When you're young...

I remember listening to an album on which one of the songs was "Oh Mary Don't You Weep"

O Mary, don't you weep, don't you mourn
O Mary, don't you weep, don't you mourn
Pharaoh's army got drowned
O Mary, don't you weep

Some of these mornings bright and fair
Take my wings and cleave the air
Pharaoh's army got drowned
O Mary, don't you weep

When I get to heaven goin' to sing and shout
Nobody there for turn me out
Pharaoh's army got drowned
O Mary don't you weep

When I get to Heaven goin' to put on my shoes
Run about glory and tell all the news
Pharaoh's army got drowned
O Mary don't you weep

I was going to link a Youtube video of it, but there are more versions than I care to spend time listening to, and none had quite the feel of the one I remembered.

I remember being puzzled by the refrain. Did it mean that Jesus' mother should stop weeping because Pharoah's men were dead (long before she was born--and weren't they taking shelter in Egypt???), or saying that this is good news and she should not start weeping, or asking if she's sad that so many went to hell? Clues were there (made pretty explicit by other lyrics not in the short version), but I didn't make the connection of Miriam=Mary until years later. Oh yeah--a spiritual, slave days, oppressor defeated and freedom arrives--stop crying.

A number of popular hymns confused me too. "My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought!" Hmm. I thought sin was supposed to be bad? I learned the song before I could read. With a few more years to understand convoluted sentences, and finally reading the punctuation(*), I get it now.

And they weren't even trying to make things confusing!

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(*) I often run slides for the songs at church. They generally come without any punctuation whatever. I leave to your imagination how the complex sentences read in that form, before I get ahold of them.

Galli without a cause

Among the gods the Romans worshiped was a relatively late addition: Cybele, the Great Mother. The Galli were her devotees. They castrated themselves, probably amputated the penis, and wore women's clothing. They collected alms in return for fortune-telling--or else for going away. In any case, they made their devotion to their goddess perfectly clear.

Some three hundred years ago if a young Italian boy had a good voice he might be castrated to preserve his beautiful soprano. That was brutal, but a career as a singer was more lucrative than many other available opportunities. There was a grisly point to the mutilation.

Today we have despicable hucksters hawking expensive surgery and drugs to make people into modern Galli. It makes the hucksters wealthy, but the victims have neither the honor of being dedicated to a god nor the possibility of a lucrative singing career. They become Galli in the name of finding their true selves--as though mangling yourself and drugging yourself out of your mind was ever likely to be a path to self-discovery. It's much more likely to lead to suicide, but that doesn't phase the hucksters or the fashionistas.

The fashion seems to be based on sympathetic magic--if you make a doll of something that looks like X, it becomes X. It might also remind you of the Aristotelian notion that a woman is an incomplete man--just make yourself incomplete, and presto!

We usually don't intervene in most affairs of adults, even when one party is plainly preying on the other. But they have taken to preying on children and persuading gullible parents that being a tomboy or wanting to dress like a Cavalier is a sign that the child needs to be mangled.

Be yourself..

That was the fortune in a cookie the couple at the table behind me shared. It seems curious advice without a little explanation. How would you explain it?

Be yourself:

1. What choice do you have?
2. You'd make a lousy Marilyn Monroe
3. Nobody else is qualified for the job
4. Try it, you might like it
5. Practice makes perfect
6. But move very slowly

Love in the cold

'Tis the time of year for noticing "Christmas" songs. Several in a row celebrated friends being together, culminating with "Let it Snow." "Still goodbye-ing," "hate going out in the storm," "all the way home I'll be warm," and so on. I tend to be a contrary sort sometimes. The first thing that jumped to mind during that song was "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden.

Sundays too my father got up early 
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, 
then with cracked hands that ached 
from labor in the weekday weather made 
banked fires blaze.
...
What did I know, what did I know 
of love's austere and lonely offices? 

I doubt that Bethlehem had much snow, but it was a cold world there too.

Roman gods

I finally got around to reading The City of God. Augustine has fun. The Romans seem to have a few too many gods on their hands.

When a male and a female are united, the god Jugatinus presides. Well, let this be born with. But the married woman must be brought home: the god Domiducus also is invoked. That she may be in the house, the god Domitius is introduced. That she may remain with her husband, the goddess Manturnae is used. What more is required? Let human modesty be spared. Let the lust of flesh and blood go on with the rest, the secret of shame being respected. Why is the bed-chamber filled with a crowd of deities, when even the groomsmen have departed? And, moreover, it is so filled, not that in consideration of their presence more regard may be paid to chastity, but that by their help the woman, naturally of the weaker sex, and trembling with the novelty of her situation, may the more readily yield her virginity. For there are the goddess Virginiensis, and the god-father Subigus, and the goddess-mother Prema, and the goddess Pertunda, and Venus, and Priapus. What is this? If it was absolutely necessary that a man, laboring at this work, should be helped by the gods, might not some one god or goddess have been sufficient? Was Venus not sufficient alone, who is even said to be named from this, that without her power a woman does not cease to be a virgin? If there is any shame in men, which is not in the deities, is it not the case that, when the married couple believe that so many gods of either sex are present, and busy at this work, they are so much affected with shame, that the man is less moved, and the woman more reluctant? And certainly, if the goddess Virginiensis is present to loose the virgin's zone, if the god Subigus is present that the virgin may be got under the man, if the goddess Prema is present that, having been got under him, she may be kept down, and may not move herself, what has the goddess Pertunda to do there? Let her blush; let her go forth. Let the husband himself do something.

Crowded indeed.

At the study this morning

Thus says the LORD, "A voice is heard in Ramah, Lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; She refuses to be comforted for her children, Because they are no more."

Thus says the LORD, "Restrain your voice from weeping And your eyes from tears; For your work will be rewarded," declares the LORD, "And they will return from the land of the enemy.

... ...

The last enemy that will be abolished is death.

Simple CIMON met an ... astronaut

I missed this story. "On Monday, July 2, the ISS received its first artificial intelligence robot" "CIMON is about the size of a volleyball and has a display built in. It can see, hear, talk, and comprehend, and its A.I. smarts mean that the more it interacts with crew members, the more abilities it will develop."

"Besides helping the crew, it’s hoped CIMON’s presence will offer researchers an understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of having an A.I. assistant on board." Umm. I'm not sure how much better this is than having a human on the radio with you.

Christian Karrasch insists there’s nothing to worry about. "He's a friendly guy and he has this hard power-off button."

Confederates in the Attic

Confederates in the Attic, Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz
It is an interesting book and you should probably read it. But bear in mind that he went looking for these things—what you would see if you went might differ. The cover picture is of Bob Hodges, who plays a significant role in the book (I sometimes wondered if he existed). He’s a hardcore “reenactor,” willing to hike barefoot and eat hardtack and sleep in the rain—and not wash--in order to achieve the full experience. At one point the group march barefoot carrying live chickens to cook, and when they reach their target, they open up the mailbag to read the letters they had earlier written to themselves. These folk disdain reenactors as unrealistic.

Lots of people, not just from the USA, find the Civil War fascinating. Apparently Gone With the Wind is a huge cultural thing in Japan.

If you read nothing else, read the chapter with the interview with Shelby Foote. "In his view, those who saw the banner as synonymous with slavery had their history wrong. The battle flag was a combat standard, not a political symbol. ... But he pinned the blame for this on educated Southerners who allowed white supremacists to misuse the flag during the civil rights struggle." True or false? Read it for yourself.

Horwitz found “The South will rise again” types without apparent difficulty. As you might expect, they don’t like blacks, don’t like the feds, and don’t like Jews. In the places he found them, they don’t hide. They are part of the community, and not shy about talking to strangers. At least, so it seems—I don’t discount artistic license.

Why the fascination with the Confederacy? He found no single answer; and different people had a different mix of motives. Sympathy for the underdog, fascination with a group that fought hard against overwhelming odds and might have won independence (it was a close call thanks to Copperheads), dislike for blacks and sympathy for a group that didn’t like them either, dislike for centralized power and sympathy for a group that rebelled against it, ancestry--"these are my people", a sense of history--these great events happened right here--and fascination with the romantic heroes of the war. The Confederacy stands for a lot of different things. “Hate” and “heritage, not hate,” both.

In these “South will rise” groups, the actual veterans seemed to have a little more nuanced idea about the Confederate struggle. Surprise. The amount of historical ignorance is rather startling—one town considers itself to be emblematic of the Confederacy, when during the war it was with the Union.

The battlegrounds were in strategic places, and strategic places often remained important. The priorities people living and working there tended more to redevelopment than enshrinement. Horwitz was disappointed.

Not everything in the book revolves around reenactors or the Sons of Confederate Veterans and their ilk. He found places where the war seems to be solidly in the past. Mostly. And when he listened to the debate about the Arthur Ashe statue on Monument Avenue, he was surprised to find reasoned arguments. That says something to me about who he’d been hanging around with.

The continued existence of groups that dislike blacks and sometimes recommend violence taints relations of blacks with whites (who can you trust). On the other hand, the existence of groups of blacks that hate whites (yep, he finds them too, and at least as ignorant as their white counterparts) taints relationships of whites with blacks. By this time the extremes justify each other’s existence.

He admitted that his journeys don’t cover nearly enough cultural territory, and it is pretty obvious that it isn’t remotely representative. We’d be up past our eyebrows in reenactors if it were. The book is now 20 years old.

My experiences were all in large cities—probably “tainted with Yankee attitudes”—so I have no personal yardstick for estimating things. Wikipedia claims that the Sons of Confederate Veterans numbers about 100,000, which looks like less than .15% of the white population of the South. If you assume that similar organizations have similar numbers, maybe 1%. That’s noticeable. For comparison, about 3% of the population is either in prison or on parole. FWIW, in Wisconsin 2/3 of the prisoners committed a violent offence; so estimate that at least 2% of the population is violent. This varies substantially by race.

If you are interested in some of the aftereffects (as of 20 years ago) of the “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight,” read it.

Thanksgiving

I seem to have started the day off on the wrong foot. I looked at the news. That's designed to induce the opposite of thanksgiving (if it bleeds...) Some things I have to know about (The Camp Fire smoke raised particulate counts so high that NERSC turned off their tape archive system--so our archiving system is stalled for now.), but most of it I can't do much about, and I can wait another day.

I think I'll make a list and do some more writing today. The original proclamation was made during wartime--and Abe found some things to be thankful for.

Sly abuse of English

"Dear shareholders ... measurable uptick in market volatility ... In recent months, against this backdrop, global markets have given back some of the strong gains recorded during 2017 ..."

Preschool education

This is a topic I've been trying to keep an eye on for a while. Back in 2013 I looked at Head Start's report and concluded that the program was not doing what it was advertised to do. We want something to do that job, and the obvious approach of early childhood education didn't seem to work.

Since then many professionals with more time and more money have had a look at the datasets. This essay reviews a number of them. Key finding: "Every study found something different, and it isn’t even close." In other words any positive effects were, at best, at the edge of detectability.

A longitudinal study in progress won't be ready for a few more years, but the interim results aren't promising. Tiny effects--maybe. Sometimes. When the Moon is full. It is frustrating because sometimes you seem to get good results, but in the big picture they wash out. Maybe that's just statistical fluctuations, or maybe there's some detail in the broad notion of "teaching" that we're missing.

I once asked whether the typical school structure might not be optimal for students with certain disadvantages. One problem often correlated with modern poverty is lack of home discipline. A school structure that relies on well-disciplined students won't work so well when they aren't. Some of our children did well with a fair bit of flexibility in scheduling, while others needed "a schedule so tight it squeaked." One teaching size does not fit all. What if we establish classes for the discipline-deprived?

Of course you have to be careful that lazy administrators(*) don't indulge in warehousing. And this kind of class is not a good place to put the violent, who probably can't be handled in school at all.(**)

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(*) We only hear about the lazy, loony, crooked, or invertebrate. Presumably there are plenty of others that don't make the news. But we have to keep an eye on them just in case.

(**) I'm not suggesting that this is a good model, though I have heard of classes that might have benefited from the approach.

It isn't even Thanksgiving yet

One signal that winter has arrived (never mind the lying calendar) is that the car frame zaps you when you slide out of the front seat. The second snowfall of the season is also a useful indicator. But the mosquito I had to swat--perhaps that's a reminder that spring is coming? (We just have a little winter to get through first.)

I live in Wisconsin of my own free will; can't blame anybody else...

Do cities naturally trend Democrat?

The rule says that if a headline is a question, the answer is no. I think the answer might be "maybe".

In discussions on a recent AVI post the question arose of whether cities would inevitably trend Democrat. If this is so, what aspects of Democrat philosophy and policy make it so?

To answer that, first ask what qualitative differences are there between rural and urban living?

One obvious difference is the scale. The much greater number and density of people in the city make it easier to build machines of people—whether an orchestra or a courier service or a sweat shop. These machines provide services the rural area can’t often match, and often quite fast—it’s a cliché but an accurate one that life in the city is faster.

The machines of the city can generate a great deal of wealth too. Historically the bulk of this was reserved for the elite, but when a middle class gets large the wealth gets shared around more.

Being part of a machine puts impersonal demands on you. This happens in the rural areas too: “Make hay while the sun shines,” and your animals depend on you. I have no idea how impersonal this may be—my adult life has been city-dwelling. But a city runs by the clock.

Machines need controllers. Self-organizing can work surprisingly well in the short term, but if you want a reliable machine long-term you have to have a clear organization and enforcement.

Some city-specific problems demand careful planning—waste disposal, for one thing. That’s much less of a problem in rural areas—unless you take your water from downstream of somebody’s leaky outhouse, or somebody from the city decides to dump stuff on you. City travel has to be tightly regulated. I can walk a shortcut through cornrows, but driving on sidewalks is frowned on.

I think I see one bias right off away: there’ll be a larger fraction of people in the cities who are used to being part of machines, and of people who think in terms of managing people-machines. They’d be more apt to find social and economic planning to be natural, instead of presumptuous.

In the city you are likely within a brick’s throw of hundreds of people, and a daily trip to work puts you close to thousands. (I’m thinking of taking the subway to downtown Chicago here.) I have been repeatedly assured that human limitations mean you can only know about 150 people well—and once you count your family and your “co-workers in the machine,” there aren’t a lot of slots left for neighbors. I don’t vouch for the accuracy of that 150, but it seems to match my own experience so I’ll go with it.

What that limitation means is that my actions impact a lot more people than I can actually know. In a rural area my fire pit probably won’t annoy anybody, but if it does they know who I am and can talk to me about it—and so long as they’re not my enemies we can reach an accommodation.

But in the city the complainants may be strangers, and negotiations get more complicated. I’m not as invested in the well-being or good humor of people I don’t know. I’m not certain that I can be, or should be. So instead of negotiations, we need rules.

In a mono-culture the rules can be intricate rules of courtesy, Japanese style—but that doesn’t seem to work at all in multi-cultural areas. It probably can’t—the rules of courtesy are part of culture.

That means you need codified rules—laws. Lots of them, and more all the time, because the number of possible interactions between people grows with the more different things they can do. I want to fly a drone and you want to listen to a radio--and if they use the same frequency who wins?

This obviously restricts liberty. Up to a point the restrictions come along with enough benefits from the smooth functioning of the machines that most people make the trade-off willingly. There is no natural bound to the number of laws, though, and there’s ample precedent for adding to them every time there’s another problem—however minor.

The Democrat governing philosophy matches this attitude and legal situation very well. Elect wise planners and the machines will run on time. They claim that this will be more equitable, but Acton’s Law applies—though that’s not relevant to the original question.(*)

Have you noticed that when “make a new regulation” is the default attitude, the elite tend to think that law and the good are whatever the rules are? Can you say “idolatry?”

Together with the impersonal environment and the cog-in-the-machine life, this elevation of the state to Arbiter of Good and Evil makes for a rather toxic environment for a human being. We need to be more than machine parts, and to love God and the good.

Perhaps cities have unique spiritual dangers after all.

(*) Although perhaps it is relevant. Entrenched corruption can give the same effect as the "one man, one vote, one time" rule—once the all-controlling rulers are in place you can’t get them out. I read a saying (possibly made up—I can’t find it again), that the tigers in the city are worse than the tigers on the mountain.

And it is demonstrably true that finite-minded humans don't plan well.

Counting votes

If the interlocks are broken, it does not matter whether someone has been monitoring who went in and out of the radiation area. When it is time to button up and turn on the beam, a search team goes in to make sure nobody was left behind. (And sometimes the safety officer hides a dummy in the experimental hall, to keep the search team on their toes.)

If the package seal is broken on the gauze pads, the burden of proof that the contents are safe is on the person providing the material. The surgeon needs a clear chain of possession and observation with trusted agents.

The default assumptions change when security is broken. If a cracker gets into your computer system, you assume that he has everyone’s password, and left nasty files behind. I can assure you that getting that cleaned up is a lot of work.

If ballots turn up outside of the regular procedures designed to prevent fraud, or are brought in from outside those procedures, the default assumption is that they have been tampered with. The burden of proof is on the election commissioner to prove that they are not. If she fails to provide clear chain of possession and observation by the required neutral observers, the votes are tainted. If the ballots are not collected and processed in the prescribed way by the prescribed deadline, the votes are tainted.

You cannot readily estimate the effect of tampering, and all votes are questionable. You can’t just scale the numbers and say "Instead of 150 votes for the Whigs and 50 for the Tories we’ll count 75 for the Whigs and 25 for the Tories," because tampering is intended to change the balance. On the other hand, this is not adequate to prove that the vote was tampered with, so absent incriminating evidence nobody is going to go to prison.

Holding new elections in Broward for the local elections seems like a no-brainer. The state-wide elections are another matter—the partisans know how many votes they need to arrange for, and will carefully make sure they have them. It may be that a new state-wide election is needed.

I have been dubious of early voting--when you hold ballots for that long guaranteeing neutral observation and possession is hard--and I consider e-voting an invitation to disaster. "There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired." Messes like this do not encourage me.

0 to 60

Some people in church will go from 0 to 60 if you come close to disparaging their favorite political figure, but be quite cool and collected if you disparage Jesus. The obvious (and probably somewhat unfair) suspicion is that you can tell where someone's heart is that way. But I wonder if this is related to scope: God can defend His own honor but I'm responsible for protecting my family. It isn't easy to see how a powerful politician needs protection from the likes of you, though.

Or perhaps this is an assault on my integrity--I chose to support X, and you are saying I'm wrong?

Or perhaps this is a side-effect of politics becoming a good vs evil battle, and you have just announced to me that you're in favor of the devil. The astute reader will notice that this is not easy to distinguish from "making an idol of the party."

Add another little data point: I know several people who start to freak out if you suggest that MSNBC is not less biased than Fox, or that the NYT picks sides. It is like suggesting to a Muslim that some of the Koran's text is corrupt. Perhaps this is a "family defense:" I'm so familiar with these voices that they're part of my family and I have to defend them against insults.

But I worry that it is a matter of "I take my world-view and values from these people, and my identity is bound up with them. They could never lie to me. Don't you dare try to turn my world upside-down."

Repeat quietly: "Do not trust in princes..." Nor in the Prince of the Power of the Airwaves.

Suppose Germany won WWI

"As a preliminary matter, we should note that the actual outcome of the First World War was a near thing"

A reader ignorant of the history of the 20th century who was given samples from this literature that did not contain actual references to the war could reasonably conclude that he was reading the literature of defeated peoples. There was indeed insanity in culture in the 1920s, but the insanity pervaded the whole West.

November exercise

It took 50 minutes for me to get from the end to the table through the Peano curve of voters in the gym. There were 5 workers at the first table, using a fancy new electronic recording system that was actually a bit slower than the old-style 2-books-and-sign method. (The other two tables I sped through in 20 seconds.)

One man was discovering that registering was one thing but actually voting required a picture ID. An elderly Chinese woman was voting for the first time. A little girl was fascinated with the baby in the stroller, who in turn seemed amazed to see all the strange people standing around and not doing anything. There were, of course, balls stuck in the gym ceiling apparatus here and there--including one that must have been wedged in between pipes by a mighty throw. I hope somebody recruited the kid who managed that.

Pollsters

Mike Royko had a good idea a few years ago: Lie to pollsters. He called it "one of my few constructive civic endeavors."

I'm taking a different tack. Sometimes I accidentally pick up a pollster's call. I hang up on robocalls. But I'm developing a spiel I use with humans. I tell them that I believe I can help them a great deal, that I look forward to working with them, and that I bill against retainer, with a 50 hour minimum and \$120/hour.

"That's all the questions I had for you today" was the last reply.

(If one of them accepts I'm going to have to head to the lawyer quickly for a standard retainer contract form.) I've heard that some people try to sell them insurance, but this seems faster.

Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail

I keep seeing references to The Camp of the Saints, and so I figured I should find out what it was about. Rule 1: read it with my own eyes first, before seeing what other people have to say.

I'm about a fifth of the way through, and unlikely to ever read any further. For those who don't trust Wikipedia, here are my observations.

Thesis: The Third World (including China! written in '73) have noticed that the West's altruism is not accompanied by any love for their own culture or own people anymore, and are staging non-violent invasions. Violence would be met by overwhelming violence, but the rulers of the West have no answer for peaceful invasion--their ideologies make the invaders sacrosanct. You don't shoot women and children, or defenseless men.

With this bit of ethical jujitsu, the invaders win and, linking up with foreigners already in the West, turn and destroy the remnants of the West. Part of this is my reading, and part summary from elsewhere. As I said, I won't be finishing the book.

Notes:

• The author seems to hate Christians. So far all of them are slimy and all in favor of the poor elsewhere destroying the West. It isn't too hard to find such characters here, but they're not the majority. He is called a "traditional Catholic," so possibly he was reacting to popular ideas among clerics in France--maybe liberation theology?
• The rulers of the West are feckless and more interested in looking virtuous than in actually taking care of their citizens. I would have thought this overblown, that when danger threatened they'd wise up, but Angela Merkel is a real-life example--and it isn't hard to find politicians here who have similar attitudes. Though what they'd really do with power is fortunately not known. Yet, or, God willing, ever.
• The citizens of the West are mostly helpless sheep, more interested in their comforts and in looking virtuous than in standing up for anything. This may change over the course of the book, but I'm not sure. One early character kills a looter, but after that bit of useful effort spends the rest of the chapter savoring a leisurely dinner while thinking about how everything will be destroyed.
• The foreigners within the West do not love the West, and are willing to join in attacking it. Again, it isn't hard to find examples of this. It is also possible to find counter-examples. By and large, "blood is thicker than water" is a solid rule around the world. We like to think of the USA as an ideology-based country and an exception to the rule, but the astute observer will have noticed that identity-based politics is a big thing here.
• People value their tribe and their culture more than they do yours.
• Although the point hasn't arisen in the book (so far), the position of supplicant is a bitter one. Gratitude isn't one of humanity's strong suits. People resent being the beggars, and the attitude the author assigns the Third World masses seems natural.

Controversy: The book is asserted by many to be racist. The accusation might be justified, although it might also just be character viewpoint-based. I haven't read far enough to be sure, but I have read enough for it to make me very tired.

Some of the characters seem rather wooden to me--in some ways this reminds me of Atlas Shrugged. There's lots of introspection, at least from the Westerners. So far there's no viewpoint except that of Westerners, whether in India or France or New York. Probably won't be, either, given the style.

Summary: Meh to the book. Takeaways from the book: other tribes don't like you much, and sometimes hate you. Your leaders are often more interested in looking good than doing good. Peaceful is not always friendly. Non-violent can be extremely dangerous.

And, as Germany shows, the book is timely.

Further explosion followup

I mentioned an explosion in town here and here

The latest word is that the gas line was improperly marked. "failed to correctly mark the gas line in the street, where it was actually located, and instead marked a spot on a sidewalk about 25 feet away where there was no gas line."

That would do it. Documentation is vital.

Moving mud pit

A mud pit is on the move.. "first 60 feet over a few months, and then 60 feet in a single day"

Yes, it is in the San Andreas fault area, and yes it is warm water that smells of rotten eggs.

"Union Pacific has been forced to build temporary tracks to avoid running trains over land impacted by the spring. Trains are now moving more slowly through the area, according to the company."

For some strange reason I'm reminded of this story we used to read to the younger kids.

Teacher union

I have said before that the industrial union adversarial model is problematic for public-sector workers--the result is inevitably adversarial, inescapably political, and as experience shows, often becomes a Praetorian Guard.

But if you ever wonder why teachers might need something to represent them, read this about Liberton teachers.. The powers-that-be demand that they teach 8 violent students (thrown chairs, injuries, police calls). 8 students, and even with 7 aides it wasn't possible to keep them from fighting. When the powers-that-be get an idea in their collective skull, there's no way to let reality intrude.

We get the same problem in this country, of course.

Trying to translate

I remember trying to read newspapers in French, and finding that I could read everything except a few key words. At the end of the article I was unsure if the minister opposed or supported the proposed law, or whether the crime report was about jaywalking or bigamy.

I have the same problem with stories in English. Some phrases have no clear meaning, and the whole story depends on them. Like "far right."

Sometimes I can figure out the meaning by tracking down the quotations--one common meaning is "nationalist," which quite a number of reporters and other sloppy thinkers think means Nazi. Sometimes it means somebody who wants to cut back hard on the welfare state. Sometimes it means somebody who wants to decentralize the government. Sometimes I can't find out what the writer means at all.

Given the propensity certain groups have for demanding ideological purity in every detail, sometimes the label gets slapped on a person who disagrees with just one item in the list. A Progressive Democrat who decides that abortion is wrong can get the label.

It's hard enough to figure out American news stories: European uses of the phrase seem disconnected from anything I'm familiar with. There's no way of easily mapping disagreements about personalities in Bavaria into American categories.

How about using categories instead? You'll find some clustering, but the smaller groups will almost certainly not cluster along the same lines as the majority parties.

Nationalism doesn't form a neat spectrum. Some think it the root of all evil. A lot of people are perfectly OK with taking care of me and mine first. Some (e.g. the Nazis) think "me and mine" have the right to dominate the rest.

Ideas about immigration seem likely to correlate with ideas about nationalism.

You'll find a spectrum rather than discrete divisions when asking how much control the central government should have.

Do they hate Jews? These days more folks on the "left" do than on the "right:" it really should be split out as its own category.

Do they advocate for one race against others?

What framework do they support for helping the sick or out-of-work?

And so on. I can understand what those things mean.

Getting clarity won't happen spontaneously. Reporters are comfortable with things as they are, and in my observation not the wisest or smartest folks around. (Good at writing, as a rule.) And who speaks for a group and when? Some groups unite on a few topics but are agnostic on others, and Schmidt will give you a different answer than Fritz. And the press releases and reporter's questions tend to focus on a few of the details, and often controntationally rather than informationally. And politicians won't sit still to answer a long list unless there's some benefit--many don't even answer the 3-4 questions the League of Women Voters asks and publishes.

Probably the nearest we'll get is by collecting the evaluations of a number of different interest groups. I wonder what google translate would do with candidate evaluations from Italian tourism promoters pushing for more money to restore Pompeii? (And which groups are actually independent of the party? It is no trick to find sock puppet groups, and others are long-time close affiliates with parties.)

Question for followers

I updated the previous post (about the fellow who tried to buy radioactive poison). Did that appear as something new?

Dark web trap

The Dark Web is an odd place.

First, to be clear, there's a huge amount of invisible stuff on the web. Absolutely gigantic. When you connect to a news site for a news story, it generally comes from a database--and there's lots of stuff in that database. We have thousands of pictures at IceCube, but no way for you to browse them. If you know what you're looking for, you can view it, but we have no index and the rest is not obvious--google doesn't see it, for example.

That's not what I'm talking about here. You can find details on how to access the Dark Web in a number of different places, some of them even reputable. Some reporters have ventured there and reported back what they found.

Bottom line: you need special software, and you need to know where to look. And if you've got any sense at all, you use several virtual networks to conceal where you are, and work from a throw-away virtual machine, or maybe a virtual machine inside a VM. Some people are very good at sniffing out where you are, and some of them are not nice people. Transactions run through crypto-currency. There appear to be, believe it or not, circles of trust. Vendors who cheat can be flagged. I assume lots of work has gone into figuring out how to subvert these trust networks.

What can you do there? Communicate privately with like minded people. That might be North Korean dissidents, or it might be neo-Nazis, or kiddie porn creators, or communists with an action plan.

Or you can also buy and sell stuff that you don't want other people to know about: fentanyl mailed from China, hand grenades, radioactive poisons, what have you. Even, supposedly, hits.

That's where one weak point in the chain shows up: if you want delivery of something physical, you have to give a physical location.

One of our local "frequent protestors" just got himself arrested for trying to buy radioactive substances to kill someone. Turns out the vendor was the FBI.

Ryan allegedly asked in subsequent contacts about how long would it take the poison to kill someone after ingested.

“I’m looking for something that’s very rare/difficult to get a hold of. Also that doesn’t show symptoms immediately but kills them fairly soon after,” the message said.

He also said he wanted the material to be “extremely difficult” to get so people would automatically suspect the government, and that the material would be safe to ship.

Anybody can pretend to be anybody on the Dark Web, but when you go to pick up the delivery it is pretty hard to deny that you-done-it.

Don't try this at home. Or anywhere, actually, unless you actually happen to be North Korean dissidents trying to stay alive. Even then I'd wonder.

---

UPDATE:

His lawyer claims he had cancer already, and wanted to kill himself in a way that a) would be untraceable and look like cancer and b) would make people think the government did it. The claims are not entirely consistent--throwing stuff on the wall to see what sticks?

Titus directives

Although you have to take a passage in context and cross-connect it with others, sometimes a close reading can be interesting.

Paul tells Titus how to direct different types of people in the church. Something jumped out at me this time. He doesn't bother directing older women to be sensible--in fact they are to be teachers themselves. But to be sensible is the only directive he gives for the young men, which included what we'd call teenagers. Perhaps his thought was that getting teenagers to be sensible was going to be a tough enough job that the rest could wait until later.

Novel approach to bank robbery

It was almost completely non-violent.

They may have known what to expect: "They has left a red bag behind that contained one hard saw, two drill machines one, one-wheel rim and 150 keys." And they may have known that the vault lock was on the fritz. But I've never before heard of herbal tea playing a pivotal role in a crime.

Cell phone call curiosity

Apropos of nothing much--I've gotten several robo-phone calls in Chinese from Chicago and LA numbers. We don't pick up, but they leave a message. The family cell phone numbers are sequential, and one of the others gets them too. Chinese spam can't be that cost-effective in the USA.

Probably it's targeted advertising--sort of like the East Coast college emails I've been getting for a year that are actually intended for a high school junior. Cheer for the almighty algorithm!

Energizing the ratchet

Performers sometimes say they're energized by the energy of the crowd. They do better than they planned, more than they planned, louder than they planned.

While no doubt almost all politicians are manipulative, I suspect quite a few get similar energy from the crowds, and sometimes depart from the stump speaches and say things that weren't on the cue cards. The morning after, some of those claims sound too wild, but they fit the moment. You can sometimes walk back things you say, though it is harder when everything is recorded.

These moments can also ratchet the wider dialog. AVI elaborated on the power of the perversion of language mentioned in Codevilla's essay. What struck me was the ratcheting--what Codevilla called the spiral. Sometimes it's clearly deliberate, and sometimes the participants have no options, but I wonder how often the ratcheting is inadvertent. The accusations just become more extreme, and sometimes it isn't part of any master plan, it just evolves.

That "energizing" seems to have a parallel in online discourse. The intensity/energy level they find in a group seems to inspire people to match it and exceed it--they must get a rush out of it, even though the mechanism is far more impersonal than is meeting face to face. Unless members of the group jump on someone who's out of line, I never see the culprit back down from an extreme claim. The morning after a bull session you can start more or less fresh, but the online conversations seem to pick up where they left off. The text is right there, just as you left it.

Without a guiding plan, with just the feeding off each other's energy, the accusations grow more extreme and the enemy more vile.

Politician meetings with hoi poloi seem to be alternately more attacked by coordinated noisy opponents, and more locked down and scripted to deal only with loyalists. Ratcheting.

Delay of game

I was trying to get to sleep with a West-Coast pennant game on the radio. No doubt the advertisers will disagree with me, but I think some minor changes would improve the game.

Every time a pitcher calls for a timeout, a ball is added to the batter's count.

Every time a batter calls for a timeout, or steps out of the batting box, a strike is added to his count.

I think the majors are probably ready for the pitch clock by now.

Seeing patterns

The Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope sees a different night sky than we do. With different constellations.. Godzilla, Mt. Fuji, Tardis, The Little Prince...

Mine detection

Ground penetrating radar, held by a drone. The devil is in the details, but it might work.

Gardening observations

Resist the temptation to use a chainsaw on the morning glories. It will probably damage the trellis, and will throw seeds into even more places--and nothing eats the seeds. A flamethrower is probably not allowed by city code. Seeds will get stuck in between the boards of the deck. A butter-knife can be helpful.

When the times come to harvest bindweed, you will regret having it so close to the rose bush.

There seems to be a strong positive correlation between the size of the harvest and the quantity of mosquitoes supervising the harvest.

Flower names evaporate: it is necessary to specify which pot and use landmarks other than other flowers' names when ordering a transplant.

Before and after the first frost is a dramatic transition.

Tall plants fall over.

The Right Stuff

The announcer is cool and collected

Diagrams: "That was a quick flight."

Some details at Hackaday, and a followup story about the time crunch at the ISS: "ISS crews are rotated out on a six month schedule because that’s about how long a Soyuz capsule can remain viable in orbit. It has a design life of only 215 days, any longer than that and the vehicle’s corrosive propellants will degrade their tanks."

I saw Esau by Iona and Peter Opie

I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild's Pocket Book is an updating of their older book, this time profusely illustrated by Maurice Sendak. It contains schoolchildren's rhymes, "clearly not rhymes that a grandmother might sing to a grandchild on her knee."

Tommy Johnson is no good,
Chop him up for firewood;
When he's dead, boil his head,
Make it into gingerbread

or

Patience is a virtue,
Virtue is a grace;
And Grace is a little girl
Who doesn't wash her face.

The second is the natural riposte to the original: "Patience is a virtue, virtue is a grace; both put together make a very pretty face."

I'm a book owner, and like this one:

Who folds a leaf down,
The devil toast brown;
Who makes mark or blot,
The devil toast hot;
Who steals this book
The devil shall cook.

No, it isn't Shakespeare, and it is often rather vulgar, and some of the customs jar--"selling a wife" was a poor man's form of divorce. You probably used some variation or another of these British chants when you were little. This may help you get a better feel for the past. For the longest time I didn't understand the point of the "Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief" poem, but once I learned the key it made English attitudes clearer. I remember joining in with other first graders to chant a ditty at a chubby classmate. I had no idea what exactly it meant, and from his reaction I'm not sure he did either, but it was supposed to be insulting.

An old observation

The rain it raineth every day
Upon the just and unjust fella
But chiefly on the just because
The unjust stole the just's umbrella.

Somewhere, somehow, somebody wrote the old rhymes that the children took up. Somebody had to write the folk songs. I wonder what they'd have thought if you'd told them that nobody would remember their names, but everybody would remember their songs.

ANITA and new physics

You may have heard of the ANITA experiment results. They claim to have seen upgoing energy showers in their Antarctica balloon experiments. That doesn't sound very surprising: IceCube sees them too--but at a lower energy. At these estimated energies, pretty much nothing doesn't interact in the Earth. They estimate the chances that this is an ordinary tau neutrino to tau lepton transformation, and get of order 1 in a million.

Their paper looks at the IceCube results and finds confirmation--but they actually beg the question a bit--they assume the particles are taus and then see if this agrees with the Standard Model, rather than assuming the Standard Model and trying to estimate whether these are taus.

And though they wrote about supersymmetric s-tau ("stau") particles as a Beyond-The-Standard-Model alternative, these don't act like the usual predictions for staus. (There's some flexibility. Actually, alot. Actually there are a ridiculous number of unknown parameters in supersymmetry, so maybe they're right after all..)

Halzen said he was surprised that an acquaintance's paper refuting ANITA's first premise wasn't out already--perhaps it wasn't as easy as he thought.

ANITA looks for radio bursts in the atmosphere resulting from showers of particles . It can't see very many radio bursts coming down at it directly, but the radio waves of downgoing showers reflect off the Antarctic ice, so its coverage is actually quite wide. Thing is, a shower developing in the Earth's atmosphere will have a particular polarization. When it reflects off the ice, that switches. So if they see an upcoming shower's radio waves with the wrong polarization (and they see 2 such), they conclude that it wasn't a reflection--the parent particle was really coming up through the Earth. And the angles they see those coming from imply that the chord through the Earth is thousands of miles. And the energy of the shower they infer means the original particle that entered the Earth on the other side must have been mighty energetic: 100EeV or thereabouts. It would have interacted along the way, and the granddaughter particle that interacted for the last time in the crust would have had only about 10EeV left. That's still a lot, btw. And the probability that it could happen as described is, as noted above, very very low.

But... What if the ice isn't nice and homogeneous? Can you get an effective reflection that doesn't reverse the polarization of the radio waves generated by the shower? Then you just have an "ordinary" 10EeV cosmic ray shower. That would be my first guess, and that's Halzen's friend's estimation (so far).

Experimental glitches and surprises happen.

Managers

I remember the conversation--monologue, actually--in which my then-supervisor, without a trace of irony, assigned me 3 different absolute top priority tasks in the space of 5 minutes. (One involved working closely with someone who was out of town...)

Other people can better that anecdote. I don't have the flier anymore, but the then-principal of our local elementary school sent home a half-page announcement that had several spelling errors and a grammatical glitch.

Opium wars

I don't sit still for podcasts, but I made an exception for the first part of Scott Adams announcing that his stepson had just died of a fentanyl overdose.

He describes the things that came together to cause this, starting with an accident his son sustained that caused brain damage, California rules that limit parental control of minor children, and the ready availability of powerful drugs and of fake Xanax (which can contain fentanyl too).

He suggests that the agents responsible for killing 30,000 Americans a year should be executed, and that if the Chinese don't do it, we should. He has a lot more faith in our ability to act inside China than I do. And faith that the society with more addicts will prevail--didn't happen last time.

This is a hard time for him. I wouldn't link to it at all, except that this is what he wanted to be public.

Fentanyl is nasty stuff. One policeman died after contact with it--apparently because he tried to wash it off with hand sanitizer, which made it much easier to absorb through skin. I gather that quite a bit of the drug is simply mailed from China, and delivered by the USPS.

Another take on The Benedict Option

I wrote some quick notes about this a few days ago.

Another blogger has a much more detailed take. Among other things the writer thinks that some of the features of a "lifetime learning university," including a campus and living space, might be useful. He worries that the modern versions of culture and state will not permit any substantive kind of isolation, and he is absolutely correct--only force of some kind will dissuade them from trying to dominate everything. He brings up the Jewish Orthodox, who use their monolithic voting block as a political force to compel the local governments to leave them alone.

However, the rule that "if something cannot continue forever, it won't" holds, and the new Western culture is deeply self-destructive. The power of the culture and state will decrease when the financial and social capital run out.

Drone wars

This Small Wars Journal post about a fighter commanding two drones at once (using video feeds from them) is full of jargon. "A concern with the bifocal picture of the battle for a lone individual, is that the data overload becomes more extreme. The aim of the 3D aspects of the OODA loop construct, and doubling or more for a single actor, is to seek continuous simultaneous review of the entire space surrounding a target; however, this impacts on tactical development significantly from an informational view." = you can't concentrate on three things at once

The idea, as illustrated in the post, is that using one or more drones greatly increases your ability to scan and attack. OK, fine. Searching for the enemy is still hard, and you almost certainly can't concentrate on 2 videos plus whatever is in front of you. Maybe some algorithms for pattern recognition would help--but those probably won't work well without high resolution, and if your drones are broadcasting brightly that's something your enemy could probably home in on.

I gather that "erratic behavior" helps make your drone attacks more effective. (Dodging, zig-zag course--sounds familiar)

The picture changes in some important ways if you aren't doing assassinations, and your enemy is equipped with the same sort of technology. In that case, you have to find ways of watching your own back at the same time. It would be nice to have a few drone-spotting drones aloft, which don't bother reporting back until they see something. If technology allows, add some drone-destroyer drones.

Since you may be otherwise engaged, it would be useful to optionally let the destroyers just attack when they find a target (though deception will make them waste ammo and power). Jamming or EMP attacks could make things interesting. Smoke screens probably won't work well, because (a) infrared and (b) the volume of stuff you need to fill a large enough volume of air is going to be daunting. Too little and the smoke tells where you/your stuff is, too much and you can't carry the smoke generator. (By this time the volume of drones would probably fill a car.)

You could launch lots of unarmed spotter drones and pray that your pattern recognition algorithm is still un-trickable (scarecrow with a cigarette lighter?) and send something armed when you think you have a positive ID.

Your job is to hide yourself, and arrange for some dummy targets, and try to figure out where your enemy is. If the drones are partly autonomous, just killing the enemy may not be enough.

IIRC, in Afghanistan they found that wells were sometimes connected by tunnels of considerable antiquity. Good luck with the drones there.

Resistance

It sometime seems that when it comes to a besetting sin, there are essentially three kinds of Christians.

1. Those that were gulled into thinking that it isn't really a sin
2. Those that are struggling with it
3. Those that gave up struggling and gull themselves

Me? Depends on the sin, but I hope most are in 2 or 1 and not in 3. Quite likely wrong, though.

"S. Dorotheus relates of a certain holy monk that he grieved at being freed from temptation, and exclaimed: “Am I not then worthy, 0 Lord, of suffering, and being a little afflicted for Thy love?” "

(I'm reading some of the desert fathers. Interesting mix of advice; sometimes contradictory. "It is human not to know yourself." -- also v.x.69 is fun -- also "If a diligent person lives with those who are not, he does not make any progress, for the whole point of being diligent is to prevent yourself by means of your work from becoming second rate. But if a lazy person lives with those who are diligent, he does make progress, or if he doesn't, at least he cannot get any worse." )

V.x.92. A brother asked an old man, "Father, what is the point of asking the seniors and getting good spiritual advice from them if I don't remember anything of what they say? Why ask seeing I don't profit by it? I feel as if I'm totally unclean."

There were two empty bowls near at hand, and the old man said, "Take one of those bowls, pour some oil into it, burn some flax in it, pour the oil back and put the bowl back in its place."

And he did so.

"Do it again," said the old man.

And he did so.

After this had been done several times, the old man said, "Now pick up the other bowl and tell me which is the cleaner."

"The one I put the oil in," he said.

"It's the same with the enquiring mind," said the old man. "Although you can't remember what you have been told, nevertheless you become cleaner than those who never ask any questions at all."

Ecclesiastes

Perhaps I'm weird (some near and dear will heartily assent) but I found that in younger years when I was in a funk I found that reading Ecclesiastes was a good way of getting out of it. Right there in the Bible--they got it! And at the end of the day they had some hope anyway.

I'm not suggesting it as cure for depression--all I had was the blues. And I wasn't trying to cheer myself up--I was looking for something that spoke to my mood.

Rule of Thumb 17

If the product claims to be compost-able or flush-able, carefully return it to the shelf and back away slowly.

Nuclear pasta

Their models may be wrong, and the details may turn out to not quite work, but you must salute the sense of humor of the researchers trying to calculate how the crusts of a neutron star could crack or break.

The crust might break if something falls into the star, or if in-falling debris slowly piles up into a tiny mountain. "How large a mountain can you build on a neutron star before the crust breaks and it collapses?"

First impressions of The Benedict Option

I've been hearing about this for some time, and after AVI said he was going to be teaching from it, decided maybe it was time to get and read it.

Thumbnail: Western Christendom is in free fall, and the West is already becoming hostile to orthodox Christianity. Christians need to build Christian communities to preserve the faith, encourage and sustain each other, and most importantly worship God. Most churches are not such communities.

His view that Western Christendom is in collapse seems accurate. He doesn't address the eventual side effects of this on the secular West, since that isn't his focus, but even the best case is pretty grim for everybody but the lucky elite. "What can't go on forever, won't."

He describes the desacralization of the West (from Charles Taylor) and the changes in philosophy that led us to our current mess. He doesn't suggest that there's an intelligence behind the changes, but I think there is.

In several places the book assumes that the local church can serve as a nucleus of community-building. Looking around at a few I know, that seems a bit optimistic, and even in the book he suggests that quite a few churches are past saving already. (Who knows what God will do, though.)

He emphasizes (rightly, I judge) the importance of liturgy--that's kryptonite to a number of people I know.

Understanding our history he calls vitally important--and that's something that's been on my mind for years. I noticed that the youth weren't getting much in the way of instruction, but a lot in the way of entertainment, and decided to do something about it. That's taken a lot longer than I hoped.

Teaching your children is vital too. He mentions some things I wish we had tried, and some things we did.

He doesn't know how these communities should organize. He describes a few, but recognizes that they will have to be organic, and probably vary somewhat depending on the circumstances. They will be local; there's no substitute for being there when somebody needs you.

Prayer, focus on God, and mutual support for living, working, and teaching will be the foundations of whatever finally works. Hold tight to the truth. Tell the positive story of sex and its importance, against the deluge of trivialization and nonsense we're immersed in. (Robot sex dolls? Really?)

Discipline yourselves--fasting, fasting from electronics, learning to appreciate manual labor. Recognize now that many professional jobs will be closed to orthodox Christians, and be ready to rework your life accordingly.

He comes back over and over to the monks at Nursa and how the principles of their community point to things we need.

My thoughts: To first order, as he points out himself, the Benedict Option is essentially trying to live a Christian life in community--something we should be doing no matter what the socio-political weather.

What should I be doing? Maybe following through with the education plan, assuming I haven't wasted my time on it. Collaring a few people in the church and talking with them about this. Maybe doing some legal research on mutual responsibilities in communities.

Most plans are going to fail, and sometimes dramatically, when people are too lax or too tight with the community rules. As little hierarchy as possible is probably best--otherwise you lose the organic nature of the community and wind up with an out-of-touch elite. Some is needed.

I need to think about this some more, and learn about what's been tried.

UPDATE: Another, much more detailed, take.

Code of conduct

Linus Torvalds apparently had it explained to him that his behavior towards other developers was destructive. So the Linux development community has a new code of conduct.

"In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to making participation in our project and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation."

You noticed too? Political affiliation isn't included. (The covenant is also quite sex-obsessed, taking up almost a third of the factors.) The Contributor Covenant starts off with some explanation about how meritocracy is a very bad thing, but the actual covenant is mostly innocuous--except for the loophole you can run a barge through.

"But you wouldn't want to work with a Nazi or a racist, would you?" No, not really. But unless their beliefs change what they do, how do I really know what they think? I've probably worked with some racists--but if so they were generally quiet about their views of gweilo, so who cares? And Nazis are rare, never mind what google's HR claims. The closest approximation to Nazis around here is antifa, and there aren't a lot of them either. (*)

What matters is not what you do, or even so much what you say, or what people infer about what you believe--but what label they can slap on you.

---

(*) "Nazi" means something specific not just about attitudes but about plans and actions. Racists of one stripe or another are not hard to find; tribalists who try to arrange the ascendancy of their tribe are ubiquitous--racists who work to destroy other races are much less common. Maybe you're God and can judge them both alike, but I have to evaluate deeds.

"Embracing My Inner Ent"

Have a look at this medieval scholar's post "On not taking sides." "After all, if my goal had been to impress anybody, I would do much better (numerically speaking) trying to impress the friends whose views I already knew I disagreed with, at least to judge from the jokes that they tell."

Or a more recent post of hers: "Get thee to a library!"

I wrote earlier this week about how senior colleagues keep urging me to get back to my proper work, the scholarship for which I have been trained and on the basis of which I hold the professional position which I do, the implication being that I should not be allowing myself to be distracted with ephemera like, I don’t know, being slandered by colleagues in my field, but rather that I should be concentrating on the work that will last for eternity, or at the very least beyond my own lifetime.

I can hear Hamlet now: "Get thee to a library, why wouldst thou be a feeder of liars?"

But that, of course, is exactly what I did thirty years ago at the beginning of my training as a scholar—get to a library.

That is where I found all the lies!

Or look at the importance of the Scots in the world.

Agrapha

Paul quotes Jesus saying something not found in the Gospels: "It is more blessed to give than to receive."

There turn out to be a small number of sayings attributed to Jesus, and not in the spurious "gospels" like "Thomas." Agrapha="non written"

Wikipedia has a list of them. Some of them just don't smell right at all: " Except ye make the lower into the upper and the left into the right, ye shall not enter into my kingdom." Nah, wrong style--bogus.

Others, such as "For ask for the great things, and the small shall be added to you," seem like variants of Gospel sayings.

One which Justin Martyr cites seems on the hairy edge: "In whatsoever things I apprehend you, in those I shall judge you." In other words, what I find you doing when I come or you die, will be used to judge you. That seems a bit out of tune with the rest of His words, except for Mark 13 "Therefore, be on the alert—for you do not know when the master of the house is coming, whether in the evening, at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning— in case he should come suddenly and find you asleep. What I say to you I say to all, 'Be on the alert!'" (And, of course, its parallel in Matthew 24.) And there's Ezekiel 18 too. And lots and lots of people who try to clean up their acts at the end of their lives find the principle plausible.

Keep your eyes on the prize.

A difference in attitude

I don't recall much about the book, but when I was quite young I read a history which included Daniel Boone, and mentioned how he had "kilt a bar." It took the time to make the point that although many people could spell better, few could kill a bear at close range.(*) (A sentiment apparently shared by his father.)

I don't see quite as much appreciation for the accomplishments of our ancestors--there's generally a caveat reminding us of their hurtful attitudes about this or that. I can see how this is supposed to shape children's attitudes into appropriate channels, but the unwarranted feeling of superiority seems like a high price to pay.

(*) Daniel apparently could read and write well enough, and liked to bring along reading matter on his hunting trips. He apparently fancied himself as a land speculator, but wasn't any good at it. "Boone's remaining land claims were sold off to pay legal fees and taxes, but he no longer paid attention to the process. In 1798, a warrant was issued for Boone's arrest after he ignored a summons to testify in a court case, although the sheriff never found him. That same year, the Kentucky assembly named Boone County in his honor."

Obscenity

I remember in a description of the USSR I read back in high school, the phrase "communist science." I thought that was an obscenity then. On mature reflection, I still think it is an obscenity. Truth is made subordinate to the desires of The Party.

Which brings me to this story. Go have a look at it. Executive summary: The author wrote an applied math paper attempting to find an evolutionary reason why males (in a vast array of species) show far greater variability than the females. This was attacked before publication by WIM, and after publication it was made to vanish from the journal.

The first question about this is, of course--is it true? The story is straightforward--were the events really that clear? I have never heard of a published article being replaced without comment before.

Was the opposition entirely driven by the fear of political repercussions? The author names names (Penn State WIM administrator Diane Henderson, Nate Brown, Mathematical Intelligencer’s editor-in-chief Marjorie Senechal) and cites quotations from them.

This is, if true, pretty damning. The loyalty of these, and presumably the rest of the WIM (Women In Mathematics) leadership (I don't know about the rank and file), is plainly not to truth but to the tribe and party. What makes this especially horrifying is that a representative of a large institution (the National Science Foundation--which--full disclosure--pays my salary) agreed.

So, what does one do--aside from forming a counter-party, which would likely degenerate the same way these have?

UPDATE: A mathematician doesn't like the paper on other grounds, but that doesn't exactly address the quoted remarks. Another party claims that the paper was only accepted on the basis of politics. The full emails mentioned might clarify things, but so far I'm still seeing politics victorious over math.

California bail

They claim that using algorithms to estimate flight risk and not demanding bail is more equitable, since the poor have a harder time making bail. The latter is true, but I wonder about the consequences.

First, I am not persuaded that an algorithm will be less biased(*) than the average of judges.

Second, there is likely to be a difference between the sets of "flight risk" and "flight risk when you have a sizeable chunk of money at stake." The second set is going to be a lot smaller--that's the whole point of bail, if you do it right.

I figure the algorithms-that-be will screw up a lot, and in addition will deny release to a larger number of people than before. If you try to force the before and after rates of bail-denial to match, the system will have a larger number of no-shows.

Perhaps that's a feature and not a bug? More no-shows means fewer convictions which means less stress on an over-full prison system.

(*) Google "fixed" its algorithm by removing gorillas from the training set.

Soil lead and blood

There's always a little lead in the soil, but sometimes there's way too much--and it gets into the kids. The soil is much harder to deal with than walls or floors, and the safety limit for soil is "37 times higher" (or 151 for the new interior standard) than for floors. That's probably not unreasonable. But.

"In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded 80% of New Orleans, thereby creating a unique natural experimental condition not ethically possible by any scientific standard.. Ten years after Katrina, the same research team was reinstated to remap New Orleans"

Yep. Lead levels dropped in the soil, and in the kids--a factor of 2.63! (They used the same census tracts to compare apples and apples.) But, of course, it wasn't just the soil. The population wasn't quite the same, and the cleanup sometimes involved repainting. And the stuff that gets picked up may be superficial, so if you can clean up the first few inches you probably cut down on the dust and subsequent transfer by a lot.

Before you ask: phytoremediation is hard. "despite some promising preliminary studies of sunflowers’ phytoextraction of lead, more extensive research has been disappointing. Since the 1990s, plants, including sunflowers, have been shown to increase accumulation of lead when a chelating agent, such as ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA), is added to the soil. Although the additive raises lead's solubility in the soil, EDTA is extremely expensive. Moreover, EDTA works in combination with other soil practices, such as adding compost, which are proven, cost-effective responses on their own."

"That said, another type of phytoremediation, called phytostabilization, does work. With phytostabilization, soil amendments are added, and the contaminant is sequestered, diluted, and prevented from becoming bioavailable. “The ability to phytostabilize lead is very strong and well demonstrated,” Chaney says. “Most lead problems can be solved by treating the soil with phosphate, limestone, and organic matter.”

Turns of phrase

People sometimes do amazing things with the language. You have heard of "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly." You can read about that here, together with such other marvels as "lithobraking maneuver" and "deconstructive deceleration" and "kaputnik."

Apparently Lady Godiva suffered "accidental excursions." As did Godiva II. ("middle melted, disks warped, and bolts stretched") Does it inspire you with confidence to read that "due to a miscalculation, Jemima was assembled with too many disks (of U235); this caused an excursion of 1.5 x 10^16 fissions"?

Illustrating math

The site MathWarehouse has some nice tools.

I'm a big fan of using examples, and animated gifs let you step through them easily.

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Just for laughs, from a different site:

UPDATE: See the comments

Misleading headlines

We've had a significant uptick in shootings in the Madison are in the past year or so. Typically the police report that those involved knew each other and that there was no threat to the general community (although I notice that there's also an uptick in mugging and commercial robberies too). Generally these seem to revolve around retaliatory shootings or drug deals.

I see the headline McFarland man shot in hand in targeted act of violence, Madison police say. In other words he was shot because people were shooting at him, which is the unsurprising default. But it is supposed to convey some soothing "Don't Worry" to the public.

The two culprits were eventually nabbed. Two men charged with robbing and shooting driver of car after waving at him to pull over. They shot at him when, after robbing him of his cell phone and cash, they attempted to take possession of the car and him. The rest of the story, which the police knew at the time, was "Worry--armed robbers are attacking random drivers." (in a residential area just a block away from a main street)

Pop

I am not the best person to judge how accurately this man's video assesses pop music then and now. I'm not up to speed on modern pop. Maybe one of you is? I have some difficulty telling the big female stars apart.

He claims three things have changed, and changed for the worse:

1. Music company costs to advertise a new song are sky high. They are therefore risk-averse, and biased toward "same old stuff." (It is exceedingly cheap to get something published on Youtube, but the process of getting it into enough ears to sell a lot of copies is more difficult and costly. There's lots of creative people in niches, but where?)
2. Many of the top singers use the same songwriters, so their stuff, unsurprisingly, sounds similar. (Is this true?)
3. A cheap way of getting attention is loudness, and a simple way of doing this is compression--bringing soft sounds up to similar levels as the louder ones, at the expense of dynamic range. (FWIW we use this in the other direction. Some preachers get pretty loud, and we compress them down. Don't tell.)

Vending machine

OK, it isn't really what you think of as a machine, since it was human powered, but it was anonymous vending.. The inventor wrote an autobiography which cannot be accused of humility, and probably not of strict veracity either.

A Canadian look at 1812

"The real legacy of 1812? It never happened again"

I'd heard that the war went went into extra innings, but apparently the treaty wasn't signed by both sides until a month later.

Flooding

Cross Plains got 15 inches--we got about 5 where I live.

The Yahara looks like a real river now. The lakes are rising, the number 2 arterial is closed and the number 1 likely will be tonight. We're supposed to get a bit more rain tomorrow. Since it took an hour and a half to get into work this morning, I think maybe telecommuting is wise.

The Road to Serfdom by F. Hayek

I finally got around to reading The Road to Serfdom. Yes, it is worthwhile reading.

He undertakes to show how any attempt to redesign a society along centrally planned lines, as every version of socialism (National Socialist or Facist or International Socialist or Democratic Socialist) tries to do, will, by the logic of planning and the limits of the human mind, tend inevitably to try control not "merely economic things" but by extension every aspect of life, control information, and revise the meaning of words. And so it has proved. For a simple example, those enamored of centralized re-education have spent the effort to try to redefine words like "racism" and "free speech" to try to eliminate contrary positions without debate.

The book draws more heavily from German examples than Soviet ones, because it was written during WWII, when the USSR was an ally which nobody wanted to antagonize, but for every German example you can easily find plenty of Soviet counterparts. It draws heavily on British politicians and thinkers because it was meant for publication on the other side of the pond.

One aspect of society which Hayek does not mention is religion, possibly because he did not understand it well. The commonalities are obvious, though. God can demand anything of us, and so can the totalitarian state. However, pastors and bishops are obviously not omniscient, so in practice we tend not to experience such thorough guidance. Only God has the intellect to manage billions of human lives with individual attention and love. Human planners have to think in terms of faceless lumps--and not think very well, either. But because the divinity in a planned state is vested in human constructs, there's no vast gap between the god and the representatives, and they can and do demand compliance with more and more intrusive rules. "Who died and made you God?" is answered by "The Plan/Party/People is God and I am part of it."

Another aspect he did not foresee, though others did notice it, is that as liberty is further and further restricted, people would be thrown the bone of "sexual liberation."

The Reader's Digest produced a condensed version of the book when it first came out--and I can easily see how it could have been condensed. His style is a bit wordy.

And, FWIW, he is not averse to things like a guaranteed minimum provision for citizens if the nation is wealthy enough, but is alive to the extreme problems of how to define the minimum and what happens at the border between states, one of which has a larger minimum provision than the other.

LHC experiments hope to cast a wide net

The LHC experiments have done careful targetted analyses of their data, looking for expected variations on the standard model. You can't go all hog wild and try any old model, because you know that whatever the final version turns out to look like, it is going to have to make very similar predictions to the standard model for the usual interactions. In other words, the standard model works pretty well, and any replacement is going to have to do at least as well.

They've been running out of candidates. Not that there's a shortage of ideas, but there's a shortage of ideas proven to work as well as the standard model. Most fail that test, and there are so many things any new model has to compare against that the effort to validate isn't trivial.

One important feature of these kinds of searches is that you can make a prediction and then check the data. If I predict that you have two aces in your hand, it is a lot more impressive if I haven't seen a thing than if we're playing stud poker. If I predict that a process will produce an excess of muons flying off at 30 degrees from the beam line, and I find a small excess, we can cheer a bit.

On the other hand, if I don't know what I'm looking for and I see a small excess of muons at 30 degrees from the beamline, that means nothing much.

I was looking at dimuon mass plots for my thesis, and found about a 2.2-sigma peak at the D0 mass. That would have been wild--the D0 wasn't expected to decay into mu+ mu- at a rate we could have observed. But random bumps happen. (I was curious and looked at the events that made up the peak--enough were garbage to account for most of the peak). Not important.

My advisor used to say that "prior knowledge is worth 3 sigma."

So, the experiments are going to go for "we don't know what we're looking for" searches. I predict there will be plenty of 3-sigma deviations.

Since the monte-carlo simulations that are supposed to predict what the data should look like aren't perfect, they may wind up seeing points of disagreement that merely represent failures of prediction. It will be a big project, and "deep learning" isn't as much "learning" as people like to think. OK, you've got a bump there. What does it mean? Is it a bump from leptophilic Z' or a bump of Amativeness? Or is the simulation of the photon interactions in the TRD not quite right?

But at this point they don't have much choice.

Sensus Fidelium

You have probably read that Saint Chrysostom said "Hell is paved with the skulls of bishops." Or, "The road to hell is paved with the skulls of bishops." Or, "The road to Hell is paved with the bones of priests and monks, and the skulls of bishops are the lamp posts that light the path."

Or you might have heard a version of this attributed to St. Athanasius (presumably refering to the Arians). Or John Eudes.

Googling around suggests that none of them actually said that. Although there have been plenty of holy bishops, there've been enough counterexamples in all eras to keep the saying alive.

Dorothy Day is supposed to have said something along the lines of "I don't expect much of bishops; it is the saints that keep the church afloat."

Faith in education

The received wisdom says that with proper education you can make a person better, and that if everyone is given the proper education the whole society will be good. It might take a generation or two to weed out the bad thoughts and bad influences, but the world will be good and people will do the right things and the useful things. That may seem an extreme example, but the basic ideas are very similar.

I strongly suspect that those most devoted to this belief have not raised many children. For instance, take something as simple and non-threatening as asking the kids to read a specific book (when they reached the same age, of course). Remember how that turned out?

Revelation 20 speaks of a thousand year rule by the holy. At the end of it, the bulk of the people turn evil again. I dunno about how symbolic or literal that is, but the principle seems perfectly accurate: the best government and the best education and the best environment in the world (like a Garden of Eden, maybe) won’t fix what ails us.

And, of course, who promises us that the educators have their heads on straight? Some materials I've seen are OK, and some convey anti-information.

Geometry on the bus

I gather "manspreading" is the offense of sitting wider than a woman would. I assume this is related to the widespread practice of "purse-flopping," in which a purse or backpack is used to reserve the adjacent seat.

I remember how weirded-out one youth got when I squeezed into the remainder of the seat beside him, and how flabbergasted the young lady and her friends were when I dropped her purse into her lap. (I had a sore knee and wasn't going to stand if I didn't have to, and she didn't take a hint.) Some folks just want extra space, and devil take the latecomers. The sideways sleepers are worse.

OTOH, there's a bit of geometry and physics involved. Seat heights suitable for the average leave those of us with longer tibia and fibula a choice between sitting straight with the femurs uncomfortably unsupported, crossing the ankles, or spreading the knees sideways. Or cross your legs--and that takes up even more space. It turns out men tend to be taller than women, and have to use a bit more sideways distance to get the hypotenuse to fit. Such is geometry.

When the seats face the aisle, there the stop/start of the bus brings some physics into play. Men usually have a higher center of mass than women, and without some extra torque will tend to flop sideways in a sudden stop. Crossed ankles reduce the lever arm against the seat, and thus the available torque. Unless your seatmates like having people fall on them, crossed ankles isn't the best choice.

Which leaves "spreading the knees out a bit" as the best option. At least until everyone is packed in like parka-ed sardines. Then you have to all sort-of rotate on the seat--everybody with the right shoulder forward and the left back, or stagger sitting at the forward edge and at the back of the seat.

No doubt this is all "so 2017," but the bus ride brought it to mind.

What message to teenagers?

Years ago I noticed that the church youth weren't learning some things that seemed fairly important—such as what the real differences and similarities were among denominations. So, I wrote a book to correct this, about the background for the faith. I gather from the lack of responses from test readers that it is not a page turner.

I did not feel as though I was the best person to write about how to live a Christian life (physician, heal thyself). But over time I've learned a few things, even when my applications of them aren't entirely thorough.

Suppose I was given time for a short talk to the youth groups. And imagine for the moment that they weren't distracted (fat chance, I know). What would they most need to hear?

No doubt that's very individual. Still, some things should not be surprises—and they often are.

1. There is often a dark night of the soul. There can be days, months, years of silence. Do not doubt in the darkness what you saw in the light.
2. Suffering is not abolished, but transformed. All God's children got troubles, and the more you love, the more people can hurt you. And somehow you come closer to God as you enter into His suffering.
3. God often wants us to wait. Moses didn’t appear on the scene to lead the Israelites to freedom right away, and even when he did try, he had to back off for another 40 years. Jesus didn't show up full grown. Get ready and wait. Persevere.
4. Joy and love have lots of imitators, and sometimes only time or stress distinguishes the fakes from the real. Or you can learn from the experiences of people who made those mistakes. "Good time lovers" don’t love you. The thrills of a youth group activity aren't really joy and the happy feelings from a concert aren't love or the voice of the Holy Spirit. "Now you've left off preaching and gone to meddling."
5. Your lives are eaten up with amusements—and usually passive ones. You have more entertainments at hand in an average day than any but emperors did before—and at the end of the day what have you accomplished? Really. Jesus was pretty clear that God wants fruit from our lives. Maybe that will have been playing with the baby, but I'm pretty sure that it isn't watching videos all day or checking Facebook/Blogger every few minutes.
6. You are rich. Christianity has some warnings for the rich. Retail therapy is part of the deceitfulness of wealth.
7. Pop culture is lying to you about sex and money.
8. Silence is an important part of life. Do you have time for any?

They won't sit still for them all. What would you say first?

"A letter to me"

"If I could write a letter to me" turned up on the radio a couple of days ago. It's trivial to come up with a list of things I should have done differently. I could write quite the letter about it.

Unfortunately one of the first items on my letter of advice would have to be to "seek out and listen to more advice." A bit of bootstrapping there...

Circles of love

Since we're finite we have some limitations. We love and sacrifice for our immediate family--work two jobs, feed the kids first, and so on. The next ring, neighbors and more distant family, we will still sacrifice for, but not usually as much. You start to hit the "150 limit" here--you just can't know all these people. The tribe or the city we don't love as strongly, and the nation (a relatively modern extension of the tribe) is even more abstract. The rest of the nations you just don't meet at all. If you travel, a very tiny fraction of them become, for a few short moments, your neighbors. The rest you never see.

AVI wrote "When we pretend to be better than we are we are in enormous danger, and those who are loyal to international enterprises smuggle in some much more primitive prejudices. They do not transcend nationalism, as they imagine, but replace it with something that aims higher but strikes lower."

Uncle Screwtape put it well: "Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."

Do I need to cite examples?

Do you like to skip rocks?

This won't surprise many of us, but these kids have a great uncle. Watch the video.

No, it doesn't take the fun out of things to test them systematically.

Liquid lens

I knew about oil immersion and microscopes--I'd watched my mother put a dab of oil on the bottom lens when she needed extra magnification. (She was typically looking for worm eggs.) The amount of magnification wasn't exactly reproducible, but it suited the purpose well enough.

Apparently one can now use a liquid lens. An electronically controlled iris lets you adjust the focus extremely rapidly. As the circumference shrinks, the drop's curvature changes, and therefore the focal length of the device.

Clever. Of course the lens will perform best when it is looking down (or up) at the object--otherwise the curvature will vary from one side to the other. Maybe not much--that depends on the surface tension of the liquid.

Quantum Mechanics Toys

Costas Papaliolios devised a little gadget for illustrating some quantum mechanical properties. It consists of a set of 21 hollow cubes with polarizing filters in them, labeled with Dirac's bra-ket notation. You know that if you use a polarizing filter to get light polarized vertically, another vertical filter will let the light through but a horizontal filter will block it (almost--the filters aren't perfect). But suppose you use a circularly polarizing filter instead? Some light will come through. And then if you put a horizontal filter after that, some light gets through.

But wait--didn't you just block all the horizontally polarized light with the first filter? Yes indeed, but then you re-measured with something that was a combination of both horizontal and vertical, and what gets through that is going to be, again, a mix of both horizontal and vertical. Measurements do not always commute. Even when you think you're not disrupting the system.

While Schwinger represented the atomic measurements of the Stern-Gerlach experiment as a matrix, Papaliolios represented the two states using the polarization of light. The quantum toys were equivalent to the magnetic field of the Stern-Gerlach experiment and to Schwinger’s matrix. By reordering, adding, or omitting blocks, you could see the unique characteristics of calculations made with matrices.

Very clever setup. The article is fun too:

Students recognized Schwinger’s brilliance, yet found his lectures impenetrable. Theoretical physicist and science writer Jeremy Bernstein recalled taking Schwinger’s course in 1950: “Schwinger was, it turned out, trying out an entirely new formulation of the theory on us—the old one would have been hard enough—and since he lectured from memory questions were discouraged.... After a few weeks I was lost.”

If you want to make your own, this article has instructions at the end.