Minting money

This morning an amusing little report circulated that one can buy a cypto-currency mining system that doubles as a space heater. Clever--take a feature that tends to be a nuisance, especially in consumer-grade computers--the high power requirements of the GPU(*)s used in the calculations that go into "crypto-currency mining," and spin it as a feature--the waste heat can heat your room! With 8 GPUs packed into that small a volume the water heat transfer system had better work well or you can set things on fire. That happened with some collaborators of ours in Maryland.

The whole crypto-currency business reminds me of the gold-rush folks. They looked to get rich by increasing the quantity of symbols of value--but not creating anything particularly valuable themselves. Thought experiment: suppose your country found boatloads of silver and gold (we won't go into details about how they collected it), and brought it back. Now you have the wherewithal to import more stuff, and you need to import--because, funny thing, having twice as many doubloons doesn't automatically double the size of your local industry. In fact it's simply apt to double the prices. Lots more gold, but not necessarily more stuff.

In Dawn Treader Lewis never bothered to explain why a lake that turned things to gold would be bad--except that people got greedy. Too bad, it would have been a one-liner.

Brainpower

One of the comments at Maggie's Farm reminded me of some experiments Richard Feynman did with himself: he could count and read, but not count and talk. "... when Feynman told mathematician John Tukey about this, Tukey could do the reverse — talk but not read. The reason was that Feynman would talk to himself in his head, while Tukey would see an image of a clock ticking over. Feynmann suggests this could be because people think differently".

The author of the article suggests that the brain has "modules" like a "sketch pad" or a "phonological module" for words and sounds.

I don't know about how other people use visual thinking in math, but I find that I often do. For example, matrix multiplication I visualize as an action. (I should redo this to slow it down). When I try to figure out the framework for a problem I draw pictures. Equations are partly sentences and partly blocks like pictures.

FWIW, I generally read by "see and say" because I'm already trained to spot the blocks in English words. Sometimes I scan too quickly, and hilarity usually ensues. But I learned phonetically. And when I hit non-English words, I work phonetically. If I have time. Train stops in Germany were a nuisance. The name was often half a block long, and I couldn't read it fast enough--so I read the first and last chunks of the name and hoped that was unique. Problem is, the last chunk was usually "strasse."

Crab bucket

"Deaf singer Mandy Harvey made headlines around the world after being put straight through to the finals of America's Got Talent. But when she first took to the stage, she received death threats from within the deaf community for promoting a "hearing" activity."

I've heard unpleasant things about Gallaudet University too. There's something very nasty about denying reality for the sake of your pride. They pay a weird homage to the very thing they ought to fight--the notion that someone with fewer skills is inferior. Instead of denying that lie, they implicitly accept it and claim that their skills and culture are equal.

"You are not your disability!" I've preached that, though I try not to be explicit about it. People get tired of hearing the same things. But it sure beats "I am my disability, and you are too, and you'd better get with my program."

New wine in classic wineskins

I understand Amazon wants to make more Lord of the Rings-based movies: prequels, I gather.

If they use existing characters, even peripheral, in a prequel, the story gets cramped. If they use new ones, it is more of a "in the universe of LoTR story," but likely without an equivalent story-teller behind them. I haven't heard any enthusiasm for working from the Silmarilion.

I suspect I won’t be investing in downloads.

But... Do you remember the stir when HarperCollins announced the plan to create new Narnia novels?

I’d pretty much forgotten about that—the article above, and several like it, date to 2001. I thought I’d heard a peep or two more recently than 16 years ago, but that may have been temporal foreshortening again.

They have coloring books, and shortened versions: told for younger audiences, and this: ”Based on characters originally featured in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, The Giant Surprise is a brand new Narnia adventure story about Marshwiggles, giants, and mice for young children. Lally, a small wigglet, and her Uncle Puddleglum undertake a hair-raising rescue of their mice friends, before they become a giant’s supper.”

I wonder if HarperCollins quietly shelved the “new novels.”

Significant?

We've had quite the uptick in drive-by shootings in the Madison area--mostly non-fatal, fortunately. Today's battle between two cars hit a third car and a nearby house.

I've noticed a lot of defaced license plates lately. Not weathering and fading (as in the last Wisconsin plate design fiasco), but scraped and dented. O(1%) of the cars I see are hard to read the plates on.

Maybe this is a new vandalism fad. That would be the best possibility.

UPDATE. O(1%) means of the order of 1%. Give or take a little.

The pilot in our Wednesday Bible study suggested that the defacement might be to foil the toll cameras.

Accusations

I'm a bit conflicted. Nobody believes the casting couch ever went away, and I'm content to believe that the overwhelming majority of the accusations are true, or at least largely so. What facts do manage to leak out past the PR over the years don't inspire confidence in the moral fiber of Hollywood folks, and sometimes the PR itself is telling.

But I have to give the devil his due. It is easy to make an accusation in this atmosphere, especially if it is old enough or vague enough to be un-actionable. After all, if your accusation goes to court, you might get cross-examined. Hollywood is a famously backstabbing place, and if a friend of a friend puts your competitor in a bad light, you might be generously grateful.

So while I hope this shakes out some "bad actors" who think fame or power entitles them, I also hope we take care to vet the accusers too.

Defending churches

Several local worship centers (including a Sikh temple) have decided to have guards. Attacks happen from time to time, and threats sometimes look serious.

Guards or not? I figure I'd rather die in church than in a hospital, but when you recall that the children are at risk too the picture changes a bit--we have an obligation to protect.

So far the odds are pretty good, and I'm not concerned.

Am I naive? I'm not in administration, and I don't see the threats. Our church has a volunteer team keeping an eye on things, but not armed with anything more lethal than a cell phone. We put that in place a few years ago when a nut case interrupted a service. High Point's board is going to vote on whether to have undercover guards--I'm curious about what they'll decide.

Peaceable kingdom

England in the 1600's isn't famous for being a nice time and place to live. But the article says it wasn't as bad as we think. "but the state was not simply stringing people up for occasional acts of petty theft. Quite often, judges and juries deliberately perjured themselves to ensure convicted thieves escaped the noose, usually by undervaluing goods stolen."

Homicide rates dropped over the century (in Kent from 5-6 per 100,000 to 3.6; in from 8-12 to 2 per 100,000). Pinker likes the idea that a strong central government means lower homicide rates--I suspect that you don't get a strong central government if the crime rate is too high.

Selfishness and Charity

David Warren starts off with: "I think that if the “natural man” would vote consistently in his own interest, and by extension in that of his close family, the world would get along tickety-boo."

He doesn't expand much on that, unfortunately. I've suspected for some time that if groups were a little clearer about their interests, there might be fewer and not more conflicts. Proving that would take a lot of study and work with counter-factuals, and I've not world enough or time. But it doesn't take much effort to think of conflicts that started with exaggerated claims and fears. Others were and are unavoidable.

His main point is about spite and charity: charity deals with specifics. "The point I make is on behalf of reality. One’s neighbour — and even in this last instance a brute animal, who could have eaten me were she much larger and in better shape — is a real thing. Insofar as our charity is real, it is directed to real things. Insofar as we are “friends to humanity,” or “friends to the poor,” or “social justice warriors,” we are putting on a ludicrous show, in which spite adopts a pretence of charity."

Naivete

Lubos Motl has a post about the naivete of physicists:

Nima Arkani-Hamed, a top Western official in the Mao collider, sort of "courageously" says that if the tanks came to the Chinese streets again, he would probably join some local protests. His father had some "disagreement" with the Khomeini regime in Iran but Nima himself doesn't really get the evil of totalitarian systems, I think after many discussions with him. As Cheng nicely says about Nima's superficial response:

But his hypothesis, well-intentioned as it was, reveals a deeply simplistic, caricatured understanding of state oppression. True terror and totalitarian control come after the tanks have left the square, when blood is wiped off the streets, the history books, and the people’s collective consciousness, when a date becomes taboo, and when a simple question confirming the existence of the Party office exposes the Achilles’ heel of a grand project.

Exactly. Totalitarianism isn't about some cool scenes with tanks and blood in the street – and Nima's cool but totally superficial and symbolic "no" to such spectacular events. The true muscles of the totalitarian machinery only start to act after the tanks and blood are removed from the sidewalks (the same is true for the German and Soviet tanks in Prague in 1939 and 1968, too). The employees are being ideologically filtered, fired, or arrested, the history is often being rewritten..

Many of my colleagues, Western or Chinese, asked me about my priorities and whether I cared more about physics or human rights, as if these pursuits are mutually exclusive.

And that question is easily used to dispose of the "incorrect" people. If you say rights matter more, you aren't dedicated enough, and if you say physics--don't complain. You are there to be used.

(Lubos is Czech, and grew up under Communism.)

NFL

I've heard quite a bit about fan disgust and lower sales and so forth, with counter arguments that there are too many broadcast games, which saturated the market. I'm not plugged into the fan zone, and in any event my observations wouldn't be representative of the broader market.

I thought one simple way to test for fan annoyance is to monitor season ticket sales. But if this article is correct, brokers buy a huge fraction of the season tickets, so any measurement will be indirect. Better than nothing, though.

Computers make it all better

The Navy issued its report about the McCain collision.

Commander Alfredo J. Sanchez, "noticed the Helmsman having difficulty maintaining course while also adjusting the throttles for speed control." Sanchez ordered the watch team to split the responsibilities for steering and speed control, shifting control of the throttle to another watchstander's station. ...

However, instead of switching just throttle control to the Lee Helm station, the Helmsman accidentally switched all control to the Lee Helm station. When that happened, the ship's rudder automatically moved to its default position (centerline). The helmsman had been steering slightly to the right. ...

At this point, everyone on the bridge thought there had been a loss of steering. In the commotion that ensued, the commanding officer and bridge crew lost track of what was going on around them.

And there's more.

I suppose that sort of SNAFU is the default for militaries. If I read my history correctly.

A newsreel from the other side.

You're probably seen "The Longest Day." The Germans made their own newsreel of the activities. They had a smaller pool of actions to draw from--and I think I see the same tank a couple of times.

Tired of your sin?

I found this cover of "The Church of Your Choice" by Dan McBride. The sound quality is quite mediocre.
Church of Your Choice: (Some of us are old enough to remember the slogan.)

"If you're tired of your sin, then we'll welcome you in. If you're not, you'll still feel right at home."

We'd all love for evangelism to mean just being winsome and attracting people to Christ. I'm perhaps a bit curmudgeonly to be adequately winsome, but it's still an easier goal than trying to be prophetic. And it's more pleasant to think we're all "close enough."

But we know what Jesus said about division, and about the world hating him and therefore hating his followers. And it isn't hard to recall people whose sins are pretty dramatic in our eyes, and who really ought to repent.

So how does one manage to be both accurate and winsome? Jesus said to welcome the children, who generally aren't motivated by a hunger for forgiveness. But he discouraged people who weren't "counting the cost."

Nobody said it was easy... Probably one big first step is not to act as though we've "arrived." (There are two kinds of Christians: those who struggle with besetting sins and those who've given up.)

Free

I don't remember where I read the rule that "A free man is one who can bind himself." He can bind himself to a wife and to the still unknown children who follow. He can promise to work for someone. He can make an implicit commitment to tend his farm; feed and care for his livestock. Or he commits to solve a problem or write a book. Some commitments are short term, others life-long and extremely open-ended.

Freedom seems less like a status and more like a coin to invest. The one who never binds himself never shows fruit.

Lone wolves

It seems popular to describe Islamist terrorists as "lone wolves," even when there's evidence for a network.

Perhaps the spokescritters-that-be have been sternly told not to divulge anything that might reveal how much we know about those networks. That seems the nicer hypothesis. Maybe it's true.

Alternatively, they may be trying hard to keep Americans from blaming Muslims in general for the incidents of fourth generation warfare. If so, I believe they are mistaken.

If the terrorists are guided by a network, the network can be tracked, understood, and selectively attacked. Lone wolves who spontaneously decide to become enemies can't be tracked. Dealing with them involves much less selective means.

A network is separable from the Muslim community: Muslim with associations = enemy, Muslim without = ordinary. If the model is "spontaneous conversion to enemy," this changes the mapping: Muslim=x% chance of being an enemy simply because he/she is Muslim. Maybe that's actually true, but there are some hints that it isn't.

If the folks in charge want Americans to not blame Muslims, I think they should steer away from the lone wolf narrative, and concentrate on the associations. (Unless they're trying to hide how much we do know.)

Dark Matter Day

I have been informed that today is Dark Matter Day, and that I am to circulate these videos:

• Searching for Dark Matter with IceCube
• Quick Takes - Why IceCube would not exist without dark matter; a smidgeon of history of the IceCube ancestor AMANDA.

We search for Dark Matter in IceCube on the assumption that it is made of particles that interact with neutrinos.

It doesn't interact with photons (dark matter particles have no charge: that's what makes them dark) nor with baryonic matter (nuclei), and all we seem to get are limits on its interaction with W and Z (weak interaction--related to radioactive nuclear decay). Since it seems much too odd that we should get two completely non-interacting types of matter in a Big Bang, that just leaves neutrinos for them to interact with. And maybe dark matter interacts with W and Z after all, which would give particles that would decay in turn, which should also give some neutrinos.

Anyhow, if the dark matter particle is unstable, it can decay into a couple of neutrinos. If there are several species of dark matter particle, heavier ones might decay into a couple of neutrinos and a lighter type of dark matter particle. Or they could fuse to make neutrinos. Anyhow, look for neutrinos. Which, happily enough, is what IceCube is designed to do.

So if you see an extra number of high energy neutrinos coming from places where you expect dark matter to accumulate--inside stars, or at the center of galaxies--you might be seeing neutrinos from dark matter particles decaying/fusing. That would be very interesting, and could give you some estimate of just how massive these dark matter particles might be.

Of course if the dark matter particles are very light, they won't accumulate in stars the way you expect(*), plus the number of low energy neutrinos from cosmic ray showers in Earth's atmosphere will probably drown out your signal. (Low mass dark matter would decay to low energy neutrinos.) So the assumptions matter.

Also have a look at the search for sterile neutrinos video. Neutrinos are hard to study...

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(*) The cloud of dark matter particles would be much more spread out. It's kind of intuitive that "heavy stuff sinks to the bottom," but it's a little more complicated because the dark matter particles don't bump into things very much--they don't interact and slow down in ways you're used to.

Reconstructing history

There’s not a lot of written history about the area that is now Liberia before the American settlers came.

To know what happened, you have to piece together strands of evidence from widely separated records, and from traditions, language families, and genetic families across a fairly large area of Africa—and I am not in any position to do that myself.

I greeted the appearance of Between the Kola Forest and the Salty Sea with enthusiasm, and bought a copy. After reading the introduction, I'm starting to wonder. He seems to have his references to Ham a little mixed (may not be entirely his fault--references are inconsistent), doesn't seem to have a good handle on the history of slavery in Africa (all European and uniquely evil), UPDATED see full review conflates "blue-eyed Aryans" with all Europeans, and approvingly cites the "black Egyptian" claims. Sorry, I read Herodotus too, and can look at the pictures the Egyptians painted, and read some of their folk-tales—ancient Egyptians were not of sub-Saharan descent. Recent DNA studies bear out the obvious—modern Egyptians have more sub-Sarahan ancestry than ancient ones. That Nubia conquered the north a time or three I can believe--I'd be surprised if they didn't. That Nubians were the ancient Egyptians isn't possible.

If he can't get the well-documented stuff right, I wonder what admixture of imagination is going into the less-documented material? I shall continue—I expect to learn something—but I am less happy.

Reference missing

There's a story about a faculty party at some university, during which the topic of Velikovsky came up. An astronomer said to the MidEast historian "His ideas about the planets are complete rubbish, but he makes interesting points about the Egyptian historical record." The historian replied that "That's funny—I thought his astronomical ideas were interesting, but his dynastic chronology was junk."

I paraphrase, and I think there were three involved. Does anybody know the original?

Anonymous calls

In the released Kennedy files there's a report about an anonymous phone call 25 minutes before the assassination. I begin to see one reason why so much was filed away for years.

The more notorious the crime, the more rubbish the investigators have to sort through.

Just for fun, how many explanations of that memo can you come up with in 10 seconds?

Panic!

New Jersey Officials Warn About Marijuana Edibles Being Given Out As Halloween Candy Treats.

One commenter wrote: "Yes, lots of people will be handing out $20 gummy bears."

I've read elsewhere (sorry, my interest in research only goes so far--I'm not checking it for myself) that marijuana tastes dreadful; suggesting that it would take a fairly determined glutton to finish one when tastier things are in the bag. Processed oils--that might escape detection. If the price is as high as quoted, though...

We've been hearing warnings like these for decades. No question, there are some pretty vicious people out there. But given the ease of identification, the lurking parents, and the kid eye for creepy people, I'd think the odds are against getting tampered candy.

If somebody want to tamper with stuff and put it back in the stores--most candies are double-wrapped. It could be done, but it would be hard to do in a way that didn't arouse suspicion. Candy would be the least of our worries from terrorists like that.

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UPDATE: Crud. It looks as though either the stuff in the store was cruddy or somebody tampered with it there.

Jobs again

I'm back on the same puzzle: in a high-tech society, what can people who aren't cut out for the high tech actually do?

I hear the "guaranteed income" proposal over and over. That feeds somebody, but doesn't give him anything useful to do. A job may not give meaning to your life, but it at least can make you feel part of the group. I know some people who can and do used enforced idleness for creative work, but I also have seen others who live for sports or video games. I don't hang around the folks who go in for mischief and drugs.

Guaranteed jobs defined by central planners haven't worked very well, though.

Any job that has very strict protocols in a tightly controlled environment will be done by a robot. Assembly line, order taking, some kinds of driving, and rewriting press releases to look like news stories. A carefully designed warehouse can be made very automatic. But things go wrong, and even the automated warehouse will need humans to clean up when a robot springs a leak or the crate of molasses gets crushed. Or the sewer backs up. Been there, done that. A factory floor can accumulate a lot of water.

People are still good at the very creative things, in chaotic situations (think walking dogs in a park), in situations where the protocols aren't always clear. I suspect that driverless cars are going to be farther away than people hope. The basics are simple, but the special cases--the corner cases--are what complicate things, and often city driving is nothing but corner cases. Only when the environment can be tightly controlled does programming become easy and easily verified. Think tunnels or elevated tracks, not streets with dogs and schoolkids and potholes. And snow.

People are also very good for personalized service. An automatic clerk that instantly googles for your preferences may make (creepy) customized "small talk," but a human can be more pleasant to interact with. (Yes, I know of exceptions.)

Skilled people can customize things. This may compete with canned customization schemes using programmable machine tools, but retrofitting stuff you already bought is always likely to be manual.

Servants are always a popular way to show off wealth. I gather servants used to be common even among middle class families in England. The ill effects of this are well known, but I notice that nominally egalitarian folks still manage to cherish implicit feelings of superiority to "those people," even without an explicit master/servant hierarchy. Would I trust my daughter to be treated well as a servant in a wealthy household? Not really. If I knew them well, maybe.

Two large problems bar the way to "jobs per tutti." The first, of course, is "what are they, and who will be willing to pay for them?" As you can see, I'm not overburdened with breakthrough ideas here. The other is "how do you get there from here?" Skipping for now the folks who disdain "menial" jobs, how do you organize a wage to live on from tasks here and there?

One thing we may have to give up is the goal that a person be independent on his own. As I've written before, I don't think that's realistic for a lot of people, who can be jointly independent in a family or friend group--but there needs to be some legal machinery to fit this into our simple-minded income tax and insurance/retirement systems. (Which will vary by state...)

My notion (it is perhaps too vague to call it a plan) is that some churches attempt to first find a few unemployed people whose prospects seem dim, and then try to match them with some perceived needs. The candidates would effectively be self-employed; the church would assist with legal i's and t's that need to be crossed and dotted, and in looking for new tasks as the old ones are completed, and in matching them to tutors as appropriate. The churches would have to keep each other abreast of what is working and why. There might need to be several iterations for a single person while they try to get the fit right--it could easily take several years to converge on something that works for that person.

If all goes well, you would have some people who now have something useful to do, and the churches would have collected a set of schemes that worked. No one plan can do everything--you need a lot of options to match the variety of gifts and limitations people bring to the table. And what works well in one subculture may be a disaster in another.

And, people being fallen, there would be occasional failures due to screw-ups or ill-will. But that's true of any enterprise at all.

Gang database

I have to keep an eye out for follow-up on the Portland police department: "Portland police next month will end their more than 20-year-old practice of designating people as gang members or gang associates in response to strong community concerns about the labels that have disproportionately affected minorities."

The Police Bureau recognizes that the gang designations have led to "unintended consequences" and served as lifelong barriers for those who have shunned the gang lifestyle and tried to get jobs, said Acting Tactical Operations Capt. Andy Shearer.

It wasn't actually that easy to get into that exclusive list:

The Oregonian/OregonLive review of the controversial gang affiliation database showed that police labeled someone a "criminal gang affiliate" more than 100 times each year, without a conviction, without an arrest. Police were able to add someone to the list if the person self-identified as a member of a gang, participated in a gang initiation ritual, committed a gang-related crime or displayed two or more observable signs of gang membership.

The article pats them on the back repeatedly:

Choo Fair, who works as a mentor for Multnomah County probation and parole and is a former Bloods gang member, praised the move.

"It's a beautiful thing. They can no longer label anybody," he said.

He expects it also will affect county parole and probation officers, who sometimes find an offender in violation of their probation because they continued to hang out with known gang members.

Note to self: check crime stats and status of the database next October.

A feast

I had leftover Hunan chicken tonight, and got to thinking of some of the meals we've had with Chinese friends. I don't have a vocabulary to describe the differences, but one dramatic difference was that the sauces our friends used weren't thick or sweet--and often not very salty, either. Later in the evening I was reading about travel in China shortly after the Boxer rebellion, and ran across the author's listing of the contents of a feast set out by a local magistrate:

1. Small cakes (five kinds), sliced pears, candied peanuts, raw water-chestnuts, cooked water-chestnuts, hard-boiled ducks' eggs (cut into small pieces), candied walnuts, honied walnuts, shredded chicken, apricot seeds, sliced pickled plums, sliced dried smoked ham (cut into tiny pieces), shredded sea moss, watermelon seeds, shrimps, bamboo sprouts, jellied haws. All the above dishes were cold. Then followed hot:
2. Shrimps served in the shell with vinegar, sea-slugs with shredded chicken, bits of sweetened pork and shredded dough --the pork and sea-slugs being cooked and served in fragrant oil.
3. Bamboo sprouts, stewed chicken kidneys.
4. Spring chicken cooked crisp in oil.
5. Stewed sea-slugs with ginger root and bean curd, stewed fungus with reed roots and ginger tops (all hot).
6. Tarts with candied jelly, sugar dumplings with dates.
7. Hot pudding made of "the eight precious vegetables," consisting of dates, watermelon seeds, chopped walnuts, chopped chestnuts, preserved oranges, lotus seeds, and two kinds of rice, all mixed and served in syrup--a delicious dish.
8. Shelled shrimps with roots of reeds and bits of hard-boiled eggs, all in one bowl with fragrant oil, biscuits coated with sweet seeds.
9. Glutinous rice in little layers with browned sugar between, minced pork dumplings, steamed biscuits.
10. Omelette with sea-slugs and bamboo sprouts, all in oil, bits of chicken stewed in oil, pork with small dumplings of flour and starch.
11. Stewed pigs' kidneys, shrimps stewed in oil, date pie.
12. Vermicelli and egg soup.
13. Stewed pork balls, reed roots, bits of hard-boiled yolks of eggs, all in oil.
14. Birds' nest soup.
The appetite being pretty well sated by this time, the following delicacies were served to taper off with:
15. Chicken boiled in oil, pork swimming in a great bowl of its own fat, stewed fish stomachs, egg soup.
16. Steamed biscuit.

Tea was served from the beginning and throughout the feast. It was made on the table by pouring hot water into a small pot half full of tea leaves, the pot being refilled as needed. The tea was served without cream or sugar, and was mild and delicious. Rice whiskey in tiny cups is usually served at feasts, though it was often omitted from the feasts given to us. The Chinese assert that the alcohol is necessary "to cut the grease."

Probably etiquette presumed small portions, not American-style ones. The menu differs substantially from both those of the restaurants and the dishes our friends made. I suspect the latter prepared dishes that were more "home-style" than those an official would set out to impress dignitaries.

I wonder if any of the local restaurants offer such 3 hour, 16 remove banquets. (It would take me at least three hours for an adventure like that. Especially since I'm only very mediocre with chopsticks.) My curiosity might exceed my palate, though. I had goat soup in Liberia--excessively spicy, with broken bones and some unidentifiable organs in it, and a very powerful taste of something strange--not liver, probably not kidney. Couldn't finish it. Across the dining room were a couple of European men pretending to be hard-nosed arms dealers. Odd clientele.

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Hear from a Chinese tourist of the same era who visited Europe and America: "Nor do they eat their meat cooked in small pieces. It is carried into the room in large chunks, often half raw, and they cut and slash and tear it apart. They eat with knives and prongs. It makes a civilized being perfectly nervous. One fancies himself in the presence of sword-swallowers."

Gentlemen, this is a football

The first time I heard that this was how Lombardi introduced training sessions, I thought it was pretty insulting and useless. Were football players really that dense?

I just read another state of the university "press release" to the staff. I learned about our priorities.

WWVLD?

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a University.

Over there are the students.

Over here are curricula representing bodies of knowledge the students need to learn.

In between them we have teachers.

Our job is to ...

Dan McBride

I found some Dan McBride songs on YouTube. He was a Baptist preacher who composed and sang a number of songs poking fun at various things about the church.

Tiptoe through the tithers

Ministry

Staff Notes

Organizational Highlights

Beautiful Dreamer (wake unto me! I'm speaking to you there on pew number three.)

Enough value?

AVI linked to a review of How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain. The last line is "but we can forgive a man a multitude of sins for giving us Huck and Jim."

And that's the issue these days, isn't it? If you value what the person did enough, you overlook the minor faults. And the major ones.

Literary critics born late enough to run no risk of being robbed by him applaud François Villon. Hollywood still loves Roman Polanski--some possibly because they're like him, but I'd guess more value his work enough to overlook his "failings." Similarly with Weinstein: until his habits became too public to ignore, his colleagues valued the work he did more than his "failings." Thomas Jefferson's work is no longer valued by many people (some of whom don't seem to understand it at all) enough to overlook his failings. (From the layout and operations of Monticello I suspect he had enough of a conscience that he wanted to look at his slaves as little as he could--beyond the crest of the hill, under the floor, behind a revolving serving door.)

The French Foreign Legion doesn't officially admit criminals, but the legend says it was an unofficial way to expunge your record by becoming a new and valuable person. How many times did a village put up with a jerk because he was invaluable in combat? On a more intimate note: "Why does she stay with him/he stay with her?"

God judges with perfect precision. We tend to put our thumbs on the scales when balancing value and failings. A few years ago the subject of OJ Simpson came up in a conversation I was eavesdropping on, and the older black man chid the younger ones--"We all know he did it." Maybe he didn't do much that's valuable, but he's our tribe.

Some of those Confederate statues were put up to honor the qualities the men (nominally) exemplified. (Some I gather were put up as warnings...) Quite a few people today look at the statue and say "I don't value anything he did." They do not honor courageous enemies, especially when the quarrel has been dead for generations. They have no reason to forgive anything. Not that they have much to forgive, since injuries were done to remote ancestors and not to them.

"Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?" When to judge, and when to let slide? I tend to put the bar far into the "actual harm" range, but that's a tendency and not an absolute rule...

Marie Curie

Everybody has heard of her and radium and her Nobel Prize (actually 2), but I don't remember reading about her devising portable X-ray machines during WW-I.

And it may have been the X-rays that gave her cancer.

Dexterity

I can't remember when I last saw the old large dollar or half dollar coins, and I haven't seen any of the new dollar coins in several years. With half-cent coins gone the way of the passenger pigeon, that leaves a very simple mix in the pocket--quarter, dime, nickel, penny--and loose cough drop. I can shuffle around for a moment or two and bring up what's need for change, plus maybe a little bit extra that came out in the same grab.

Now double the number of coins.

It is much faster to pull out my wallet for some paper than to try to get my fingers to remember what those odd sizes mean. I think that was about \$19 worth of change there.

Wikipedia

We all know (or I hope we do) that Wikipedia is very unreliable on any subject that involves politics or disputed social issues.

My experience with the science articles has been that they're not always very clear. The math sections, on the other hand, have been, on the whole very useful and complete. I often have to chase through a list of definitions, and I wish wish wish more mathematicians would use examples in their communications (they use plenty in their research!).

The Motherboard article on the subject is a bit over the top. OK, way over the top. I know plenty of practicing scientists, and I can't think of one who wants knowledge restricted to an elite, and on the contrary, quite a few who volunteer in gigs to explain things to youngsters.

The problem isn't that "you can imagine impenetrable writing as a defensive strategy wielded to scare off editor-meddlers." The problem is that the science writers a) don't have huge wads of time and b) don't really know their audiences. And c) want things to be accurate--the imprecision of everyday language can be terrible. (Think of all the different meanings of "energy" you find in popular language--from heat to personal vivacity to obscure mystical flow up through your lung when somebody pokes your foot with a needle.)

FWIW, years ago I proposed that our grad students be required to prepare a web "poster session" of their theses, with a target audience of high school seniors who have at least algebra and some physical science background. Somebody would have to create a network of web pages to explain the background, of course, which their thesis-pages would reference. Crickets

Mine! Mine!

AVI illustrates an application of Acton's Law, with treatment beds.

Excitement

This week is full of phone conferences. We issued a bulletin announcing a nice very high energy "track-like" event, and this events seems to coincide in direction and time with a gamma ray blazar.

It would be wonderful to be able to associate a neutrino with a known source (it turns out to be rather hard), and the presence of two kinds of messengers (neutrinos and gamma rays) would give hard evidence for some classes of models of what's going on there, and serious challenges to others.

Scuttlebutt holds that the recalculated direction doesn't point as cleanly at the blazar as the first estimates said, but we'll see--probably by the end of the week.

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BTW, a muon neutrino produces a muon through a charged current interaction, and that muon track points back pretty well to where the muon neutrino came from. An electron neutrino produces an electron, and that showers very quickly--you get a dramatic amount of light but not much of a track to point with. A tau neutrino--we've apparently had some taus, but it has proved rather hard to distinguish them from the electrons. Some of the time the tau track should shower quickly like an electron, but sometimes we should get a "double bang:" an interaction and shower, followed by a short track and another shower--sort of like a dumb-bell. So far we've not seen the double bang.

Speed limits

John Lower wants to redo our speed limits, based on measurements by smart sensors in traffic control systems. He thinks that might make a lot of speed limits slower.

Redoing the old studies from the 50's and 60's makes sense. Adjustable speed limits does not: keep the number of driving variables small if you want minimum confusion. For example, reversible lanes are OK if there are physical barriers that shift, but if they are controlled by overhead X or O symbols you are asking for accidents. "Motor memory" of how fast I am supposed to be going along street-type X plays a role in my driving style, and I suspect I'm not alone.

And if photographic speed limit enforcement starts to become ubiquitous, I expect a significant rise in vandalism. Air rifles and slingshots and paintball guns would probably be useful for the purpose.

Mike Royko had something to say about speed limits.

UPDATE: "Unknown" points out in the comments that the variable speeds can work.

Busted!

My flight was delayed into O'Hare. I suspect luggage is loaded in alphabetical order, and unloaded in reverse alphabetical order.

When I finally got my suitcase I got into the line for customs (*), and observed my first bust. I don't know if it was the same little beagle I've seen before or if they have a family of them. The dog had identified a suspect. The agent on the other end of the leash was confiscating ...

Bananas. This was a fruit-sniffing dog.

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(*) I dutifully filled out the card on the plane, but you use kiosk questionnaires now and give the customs agent the receipt.

Day 5

The weather forecast on accuweather.com predicted wind gusts of up to hurricane strength this afternoon. Looking at the trees in the protected courtyard, I can believe it. It's supposed to keep up for another 3 hours. I wonder what that will do to the double-decker buses? I'm supposed to take one (the 100 line) this evening to get to the dinner... UPDATE Buses are not running, neither is sBahn (trees across the tracks), and some uBahn are closed too.

Just for laughs I went by the Pergamon--long long lines that weren't moving. (Ditto for the others) I had other things to do anyway.

There are still a lot of bullet marks in the older buildings around here, and the train support. (I'm not sure what you call the brick and stone buildings the tracks are built on. At the stations these are filled with shops and food places.)

It is sub-50, damp with occasional rain, and quite windy. At least the weather should be OK for the flight out tomorrow. Staying put for now.

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UPDATE: Xavier did a lot of damage. We walked to the banquet aside from one last O(60mph) gust it wasn't bad anymore, but branches were down everywhere and the hooded crows were angry as all getout. Monbijou Theater had boarded up their bar, but their signs and banners were gone and most stuff was knocked down. Even fence sections weighted with 200lb of concrete were knocked over. But the giant banners for the museum across the Spree were still there.

Day 4

Planning meetings today. My todo list expanded, with documentation rising higher on the list. That is to say, prying loose documentation about the data-files various groups created. If you want somebody to be able to replicate your study with more data, or even know whether your data-files are relevant to their work . . . please tell us what software you used, and what cuts are on the data.

This part of Berlin is a tourist area, with lots of people from all over--including lots of Germans visiting too. Lots of restaurants with tables outdoors--which would be much more enticing if it weren't 50 and gloomy with scattered showers. Now if I just had time to go see the Ishtar Gate...

Food may be good, but alone you are just eating: dining needs friends.

Day 3

German Unification Day. Most shops are closed, and there are more children about than there were yesterday.

I went hunting for a grocery store, but didn't recognize it at all--looked more like a bakery than a place to buy turnips. And it was closed.

A block away is the original Weber office, with a giant round grill out in front.

Lots of talks. More when I wake up.

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The Neue Synagoge is just down the street from me. Yes, there's a chain, and yes, those are policemen. At night too.

Old story

Every weekday a man would walk to the news stand to buy a paper, and then stand at the bus stop reading it.

The vendor didn't like him, and wasn't shy about it.

One day another man waiting there too said "Excuse me, but you know there's another news stand across the street. You don't have to buy from that guy."

The man with the paper replied "I'm not letting that insulting SOB decide where I buy my newspapers."

Some people want everything to be political.

Berlin Day 2

The hotel corner is a hub for several trams, and the sBahn is half a block away. The rooms face the courtyard, so the noise doesn't bother people--or at least doesn't bother me. On the other hand, the room we met in parallels the tracks, so every subway or commuter train distracts a bit.

My talk went well, the others were interesting, though I wonder about the Markov Chain Monte Carlo(*) approach to scattering. As one of the attendees pointed out, there is no theoretical reason why the approximation he was testing should work, and in the end you have to rely on "Well, the distributions look OK in this case"--and the only way to know that they "look ok in this case" is . . . to do the usual estimation, with all the CPU time expense that entails.

I forgot to mention one nice feature of the airport: when we got off the plane, the baggage pickup was right there. No heading down to a common pool of baggage carousels and scouting about for the right one--or what will be the right one when the current deposit is done. Security is probably much better, too.

The Grand Bar served up food very quickly, and with much nicer presentation and ambience than you expect from a "bar." If you eat equal volumes of broccoli and potatoes, they cancel out, right?

I was curious if the simple pre-pay cards would let me make calls from here to the US, but O2 says no. Oh well.

I've never seen Cabaret. I suppose I should, one of these days. There are plenty of posters and graffiti up condemning the AfD as nazis: I don't think nazis will make any kind of comeback in my lifetime, or my children's lifetimes. Not with that name anyway, whether chosen or imposed.

Tour boats on the Spree at night are lit up with bright lights, and they sometimes use searchlights on the clouds as well. Tried to take a picture, but the contrast was terrible. There's nothing like the dynamic range of the human eye.

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(*) No, I'd never heard of it before, but Jakob said he and some others had brainstormed it for a while and concluded that it was semi-impossible. I really really want a Journal of Stuff That Doesn't Work.

EMP

I wonder how seriously the powers-that-be are taking EMP risks.

We hear how EMP would fry computers, sensitive electronics, fancy auto ignition systems I wonder about how likely that is if you're not at ground 0, and mess up the power grid. Bye bye water supply, communications, etc.

Despite the CNN rant we were subjected to this morning(*) about Puerto Rico, you can't pre-position enough supplies with only a couple of day's notice, and when the storm takes out everything you can't wave a magic wand and have a hundred thousand generators instantly materialize. And figuring out what to do in what order isn't trivial.

If we wanted less exposure to EMP, how would we design things? The national power grid needs work; some robustness might be designed into it. (Please?!) Do we have ways to hack and slash local chunks back together again (chucking out all the smart power stuff, and maybe not even hanging power lines high in the air the first month)?

Lightning strikes cause bad transients--can we look at how to isolate buildings from them? That might carry over into EMP hardening too.

We're doing a lot of alternative energy stuff: there's no way that wind could replace coal, but the tie-ins that make wind's variable supply feed into the grid might be extended to pre-positioned backup generators.

We can't move as much stuff as efficiently without fast computer communication. Do we still have fall-back approaches?

Are backup generators standard for water towers?

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(*) The admin spokesman didn't seem to understand the situation either.

Disconnected notes from Berlin Day 1

Around the corner from the Monbijou Hotel is "Flakes and Shakes." They claim to have over 100 types of American breakfast cereal for sale. I didn't go in to see if Bruce Jenner is still on Wheaties.

Along Monbijoustrasse, on the other side of the Spree, is a block of vendor stands. At the end of the block is an elevated trash bin with the label "Museum of Contemporary Trash" likely a dig at Museum Island across the street.

The whole area is redolent of sewer: one of those little things that didn't get updated at reunion time. Hackescher Markt is what you'd get if you put high end boutique stores in mini-plazas made of old buildings and then glued them together. The layout is straightforward but that doesn't matter, you get turned around anyway.

Berlin is a graffiti city. Some is coarse and stupid, some is gang related, some political, but there seems to be a fair amount that relates to the art community. (I will give the benefit of the doubt for the word "art.")

When you look down a random street in this area you're apt to see a building or three older than a century, and street names and sometimes monuments for famous Germans. And tourists taking pictures of the same. Museum Island is here--lots of good art and significant reminders. I can imagine if I were a musical Berliner who wanted to make a name for myself and was faced daily with reminders that I'm not even remotely a new Beethoven, I'd be tempted to use novelty as a shortcut to innovation, or maybe just as a primal scream. "I can't paint like Durer or write like Goethe or study and think like Humboldt but I am a painter/writer/'thinker'!" OK, primal scream and thinking don't go very well together.

The Berlin Wall was graffiti-ed up as a protest--that would tend to make a big mental link to graffiti and liberty.

At any rate, it is a bit disconcerting to see an area painted up like a disputed territory in Chicago.

Restaurants all over the place too. I decided to try curry-wurst. Once is plenty--it tasted ok but I've still got a cannonball in my tum.

I'm trying to stay awake long enough to start the time shift. Gets dark earlier here than at home...

I got off at the wrong stop from the TXL bus, but still had time on the ticket so took the S42 loop on the sBahn (the S41 going the opposite direction is under construction--you've got to either take the bus or go the loonnnngg way around the loop) and asked a friendly native which direction I wanted to take. Trains often get names from the last stop, which may be off the map and is in tiny print anyway. Which direction you get depends on which platform you're on.

Bridge technology

The compilation is available online in a scan of a copy--a few pages are not readable and many are hard on the eyes.

WHY BRIDGES ARE BUILT IN SECRET

L. Nelson (Legends of Liberia)

Long before white men were known in the land there lived a rich woman by the name of Sagba Massa. Sagba possessed a certain magic ring which she always wore on her hand; with this ring she could summon and control the power of spirits and forest devils, and her clan, whom she rules, prospered accordingly. Her lands yielded abundant crops, rain fell when rain was needed, and evil beings who walked in the night left her people alone.

The Chief of Sagba's tribe, a wise old man called Mana Kpaka, sent messages through the land requiring lesser chiefs and clan leaders to assemble at his town for a converence concerning tribal warfare. Sagba Massa set out on her journey to this town, and on the way she was obliged to cross the Yanjah River. While crossing in a canoe she saw a beautiful woman sitting on a rock, and wondered who she was. A moment later the woman disappeared, and Sagba, whose hand was trailing lightly in the water, suddently felt her magic ring drawn gently from her finger.

She cried out in alarm and peered down into the shining water, but saw nothing there. The beautiful woman who sat on the rock had been a water spirit, and doubtless it was she who had stolen the precious ring. Sagba made camp on the river bank and called up her best diviners to discover what she must do: the diviners read their sands and gave her their advice.

Three men were brought from distant places. One of them had power over water. The second had power over light and could see into the very heart of mountains. The third had power over earth, and could crush the biggest rocks to powder in his hands. Sagba Massa paid them well and commanded them to find her ring.

The first man tipped the river on its side.

The second man saw the ring hidden inside a rock which lay in the river bed.

The third man lifted the rock and broke it, and having found the ring he gave it back to Sagba. She went to the conference called by Mana Kpaka, and when returning she decided to build a bridge across the Yaajah river, a bridge which would nowhere touch the water.

With the aid of her ring a number of spirits were summoned and they were told to build a bridge from bank to bank in such a way that men who crossed might be beyond the reach of mischievous river spirits. The spirits said they would work by night, but men must work by day. Trusted men were called upon to build the bridge by day; and the spirits threw building medicine on them so they would build well and make no error. The spirits selected two large trees on opposite banks, and swung stout lines of cane and vines across the river from tree to tree; but they only worked by night, when no one was about. The men used secret knots and the cunning of their medicine to weave a slender footwalk between the hangling lines; they worked only by day, and no man who was not one of them was permitted to be there.

Thus the first suspension bridge was built, and now the manner of this work is a closely guarded secret handed on from father to son. The secret is known only to spirits and selected groups of men, and anyone who tries to watch is killed.

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Strictly speaking this isn't an explanation of why the spirits wanted everything to be secret, but never mind that.

You would think that the people walking over it every day would be able to look at the knots and reverse engineer the method, but I'll bet there are some non-obvious tools involved. Think patent enforcement.

I couldn't figure it out, but I'm no good with visualizing, or successfully tying, any but the simplest knots.

Under the counter

One of the businesses along my route to work had a little shooting: An employee at an East Side gyros carryout shop, upset that a man tried to run off with “a kilo” of his cocaine without paying for it, shot the man in the back Monday. (He survived.)

The man said the incident had started in a back room, where Howard had retrieved the cocaine from a cabinet or small refrigerator. He said Howard weighed the cocaine on a scale in front of him.

Police executed a search warrant later at Spartan, where a bag of cocaine was found inside of another bag, which also contained a document confirming that Howard was a patient of a local medical clinic. The bag was found stashed above a refrigerator in the food preparation area at Spartan.

Along with cocaine, police found a digital scale and two 9mm handguns and ammunition for the guns.

I ran the story by Youngest Daughter, who graduated from a culinary arts program. She wondered about food safety there. What sorts of mistakes might be made?

FWIW, the company announced that the actions of “temporary employee” Eric C. Howard, ... “in no way approved or allowed by our corporation in anyway.” And that they'd never seen any cocaine. No word on whether they ever tried to use small bags of flour...

MRI

"It went zip when it moved and bop when it stopped and whirrr when it stood still."

An hour of 1950's sci-fi effects, with aching neck (though the improvised pad helped) and back. What freedom it is to scratch my nose again! And rest on a mattress.

And know that the doctor's worry was groundless.

Attitudes towards authority

AVI's parable reminded me of a couple of anecdotes.

About 40 years ago I was listening to a preacher who was talking about the calling of God. He described the last question the ordination committee put to him: "If we decide not to ordain you, what will you do?" He said (I paraphrase) "I gave them the only answer I could--
'Whether you ordain me or not, I must preach because God calls me to.' It was the answer they wanted to hear."

Simon Stylites chose a curious approach to austerity--living on top of a 6 or 8 foot high (but the Egyptians built them wide!) pillar. Instead of finding himself alone, thousands flocked to hear him and ask for advice. Church elders weren't sure what to make of him.

Elders living in the desert heard about Saint Simeon, who had chosen a new and strange form of ascetic striving. Wanting to test the new ascetic and determine whether his extreme ascetic feats were pleasing to God, they sent messengers to him, who in the name of these desert fathers were to bid Saint Simeon to come down from the pillar.

In the case of disobedience they were to forcibly drag him to the ground. But if he was willing to submit, they were to leave him on his pillar. Saint Simeon displayed complete obedience and deep Christian humility. The monks told him to stay where he was, asking God to be his helper.

Of course in Simon's case obedience meant he wasn't crazy, so the cases differ there. But in both cases they asked the same question: are you willing to accept the judgment of your elders that you are mistaken about your calling? The great difference is in the expected right answer.

Truth being said

From Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Some nights, abed, Will put his ear to the wall to listen, and if his folks talked things that were right, he stayed, and if not right he turned away. If it was about time and passing years or himself or town or just the general inconclusive way God ran the world, he listened warmly, comfortably, secretly, for it was usually Dad talking. He could not often speak with Dad anywhere in the world, inside or out, but this was different. There was a thing in Dad's voice, up, over, down, easy as a hand winging soft in the air like a white bird describing flight pattern, made the ear want to follow and the mind's eye to see.

And the odd thing in Dad's voice was the sound truth makes being said. The sound of truth, in a wild roving land of city or plain country lies, will spell any boy. Many nights Will drowsed this way, his senses like stopped clocks long before that half-singing voice was still. Dad's voice was a midnight school, teaching deep fathom hours, and the subject was life.

It is different when you're being addressed directly, for then you have to react (and maybe repent) and can't muse.

Mr Weston's Good Wine

I don’t remember where I read about Mr. Weston’s Good Wine, by Theodore Powys, but it was just a couple of days ago. The idea intrigued me (and the book was in the library): a traveling wine merchant comes to the village of Folly Down and time stops. The wine merchant turns out to be God.

His assistant’s name is Michael. They purvey vintages new and old—the very oldest and darkest are cash-only sales—no credit.

The book is supposed to be T.F. Powys’s masterpiece. The setting and characters are well-drawn, the story ambles along nicely, and there’s redemption and damnation. There are predators and innocents, dark secrets, a local version of St. Francis and a priest who doesn't believe in God, and a girl who fell in love with a picture of an angel and won’t be satisfied with a mere man. What else could you wish for?

Well, a story with God incognito should have Him display—not gravitas exactly, the incognito forbids that--fittingness. Weston is at pains to distance himself from organized religion (he’s never been to church before) and he didn’t really mean for people to take the Bible seriously. Author’s privilege so far. But most of the resolutions involve (perhaps not surprisingly, given the book’s title) Cana in one form or another—as though there were no other loves than the sexual. Maybe Powys wanted to use marriage to stand in for other things (as Paul did), but if so I missed it. Powys and his wife did have children, so he knew there were other varieties of love.

In other words, there’s a whiff of ground axe and most of the denouements seem a bit of a single-note. (Love or death--or both) The miracle is telegraphed, but the judgment and punishment comes out of nowhere—I can think of several authors who’d have done that scene better, though perhaps with less elegant prose. When you write an allegory, the core needs to hold up better than that.

Meh.

Error rates

I'm often asked for my email address. I try to partition my internet interactions, and in consequence use 5 gmail accounts. I know that PayPal will never email me at address X, or amazon at address Y--it helps with the signal to noise ratio.

One address was a complete dummy, used to test the integrity of a Saudi-backed group (they proved trustworthy, btw). The dummy account was idle for several years, until a 1-byte message appeared, which showed whoever was probing that the address was real. The amount of spam has been rising fairly steadily since then. And the rate of real messages. That dummy account got email from a woman wanting to talk about vacation pictures (I set her straight), and then nothing but spam until a few months ago, when somebody accidentally set it as the account reset location for his membership in some Belgian porn site. (I gather he got things straightened out, since the reset messages only showed up for a week.)

On another account, for the past year, I've been getting messages inviting some woman I've never heard of (and whose name bears no resemblance whatever to the account name!) to visit one or the other college. There's typically no place to ask to be removed from such lists. On another account, which I use for Craigslist, I just got Verizon's billing information for somebody in New England with a new cell phone. I spent a quarter hour on the phone being a good citizen about that one.

There were two other similar errors that I can't recall the details of. In sum, over the past 3 years, on 5 accounts, I've found 6 errors. Last year Google said there were over a billion accounts. Shall I extrapolate that and say there are of order 400 million errors per year? (plus or minus 160 million :-) ).(*) Not google's errors, of course--typos or misunderstandings or made-up addresses. At Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, they used to have a demonstration of phone number reverse lookup--type in a number and it would give the address. Pick a random number, and the chances were it was a real phone number...

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(*) I know, the look-elsewhere effect--I wouldn't be posting if there hadn't been something recent--the real error rate is lower, of course.

RIP

We had to miss Mark's funeral because of my wife's surgery today.(*) The bio doesn't mention that he was also active in church. He was very alert and creative and a joy to be around.

The large photo of him, in among the flowers at the visitation, showed him looking dignified and happy in his lab coat--with a little chick on his shoulder.

He arranged for a few of our kids to do job shadows with him: one was startled to find that part of the day's duties involved blenderizing chicks.

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(*)It looks like the surgery went OK, but of course the first day or two feels worse than before.

Tunes

I remember a TV game show called "Name That Tune." Contestants were given a clue, and then a bidding war ensued starting at 7 notes: "I can name that tune in 4 notes." When one conceded, the piano player played the winning number of notes (sometimes only 1!), and the other tried to guess the name of the tune.

I don't know why I remembered that show yesterday, but I wondered: how well can you identify a tune from the last notes?

Experiences

Crowley seems to have won the field. "Do what you will" seems to be the dominant touchstone for ethics. He meant, or at least professed to mean, that your true self would make appropriate decisions, but the simpler way (and I hope I may be forgiven for thinking it Crowley's true meaning) is to follow your impulses. We measure how strong we are by how strong our feelings and impulses are.

And in the society that resulted, the most valuable things are experiences. To see the Shire in New Zealand, or ride a hot-air balloon, or free climb El Capitan--OK, most of us aren't eager to take on the years of discipline to manage El Capitan, but watching the GoPro video is almost as good. Right?

A cruise in the Bahamas, see the pyramids of Egypt, a trip to Machu Picchu--what is on the usual bucket list? For that matter, what's on the unofficial bucket list--the things you want to experience but would be embarrassed to tell your friends?

The most valuable experiences are those that demand training and skill. The pinnacles of experience would be free-climbing K2, surfing a tsunami, sky-diving from orbit. Most settle for less. But after you've sky-dived, you will have to try to sky-dive while balancing on a skate-board, or while playing the accordion, or while trying to have sex.

Lots of people covet celebrity, which can be very decoupled from any accomplishment.

"Getting stuff" doesn't seem quite so fashionable, but I suspect that's because we're rich, we have most of the stuff we want anyhow, and we noticed that it wasn't making us happy enough. But next year's iPhone--that'll be the ultimate!

What doesn't seem to be so popular is writing a symphony or the next Moby Dick, or building cabinets that the Smithsonian displays. (Or becoming a saint, but that's never been popular) Accomplishment is harder than simple experience--is it also less popular? Accomplishment may be "what you will" but it involves a lot of grunt work or doing what other people want. And following rules--which conflicts with the "what you will" theme.

Maybe you can keep experiences longer than stuff, though dementia can steal those too, but at the end of the day you don't get to keep anything, unless you've invested with Someone in the resurrection business.

Can you tell I read Ecclesiastes recently?

Ownership

The 'Internet of Things' Is Sending Us Back to the Middle Ages.

What Joshua means by that is that more and more in our lives is not owned but rented/licensed, and therefore controlled by someone else. The most dramatic example he gives is John Deere farm equipment--the embedded software is owned by them, and therefore the whole system must be repaired by them alone.

Yet the expansion of the internet of things seems to be bringing us back to something like that old feudal model, where people didn’t own the items they used every day. In this 21st-century version, companies are using intellectual property law – intended to protect ideas – to control physical objects consumers think they own.

My phone is a Samsung Galaxy. Google controls the operating system and the Google Apps that make an Android smartphone work well. Google licenses them to Samsung, which makes its own modification to the Android interface, and sublicenses the right to use my own phone to me – or at least that is the argument that Google and Samsung make. Samsung cuts deals with lots of software providers which want to take my data for their own use.

Have you noticed an uptick in businesses cutting customers off for their political persuasions? I get a whiff of Hell's Pavement (wikipedia) too. "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. You bought a Thermolux heater, and you know you're only supposed to buy P&D."

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And everybody wants a revenue stream, not just a sale. Office 365 comes to mind here: You don't own it, you rent it. We use an older (licensed) version of Office on one machine, and LibreOffice on the rest.

Faithfulness

AVI is musing about measures of worth past and present. And future.

I was sure there was a chair behind me when I sat down. I trusted that bench to carry my weight. I trust that the gas station will take my cash in payment. I trust that if I push this button, the elevator will go up.

I trust that stores will be open when they say they will, and that the food inspectors keep the suppliers honest. I trust that the bus will go where the timetable says it will. I trust I don’t have to watch my back because my immediate neighbors will not try to kill me. (*)

These are important things for me.

For myself, I like "flexibility." There've been plenty of days when it would have been tempting to call in sick. And I have more interesting projects to work on than those I get paid to do.

We care a lot about faithfulness—in other people. Glen Campbell’s signature song Gentle on My Mind celebrated his lady’s faithfulness and his own "flexibility."

Not very fair, is it?

Some select people have succeeded in getting acclaim for their "flexibility," though usually under the name of "being true to him/her/itself." It seems that most of us just lose people's trust, though.

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(*)About 2 blocks away I’m not so sure. If neighborhood and police reports are anything to go by.

The ENArchs

Class stratification in France: the ENA-rchs and French unions:

For all what the history books show, the French never actually had a Revolution. It is possible to go to Russia, and live there for years, and never see a trace of the old aristocracy in the state institutions or companies. There is a definite hierarchy in place, but it is not one based on class. In France, by contrast, it doesn’t take one long to figure out that the entire government and major corporations are dominated by an elite consisting of the old French aristocratic families (take a look at the names, and see how many have de in them) and the cream of the crop of the French grandes écoles:

and

And as with the government and the electorate, stuffing the upper echelons full of well-connected elites results in a huge disconnect between the management and the workers. For it is largely true that, no matter how hard one works and how brilliant one is, you will never surpass the chosen few from the grandes écoles in terms of promotion and prestige. For sure, many try, and considerable efforts are made by the company management to convince the ordinary folk that if they show sufficient compliance, obedience, and work themselves to death they will be admitted to the hallowed ranks of the chosen few. But in reality, they are being sold an absolute lie.

Anybody with experience in France care to comment?

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Found via White Sun of the Desert

Actions and words

"But what do you think? A man had two sons, and he came to the first and said, 'Son, go work today in the vineyard.' "And he answered, 'I will not'; but afterward he regretted it and went. "The man came to the second and said the same thing; and he answered, 'I will, sir'; but he did not go. "Which of the two did the will of his father?" They said, "The first."

If you haven't read Shannon Burns' essay on language and violence, do. Near the end is the story of Ricky at the recycling center.

Jesus said to them, "Truly I say to you that the tax collectors and prostitutes will get into the kingdom of God before you."

Ancient wars

A review of Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede wound up on my radar. The author (Aisha Harris) introduces it by comparing it to Medieval Times. I've been to the latter once: romanticized medieval culture, combat, and dining--not very closely related to anything SCA would put on. The real era often treated classes of luckless people very badly, and sometimes the conflicts involved things just as horrible as anything the 19'th century saw. But that was all 7-900 years ago, and the quarrels quit mattering long ago. Nobody but historians cares who was Duke of York in 1232, and we're apt to laugh at the differences between the warring sides--when we understand them at all. Not our oxen getting gored here...

In the American Civil War the North won, and by and large most folks in the North that I know don't give it a second thought anymore. Badger football is in Camp Randall stadium, and I doubt many fans realize the park memorializes a Union encampment/training ground. And when they do, they don't care. It's an ancient war. There are some customary attitudes one is supposed to have about it ("If this show were being performed in New York, he said, he’d think it was weird."), but little more. I can't speak for the South--I gather the hostility diminished over the years, and that in some circles there are customary attitudes one is supposed to have about it ("War was really about state's rights"--likely a big part of it for the rank and file, but definitely not true for the leaders). I've no idea how much emotion is invested in the war anymore.

But if the Dixie Stampede is any indication, where one of the pigs in the pig race is named for the iconic Lee, I suspect that there's a fair bit of "it's an ancient war" in the South too. What makes a glamorized Medieval Times-type amusement possible is that nobody deeply cares about the contest.

Aisha came to it as one for whom the themes of the Civil War were not ancient history. She found parts very awkward, sometimes tasteless or tone-deaf, and generally felt out of place. And she's right, of course(*). But I hope her children will be able to say "it's an ancient war." That might be a lot to hope for--maybe I should say her grandchildren.

The alternative to "it's an ancient war" is that new wars refer to the old in their laundry list of grievances. (Not that the old grievances matter as much as the new, but you want to show continuity in the villainy of your enemies.) That's not the road I want us going down.

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(*) Although sometimes ... She complained that the "southerners" door label was light tan and the "northerners" was dark blue; this was tone-deaf. Um. If it had been reversed, would that have been better? I'd have thought the colors were a reference to the uniforms, not demography.

Babylonian "trig"

"Plimpton 322 predates Hipparchus by more than 1000 years," says Dr Wildberger. "It opens up new possibilities not just for modern mathematics research, but also for mathematics education. With Plimpton 322 we see a simpler, more accurate trigonometry that has clear advantages over our own."

When I read "However unlike today’s trigonometry, Babylonian mathematics used a base 60, or sexagesimal system, rather than the 10 which is used today. Because 60 is far easier to divide by three, experts studying the tablet, found that the calculations are far more accurate." I surmised that Sarah Knapton (Science Editor for the Telegraph) probably wouldn't know a sine if it hung blinking above the highway.

And it turns out the good Dr. Wildberger has a book to hawk. Said book is supposedly going to revolutionize the teaching of trig, apparently by using rational numbers and limits. (Don't reporters do any background checking anymore?)

Want a different view of the Plimpton tablet? It looks like a table of Pythagorean triples. Pythagorean triples are a fun topic that mathematicians have been working on for several thousand years now. I've played with them myself. The simplest one is the (3, 4, 5) triangle. The next is (5, 12, 13). There are an infinite number of them, and if it amused you (and apparently it amuses Dr Wildberger) you can get arbitrarily close to the shape of any right triangle with a Pythagorean triple triangle.

The traditional approach to trig links neatly with complex numbers and turns up smoothly in various branches of math. His scheme avoids some ambiguities with orientation, just as he claims, but also misses out on the connections. Poor choice.

In India, 1400 years ago, sine and cosine were approximated with parabolas, and I vaguely remember the idea being considerably older than that; so I'm not saying the Babylonians didn't do any trig. But this is not it.

Monocles

Such malcontents have always been around. Aside from the Biblical reference, there are many more. One famous example are the infamous delatores from the reign of Tiberius. One Senator was condemned to death because he was seen leaving the “bathroom” in proximity to his meeting with the divine Tiberius. He must have had his purse on him, it was deduced by this profiteering accuser. Therefore a delator seeking to quench the appetite of a paranoid and self righteous Tiberius told him of it. What of it? Nothing until the delator spun it. The coins in his purse bore the emperor’s divine image. The spin worked. The Senator was condemned for making rude and disgusting sounds, which he must have made while in the john, with the divine image of the emperor being a witness to it. It was blasphemy!

Part 2 is here.

Statues

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

But what if the cause is not entirely worthy, or what if the man in the arena has some vices?

We, the pinnacle of moral development and the epitome of all virtues, weigh those vices and decide whether to acknowledge the other's achievements. We must not celebrate the poetry of this man because he was a thief and murderer, or the scientific achievements of that man because he wore the shirt his girlfriend gave him, or the courage and skill of a defeated enemy because you must have truth but never reconciliation. You can't celebrate a man who helped design a great experiment in liberty because he wasn't consistent.(*)

You've heard the complaints in the other direction too, haven't you? "You can't honor that Communist terrorist Nelson Mandela."

I don't fly a Confederate flag, nor want a statue of Lee in our neighborhood park. I get it that some people don't feel as though they were involved in any historical reconciliation. What gets up my nose is the envious insistence on our superiority and right to demand obedience to every single detail of today's rules.

Who died and made us God?

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(*) You may have to fight the enemy because of his vices, but acknowledge his virtues--they probably make him a more dangerous enemy. You might even learn something from him.

When the pretty birds have flown

On AVI's theme:

Or perhaps a different friend in need?

Titles

I sometimes overlook the most obvious things, for the longest time. I must have read Voyage of the Dawn Treader fifty years ago, and I only just realized the sly title Lewis gave the Governor of the Lone Islands: "His Sufficiency." No majesty or excellence is claimed or aspired to; just "sufficient." Beautiful bureaucrat-ese.

Cat videos

In my youth I was a last-picked non-athlete, and I never got much into sports personally. In between other interests and a tendency to deprecate whatever was popular, I never got into sports vicariously.

And so, as a young adult, I didn't see much use in professional sports, and thought investing in a city team a terrible waste of money. Over time I started to notice that watching sports was one of the few civic bonding activities we had. Oh. Maybe this kind of entertainment serves a useful function after all...

Cat videos are a byword for triviality. But in seas of rancid virtue-signalling, perhaps they represent something we can bond on--at least a little. They aren't much at all, but every little bit helps. I won't sneer.

The marchers

It was predictable, and I'm not happy to have been right. We've had one flavor of political shock troops for a couple of years--pretty soon we'll have another; maybe more than two. I'd hoped we could keep it all in the past.

I wonder whose side the driver was on. As of this time I have to take every report with a helping of salt. I can think of four different scenarios for the driver without breaking a sweat--three of them fairly likely. All I know is that somebody is supposed to have been arrested. Update: He's alleged to have been seen with the first group of marchers. As feared.

One picture showed a close group of marchers, probably the same team, carrying confederate and nazi flags. (The old Confederacy lands supplied a lot of volunteers to fight the original Nazis.) I've no reason to doubt that "heritage not hate" is a real description of the motives of a lot of confederate flag wavers--and the combination of a symbol of resistance to central control carried with a symbol of totalitarian rule is more than a little ironic. Probably the pictured group were all nazis, and used the confederate flag as the symbol of racial supremacy it is for some people. Some of the other marchers were said to be racial separatists (not the same thing as supremacists, of course), and I've no notion yet of who the rest were, or even if they knew who all the other groups were. Somebody thought it was OK to have nazis tag along, though. Or wanna-be nazis.

Words are supposed to mean something. I've always been interested in history, and WWII was not that long ago when I was young. Nazis were still the symbol of the enemy, and everybody knew why. I hear horror stories that substantial fractions of today's graduates unable to tell what side England was on during WWII (or else who are pulling the pollster's leg--but I observe a fair amount of ignorance myself). What does "nazi" mean to them? Generic bad group? "I know, teacher! I know! It means Trump and anyone who voted for him!" Similarly, racist means you wonder out loud why we import foreigners to cheaply do the jobs you can't find anymore. It isn't even so much "May as well be hanged for sheep as for lamb" as that the distinctions are blurred.

When the powers-that-be claim that noticing certain problems makes you a swamp-dweller, some proportion of you will join the swamp-dwellers. Think of labor relations early last century. Publicly noticing problems got you called communist, and a lot of noticers joined the communist swamp-creatures.(*)

I suspect that too many people have long memories for the nazis to become a significant force again--certainly not under that name. But the attitudes may come back. We had those attitudes before, and though we've had a few generations in which white racism was suppressed, anything can happen--especially when the elite are alien and arbitrary. "Cling to those you can trust"--and you can't trust Pichai, or the Mizzou administration, or HR.

I used "you," but I, and I suspect most of my readers, are in the happy situation of having skills and education that mean we can comfortably ignore some of the problems, and that, knowing the history, we know the boundaries between the ordinary and the vile. I don't worry about the swamp-creatures--there usually aren't a lot of them. We protect free speech for good reason. I worry when people stop noticing the differences. God help us.

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(*) National socialism is congruent to international socialism: totalitarian, the party is the most important thing, violent expansion, have to break a few eggs to create utopia... I regard Che Guevara shirts the same way I think of Martin Bormann shirts.

Blue and Green

I remember wondering once upon a time how it was that the Blue and Green parties got to be so all-encompassing: Religion, class, politics, sports--and probably other things the histories didn't record.

I think I get it now. If I were to find a MAGA hat and pay a visit to a few selected restaurants in Madison, I suspect service would be quite slow, and I might be rebuked for producing a "hostile environment." Virtue signaling your politics or social views in your business isn't ubiquitous, but is still very common. The new restaurant in the building we rent office space from made a point of emphasizing how much they supported Planned Parenthood--even before they opened. I think you can still eat at McD's without implicitly supporting any party, but stories about restaurants refusing to serve cops keep cropping up. Typically corporate comes down hard on the offenders, but clearly the impulse is there.

Has it always been like that? I seem to recall more overlap in interests when I was younger--but the Cubs and the Sox had (overall) different classes for fan bases(*), and my Better Half remembers a visit to Finn McCools to find the band was playing "If you hate the Queen of England clap your hands." (She got by with a visit to the ladies' room and some fractured German to a belligerent inquisitor.)

(*) It was explained to me that the class difference was a side effect of being located in different neighborhoods

Pets

In the Atlantic we find: "Pets don’t actually make people healthier, according to a new analysis. Ability to own a pet does." "The cat owners appeared healthier than people without pets, but the difference went away when the researchers factored in that the cat owners were likely to be healthy for other reasons, mostly bearing on socioeconomic status."

Of course, we want to keep an eye on this to make sure that the result is true. But if it is, what's going to happen to the Emotional Support Animal industry? I haven't seen their reaction yet, but let me guess: "The study doesn't address emotional issues, only deals with children ..."

Chastity of the Mind

It is tempting to embrace every story that comes along that flatters your tribe or besmirches your opponents. After all, the stories generally fit with what you know; build on knowledge you already have.

When you know the CIA is evil and has done unforgiveable things, stories of how they engineered Tolbert’s assassination or plotted 9/11 dovetail nicely with their record of villainy. Racists abound, so when 3 black churches burn in 2 weeks you know it means racist activity is on the rise. When you know the Clintons are corrupt and ruthless, the story that a man killed himself just before he was due to testify about them obviously tells of just another rub-out among many.

Be realistic. Soldiers won’t die if you don’t retweet that bon mot immediately, or repost that quotation of uncertain provenance. You’re not really in a hurry. You may like to think that hearts and minds wait trembling for your imprimatur on the news, but people who know you can probably already predict what you plan to say.

Instantly reposting stories that go down like such sweet morsels is just virtue signaling: your judgment must be profound since you have such noble friends and recognize such a vile and deceptive enemy!

Two words: Richard Jewell. Three words: Duke lacrosse case. Four words: Day care satanic abuse.

A good scientist looks at data that supports his model, and also looks for data that would contradict it. Until it is studied carefully, it is not good for either purpose.

The first reports are usually wrong. (Sometimes later ones are a cover-up, but not so often.) Let your conclusions be tentative, if you must draw any--wait a while and see what else develops.

Yes, I’ve been bitten by that kind of mistake too. It takes practice to reserve judgment.

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“There’s a Bene Gesserit saying,” she said. “You have sayings for everything!” he protested. “You’ll like this one,” she said. “It goes: 'Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.'” From Dune by Frank Herbert

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"Do you read the papers? Of course, you do. But do you read them as I read them? I rather doubt that you have come upon my system. ... I remember once when I lived in the Capital for a month and bought the paper fresh each day. I went wild with love, anger, irritation, frustration; all of the passions boiled in me. I was young. I exploded at everything I saw. But then I saw what I was doing: I was believing what I read. Have you noticed? You believe a paper printed on the very day you buy it? This has happened but only an hour ago, you think! It must be true... So I learned to stand back away and let the paper age and mellow. Back here, in Colonia, I saw the headlines diminish into nothing. The week-old paper - why, you can spit on it, if you wish.” From “And the rock cried out” by Ray Bradbury

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“[John]: 'But I must think it is one or the other.'

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

[John]: 'I don't know that I have ever tried.'

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