Choose to do together

"Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together." (I saw this on Facebook, but it turns out to be a real quotation anyway (Barney Frank).(*) ) Except that there’s a little difference between kids negotiating a 7-player pickup game of softball, and government. Remember what it is?

Back in the late 1980s, before going into the military, I worked for a furniture dealer in Cincinnati, which supplied high-end furnishings throughout the tri-state area. Mostly I worked in the warehouse, but occasionally I was asked to take a delivery truck and run one of the orders out to a customer site. On one of these runs, I had to drive deep into the Kentucky hills, far from the main highways, and as luck would have it, the truck broke down. Remember, in those days, before cell phones, being stranded was a much greater inconvenience that it is today. I had to flag down a passing vehicle, and it was two hours before an old, decrepit pickup truck stopped for me. Getting in the cab, I noticed the driver bore every resemblance to a mountain man: overalls, long beard, floppy hat, the works. But he was friendly, and offered to drive me into the next town to find a telephone.

We drove along the narrow road for some time before the driver said, “Why don’t you reach underneath your seat and get that jug?” Uh-oh, moonshine, I thought, but I did as he asked. Yep, a clear glass jug, maybe half a gallon or so, with a pale yellow liquid filling it. “Now, how’s about you open it up?” he said. I pulled out the cork, and immediately my eyes filled with tears, and I think my eyebrows started to ignite. “Now,” the driver said, “how’s about you take a swig?”

“Oh, I’m much obliged,” I stuttered, “but you know, I’m still officially on the job, so I can’t take a drink –“ The next thing I saw was the gun, pointed at my head. The driver said, “Now, I asked, how’s about you take a drink?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said, and I did. I think I’d rather have been shot in the head! I gasped, I gagged, I did my best to stop heaving, I was in a cold sweat. “Smooth!” I said.

“Well, that’s real nice,” said the driver, handing me the gun. Now, how’s about you hold the gun to my head so I can take a drink?”(**)

If you take the "things we choose to do together" quota at full value, it sounds very familiar: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Kind of by definition…

"We don’t mean it that way!"

Maybe not, but for some reason that’s the way it generally works out. There's always a good reason to oversee those voluntary associations. They can't be trusted, you know--people use them as a cover for badthink. Only when everyone has pure thoughts™ will everyone do good things and we finally achieve our Utopia.

"You know what we mean--we don’t do it the way he did!"

Fortunately, though with some notable exceptions (e.g. Antifa), that's sort of true—we're not seeing many squadristi. But the squadristi are only needed until you get hold of the levers that let you hire and fire and prosecute. When you can get someone fired for this week’s badthink, why bother with inconvenient thugs?

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(*) News on Facebook is marginally more reliable than the Onion's, and vastly less amusing.

(**) Shamelessly cribbed from somebody called "Old RPM Daddy." I read a different version back in the 70's.

Fasting

I grew up thinking that fasting was going without any food, though maybe with a little water, for however long the fast might be. Even when I learned better, it was still a little startling to read that penances of year-long fasts were sometimes assigned.(*)

The Orthodox fasting rules are quite rigorous--even stricter than those of vegans.(**) To try to keep those would require coordination with other folks who also eat here. There's an old rule about accepting hospitality that says that if someone who doesn't know you are fasting offers you food, Jesus' rule about not letting people know about fasting holds, and you should accept. So, if you don't tell anybody, and someone fixes breakfast for you... I suspect that's a bit like lifting weights until you "think you're tired."

I get dizzy and fuzzy after too long without food--and both my travel and my job demand focus. And other dietary constraints apply.

Excuses, excuses.

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From a site on fasting for non-monastics: "Priests, of course, do not have breakfast before serving the Liturgy, and maybe that is why some of our sermons are not as good as they could be."

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(*) From the Canons of Theodore "If a man commits adultery, he is to fast 7 years, 3 days each week on bread and water" Also "If any man steals things of value, if he is a layman, he is to fast 5 years; if a subdeacon, 6 years; if a deacon, 7 years; if a masspriest, 10 years; if a bishop, 12 years." This seems to make Tetzel's wares a little more attractive. (The Canons weren't in use anymore by then, though.)

(**) Is it holiness or forgiveness that vegans seek?

Mediterranean flood

"Once upon a time there was a massive flood across the Mediterranean Sea, an in-pouring of water so huge that it excavated a canyon five kilometres deep and 20 kilometres long, and created a waterfall with a 1.5 kilometre drop."

This was about 5.3 million years ago.

Did this change in Atlantic currents have effects on the climate? I figure that if it refilled in 2 years as the article says, the volume of water moving would have been about 1/2 of the circumpolar current, so this could have been significant, especially if it drained from one direction more than another--Coriolis effect should send some north water down and out into the Atlantic. I'm not sure what effect this would have, though. These days the north-south current there is warm, not cold.

It is way too early to have any bearing on Ice Ages (2.6 million years ago).

Easter

We sang this morning of Jesus' tearing the bars away.

But the bars are far more terrible than any iron rods for isolation--they are bars of dust and dissolution, bars of forgetfulness and loss, bars to turn glory into nothing.

You can imagine someone standing at a tomb and calling back the departed, but imagination fails at the challenge to raise yourself from nothing. That needs someone who can create from nothing--and this is an even bigger task.

Francis

David Warren had a good question: if Scalfari persistently misrepresents Francis, why does Francis keep talking with him?

Maybe they're really good friends, or maybe Francis tries to agree with Scalfari as much as he can. Or maybe Francis likes showing off how sophisticated he can be. Or maybe he fumbles his words like a couple of recent presidents we've had.

We all adjust our conversation to our companions. Well, almost all of us. "Know thy audience" is frequently heard around here.

I'm not sure where to look for an accurate appraisal. Most big media outlets are both hostile and bone ignorant, and the Vatican sometimes speaks with many voices. Maybe the Bee had a scoop.

Fortunately I'm not in a position to say what hell is like.(*) We were admonished that heaven is not something we're able to imagine, and probably hell is likewise not imaginable. C.S. Lewis experimented with some annihilation-ist like stories: talking beasts who fail the judgment in The Last Battle revert to animal, and hell in The Great Divorce is persons' shrinking themselves down into nothing. Different reference points may observe different things. Whatever it may be like, we have it on better authority than Francis' that the place/state is real and not part of our originally planned destiny. I'd avoid close investigation. That didn't stop me from writing my own story...

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(*) We had to read Huis Clos in French class. My experience tells me that Sartre is dead wrong.

Following a quote

I was reading The Victorian Age in Literature, by G. K. Chesterton, and for a change was surprised by a quote that wasn't Chesterton's, but seemed addressed to modern culture. I suppose it was, since there are direct connections from that era to this.

I'd never heard of William Watsony. The part Chesterton quoted is highlighted. Today we call this "authenticity."

I have not paid the world
The evil and the insolent courtesy
Of offering it my baseness for a gift.

And unto such as think all Art is cold,
All music unimpassioned, if it breathe
An ardour not of Eros' lips, and glow
With fire not caught from Aphrodite's breast,

Be it enough to say, that in Man's life
Is room for great emotions unbegot
Of dalliance and embracement, unbegot
Ev'n of the purer nuptials of the soul ;

And one not pale of blood, to human touch
Not tardily responsive, yet may know
A deeper transport and a mightier thrill
Than comes of commerce with mortality.

Just for fun

Have a look at the Bunimovich stadium. Trajectories become relatively random quickly. The animation is fun, and there's a static image about halfway down the page that shows what's going on.

Authenticity in China.. and money

This Aeon article claims that Chinese ideas about original and copy differ substantially from Western notions--that if something is made in the spirit of the first creation, and I gather (perhaps wrongly) with the same materials and tools, it effectively is a new original. It sounds nice and plausible, and it looks like there is a history of this attitude. I don't have the scholarship to confirm or deny, but I think I can claim that the rule Byung-Chul Han proposes isn't universal. (In the process I got sidetracked.)

It certainly didn't apply to paper money -at least not from the point of view of the Emperor, who prescribed execution for copying it (although in eras when the money was badly depreciated and deprecated, the penalty might only be a fine). And if the provenance is culturally important--this belonged to Duke Zhou--I'm not persuaded that a buyer would be as satisfied if the piece were more recent. (The artifact would no doubt still be valuable, if Han is right.)

Read the Aeon article--and the one about paper money is interesting too:

A most original solution to the counterfeiting problem occurred in Sung times after a large shipment of counterfeit money had been seized. During the discussion as to what should be done with the counterfeiters, one court official stated that the current policy of beheading the criminals and destroying their money was a mistake. He proposed instead the following: “If you put the official imperial stamp on the counterfeited paper, it will be just as good as genuine paper. If you punish these men only by tattooing them, and circulate these notes, it is exactly as if you saved each day 300,000 copper cash together with fifty lives.” It is said that the proposition was adopted.

and

I have concluded, therefore, that the representation of only nine coins, or 90 cash per string was deliberate. But how can 900 cash be the same as 1000 cash? The explanation, I believe, lies in the fact that during the Hung-wu reign 900 cash passed for 1000; just as 770 cash represented a string in Sung dynasty times and 800 during the Chin dynasty. In other words the government’s financial arm, the Board of Revenue, must have set the relation of cash coin to the value of a string by decree. Thus the official value of cash in the marketplace would vary from time to time.

why?

When emperor Shin Tsung of the Posterior Chou ascended the throne in 915AD, he was in great need of funds. He seized over 3350 monasteries and then gave orders to melt all Buddhist bronze images found there so that they could be turned into cash. The emperor declared that Buddha himself would raise no objection, having in his lifetime given up so much for mankind. The shortage of money also caused the emperor to send a fleet of junks to Korea to trade silk for copper with which to mint cash coins.

Passion Fruit

or

Well Read, Good and Faithful Servant

I hoped that was what He said, but apparently it wasn't exactly like that.

That's inconvenient.

Oskar Gröning

He died age 94 before he could begin serving his sentence for his role in Auschwitz. He was a bookkeeper. He was sentenced in 2015 to being an accessory to murder of 300,000 Jews, and, his appeals having failed, was about to be imprisoned when he died.

Wikipedia has his story. One might ask why the authorities waited so long to try him. He was charged based on his own testimony--he couldn't stand Holocaust deniers, and told of where he had been and what he had seen. He considered himself relatively innocent--he had never been more than a bookkeeper, and had tried to leave.

Read his story. He's an interesting mix of self-deception and integrity.

Flu

The word is that this year's immunization was only 10% effective. I must be in the 90%. The flu is ended, but a malady lingers on.

Harmonizing?

LSD is 'harmonizing' for the brain — and can change your personality for years, studies find".

???

The study found that taking LSD is “harmonizing” because it helps connect different parts of your brain in new ways while “reorganizing” it. The effects were temporary, but Newsweek reports that it’s a positive sign for people with some psychological conditions.

Wait, I thought they just said "for years." There's more...

And some in the tech industry have started to take LSD in small amounts to increase their productivity.

...

“I had an epic time," he told Rolling Stone after one day at work. “I was making a lot of sales, talking to a lot of people, finding solutions to their technical problems.”

Actually, that might explain some things happening in software recently...

But onward--the actual paper is Connectome-harmonic decomposition of human brain activity reveals dynamical repertoire re-organization under LSD The first thing that jumps to mind is "what in the world is connectome-harmonic decomposition?"

I'm glad you asked. Basically it is just a harmonic analysis of brain surface electrical patterns. Despite what they claim in the text, I don't see that the various harmonic patters bear necessary resemblance to conectivity--they appear to just be the spherical harmonics mapped onto a brain instead of a sphere. (And the text bears that out--this models the surface only. Other tools are supposed to address inner workings--I think.) The other examples plotted do not all fill me with confidence: e.g. the "mammal-skin"-shaped plates were supposed to show something significant? Hint: in a real mammal one boundary condition on the skin is that it wraps around.

This quote jumped out at me:

Taken together, these results suggest that the visual, somato-motor, and limbic, as well as the default mode network, are well predicted by individual connectome harmonics of a narrow frequency range, whereas the higher cognitive networks rely on a broader frequency range of connectome harmonics distributed over the spatial spectrum.

Or in English: the network activity for several brain functions can be predicted using only a few frequencies and harmonic patterns. That's a lot stronger than I think they can claim. Their measurement of network activity may involve only a few frequencies, but that's not the same as network activity as a whole.

One well known problem with using spherical harmonic decomposition of a pattern is that measurement uncertainties (and any sorts of gaps in the measurement coverage) make the higher frequency harmonics pretty meaningless. Been there, done that, got nothing.

So, maybe there's something to look at, but I'd be very careful about drawing conclusions.

Oh, yes, where did that "harmonizing" come in? The only use of the word in the paper is in the name of an ethics committee.

My guess is that it either comes from the vivid imagination of the science reporter, or a translation problem in talking with the Spanish researchers.

Octopus

I've had a plate of the small ones a few times. They're OK, but quite a long way from being my go-to dish. My sense was similar to this Slate writer's: "Here is food." Except he likes them better.

That article is interesting--he reports on a claim that the famous escape artist Inky didn't actually escape. And some of the other things you've heard...

In spite of their purported brilliance, the study found that octopuses did not learn to do the task any better over time. (They’re slow learners in other contexts, too.) And what about the classic research from the early 1990s, which suggested an octopus could learn to choose a colored ball just by watching other octopuses? That behavior, which helped make the octopus an “honorary vertebrate” for the purposes of British law, isn’t so extraordinary, even for invertebrates. Bumblebees, for example, can learn to choose between green and orange flowers after watching other bumblebees. Yet no one ever calls the bee “the genius of the garden.”

I guess it’s easy to write off bumblebees, since they seem so much the same. The octopus, on the other hand, delights us with its special talents and funny personality. We hear Inky was “a curious boy,” that Otto was prone to getting bored, that Ozy was a whiz with jars, that Paul would sometimes share his thoughts on soccer games. But this focus on the octopus’s temperament and character might also be a canard. While research published in the early 1990s found some hints that octopuses might have personalities, their patterns of behavior didn’t even seem to hold across the two weeks of the study. A more recent paper, out in 2010, suggested an octopus doesn’t have an overarching disposition. (There is better, formal evidence for personality in cuttlefish and squid.)

Ahh, reproducibility... Hank was a fun cartoon character, though.

Judgementalism

AVI posted recently some thoughts about judgmentalism. I mulled over responses, and then realized that (as usual) Chesterton said it better.

"Modern theory, as a whole, is rather encouraging egoism. But we need not be alarmed about that. Modern practice, being exactly like ancient practice, is still heartily discouraging it. The man with the strong magnetic personality is still the man whom those who know him best desire most warmly to kick out of the club. The man in a really acute stage of self-realisation is a no more pleasing object in the club than in the pub."

There's a natural revulsion against the mere man who presumes to know my thoughts and judge my actions. Especially when the touchstone du jour puts the thumb on the scales.

Unexpected side effects

Most of the driveways in our neighborhood are asphalt, in various states of maintenance. Ours was in pretty bad shape when we sprang for a concrete replacement a few years ago. It made shoveling the driveway much easier, though sometimes a tad more slippery than the rough asphalt had been.

I just looked out the window to see several kids from nearby drawing on the driveway with chalk. We've no objections, of course, but I wondered why ours would be popular, since we don't have kids that age at home anymore.

Concrete makes a better canvas for chalk art. I'd go out and look at what they drew, but the flu has me down.

Underwater archaelogy

"Archaeologists have uncovered a Native American burial site dating back 7,000 years off the coast of Florida."

I've been hoping to hear of such things for a long time, but didn't think them likely. Stand on the seashore and watch the waves, and then come back the next day and see how wave action tore things up. But apparently this site was in a peat pond, and was buried naturally before the ocean levels rose, and so was partly protected from the breakers.

BBC and eggs

Liberia has given a leading foreign investment firm 72 hours to pay a \$25,000 fine for hiking the price of chicken eggs.

According Liberia's Daily Observer newspaper, Fouani Brothers Corporation raised the prices of eggs from \$35.89 per carton of 360 eggs to \$70 per carton.

Let's see. The original price, per BBC, was 10 cents an egg in bulk. For imported eggs that's spectacularly cheap--comparable to what we pay here. I have a little trouble believing that number.

Try another source: Numbeo site on the cost of living says eggs are (today--when you look at it it may differ) \$3.70/dozen (480 LD). (\$6.25 for a gallon of milk)

A man who has one watch knows what time it is...

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(*) No, I don't know whether this is the 12-egg carton or a 24-egg carton.

George Ott

I first met George Ott when I came to work at UW in 85. He was friendly, helpful, and challenging--he made sure anything was thought out before it was started--before it was planned. He was always busy, and always had time. He told me of his youthful rocketry--he and a friend built zinc/sulfur rockets, with a launch pit and a fortified control center. (We just used our own mix of black powder and a fuse.) He built a cabin in a lake resort area, and family and friends (and sometimes boy scout troops) would visit the place during the summer--the rule was (since the cabin was never completely finished) that you did something for maintenance or construction. He built an air pump system so his kids could go diving in the lake!

His family took vacations near power generators--but he never got to see the Aswan Dam, which was on his bucket list. He took a boy scout troop to Alaska, another to the Grand Canyon, and another to see the polar bear migration.

At the funeral we heard a lot about how he'd chaired the building and grounds committee for his church since there were dinosaurs on the earth, and was the only one who understood why the building had 5 furnaces. He was also the go-to person for building questions (he volunteered for Habitat for Humanity)--my last conversation with him was about the Tiny House construction materials and how durable they were.

It was fun talking with him and working with him. I once told him this was probably my favorite scene from movies, and it seems to fit him.

Persuasion

"and there was nothing which he did not promise, being very urgent in his request, until at last he persuaded them: for it would seem that it is easier to deceive many than one, seeing that, though he did not prove able to deceive Cleomenes the Lacedemonian by himself, yet he did this to thirty thousand Athenians"

Some things don't change much.

Sometimes crowds get it right. We've a large industry devoted to making sure they don't.

Bitcoin

Lubos Motl takes an interesting approach to thinking about Bitcoins: think of them as stock in a company that doesn't pay any dividends. Or hold any assets.

Born Free

The song from "Born Free" came back to me again this evening. I haven't heard it (or mentally replayed it) in decades. It is a great anthem to freedom--sort of.

Elsa was trained to return to the wild, and when she was released her scope for roaming was vastly increased--in that sense she was free. But in another sense she still wasn't. Her appetites drove her, and what choice had she in that? I have not quite puzzled it out completely, but I suspect, with Lewis, that the pet cat may be more free than the wild one, even though it superficially labors under more restraints.

"As free as the grass grows" It sounded nice, and I never bothered to think about exactly what that might mean. "Stay free where no walls divide you" Sounds good, but it doesn't seem to make sense, unless somehow I'm on both sides of the wall. Even "born free" is a little odd when you think about it. We're born dependent, not able to exercise much freedom. We're born into families, with obligations we did not ask for. What kind of freedom were we celebrating here?

It sounded good and noble, and we didn't think about it much. I wonder if, at that age, I would have sat still for a more rigorous discussion of what freedom was. I read Plato, but I didn't do Plato--I didn't try on my own or with others to puzzle such things out. Do you need more adult experience, or can youngsters handle such questions? (If said youngster is aching to get back to a video game, probably not.)

Also from Eliot's Choruses

О Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and
  impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and
  desperately wicked.

Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite and Geshem
  the Arabian: were doubtless men of public spirit and zeal.

Preserve me from the enemy who has something to gain: and
  from the friend who has something to lose.

Remembering the words of Nehemiah the Prophet: "The trowel
  in hand, and the gun rather loose in the holster." 

Armed teachers

The idea is back in the news.

Let's not.

True, there are schools where I wouldn't care to go teach without a gun and a buddy handy. But curiously enough nobody seems to be talking about those classrooms.

Have you watched teachers at work? They are concentrating on things relevant to the lesson and to class management. If you want a guard, get a dedicated guard.

Although even a guard may not be very useful.

Think about it: if teachers were armed, the likelihood of a weapon going loose thanks to carelessness or pickpocket-ry goes through the roof. Can you remember what it was like at those ages, and imagine what a fascinating challenge it would be to try to swipe the teacher's pistol(*)? With Billy going OOC in one corner and Jennifer melting down in another, and the teacher too distracted to notice the rest of you?

Do I have a solution to the problem? Which problem? Mass shootings are rare; gang fights and deaths on the way to and from school are much more common. I don't have easy solutions to that. Cruz had red flags sticking out all over (I gather most of the shooters did, though not to this extent), but ... I've heard that discipline policies are applied unevenly to avoid the horrifying sin of "disparate impact." Maybe that played a role. Maybe nobody wanted to take responsibility. I'll wait a while for a fuller report. If we get one, of course. Since a lot of his record accumulated when he was a minor, maybe there'll be some claims about privacy to justify circling the wagons. Notice how we hear virtually nothing about the Las Vegas shooting? (The best explanation I've heard is that the really big money is having lawyers slowly dredge through and dispute every detail to make sure the hotel doesn't get sued to bits.)

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(*) "Smart guns" sound pretty useless in a pinch. And if the weapon is easy to get at it is easier to steal or have fall out; and if it is hard to get at it won't be nearly as much use when you need it. And seriously--teachers already have in-service training about every fad under the sun; I don't think they'd be happy with mandatory bi-weekly firearms practice.

Trying to do good?

Grim's Hall links to a review comparing popular political philosophy and Christianity, noting the same thing I've observed before--for many people the state and politics are their religion.

I'm looking at the different ways people tried to be good. Billy Graham tried to tell good news about God, and concentrated on personal integrity--the famous "Pence Rule" and making sure he never managed the money or was paid outlandishly (unfortunately 1 Samuel 8:5 applies). He tried to concentrate on just one thing.

"Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner drank a glass of chocolate milk to demonstrate his belief in diversity." "It was one of two demonstrations at the event, both of which received ovations from the crowd.") True, it wasn't his idea, but he was applauded for a symbol of "diversity," which is not a good in itself but potentially a means to a good--or to disaster, depending on whether people manage to keep their eyes on the real prize or not.

To be fair, the governor's humiliation is just the first thing that appeared--it's no trick to find plenty of other posturing about "do X and we will all be happy," when X is only tenuously related to Y which might, with proper guidance, produce some happiness. But when the moral center of the universe is the state, these weak chains of reasoning get weighted with transcendental meaning.

"They constantly try to escape. From the darkness outside and within. By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good."

California Stop

When I went to UCLA some years back, the taxi took us from the airport to UCLA by taking back roads and not spending much time at stop signs.

I gather the rolling stop is part of the informal rules of the road there, though the link above suggests that other places indulge too. Enough of us obey stop signs around here to make the exceptions stand out--until the intersection gets icy. Then the more experienced drivers take it slow, but never quite stop. It is hard to get started again. I suppose that's technically illegal, but it helps keep driving safe.

Yes, the road to the stop sign is uphill. How'd you guess?

Vices

AVI has an interesting post up asking what gods are worshipped through the violations of the Ten Commandments.

Off and on I've been exploring a somewhat different question--What is the power behind the seven deadly sins; not as in one-offs but as part of your life?

I'm not such a staring fool as to believe that ignorance is the root of all sin, and that with education we could all be righteous. On the contrary, one of the turning points in my becoming a Christian was discovering a hunger for destruction for the sake of destruction. I see enough evidence around me to suggest that this is a universal trait.

But something needs to feed a vice. Glutton is a vice, and presumably so would gnawing gravel if people were apt to do that. That's my question: What makes people apt to the one and not to the other?

Some of the vices (lust, gluttony) are fueled by pleasure. Got it. What's the pleasure in envy? In some ways that's like gnawing gravel!

I gather that Maslow's pyramid puts morality in the top of the hierarchy of needs, but I think this need to be moral permeates the rest.

I wrote a few years ago that sex wasn't just a pleasure, but could mimic a number of the gifts of the Spirit--make us seem holier than we are.

One plausible candidate to fuel envy is a love of justice, although very restricted in scope. "I'm as good as he (and in some senses that is true!), so why does he have the money or the respect or Jesse's girl and I don't?" It ain't fair. Twisted love of justice could power wrath too.

Gluttony and sloth seem related in a focus on comfort, but I'm not seeing any obvious nobler fuels than pleasure--though sloth might also be related to cowardice or despair. And gluttony in the form of eating too daintily can tie in with pride, too.

Greed: we want recognition for our contributions. (Or maybe we're afraid, or there's a hunger in the soul that we can't fill no matter how much stuff we pile in there, but we persevere. Perseverance can be a good thing, can't it?)

Pride: I'm made in the image of God; I'm a co-creator; I'm big stuff. I'm not saying I'm the center of the universe, but wherever I go, there I am. It really is hard to get past that, isn't it?

What else can we look at? Despair, acedia, cowardice... Maybe acedia is what's left when all the power of virtues drain away.

---

Warwick Allison meant it as a joke, but

Then	Now
Pride	Self Esteem
Anger	Assertiveness
Envy	Appreciation
Greed	Enterprise
Lust	Libido
Gluttony	Appetite
Sloth	Stress Management

HbA1c

The NYT linked to a study finding mental decline correlated with high blood sugar levels in people over 60. I really really like error bars on plots, but this is what they want us to see:

BTW, it looks like what was originally dotted lines turned into grey lines instead. Pre-diabetes--not too much additional effect, but diabetes was noticeable. Not disastrous, but noticeable. Given how high some of the A1c levels got, I'd have expected maybe a little more effect. (I'm not sure I understand their translations from mmol/mol to % on page 4.)

Chicxulub vs Deccan

I have wondered for a while if Chicxulub might have triggered the Deccan Flats eruptions. Two big events happened at a similar time, and we had arguments over which did in the dinos. Chics was winning the debate, but why not have both?

One new proposal suggests that there might be a relationship, and in addition something I didn't think about at all:

The asteroid also appears to have sent ripples through Earth's tectonic plates, which spread out through the oceans and caused tens of thousands of miles of underwater volcanic ridges to spew magma. The authors describe those eruptions as "on par with the largest eruptive events in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, including the Deccan Traps."

Part of the debate about what really killed the dinosaurs has to do with the interplay between the asteroid impact and the Deccan Traps eruptions. The most up-to-date understanding suggests the Deccan Traps eruptions began before the Chicxulub impact. But they also seem to have gotten much more active in the time after the asteroid hit.

Progress

Yard Sale of the Mind has and cites some interesting thoughts on what it is and whether we have it.

Asymmetry

One of the party became ill on our trip to the Field Museum, and we turned back at Belvidere. It cost \$1.90 to get into Illinois, but \$6.00 to escape. (\$1.10 to turn around, then \$3 and \$1.9 again) Draw your own conclusions.

Trench warfare

I had not heard about these lessons from the Russo-Japanese War before. The obvious lesson was wrong.

From whence the numbers?

The story about student protests at the University of Liberia had a few curious features. The claim was that 10,000 would-be students paid fees to apply, but that Dr. Weeks, president of the university, said only 2,000 were going to be allowed to register. It looks like the process was so slow that only 2,000 were registered by the deadline, possibly slowed by people looking for a dash. At any rate, 8,000 students wanted to register, or at least get their fees back. They claim that not getting a university education is unconstitutional(*)

The first article is a little over-the-top ("In other countries or other universities students sit in their bed rooms to register."), but yes, facilities aren't that good and registering, much less getting reimbursed, can be quite difficult.(**)

The story also suggests that Weeks backed down under pressure, and is opening registration--but doesn't make it clear whether this is for some of the 2,000 who hadn't finished the process or for the 8,000. Or if this is going to be a "go slow" process. The UL's budget is \$16 million (some from aid sources)--Liberia is not rich. Tuition is nominal: \$0.80/credit, though this doesn't include fees, and for some families even this can be a hardship. Tuition makes up about 1% of the school's budget.

Who is applying? The spring entrance exam passed 1,661 out of 7,735, and the fall exam passed 1,036 out of 5,243. Unless my calculator is badly mistaken, that suggests an entering class of no more than 2,697, not 10,000.

2000 was the size of November's graduating class.

I think somebody is pulling numbers out of the air.

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(*)"Article 6:
The Republic shall, because of the vital role assigned to the individual citizen under this Constitution for the social, economic and political well being of Liberia, provide equal access to educational opportunities and facilities for all citizens to the extent of available resources. Emphasis shall be placed on the mass education of the Liberian people and the elimination of illiteracy."

The resources aren't there, and the emphasis is on "mass education:" I don't think the students have a solid case. OTOH, the "equal access" doesn't seem to be qualified by whether or not the student is able to master the work--sloppy drafting here.

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(**) I've seen the library. I offered to organize a donation of physics/math books, but the only reply was deeply unserious (leave piles of books at the airport for people to pack into their luggage and bring? really?).

Microlensing planets

The image with the article is deceptive:. It shows blobs around a center, and you want to hope, "are those actual images of extragalactic planets?" Unfortunately, no--those are images of quasars, and the microlensing effects not the image but the spectrum of light:

We show that a population of unbound planets between stars with masses ranging from Moon to Jupiter masses is needed to explain the frequent Fe Kα line energy shifts observed in the gravitationally lensed quasar RXJ 1131–1231 at a lens redshift of z = 0.295 or 3.8 billion lt-yr away. We constrain the planet mass-fraction to be larger than 0.0001 of the halo mass, which is equivalent to 2000 objects ranging from Moon to Jupiter mass per main-sequence star.

To make up for that disappointment, notice the word "unbound" in the quote above. They think they have detected, though not seen, a multitude of planets between stars. REAL planets.

Dinkum

In looking up a daughter's question, I found The story of Dinkum. Executive summary: it looks like it derives from Lincolnshire or Derbyshire. The folk etymologies are fun, though.

Do you often feel like cocky on the biscuit tin?

Theory

Dreams

I got to thinking about one of those recurring dreams this morning--the one where I'm lost in a strange city. In the dreams, I'm not trying to get home. I'm trying to find my "home away from home," the place where I'm stationed and supposed to be.

Maybe thinking of home would be too real, and things that are too real don't work in that type of dreaming (unlike the vividly near-real ones that leave you wondering for a few moments how you are ever going to get yourself out of trouble).

Or maybe the dreams are a good description.

Forgetting books

Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read

Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.

and

"Reading is a nuanced word," she writes, "but the most common kind of reading is likely reading as consumption: where we read, especially on the internet, merely to acquire information. Information that stands no chance of becoming knowledge unless it 'sticks.'"

I've had the experience of reading a book, understanding the details and the mechanisms and the argument, and then after a while had it drift out of mind. (I looked up an old blog post. It was next to a review of a book that I barely remember.) Nevertheless, for me the book doesn't go entirely away. The residuum, in my mind at least, is the connections. I don't remember names very well, but I remember principles and mechanisms. Why did the Spanish Armada fail? I don't recall the details, but do recall some of the reasons.

That can be dangerous if the books are misleading. If all you have left is the impressions, and whatever backed them up is gone, you have unsupported confidence, with no pesky details to be contradicted. You are persuaded that the CIA killed JFK, but you can't think of a single reason why--you just know that they did.

So how do you make it stick? One approach is to read (or watch) slower--not binge-watching. Implicit in one of their descriptions is that you take the time to make notes and ask questions about or of the work.

BTW, it takes many years for me to forget enough to re-read most mystery novels--unless there's some additional attraction in the story that keeps me going even when I know the outcome.

Ella's

For those who remember Madison, Ella's Deli closed today. It was a great place to bring kids. In season, there was a merry-go-round ride outside (and a miniature of it on display inside), and every portion of the ceiling and quite a bit of the walls was devoted to toys--mostly moving, very many vintage. The tables with glass tops had small toys under glass--a different theme for each table. the picture here doesn't do justice to how full it was of attractions, or how animated it was.

Since the kids are grown, we haven't been back in a long time. The owners want to retire, and nobody has stepped up to buy the place. Yet. Maybe there are overdue repairs that scared off buyers, or maybe they're playing chicken, or maybe it is just fiendishly expensive to keep everything maintained. The place turns up on travel guides, but google only turned up 30,000 references. Odd.

This link is from the Wayback Machine, so it may keep for a little longer than the original web page.

Fish allergy

In the process of doing a little research about fish allergies, I ran across this unpleasant little surprise: "Also, its potency as a food allergen was shown in a case report of severe anaphylaxis upon ingestion of sweets containing several grams of fish gelatin." and "Fish gelatin is commonly used in food and pharmaceutical products replacing mammalian gelatins."

Unfortunately, it looks like there hasn't been a lot of progress in trying to prevent/mitigate fish allergies.

And now for something completely different

Don't try this at home.

I'd always wondered... It's about what you expect.

Dogs and Babies

A friend said this morning that one wonderful thing about dogs was that you always knew what would delight them.

True. We don't have a dog, but those I've known don’t seem to tire of going out in the morning to run, or out to fetch in the afternoon. Each time is fresh.

Babies are like that too. They don’t get jaded nearly as easily as us old and sinful sorts. It takes time to develop an attitude of ingratitude.

For an adult, this moment connects with the memories of other moments, so we're not "in the moment" in exactly the same way as a baby. But if we can enjoy the gift of another beautiful sunset, remembering other gifts before, and not pick flaws, we have one more bright stone in the mosaic. If not: "the view from the Sears Tower was better" makes this moment worth less. (*)

Our more typical approach is to go looking for something new, to try to get the old sense of wonder and refreshment. Adventure and curiosity are good, but they don't take the place of enjoying what you have.

It is almost always fun to be around someone who really enjoys what they’re doing and seeing. Unless, perhaps, what they're doing is watching you chase your hat down the sidewalk. Even then, sometimes the giggles from the sidelines help.

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... we try to imitate the joy of gratitude with the pleasure of novelty ...

(*) On the other hand, a sunset is better watched together than alone, and "I wish she could see this" is a good kind of "I wish this were better."

Songs in translation again

The Russian Dorogoi dlinnoyu is the original, and Those Were the Days the translation. Since I don't speak Russian, I miss the poetry, but for a change, I like the sound of the translation better. The Russian sounds like stuffing a quart of frogs into a pint jar.

The translation into French (words here) of the English works pretty well, and seems faithful to the mood. I suppose French is a little more supple tool to translate into.

I'd not realized that Aguas de Março was the end of the warm season in Brazil, so Waters of March means something much different in the USA. Winter's coming vs winter's over. He modified the English lyrics to accommodate that...

Drugs

"German troops did not conquer Poland and Czechoslovakia thanks to a pill called Pervitin;" nevertheless it may have played a role. About Blitzed, from the LA Review of Books.

It was almost as easy to obtain after the war.

I wonder what social effects were associated with widespread use of meth. Alcohol, khat, marijuana, meth... Thought experiment: these have different psychological effects when you abuse them; if even only 10% of the population abuses one, that should have some cultural effects--even if only in stereotypes and expectations, but surely in things like the associations you have with ideal recreations. That would be very hard to tease out of other effects. Availability depends on where you are, and your neighboring cultures influence your culture too. And your culture will effect what drugs are more popular. You probably can't find causation.

Leaven

Mark 8:15 "And He was giving orders to them, saying, "Watch out! Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.""

The leaven of the Pharisees I think we know about: the sense that our works or our position make us holier that other people. The effect isn't limited to Christians or Jews, I can easily name atheists who are holier-than-thou--for their definition of holy. It is an easy sense to acquire--we have to try to be holy, and be alert about problems, and you notice pretty quickly that some people aren't.

I looked around for what people though the leaven of Herod might be.

Mark 6:20 "Herod was afraid of John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he kept him safe. And when he heard him, he was very perplexed; but he used to enjoy listening to him."

Luke 23:8 "Now Herod was very glad when he saw Jesus; for he had wanted to see Him for a long time, because he had been hearing about Him and was hoping to see some sign performed by Him." (Jesus refused to say a word to him.)

Ezekiel 33:32 "Behold, you are to them like a sensual song by one who has a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument; for they hear your words but they do not practice them."

Jesus referred to Herod as a fox, and I gather that the fox was not a symbol of cunning in that place and era. One thinks of Laodacea.

The descriptions aren't very detailed, but I get the impression of a man who liked to hear the word of God. Maybe even loved it, but didn't love it enough to do anything about it.

So, maybe He meant the leaven of connoisseur-ship?

Hawaii

Let me guess: The alert was not an accident.

I'm assuming that the systems and procedures have been in place since the 60's. If the system were that subject to false alarms, we'd have had a few other alerts by now. If the system is reliable, then the probability is high that this was deliberate. Whodunit?

1. Some Hawaiian official, trying to make a point? Unlikely; it would require amazing stupidity not to realize that people could get hurt, and that this would be at best career-ending and more likely incarceration-beginning. (Hmm. We hear about people like that regularly...)
2. China or NKorea hacking the system, probing to see what our response is like? If so, then they trust Trump a lot--that's kind of risky business.
3. Anonymous or a script kiddie with a malicious streak? I'd vote for this one. I can very easily believe that the Hawaii government computer/network security is no good.

On the other hand, maybe Hawaii was trying to re-implement the old systems, and has a terrible test environment. That's really easy to believe too.

UPDATE: The story now is that during a shift change someone pushed the wrong button. From the rest of the story I get the impression that they hadn't been doing this very long. So, not software, but a klutzy system with no cross-checks. It was the second option, and they were trying to resurrect the system rather than re-implement it.

Speaking of the obvious

Proverbs 13:20 says roughly that you should hang out with the wise, and that way you will become wise.

Turn that on its head. Why should the wise want to hang out with you?

Maybe because wanting wisdom is already a part of wisdom, and those who hunger and thirst (and ask God) for it are the ones who get filled with it. The other "wise" recognize a kindred spirit even in a beginner, and they know how far they are from wisdom themselves.

Or maybe because you're persistent.

Hypatia

The story on the hypatia meteorite surprised me. (full paper here)

A meteorite picked up in Egypt (in the Libyan Desert Glass area) contains an unusual amount of carbon, and some odd chemicals (silver iodine phosphide), and metallic aluminum.

I'm trying to imagine just how such a thing would form. If stuff is condensing out of a cold cloud, I can imagine how you could get metallic crystals of aluminum, but if the cloud components are reactive enough to produce iodine compounds, why didn't the iodine react with the aluminum too? The C13 balance suggests that it isn't some kind of terrestrial artifact.

Polygamy

There's an interesting take on polygamy in The Economist. The thesis is that polygamy spurs inequality and war in societies that have a lot of it. If the numbers are accurate, Guinea's situation is scary: 50% of women are part of polygamous households. Because the population is growing, that doesn't mean 50% of men will never marry, but the rate of never-marrying will still be very high. (The quote below is therefore not completely accurate.)

By contrast, every time a rich man takes an extra wife, another poor man must remain single. If the richest and most powerful 10% of men have, say, four wives each, the bottom 30% of men cannot marry. Young men will take desperate measures to avoid this state.

This is one of the reasons why the Arab Spring erupted, why the jihadists of Boko Haram and Islamic State were able to conquer swathes of Nigeria, Iraq and Syria, and why the polygamous parts of Indonesia and Haiti are so turbulent. Polygamous societies are bloodier, more likely to invade their neighbours and more prone to collapse than others are. The taking of multiple wives is a feature of life in all of the 20 most unstable countries on the Fragile States Index compiled by the Fund for Peace, an NGO

and

By increasing the bride price, polygamy tends to raise the age at which young men get married; it takes a long time to save enough money. At the same time, it lowers the age at which women get married. All but the wealthiest families need to "sell" their daughters before they can afford to "buy" wives for their sons; they also want the wives they shell out for to be young and fertile. In South Sudan "a girl is called an old lady at age 20 because she cannot bear many children after that," a local man told Marc Sommers of Boston University and Stephanie Schwartz of Columbia University. A tribal elder spelled out the maths of the situation. "When you have 10 daughters, each one will give you 30 cows, and they are all for [the father]. So then you have 300 cows." If a patriarch sells his daughters at 15 and does not let his sons marry until they are 30, he has 15 years to enjoy the returns on the assets he gained from brideprice. That’s a lot of milk.

I wonder what the rates are elsewhere: for example, China. Another article claims In 19th-century China, where as many as 25 percent of men were unable to marry, "these young men became natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia," which nearly toppled the government. In what is now Taiwan, unattached males fomented regular revolts and became "entrepreneurs of violence."

(Since polygamy is almost entirely polygyny, I use the more familiar blanket term.)

The Economist article touches briefly on how women in polygamous marriages fare (and, for fairness, cites defenders), and you can draw your own conclusions, but other sources agree that the answer is: very often badly. A book (name eludes me) about women in Chinese households was particularly grim: the mother-in-law or the chief wife could abuse the rest, and in the book that was quite common. Statistics may be a bit hard to come by, though--the book was anecdotal, with all that implies.

Genesis and Samuel describe a few polygamous families--I don't recall any that seemed happy.

Polygamy seems to be becoming a hot topic recently, though--I gather there was even a TV series that critics said we should learn from.

How about we don't go there? Yes, no doubt it is terribly unfair to the already-married who try to come here to live. Still, no.

Temperatures

This is from last week. It got a little cool around here, and the furnace exhaust decorated everything handy. You can't quite see the icicle hanging from the pipe.

Goose

Somewhere along I-74 east of Urbana there must be some open water, despite the cold. It's quite a bit south for Fermilab's cooling ponds, and a bit far east for the Clinton Power Station. There was a solitary Canada goose flying over the highway, presumably looking for a place to land and eat. Must have missed the memo about migration...

Cancer in animals

It says here that 1 in 2 in the UK will get some form of cancer during their lifetime, and from the graph it looks like almost all of that is post-60 years old.

It says here that 1 in 2 dogs over 10 years old will have cancer of some kind (varies wildly by breed--smaller have much lower rates).

I'm trying to figure out how to compare those numbers. Two factors that come to mind are 1) senescence of the system as a whole and 2) the number of cell divisions that have taken place (more means more random accumulated errors). The replication rate varies a lot in humans depending on what kind of cell you're talking about--and since the faster replicating ones aren't necessarily the ones that have the most frequent cancers, I suspect that's not the biggest factor. I didn't find anything about cell division rates in dogs that I could use to compare with humans, but it probably doesn't matter anyway.

So maybe 10 dog years are like 60 human years, and the system isn't able to smack down failures as well? (On average--I know young ones can get cancer too.) Does the cancer rate with age normalized to the lifetime follow the same sort of trend with various breeds, or with other animals? Does anybody know?

Happy New Year!

We decided to try New Years's Resolutions this time, but with a slight twist--you assign one from a list to someone else. For example, "I will write a sonnet on chicken farming," "I will rewrite a verse from We Three Kings to be grammatical, singable, and retain the meaning," "I will prepare and eat a chocolate-covered dill pickle," "I will sing the Star Spangled Banner backwards," and so on.

We all contributed to the list, too.

I have some writing to do.

Chronicles of Matthew Paris

The edition I have only goes up through 1250, where he lays down his pen. And later picks it up for another 9 years.

Early on he describes a painting of Christ in Majesty with the Church and Synagogue. Near the end he describes Henry III's extortion of money from the Jews, whom he accused of fraud--to Matthew's satisfaction but modern suspicion.

In the last year or two he describes wild weather, earthquakes, and tsunamis, and he describes the destruction of the 7'th Crusade. (St. Louis was unable to keep the competing egos in check, didn't have good planning or support, and seriously overreached.) Some people "took the cross" in order to collect donations, but without any serious intention of going to fight.

This bit of description has an interesting assumption built into it... Matthew is being a bit snarky.

The above-mentioned special clerk of the lord king, whose wealth attained to episcopal heights ...

An empty church is one without a priest or bishop to receive the income from it, and the king, except when there was a special exemption, had veto power over who got appointed. Unless he decided to ignore the exemption. And Innocent IV never had enough money either, and any appointments or other requests had to be well-lubricated. Quite a bit of the chronicles describe one or the other kind of novel extortion and waste. Innocent and Frederick were at war, and fortunes of war meant that large amounts of extorted money wound up lost.

He doesn't describe traditional exactions, unfortunately.

This was an era in which the barons fought the crown from time to time, and we, from the perspective of the heirs of the winners, think the dominance of the crown was the right goal--centralize the rule of law. But at the time, it wasn't quite so obvious, and the crown was exceedingly arbitrary--and stupid. Some themes seem quite familiar: in order to maintain a reputation for generosity to the poor, despite his lack of liquidity, Henry III visited London and told Londoners that their traditional New Years' presents would be given to him this year.

Random notes

Walgreens has Marvel Fantastic Four Body Wash for sale. I suppose the target group is young kids, though I wasn't aware that young comic fans went in for body wash in a big way. What does this team's endorsement convey to an adult? Will you have skin that looks like Thing or that feels like Human Torch?

Eldest Son told me that one of the fragmentary plays from ancient Greece had been "completed" by a modern writer. I asked him if this qualified as "fan fiction." He said he'd already thought of that, and asked for a verdict on the matter from the Protectors of the Plot Continuum. (They said it was a middle ground; probably have to look at it.) I gather from him that reworkings of old plays are often seriously anachronistic.

The Milwaukee Public Museum had an exhibit on weapons, and one of the last displays held a wheel-lock pistol with 2 wheels on one barrel. I didn't remember hearing of such a Roman-candle-esque device, but there it was, and it shows up in the history of firearms. I wonder how often the first charge over-compressed and went off spontaneously after the outer charge was fired.

Weah

It looks like George Weah will be the next Liberian president. He'll be called a footballer (or soccer player), and there'll probably be some obsolete mention of his lack of formal education (he got a business degree from DeVry U in Florida(*) in 2011). But if I read the numbers right, he's been in politics for a dozen years now--not quite as long as his football career, but comparable.

It looks as though 60% wanted Weah rather than the existing Vice President Boakai. There have been charges of nepotism and corruption for several years aimed at Ellen and Boakai--possibly they stuck and people wanted a clean house. Maybe 12 years in politics honed Weah's skills a bit. Maybe there aren't enough Kissi and related tribes for Boakai to match the Kru and supporting tribes for Weah.

Or all of the above to some degree. Pretty much all the information I get is filtered by the Liberian media or through fairly well-off Liberians in the US.

Both men had joined the Poro : Weah in 2005 and Boakai in 2017 (or very early in life if a spokesman told the truth). That's an aspect of the Liberian political scene that I have no way of analyzing. Even if I were on the scene in Liberia, the Poro is a secret society. How do the leaders of the Poro exert influence and for what purposes? No clue.

Weah converted from Christianity to Islam, and then back again, if Wikipedia may be believed. I'm not sure what to make of that, either.

It looks like a simple headline--Former footballer elected President--but things are much more curious when you look closer.

At any rate, I wish him and Liberia the best. He'll have an interesting term--the UN will probably withdraw its peacekeeping troops during his tenure, and that will have an unhappy effect on the economy. For which he'll probably be blamed. It's traditional.

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(*) It is in the top 35% of business programs in the US.

The photo of him in the first link shows microphones labled "UNMIL Radio." I didn't realize that the UN military ran a radio station. I'm really out of the loop...

Love of things

Faithful stuffed rabbit
No longer shares his dreaming
His baby love grew

But it was real love. Though the rabbit could not love him back, it had been a token of love for him, and so in a way it did, and it was fitting that he find it lovable too. And not just of our love, but of the love of the One who planned that the things of the world serve as instruments of love.

A blanket, meant to comfort, stands in for deeper comfort in a new role as companion. I smiled, and tried to remember--there are pictures, after all...

Bunny is worn. He was set aside, and inherited for a while by his sister in the same role, and set aside again. But love is never lost to God.

Why Bethlehem

The prim live in a world of illusion. Not just the prim; many of the comfortable and the confident too.

Farrar said

Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works.

O Holy Night

I wrote before that you could usually tell which version of a song was the original language, although sometimes the results were equally good.

I heard a little history of O Holy Night the other day, and decided to look up the French Minuit, chrétiens. "Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight" did a superlative translation: it is almost seamless, and "a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices" is a marvelously evocative line. And Cappeau did wonders in the original.

The US wiki says "the parish priest asked Cappeau, a native of the town, to write a Christmas poem, even though the latter never showed any interest in religion, and Cappeau obliged." The French wiki says "Placide Cappeau, un négociant en vin qui était républicain, socialiste et anticlérical, prétendit lui-même l'avoir écrit ... dans la diligence qui le conduisait à Paris ..." (Placide Cappeau, a wine merchant who was republican, socialist, and anti-clerical, claimed to have written it on a trip to Paris) and goes on to explain the actual shared credit and where it was written. Interesting choice of writer, but clearly Maurice Gilles knew his man.

The guest on the program said abolitionists made the song popular in the US.

UPDATE: Fixed the "translation."

Boredom again

Always check to see if someone said it better, before clicking "Publish" ...

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Tolerance for Boredom

We took some Chinese students to the "traveler's Christmas Eve service" tonight. The music was the old carols put to a slightly different tempo. Everybody caught on pretty quickly.

At the end of one song the lead singer took the last two words very slowly. Everybody else sang at the expected speed. Mismatch, and not in a good way...

I propose that one of the characteristics churches should look for in music leaders is a vast tolerance for boredom.

You, and all the popular singers of the past decades who cut Christmas albums, are able to jazz up the old familiar tune with some new musical twists. That's nice. If you plan to involve the congregation in singing, you have to let them know what to sing and when. You've heard that version of that song hundreds of times; you probably feel like WalMart employees hearing the music loop for the 325'th time today. I'll bet you're bored.

I know what boredom can do. I remember planning a Bible study by collecting all the obscure details around a passage. That was cute, but what I thought was illustration was just clutter unless the point of the passage came first. We'd all read it before, but it doesn't hurt to cover the basics again.

"But what's the point of all my training if all I do is the same old stuff?" It's not about you; not about me.

If we're going to serve at all, we have to be willing to be bored.

Same coin

I'm not up to speed on Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and when I saw Althouse's post I figured I should get some notion of what those ideologues were up to these days. One of the comments led me to a NYT article explaining how Coates and Richard Spencer both believe in the primal importance of race and the overwhelming power of whiteness, and where Williams quotes Spencer as saying "This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist. This is why I'm actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip." I suspect that his confidence is not altogether unjustified, btw--fashions can turn on a dime and the people noisiest about being allies typically don't seem to be investing any of their effort or money in helping individuals. Maybe they hide it very well, not letting the left hand know what the right is doing?(*)

I wrote about the same sort of thing years ago: both right and left in Madison shared a belief in the omnipotence of the USA. If you point out that problem X is beyond our capacity to solve, you get called defeatist or a tool of the oppressors.

"We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century — the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" — lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth." (On Reading Old Books, C.S. Lewis)

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(*)"Christ did not love humanity, He never said He loved humanity; He loved men. Neither He nor anyone else can love humanity; it is like loving a gigantic centipede." Chesterton

Defined by relationships?

I noticed that behind the scenes most math is defined in terms of relationships, operations, mapping, and interaction. Even things like the ordinary counting numbers—you can find a definition of a non-negative integer in terms of the characteristic unique to all sets that have that many elements. (That sounds a bit circular, doesn't it?) One hot topic tries to treat vast swaths of math in terms of objects and morphisms.

This has been extremely fruitful.

The same sort of approach of defining things in terms of their operations seems to be able to produce quite complex machines, whether physical or organizational. It is very convenient to define people-roles in terms of their interactions and operations: "We need N of type AAZ and M of type CBZ." The more interchangeable the components are, the more efficiently you can feed and run the system—at least in theory. If everyone is identical except for minor education and training differences, you can feed as many of each people-role as you need into the hopper, and shift them around like checkers. (It helps if they have no personal attachments, so you can ship the components around the world at will.)

But this kind of abstraction is well known to induce some push-back from the unique individuals who find themselves thus categorized. And, funny thing, there turn out to be irreducible differences that make people non-interchangeable for some of those people-roles.

And the apparent circularity of some definitions strongly suggests to me that there needs to be some room for some fundamental objects in mathematics. I haven't run across a good definition of a "geometric point" that isn't circular in some way.

And if you only think of defining things by their transformations and mappings, you don't have much mental space for thinking about things like Forms or aseity. (Does that mindset account for the rise of process theology?) People and things are contingent and largely defined by relationships (just don’t try to abstract too much away!), but that doesn't prove everything is.

Shortcuts to forgetfulness

'All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.' Blaise Pascal If you've electronic media, you're not quite alone--imagine sitting quietly in a room without them, and without books or anything to write on or play with. Just being alone--can you do it?

This morning in Bible study one man cited the received wisdom that "You have to love yourself before you can love others." I wondered at the group if that was 100% true. It seemed sometimes as though what was really needed was self-forgetfulness in admiration of the beloved. We didn't come to a conclusion on my counter proposal.

I'm convinced that a certain kind of self-forgetfulness can be a good thing. If your life and loves are not ordered properly and you don't do a little self-reflection/self-examination, you won't get out of your trouble; you'll just dig yourself in deeper. I don't mean we should be feckless.

"Drunken monkeys" or an incessant judgmental narrative isn't the way our lives are supposed to work. Our motors are misfiring badly, and it is painful to listen to ourselves sometimes. Or perhaps the observing swamps the doing or the being, and we get into trouble. Ask a player to explain how he is catching the ball, and watch his performance crumble. When you're in the groove, you don't think about how you feel.

Achieving "the groove" is hard, and so is quieting drunken monkeys. There has to be an easier way.

Amusements: a-"muse"-ments--things to keep us from thinking (e.g. about ourselves) for a while. "Drown his sorrows in a bottle" is a cliche--and therefore likely true of a lot of people, who I guess are looking for self-forgetfulness. Or something magnificently exciting--sex, or (for some of us) sports.

We can't sit still. So--Netflix. Or chemicals to force us to be mellow about ourselves.

Armor

The National Interest story on the Kugelpanzer assumes that this one-man "tank" was supposed to be--well--a tank. (The picture for the story is completely irrelevant.)

"Thus, the Kugelpanzer was likely designed with some other purpose in mind." I can take a guess.

They didn't have the technology to build exoskeletons, so they made up a kind of personal armor instead. I think that instead of Iron Man flying through the air, they wanted supermen rolling around the battlefield. 5mm of armor isn't a lot, but I'm imagining a whole bunch of these coming over the hill at once...

Yes, you're right--a maintenance nightmare and expensive as all get-out.

Diversity

Over a dozen years ago I wrote about diversity in a university setting. If I were writing it today I might revisit some of the things I wrote about learning styles.

My bottom line was that "diversity" is not a goal but a means to an end.

Note carefully: I am not saying that invidious discrimination is justifiable. That is a different issue. I am saying that "diversity" as such ought not be made into a goal.

Can you think of a single case in which diversity is not merely a means?

• A diversity of ethnic restaurants : stimulate a jaded palate.
• A diversity of research groups in a university department : sometimes you get cross-fertilization. Such groups have finite lifetimes, and if there’s only one group incoming students have no research to join when it dies.
• A diversity of viewpoints on the jury : look at the question from as many sides as possible to arrive at the truth
• A diversity of ethnicities in kindergarten : if that's what the neighborhood is—you want everyone to have a basic education
• A diversity of ethnicities in a church : the church is catholic—everyone God made is called
• A diversity of peoples on Earth : OK, this one is above my pay grade, but I suspect the reason was to have as many ways to display and share facets of God’s goodness as possible. We've messed the goodness part up.
• Mandated diversity : full employment for the diversity professionals

Because it is a means and not an end, diversity can fail to accomplish the end, or even prevent it. For example, a completely diverse jury would include Mafiosi, and if you have too many research groups in a department they are too small to do any work.

When you confuse means and ends, you distort the ends and don't do a good job with the means. If "Diversity is one of our goals" in a research group, that tells me that they no longer care wholeheartedly about truth, but want to employ people on the basis of something other than understanding they bring to the table. They try to become a "full employment agency."

Pies

I need to keep an eye out for Pie: A History. From BBC:

The cases, which could be several inches thick, according to Janet Clarkson, author of Pie: A History, were perhaps not even intended to be edible. Even once fat had begun to be added to the dough, bringing us into the realm of modern pastry, a pie crust was still sometimes considered more as a kind of primitive Tupperware.

A well-baked meat pie, with liquid fat poured into any steam holes left open and left to solidify, might even be kept for up to a year, with the crust apparently keeping out air and spoilage. It seems difficult to fathom today, but as Clarkson reflects, "it was such a common practice that we have to assume that most of the time consumers survived the experience".

I Sleep in Hitler's Room, by Tuvia Tenenbom

I’m glad I read The Lies They Tell first.

I wish Tenenbom had tried to use different fonts to distinguish observations, fantasies, and questions. Other people's responses are in quotations, but he mixes then and later musings together freely.

Early on in I Sleep in Hitler's Room he meets a friendly hardline Nazi in Club 88, who thinks he’s a fellow-traveler. He is appalling. So are the friendly Turks and other Muslims who also hate Jews. So is the willful blindness of the other Germans and the media to the Muslim hatred of Jews. Thus far there's nothing terribly controversial in the book—if you look hard enough you can find Nazis, Muslim attitudes towards Jews are well known, and so is the make-believe about those attitudes.

He "discovers" the equally-well-known connection between leftist politics and detestation of Israel. Since German politics tends left—surprise! Disproportionate condemnation of Israel. (When challenged about Chechnya or other problems, most of those he talks to seem to have no notion of what he's talking about.)

Having read The Lies first, I’m a bit suspicious of his sampling for this book. He claims in the preface that it is representative, and tells the story of how his publisher screamed at him and refused to publish the book without multiple changes and deletions. (The publisher tells a different story.)

This is important, because one claim that crops up over and over is that the Jews run finance and governments. Is the attitude really that widespread?

Tenenbom makes numerous wry references to how he ought to spend his share of this vast wealth Jews allegedly control. It is humorous at first, but after a while I noticed how much he was spending. No, he doesn’t run Goldman Sachs, but a New York theater director doesn't seem to have to make the same hard financial choices as most of the rest of us.

That Jews are disproportionately represented in such positions is well known. It is perhaps less well remembered that they are also disproportionately represented among Nobel Prize winners and other measures of accomplishment (as opposed to control). So perhaps the attitude is widespread. It doesn't appear in the circles I frequent. It does show up in online comment sections--but I've no way to estimate how common it is in the general public.

One scene, in which a family invites him to dinner, ends with him leaving the man crying. Tuvia doesn't come across as the most pleasant of guests.

He finds a staggering number of Germans who allege a Jewish grandparent, and pretty much everybody asserts that either their parents 1) had no idea what was going on or 2) never talked about it. He also finds references to Israel or the Holocaust everywhere, and professes to be annoyed with it.

Two of his favorite opening questions are "Are you proud to be a German?" and "What does it mean to be German?" The latter is probably not answerable, and the former isn't much better.

IIRC, after WWII, the Allied powers had a problem: they could assert (with some accuracy) that the bulk of the Germans were complicit in crimes, and try to punish accordingly. Or they could distinguish Nazis from normal Germans, and blame the Nazis—who were plainly more guilty. What eventually resulted seems to have been a hybrid: officially the Nazis are blamed and ordinary Germans absolved, but unofficially everybody equates WWII Germans and Nazis, and blames Germans in general. The former seems like a recipe for encouraging people to try to hide everything, pretend it didn't happen, and try not to draw attention to themselves—and maybe the poison would decay away with the next generation. In practice it seems to me as though people were asked to take a kind of attenuated blame for something they felt officially absolved for. I wonder if that would encourage ways of "baming the victim." Mix that (especially among the guiltless second and third generations!) with the popular leftist rule of "blame the powerful," and concentrating on Israeli villainy seems to follow naturally.

Back to Tuvia: He concludes that German anti-Semitism has "to do more with the psychological history of the German than with thought-out anti-Semitism." "Polish anti-Semitism, as far as I can tell, is grounded in religion. Germany’s is grounded in psychology and narcissism." (ditto for Islamic anti-Semitism) "It will be much easier to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and between Arabs and Jews in general, than to uproot the Jew hate of the German. The first two are on the table, no surprises; the third is wrapped in heavy brainy arguments and eye-blinding magical color shows in addition to being hidden behind the many masks so common to our present-day Western culture."

Hold the phone. Jew-hatred grounded in religion is "on the table?" Tuvia was raised Orthodox, but is no longer religious, and it shows.

Tuvia Tenenbom

AVI pointed out a link about antisemitism in Germany. The source for the article is a book by Tuvia Tenenbom, a journalist writing about people he talked to in Germany. I Sleep in Hitler's Room hasn't arrived at the local library yet, but The Lies They Tell was handy.

Tuvia is Jewish, but usually pretends to be German in this picaresque tale of his experiences during a 6-month tour of the US. He likes to go to the strange or dangerous places. And he wants, in particular, to find out how/why people like or dislike Jews. (And why Jews seem to detest Jews.) And whether belief in climate change correlates with dislike for Israel.

He tells the stories well, and professes to have discovered unexpected delight in the American landscape, in driving, and even in shooting. In the end, he determines that Americans are afraid to speak, racist, and rather hypocritical--and, as one rarely finds in the world, ashamed of being tribal.

The problem with his conclusions is that he picked and chose the people he wrote about in depth. I don't believe he met that few people on his trip. Drama and contrast he wanted--that's what he put in.

He might object that the majority of the people along the way were busy with their phones or their netflix and weren't available to interact with him. But seriously--what fraction of the people in the USA own 100 guns? And I generally don't have any difficulty in learning who people voted for--they often volunteer that. (Whatever became of secret ballots?)

In one chapter he interviews Untermeyer, who was unaware of the depth of Jew-hatred in officialdom of Qatar and Saudi Arabia--ambassadors get escorted in, and don't see their documents rewritten to have a birthplace of New York rather than Tel Aviv.

What seems to leave him most aghast is the way people fret over Palestinians without a care for the homeless a few blocks away. That seems a bit overdrawn to me--I know people who are somewhat like that, but there's a little nuance in their attitudes that Tuvia didn't see, or didn't report.

He understands enough to know that you have to visit churches if you want to know the people here, but he's pretty tone-deaf. His "superiority" grates after a while.

Yes, read it--people like them are out there--but don't trust his conclusions.

And when the book on Germany arrives, I'll try to calibrate his reporting on Germany accordingly.

Showing love

Love came to Earth as someone who needed to be loved. His first gift was an opportunity for us (in the persons of Mary and Joseph) to love.

Citizen science

A writer for Aeon is deeply suspicious of "citizen science", judging it to be a scam to get free labor for big businesses.

The very label ‘citizen science’ (as opposed to, say, ‘amateur’ or ‘extramural’) carries the unsubtle suggestion that science should be a participatory democracy, not an unpalatable, autocratic regime. Proponents claim that it has all manner of salutary side-effects. People will get the knowledge they want through direct action, it’s argued, instead of having it shoved down their throats by some Ivy-league elitist. Getting a hands-on appreciation for research will help to dispel the worrisome doubts that certain citizens now possess about the legitimacy of scientific authority. And when it comes to medicine, discoveries of novel therapies are increasingly rare, despite the desperate manoeuvres of the pharmaceuticals industry; citizen participation should speed up research and make it much easier to replicate results. Finally, the retraction and replication crises that have besieged academic journals suggest that ‘proper’ science might not be so proper, anyway. Perhaps it’s time to consider alternatives.

(There are several straw men in that passage. Can you count them?)

and

But things lose their lustre when you look a little closer. It’s not a coincidence that citizen science lowers the cost of research that requires lots of routinised labour. Thankfully, we’re flush with design tools that manage to transform repetitive, mindless behaviour into something strangely fun and addictive: games. Galaxy Zoo, a non-profit, amateur astronomy project initially set up with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, asks participants to scan millions of celestial images for common galactic morphologies; to keep their attention, players can spell out words with constellations, or win points for certain cute galactic structures. Smartfin, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, gets surfers to attach a sensor to their boards and collect data on salinity, temperature and the like, all of which is pinged back to Scripps once the surfer makes it back to the beach and hooks up the fin to a smartphone. Hundreds of ‘camera traps’, scattered around the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, capture images of creatures that can then be identified by users at Snapshot Serengeti, thus keeping track of animal populations; to amuse themselves, people can attach comments to their favourite photographs (lolgoats, perhaps, rather than lolcats).

And he goes on from there to find what he considers dubious funding sources and worry at length about who benefits from all this.

Do people who participate in these things consider themselves scientists? Or do they think of themselves as assistants? Collecting data is one thing, figuring out how to use it is another.

NSF-funded experiments such as IceCube are required to make their data public, but to get something meaningful out of it requires some disciplines that most people don't pick up on automatically. We're very good at pattern recognition, but sometimes the first pattern you see doesn't actually tell you what you want to know.

A for-instance: you can use the IceCube data to discover that there are seasonal changes in the number of cosmic rays you see. The effect is easy to spot, and someone naively looking at plots might think they'd discovered something new and mysterious. What happens is that at ground level you see the remnants of cosmic ray showers that begin in the upper atmosphere. When the air is warmer (summer), it expands higher, and the cosmic ray showers start higher up. (We keep track of best estimates of upper atmosphere air temperature to go along with our data.)

Or you could use something like those population density maps in the cartoon above to discover that there are more crimes where there are more people. Not a surprise: if you look instead at the number of crimes divided by the number of people (the rate), you'd find that the distribution doesn't look the same--some places with more people have higher crime rates, others not so much. You could see how the violent crime rate varies with the rate of car ownership, or density of bars, or rate of single parent households. It isn't hard to think of things to compare it with, and with a little training you can figure out how to study the problem in one variable. I was going to say "It isn't rocket science," but maybe that's misleading. Keeping track of multiple variable is harder, and figuring out which are correlated with which takes quite a bit of care. (Quiz--if you use the number of schools in an area as one variable, should you also use the number of children as a variable at the same time?)

The basic disciplines that science requires are things I think most people can acquire at some level: how to think about analyzing a problem into its "moving parts," to be strictly honest and willing to challenge your own hypotheses, and so on. Those are good disciplines to have. But studying complex problems is hard enough that most people don't care to invest the time--and some can't manage the math that usually turns up. But so long as I don't delude myself into thinking I'm Rembrandt, I think doing a little drawing myself is good. It can help you see. Likewise, learning to do a little scientific analysis can help you see.

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Justin Vandenbroucke developed a cool cosmic ray detector that anyone can carry with them. If enough people use it, the distributed data collected might be useful in discovering patterns in cosmic ray fluxes in the Earth's magnetic field (for example). Right now it is mostly just educational. And most of the people running the app are concentrated in a few places in the US and Europe, so the detectors don't have a lot of planetary coverage.

Spencer Axani designed a little box muon detector that lights up when a charged particle goes through. He had a stack of these in the lab across from my office, and you could sometimes see where several lit up in a line. One of these boxes is a toy. A stack of them is a demonstration system. If there were a way to collect data from them remotely, a hundred thousand spread around would be a cosmic shower detector.

Having a cosmic ray detection app, or a box, doesn't teach me much about science, or how it works. That's a shame. But it helps teach about what's around us that we don't notice--just like the people counting moth populations.