked up by then.

A lot of the troops' salaries probably went home to family, but some was spent locally and it was hard currency. Now that they're leaving, hard currency is drying up. Expect a jolt.

Blame slinging has already begun:

He said the CBL is, however, aware that there are some business executives who are reportedly hoarding large quantities of Liberian dollar at home instead of using the banking system.

He said these suspected hoarders have the tendency of using cash “hoards to adversely and artificially impact the exchange rate; actions that have the propensity to be interpreted as economic sabotage.”

People are blaming the CBL for printing too many Liberian dollars; he needs to point elsewhere. Still--claiming that executives are hoarding Liberian dollars in order to make them depreciate?

BTW, police aren't getting paid:

Delays in the payment of Liberia National Police officers after waiting for nearly three months yesterday took a different turn when pay checks in Liberian dollars could not be encashed at the bank.

After the checks were reportedly rejected due to lack of sufficient funds, LNP authorities under the supervision of the Police Support Unit (PSU) took over yesterday’s payment exercise, which was conducted in the basement of the LNP on Capitol Hill.

A Daily Observer investigation established that during the exercise, which brought together officers from the PSU, Liberian dollar checks that were destined to be cashed at one of the local banks, were discovered to have names of several “dead personnel and officers,” others who had traveled abroad and others dismissed and no longer in the employ of the LNP.

I don't think you can attribute that problem to the UNMIL drawdown, though.

Secret service

Can you find any similarities with Liberia?

"Gen of Academia, I observe that you are very religious in all respects."

I've read several popular essays bemoaning the hypersensitive "precious snowflakes" afflicting our campuses, and wondering at the spinelessness of the administrators.

I don't believe it. I don't know any of these alleged snowflakes personally, but somehow I have trouble believing that a professor would need a fainting couch when a man wore the wrong shirt. If so, TV should have left her comatose.

This alleged sensitivity seems more like tithing dill and mint and cumin and carefully straining out all gnats from the camel soup.

Let me run with that model. Infidels and any who disagree with a denunciation are evil. Those who fail to commit to the full (and dynamic) list of regulations are, at best, failures who must be rebuked. The sensitivity is affectation, in a status struggle as they explore the ramifications of the principles of their religion.(*) If A can claim awareness of a new oppression, however small it may seem to outsiders, that proves that "ze" is holier than the others.

The faith is widely respected, even by school administrators who, since they often have real jobs, are not generally among the adepts. The adepts tell others what needs to change.

Hmm. The model seems to fit OK.

At least the old Syrian ascetics only flagellated themselves.

(*) The main articles of the faith seem to be that all human relationships are power-based, all people are equivalent and only distinguished by environment, and that identity is self-determined. And that inequality is proof that power has been misused.

---

Perhaps I should borrow a phrase from Andre Norton and start referring to people as "gentle-saps," suppressing the urge to use the short vowel sound instead of the long.

July 3 fireworks

The temperature slowly dropped from the 70's to mid 60's as the evening darkened. We'd decided to skip the city fireworks display, which was scheduled for after the last midget race, which started at 10. We opted for a small fire in the firepit instead. We didn't miss much though--the fireflies were out in force (but not mosquitoes!), and neighbors 2 houses away had an hour and a half of cone fountains, rockets, and shells. I've no idea how they afford the display; maybe several families get together--I didn't recognize most of the people standing around when I went over to thank them. One of the big red 80' wide bursts went off 30 feet up (oops) and a small silver blue shell skittered down the street before exploding--but otherwise there were no mishaps in the amateur show.

Across the street in the other direction, in "Nature's Preserve Office Park" (*), another group fired off a shorter show; a block down our street somebody was setting off some lovely shells; there was another show two blocks in one direction and we could see another through the trees about 6 blocks away in yet another direction.

So we had a fine time sitting and watching the fire and the fireworks and the fireflies.

Rockets and shells are quite illegal, of course (this is Wisconsin), but I think the police know better than to try to interfere. Middle Daughter suggested they were probably very busy with drunk and disorderly.

---

(*) You can't make this stuff up.

We need some new ideas

Sabine Hossenfelder writes

At the end of the LHC’s first run at high energies, both the CMS and ATLAS collaborations reported a particularly interesting “bump” in the diphoton channel. ... a bump of a particular size, width and energy could either indicate a completely new, fundamental, beyond-the-standard-model particle, the first of its kind – or a new standard model feature — or it could simply be statistical noise. Despite the fact that it would be the nightmare of most of my colleagues, I’m hoping the diphoton bump turns out to be nothing more than noise.

and

Since I entered physics, I’ve seen grand unified models proposed and falsified. I’ve seen loads of dark matter candidates not being found, followed by a ritual parameter adjustment to explain the lack of detection. I’ve seen supersymmetric particles being “predicted” with constantly increasing masses, from some GeV to some 100 GeV to LHC energies of some TeV. And now that it looks like the LHC isn’t going to see any superpartners either, my colleagues in particle physicists are more than willing to once again move the goalposts.

Yep. What she said. SuperSymmetry is a way to get the equations to please not give infinity as an answer, but somehow the predicted particles (one for each of the known particles) just never turn up. SuperCemetery of effort.

Perhaps more dramatically, Adam Frank wants to drag some theorists out of Laputa with a few postulates that used to be pretty standard wisdom: "There is only one universe." (a bas le multiverse!) "Time is real" (not emergent), and "Mathematics is selectively real" (the real world doesn't care how beautifully symmetric your equations are).

Two big complaints about string theory are that there's been no convergence on an actual theory that makes testable predictions within its framework(*), and that it predicts SuperSymmetry--which doesn't seem to exist.

I'll add my complaint that when you have to renormalize to get your sums to shake the infinities out of them, there's something seriously wrong with the paradigm of your calculation. I don't know how to fix it. (**)

And in a related vein, I'm pretty dubious of early Universe inflation: the universe expanded extra fast for a while just after the Big Bang. Why? Ummm.. Well, if it did expand that way then observations match theory, so let's assume it did and try to figure out how. And Dark Energy to make the Universe's expansion accelerate.

We need some new ideas.

---

(*)The assumptions that make up the framework seemed quite nice, though.

---

(**) UPDATE: I think what I want is a way of finding a problem dual to the type of things we do now, but that is more tractable even if it is less obvious how it connects to the physics.

In amber

A bird lost a wing-tip in amber. I've nothing to say, just go look. I didn't know amber sometimes had feathers, but this isn't the only sample.

More proverbs

I spent a good chunk of the day resting my newly wrenched back(*) and reading the Expositors commentary on Ecclesiastes. (Wordy, and I think he missed fire a few times.) He cited some proverbs from the Talmud, and I looked them up. Some of the proverbs are familiar, and I gather they were a little reluctant to cite one source, but others aren't. Have a look.

The house which opens not to the poor will open to the physician.

Hospitality is an expression of Divine worship.

Truth is heavy, therefore few care to carry it.

The soldiers fight, and the kings are heroes.

Commit a sin twice and it will not seem to thee a crime.

Hold no man responsible for his utterances in times of grief.

All the blessings of a household come through the wife, therefore should her husband honour her.

---

(*) and walking around too, the way you're supposed to--but it's hard to read then.

Voting

BBC has a puff piece on youth response to the Brexit.

Other than anger, a common theme was frustration among 16- and 17-year-olds, who were not allowed to vote in the poll. Last year an initiative backed by Labour, the Lib Dems and SNP proposed lowering the voting age. However the government rejected the idea on the grounds of cost, and it was voted down.

"I love waking up to be completely terrified about something that's going to affect me yet i had no say in it," mused one teenager.

I completely forgot about that bit of nonsense: 16-year-old voters. Yikes.

I've a better idea: raise the voting age to 30, younger if you serve a couple of years in the military.

FWIW, I'm not British, and can really only guess at how I would have voted if I was. As an American, I'd vote for Brexit and damn the torpedoes. But I've no feel for what the problems and benefits and loyalties really would be like there, and apparently a lot of people there thought differently; Brexit won by only a small margin.

Can you detect magnetic fields?

Kirschvink thinks he's shown that they can. With a rig that produces (or not, double-blind) a magnetic field around the head:

It was a small sample—just two dozen human subjects—but his basement apparatus had yielded a consistent, repeatable effect. When the magnetic field was rotated counterclockwise—the equivalent of the subject looking to the right—there was sharp drop in α waves. The suppression of α waves, in the EEG world, is associated with brain processing: A set of neurons were firing in response to the magnetic field, the only changing variable. The neural response was delayed by a few hundred milliseconds, and Kirschvink says the lag suggests an active brain response. A magnetic field can induce electric currents in the brain that could mimic an EEG signal—but they would show up immediately.

OK, small sample. Also, if we did have such a field-sensitive organ, would it necessarily be in the head? And lying in an MRI system should overload such an organ. Maybe that would make it numb (negative result), or make the person uncomfortable or slightly disoriented (natural enough in a cramped and noisy system).

He needs to test with stronger fields.

Virtual Doctors

I suggested a framework for "distributed doctoring" for Liberia a few years ago.
Huw Jones organized "Virtual Doctors" in which clinics in Zambia can consult volunteer doctors in the UK, sometimes even sending xrays for analysis. Kudos to them!

That's one piece of the puzzle I was dreaming of.