Declaring life bankruptcy

The United States was for a long time a frontier culture. I'm told, and it seems plausible, that it wasn't only people looking for a better life who emigrated, but also people who had managed to make themselves odious in their neighbor's eyes. If you can't stand it where you are, move elsewhere, change your name, and try a new start.

This is golden for men who want to ditch their families, or other criminals looking to escape punishment and find new targets.

On the other hand, it could also be a refuge for people who had made an injudicious choice and have had second, wiser, thoughts. It might be easier to reform in a place where nobody knows your name (maybe).

One of my wife's ancestors was apprenticed, in what's now Germany, to an abusive master. The lad, pushed too far, rammed the master into a horse-trough and took a boat to the USA to avoid the harsh penalties inflicted on insubordinate apprentices.

My cousin's geneological research suggests that a not-too-distant ancestor of ours was not born with the name he died with.

The option of "starting over" is an alluring one. Part of the legend of the French Foreign Legion was that you could join under an assumed name, and earn the new name and a new life in the Legion. They actually did some background checks--at least some of the time.. A stint in the Legion would "pay for" your crime--at least in the great myth of the Legion.

Suppose you're not a crook looking for new victims.

Maybe you have some obligations that would make "declaring my old life bankrupt" a grave offense. Then running away is obviously evil. Or perhaps you're a teenage who thinks home is horrible and you'd be ever so much better treated in the big city. Maybe you're right, but more likely you're a fool who is about to find out what predation means. But maybe the environment really is oppressive and unjust, and the whole community's disapproving eyes are on you, and you need to get out from under them. Probably you won't ever cut and run, but I think I understand the appeal of having the option.

Having a national ID makes this escape a lot harder. You can easily understand the appeal of having such a thing--it makes catching deadbeat dads (and moms) easier, and makes it easy to tell who is a citizen entitled to benefits and who is not. And, in case of war, it makes it easier to spot enemy infiltrators. (We're at war now and probably will be for the rest of my lifetime. Lots of wars have taken decades or centuries--the Spanish Reconquista took 500 years.)

But a universal ID lets the powers-that-be apply the small-town's lack of privacy without any sense of small-town community. If you're the wrong flavor of citizen, the nation's disapproving eyes are on you, without any mitigation or any escape or possibility of starting over. China is our current bad example--it maintains a database of all its residents with the possibility, and already the beginnings, of a system to track everyone and punish the smallest deviations from the will of the powers-that-be.

One of the prices of liberty is insecurity. It shouldn't be easy to duck and run, but it seems to me that it should be possible. For criminals with connections, it always will be.

Returns

The discerning reader will be gratified to learn that Dr. Boli is back after his long hiatus.

Charlie Gould

I had never heard of him before. He was the first Union soldier to breach the Confederate works at Petersburg. "if he had only had his revolver he could have held the fort alone."

I read of an "English" fighter about a thousand years ago fighting on with an arrow through his jaw and into his neck, and going on to live a long life afterwards.

I dislike the jab for testing blood sugar.

Imposter Syndrome

Talk about Imposter Syndrome is making the rounds. The journal club addressed it recently, on a day I was absent. Since they're about to look at mental illness and stress among grad students, I thought I should try to catch up, and went to the workshop on I.S. at the conference last Thursday.

Thumbnail: You feel as though you have your position or fame purely due to luck, and worry that you will be found out and humiliated.

Wikipedia suggests that people started talking about this in the late 70's, but that the effect (not a mental illness) is quite common.

It has been estimated that nearly 70 percent of individuals will experience signs and symptoms of impostor phenomenon at least once in their life. This can be a result of a new setting, academic or professional. Research shows that impostor phenomenon is not uncommon for students when entering a new academic environment. Feelings of insecurity can come as a result to an unknown, new environment. This can lead to lower self-confidence and belief in their own abilities.

Wikipedia also says this especially impacts "women of color" in academia, and attributes this to "hideous forms of racism and sexism." That hypothesis isn't necessary (and anecdotal observations contradict it). The effect was predicted long before. Although "affirmative action" goes by many different names these days, it still exists, and the recipient cannot be sure that the thumb was not on the scales--"Hello self-doubt!"

My observations are mostly of grad students and post-docs and engineers and scientists and profs. By this level, there's no question that the student has intellectual horsepower. Maybe there was a thumb on the scales early on, but that won't carry you far. I haven't met a mediocre student yet on any of the teams I've been on. Some are sharp, and some are super-sharp, but they all "belong here." OK, I lie, there was one student who could not seem to follow instructions. I'm pretty sure the student was clever, but something about taking notes and asking questions and re-organizing the analysis seemed to be outside this student's world.

They don't always feel that that they belong. I empathisize. Been there, done that.

Being a perfectionist, or feeling as though you have to be Superman, having lots of other people's expectations on your shoulders, or being in a new environment can help bring this on. Those all seem to be obvious contributors.

Two other things strike me as very important.

1. When your job is to solve abstract problems, you quickly find out that there are two kinds of problems. Problems you have solved already are easy, almost trivial. If you think of them at all you probably grudge the time you spent on blind alleys for something so obvious. You pay them no more mind than you do the light traffic on your way to work. Problems you have not solved yet are hard. They occupy your mind they way the heavy traffic does. There's a sampling bias: you see things you can't do, and ignore things you can.
   

   Since nobody is a super-polymath (despite your ambition), you have colleagues who have solved some of the problems you haven't. Therefore they are smart and you are dumb. If you can't solve the kinds of problems they can, why are you here?
   

   I'm not sure this translates so well into careers in which problems with physical dimensions have to be solved over and over (you have to kill another deer every couple of weeks if you want to keep eating). But in academia it can be pretty dramatic.

2. The other thing that jumps out at me is that you regard yourself and your worthiness entirely on the basis of accomplishment--not relationship. And, only on the basis of accomplishment in this particular environment.
   

   I am a son, brother, husband, and a father, and a Christian (another relationship). If they decide tomorrow that my work is unacceptable and escort me out of the building, that'll hurt, but it isn't the entirety of who I am. Looking around the room at the journal club, I see plenty of grad students who know more astrophysics than I do, but it doesn't phase me the way it once would have.
   

I'm not sure how to translate these into effective ways to help people. Recognizing the sampling bias is one thing, internalizing that observation is another. And it isn't terribly helpful to say "cultivate relationships and skills outside your work." Doing that, especially for a time-crunched grad student, isn't always easy.

Of the things mentioned in wikipedia, having mentor seems most likely to be helpful (preferably not your advisor!). Understanding the whys may help, and regular reminders probably would too.

I figured that the folks who hired me decided I was OK, and I would do my best. If they miscalculated, that was their hard luck.

My thesis advisor Lee Holloway tried to set his students a good example by asking the elementary questions at seminars. "What do you mean by X?"

Fishers of men

I hoped that God would give me the gift of such forceful brilliance that when talking with unbelievers I would "knock-em-dead." Unfortunately the Lord does not seem to approve of fishing with dynamite. Probably this is because people wind up more impressed by the action than the Lord.

"Let this Christ, the King of Israel, now come down from the cross, so that we may see and believe!" He didn't. It would have been dynamite to see...

There's an old rhyme "Confess a man against his will, he's of the same opinion still." I mondegreened it into "Convince a man against his will, he's of the same opinion still." I think my mistake is also true. The most thorough proofs don't sink in and make a change unless the hearer wants them to. Parents will have noticed this. And of course, sometimes people hold conflicting "truths" for a lifetime. And for the honor of truth, I have exemplified this also: after I was convinced of the truth of Christianity it was another two weeks before I finally converted. (One afternoon, with a clarity I never had before or since, I realized that everything made sense in Jesus. How can you do more than a supernatural persuasion?--and even then I procrastinated.)

Father Simon says that when Jesus called people to be "fishers of men" he expects them to be tasty bait. I'd not quite say that--the attraction is supposed to be Jesus--but it does seem as though the call is almost always one by one by one.

Headline complaints

The headline reads "Metal Foam Stops .50 Caliber Rounds as Well as Steel – At Less Than Half the Weight". If you read the article, "stops" isn't quite the right word to use. The composite armor "was able to absorb 72-75% of the kinetic energy of the ball rounds." That's more than ok for something light, but the headline is misleading. I presume that the impact turns into many collapses and spallations inside the "bubbles" and helps dissipate the energy--a bit like crunchable bumpers, but at higher energy.

In addition, "CMFs, in addition to being lightweight, are very effective at shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation" is misleading, and so is the article it links to. Steel is better than aluminum, and not so good as lead is the right answer--and one of the commenters pointed that out, noting that the researcher's real abstract didn't claim otherwise. Radiation gets stopped by stuff, not structure.

Keystone Kriminals

If this weren't so close to my daily orbit I'd be laughing.

Two assailants stole money from a pizza delivery man but he got their keys in an attempted Downtown Madison robbery early Saturday morning, with both items switching back to their respective parties by the end of the incident

Pronouns

Thursday was my first day back from vacation, and also the day of the IT Professionals conference. They pay me for it, so I suppose I'm a professional.

After registration, on the way to the coffee and bagels (tea and an apple), was a table with a couple making "pronoun preference" buttons--"he/him" or "she/her" or you could write in your own.(*) In the end, I only saw a handful of people wearing them. I flatter myself that it's always been easy to tell what sex I am--especially now with a dad-bod and extensive male pattern baldness. I wonder how many people viewed the idea of an explicit id as faintly insulting.

If I have to register a pronoun, I think I'll pick "Mar".(**) ( ܡܪܝ ) I admit that this is purely aspirational, but would serve as a good reminder.

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(*)I saw only one man with the write-in button. His print was so small I couldn't make it out. As usual, the conference was mostly men.

(**) "Mor" would also work, except that it would be confused with "more."

Qui bono?

Quite a few states are legalizing or looking at legalizing marijuana. From my vantage the process looks coordinated. Perhaps this is purely grass-roots (if you'll pardon the pun), but I suspect the lobbying groups' funding might bear inspection. Is this "big tobacco" or some other group?

Is it a coincidence that the CBD oil hype hit about the same time?

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My take on legalization is that we have more than enough problems with alcohol abuse; we don't need a new crop of addicts--even if (as is loudly asserted) its addiction is less destructive than alcohol's.

Golden rice

I hadn't heard much about it for years. It turns out there's a good reason for that. It took a while get get the bugs worked out of it.

The initial version of the crop actually put very low amounts of the desired nutrient in the edible portions of rice. Switching to another form of the gene (one from corn) solved that, but the new version ended up with the added gene inserted in the middle of a gene essential for the activity of a plant growth-regulating hormone. Switching to a different version of the same plant solved that but delayed the process. Once field trials were finally ready to start in 2013, anti-GMO activists destroyed the plantings, setting everything back again.

Stand on Zanzibar

I read Brunner's book decades ago, and haven't been particularly interested in re-reading it. It had some memorable moments. The BBC decided to highlight it as almost prophetic. Well, compare that with a more detailed listing of predictions/realities.. He didn't do badly. For example, he predicted widespread genetic engineering, but not the public reaction to it.

The BBC story describes how he tried to do his "predictions." I like his approach.

So how did Brunner do it? To start with, he spent nearly three years reading up on topics from the role of genetic inheritance in disease to links between population spurts and urban violence. He also spent a month in the US in 1966, visiting Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Then, breaking with his usual work routine, instead of outlining his plot, he filled 60 pages with thoughts before hammering out a first draft.

As he went, he devised a series of ‘parallel thought exercises’ to generate ideas. As Smith describes it, he imagined a Victorian time-traveller pitching up in the 1960s, and then pondered how he’d go about explaining to them everything from the telephone to the sexual revolution. The first was relatively simple, but accounting for the vast differences in cultural mores required him to examine countless cultural assumptions. “Then, he reversed the process, asking himself what those assumptions might mean for the future, how present environments might already be making us aware of those to come”, Smith explains. For instance, the ‘hobby-type saboteurs’ that pop up throughout the novel, getting their kicks through recreational violence, came to Brunner after he clocked the prevalence of Peter Pan syndrome on both sides of the Atlantic, and then read about kids vandalising public transport for fun.

The blogger's link claims that amateur saboteurs are under-reported. I've heard some hair-curling descriptions of infrastructure vulnerabilities, and I suspect that if the Internet weren't such an effective opiate we'd see more damage.

Teller Light

This post has pictures.

When a nuke explodes, x-rays escape the container long before the container itself is destroyed--for some definitions of "long before." They ionize air outside, and when the air de-excites it glows. The post shows 2 pictures taken a millionth of a second apart, with air glowing outside the bomb's casing.

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The next post on that blog consists of only a title, "It's Late," with a number of comments by his wife added in the months and years after the author's death shortly after that last post.

A blog is a curious sort of legacy. It may be a collection of (maybe) interesting tidbits, old news, a diary, one part of a long conversation, maybe a few analyses mixed in that might be useful standalone...

I started writing this one intending to follow the denBeste model--concentrating on original content, and not so much the Instapundit model of links with brief comments. You can see for yourself how that worked out. I wonder how long it would take to sift through and collect those things I think might be useful for a longer while. I spent time on analyses that subsequent events have rendered moot. Was it worth doing? Maybe only for my own effort to be "an exact man" ...

Lessons learned

Driving down Bird I saw for sale what I thought was a great idea: modular garden fence panels. I pulled over to look. Put stakes in the ground and run them through screw-eyes in the ends of each panel. When you want to trim the weeds, or need access with a tiller, just lift the panel from the stakes and walk on in. I figured the price was too high, and made my own.

A pneumatic staple gun is great for attaching the screening. I got that one right the first time. (Lesson 0)

I tried using 2x4 for the frame--just once. I didn't want to waste the materials, or else that monstrosity would be long gone. Ever after I used 2x2, and when I couldn't find decent ones, split 2x4's on my table saw. (Lesson 1)

I used wall plates to assemble the frames. That was tedious, painful, and pricy. The next time I made panels I clamped the 2x2 together and bored holes for glued dowels. That was much cheaper, was about the same amount of effort, and seems to be just as robust--maybe a little more so. (Lesson 2)

Over time chicken-wire rusts rather badly, and results in unexpected personal perforations. Next time I'm using hardware cloth. It's more expensive and harder to work with, but looks more rugged. (Lesson 3). (For the garden door itself I had the wit to staple lath overlapping the edge of the chicken-wire so the ends don't bite.)

Round stakes wobble. You need to secure each panel to the next with cable ties. In fact, buying the steel rods may not have been entirely necessary, and later efforts just use cable ties and a few plastic garden rods. (Lesson 4)

Weeds will have their way. They penetrate black mulch, old rugs, and weave their way around pavers. Every year, pull out each panel and clean out the weeds and whatnot from the landing zone, and then reassemble the thing. Budget several hours. (Lesson 5)

Now I'm wondering what I'll learn next year.

UPDATE: I forgot lesson 6: A garden gate needs a sill!

Cahokia

It is worth visiting

Infrastructure question

I asked how Cahokia got its water, and how did it dispose of sewage. "Haul water by pot from the river" was the suggestion for input--though enough to supply 10-20,000 people is a lot of haulage. Nobody knew about output. It may have been the same. Dumping waste in the borrow pits (where they dug the dirt to build the mounds) would have been an easy but stinking idea. So, since there was no obvious drainage, they probably used night soil luggers hauling to the river--or maybe the farms, though quick googling doesn't show any references to Amerindians doing that. Maybe urine lugging too, but maybe not--also stinky, but less of a health hazard. Still, they planned a lot of the city, so probably they planned something.

Engineering issue 1

Hauling water from one of the network of nearby channels would have been tedious but doable--and if they had "rain barrels" that would have reduced the need. (No malaria yet, though mosquitoes are always annoying.). However, the channels changed over time. This could be problematic for both the water supply and for trade, since quite a lot would have been water borne.

I noticed one figure that appeared twice--a swimming beaver with a stick in his mouth and front paws. If, from time to time, they had to do some dam-work of their own to make sure the river channels they wanted didn't dry up, they beaver would have been an important icon. Of course any dam-work would have rotted away a thousand years ago. But they did a lot of palisade-work, so they had access to lots of logs. This is just a hint; and I'm not sure where, if anywhere, you could look to find out whether they dammed or not.

Engineering issue 2

Monk's Mound has had a number of cores taken, and it looks like it has suffered from several major slumps over the past thousand years. We were told that the Mississippians tried different combinations of soils and clays and internal structures to try to maximize stability. In one place researchers found a layer of cobbles, with no obvious purpose. Maybe this was to help with drainage in an earlier iteration of the mound? The mound was built in stages, with what seem to my untrained eyes to be different layouts, though maybe there was some unifying principle. I gather that sections started slumping while it was still being built.

Lightning

On Monk's Mound, the top level supposedly held a huge fence, a 40-50' high building for the chief, and an even taller pole in front of the building in the courtyard. This would have been the tallest thing for miles in any direction. We get thunderstorms in this part of the world--frequently.

That tall pole would have gotten plenty of strikes. I suppose they must have had to replace it regularly. However, it might have helped protect the great house. For a while.

I wonder how the Mississippians would have interpreted that. Perhaps one of the functions of the Supreme Leader was to take all the lightning strikes for the city onto himself.

We were told that Natchez tribe had characteristics most like the Mississippians, and so their customs are used as models. In the link, lightning set fire to one of their temples and the distraught citizens went so far as to throw children into the flames to try to get the gods to put out the fire. I'm not sure what that means about what they thought of lightning, but it does suggest that fire prevention wasn't perceived as high on their priority list and lightning wasn't one of the great worries.

Plaza

They flattened out the surface of the Grand Plaza--an undertaking as massive as the construction of the Monk's Mound itself--though needing less dirt from elsewhere. I wonder why. Maybe for massive games that needed flat surfaces, or maybe the Supreme Ruler got tired of ruts and mandated smoothness?

Tools

They dug all this dirt with stone tools. A stone hoe looks stupidly dull, and would have been painful to dig with--except in mud, and that would have been painful to lug around. And a stone axe looks like it would do more crushing than cutting.

I used to wonder why they didn't sharpen the stone axe more, until I watched the center's video of knapping. I think I get it now. Stone can be pretty brittle, and sharper stones would chip and snap rather quickly. Maybe you could get more done with a sharp axe before it chipped too badly and you had to get a new stone, but they weren't easy to make as it was. Dull and strong was probably a decent compromise.

Defense

The palisades around the Grand Plaza were built/rebuilt 4 times in a century, with plenty of bastions. Clearly they had enemies--bastions like that look silly if for a purely ritual formation.

The bastion/entry pair scheme doesn't make much sense unless the rest of the common folk of the city could gather inside, so they must have had grain and water storage inside the Plaza--not huge, since there don't seem to have been many other towns of size big enough to man a siege. Maybe the sister St. Louis and East St. Louis settlements provided the raiders. Civil wars are always "a thing" in history. The palisades would need of order 100,000 trees each time. I wonder if they dragged them from nearby or floated them downstream from logging elsewhere? (There's that beaver motif again.)

Galena

They had galena for ornaments, but not lead. I wondered about that, but it turns out you have to pre-roast the ground-up ore to burn off the sulfide and make an oxide--and that's a noxious step with not immediate payoff. Only after roasting the oxide with charcoal do you get lead.

Natchez

As noted above, the Natchez are supposed to have been the most similar of the surviving tribes to the Mississippians. A burial in mound 72 had a few men, one with a huge pile of expensive grave goods, and over a hundred women.

They had a legend of a founding leader who taught them and directed them to a new country. They also had (as is almost universal) a story of a great flood which some escaped on a high mountain. Cahokia had suffered a great flood, and Monk's Mound would have been a possible refuge--but perhaps the story inspired the mound?

Art

For some reason the bird man image struck me as Mayan, but I can't think why because the styles are quite different. Maybe the feathers and the over-drawn nose?

Many figures are depicted kneeling. Maybe this was to show proper subservience, but maybe it was a stylistic convention designed to let you make a human figure as large as possible for a given chunk of rock. If you carved a standing figure from a 5" rock, the head and torso would be 2 1/2 inches high, but if the figure is kneeling you can make them almost 4" high.

Reconstruction

Several mounds were excavated, and then rebuilt. Even the Monk's Mound has been partly rebuilt, but I gather they haven't tried to restore it to original (pre 1250) form.

Today

St Louis was clear in the distance. The new city has a dozen times the area, a hundred times the population, and thousands of times the wealth of the old city. Although, as Merlin pointed out, how can you be really rich without servants? And the Birdman might have added, without a hundred wives?

Professions and mental illness

Folklore says that mathematicians and grandmaster chess players peak early and have a greater-than-average chance of going mad.

I'm not sure if that's true, nor what exactly is meant by "madness" here, but suppose there is really a correlation. In both "professions" there's a very high bar to entry, so we can immediately rule out the hypothesis that people with a tendency to (e.g) schizophrenia gravitate to those jobs. It would be like saying people with a tendency to fallen arches tend to become basketball players--not unless they're 6'7" or so. I'm not so sure about other professions--lawyer, for instance. They need some intellectual horsepower, but it isn't as exclusive a group.

Some professions (police, surgeon) are obviously extremely high stress, to a degree that I doubt most mathematicians or engineers see. Maybe leaving out those would clarify the question.

Is there a pattern to the incidence of mental illness in the professions? I'm not thinking of a scientist with a bee in his bonnet about 9/11 conspiracies OK, I lie--I am, but I don't include conspiracy theory addiction unless it is a debilitating illness

If there is such a pattern, does it reflect a selection bias? (I was told that many speech therapists became interested in the profession because they needed that help in childhood.) Or does a raw talent set correlate with a weakness? Or is the way we teach some professions all screwed up? (horse whisperer in Columbia vs the horse breakers, or medical interns)

I have known of, though not personally, a few physics students who have had a "breakdown" of some kind, but I did not have the need to know the details and was not told. (And a few who washed out or decided they liked other things better--not the same thing.). So, less than a percent had a mental problem, plus or minus, and that may have been stress-related. One of the professors in the two universities I am most familiar with committed suicide, but again I have no details, except that there were no obvious problems beforehand. About 1 percent, plus or minus. That seems a trifle high. If one uses suicide rate as a proxy for the rate of all mental health problems then farmers and mechanics are at greater risk than policemen.

This looks complicated.

Poetry and music

I hesitate to call something so short a dream, but I had a dream that I was sitting next to a country music composer of patriotic songs and handing him Kipling's Et Dona ferentes and suggesting that he might find it inspiring. I suppose I had been slightly irritated sometime the previous day...

On waking, I thought the notion rather fitting. Perhaps not that work in particular (a nice idea, but a trifle clunky), but honor and common sense and place matter in his work--and I can't imagine pop singers touching Danny Deever with a barge pole, though a few country singers might. On the other hand, Pete Seeger or Joan Baez might have done something with Birds of Prey March. Kipling often uses a much longer line than most songs do, so quotation probably won't fly.

If you could find an American idiom for the phrase Gods of the Copybook Headings, that one might almost write itself--but not by Taylor Swift.

UPDATE: Spell-check turned "ferentes" into "ferments"

Spectra of meteors

I forgot the charger for the laptop, so I had to try to think things out instead of looking them up.

What would meteors made of chunks of stuff like Bennu seems to be do when they hit the atmosphere? The soft conglomeration stuff should shatter easily and vaporize quickly, while the denser rock should punch through deeper. If the soft and hard stuff are made of different minerals, you should see different spectra at different points along the trail.

I tried to come up with a design to collect lots of data quickly, by having the telescope direction follow the radiant point, using a "cone" of mirrors inside to reflect concentric circles of light onto collector mirrors (of truly weird shape) and then onto diffraction gratings for on-line analysis. You'd get fairly coarse track resolution, of course. The whole business could be triggered by sensing whether there was a flash of light or not. (Too long a flash is an airplane or firefly, too short is an artifact or a coincidence. No flash means no meteor--just background.)

It could work. I think. There might be too much smearing of the image, though.

It turns out that this sort of analysis has already been done. If you shine the light on a diffraction grating, instead of getting a line in the sky you get a wide spectral smear, sort of like a feather--if you are lucky and the meteor's track is parallel to your grating. All it needs is lots of pictures and lots of patience and careful study of photographs of the steaks.

And different meteor showers do have different compositions. And there can be a difference in what appears at higher altitudes, as shown in the last image on that page.

Of course the atmosphere glows too when it gets hot, and there's black body radiation as well as the spectral lines, so it isn't trivial to parse out the details.

Travel notes: gaming and casinos

Gaming and casinos blight towns. They suck up the money and the hope. Who hopes to start an auto repair shop when a winning tickets seems so much easier?

Within a hundred yards--a gaming parlor and two pawn shops.

Revelation 21-22

"There will no longer be any night." Two meanings come to mind: no more night in the sense of danger and evil ("So after receiving the morsel he went out immediately, and it was night."), and also in the sense of "party's over, go home."

On thing that has always annoyed me about large parties is that you can't be with everyone you want to. Somebody is always at the far end of the table--you can only talk with the 2 to 4 people next to you. That is the sad consequence of a table's geometry.

The New Jerusalem has some curious features--there's a river through a cubical city 1500 miles on a side (the Earth was known to be round) with the same tree on both sides of the river. I get the impression that this isn't a literal image but an impression. Lovecraft was enamored with the idea of non-Euclidean geometry to evoke alien dangers. I wonder if a different geometry might have its wonderful aspects.

Bennu

The Astronomy Picture of the Day of Bennu is very curious. It looks like a scree field, and it probably is scree all the way down. But the rocks are interesting. Much of the stuff lying around is clearly pitted and "space-weathered" and looks like concretions of smaller bits of stuff--the sort of thing you might expect from gentle gravity pulling dust and stuff together. But some show clean cleavage, as though a hard rock was cracked. If asteroids were built of accumulated cruft, like comets are supposed to be, all of it should be rough-looking.

Meteorites tell us that there are some hard bits in the asteroids--indeed some theories hold that a planetoid, big enough to have the heat and pressure to make rocks, broke up to make the asteroid belt--and all that frail-looking stuff suggests that a lot of the meteor gets splattered away high up in the atmosphere.

The meteor trail in the air is mostly glow from heated oxygen and nitrogen, but I'd expect some amount of light from the frying meteor as well. If (That's a big if. As it says at the link, usually you don't have a spectrometer pointed at the meteor trail.) you could compare the spectrum at the start and at the end, and subtract off the atmospheric contribution, you might be able to tell the difference between the composition of the soft cruft and the harder bits.

An amateur spy

Yesterday the BBC posted a story about a young Ghana lad who wanted to be a spy.

He was supposed to follow his father into the police, but Azeteng dreamed of being a spy. He spent his pocket money on James Bond films and low-budget CIA thrillers, burned on to blank DVDs by traders at the local market. On the weekends, when his father sent him to cut grass for the family’s livestock in a garden behind the police station, Azeteng would pretend he was on a mission, and tiptoe up to the door to listen in.

What he heard on those weekends killed off what little ambition he had to join the police. He heard poor women come to the office to report that their husbands had beaten them, only to be told they would have to pay for a pen to take their statement, or for petrol to drive to make arrests. The tricks were cheap, and the sums pitifully small, but they had an outsized impact on young Azeteng. When he saw prisoners whipped with sticks in their cells, he knew for sure he would not be a policeman after all.

He scraped money together, bought some camera glasses, and went to find out the truth behind the migrant transport chain. He took pictures, notes, and what documents he could find (a dead man's ID)--and nearly died. He saw a lot of death. And you don't want to take that journey if you're a woman.

He says he wrote things down. Presumably he memorized them first and then wrote them when he could be unobserved. Which isn't easy to arrange in a crowded vehicle, or an area guarded by suspicious gunmen.

Then three months later, in February 2018, Azeteng got a call asking him to come back to the NCA offices. They told him that parts of his evidence had been sent to law enforcement in Mali and used in operations in Gao that resulted in the arrests of suspected people-smugglers.

...

The technical language masked something that had meant the world to Azeteng — his journey had not been in vain. He had gone undercover, and contributed in some way to fighting crimes against migrants.

Quick clarification

The long and complex works (symphonies or novels) aren't by those qualities alone better than shorter and simpler works (song or short story). Some tunes are meant to be short and focussed, just as some stories are gems when short and flabby when expanded. I didn't intend to disparage any country genre or performer.

There are some books I've re-read several times (off the top of my head: Treasure Island, Screwtape Letters, Lord of the Rings, Descent Into Hell, The Longest Day, Dinosaur Beach, and others). But there are short stories I've re-read many times too. Don't ask me which is better.

Country Classics

I heard the phrase after listening to Rachmaninoff’s 2nd, and so naturally it made me think of crossovers and fusion.

I tried to imagine Dolly Parton singing Vocalise. She undoubtedly has heard it, and could probably do a fine job with it. I’d guess most big-name singers were introduced to, and probably trained on, some of the classical composers. I suspect her fan base would be respectful, admire the result, and maybe even ask for it now and then.

How about the reverse? The themes are often similar. Consider Drinkin’ Problem vs Carmina Burana. And quite a few composers were inspired by folk tunes. For American tunes, think of Copland. I have to confess I’m not terribly fond of his work.

For apples to apples, and maybe some actual fusion works, you’d have to look at short pieces. Ballads can run on for a while, but I haven’t heard many that were musically complex, though some short country songs are. So "short" is mandatory. The most famous compositions by the big name classical and romantic composers are far longer than your average song, and generally quite complex, but they wrote plenty of shorter ones too, and modern songwriters borrow from sections of longer works. (a partial list) And besides tunes, country composers can borrow what melodic tools they please from the common heritage.

You shouldn't need a steel guitar or a fiddle to reproduce the country musical idioms.

I don’t see why this couldn’t work. Which probably means somebody did it 70 years ago and I never got the memo. I try to research posts, but there's a lot I don't know. I never got very far in music theory. There's probably some key word of jargon that would have made google tell me all.

A story not told

There's a story I look forward to hearing someday. In Mark 16 we read about the angel saying to the women to "tell his disciples and tell Peter." In Luke we read about the Eleven saying "It is true! The Lord has really risen and has appeared to Simon." And in John we read the touching story of Jesus meeting Peter and several others, and asking if Peter loves Him.

John is famously not entirely chronological, but he specifies that the latter scene is "after" appearing to the other eleven, and therefore presumably well after the Emmaus trip. And Peter is with other disciples, and not separate, as is implied in the Mark passage.

So I'm guessing there was another meeting, in between Luke 24:12 and Luke 24:34, in which Jesus appeared to Peter. I wonder what was spoken, and what was communicated. It brought Peter back to the rest.

Uncle Screwtape predicted it

"Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom."

"we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur"

Doris Day

I saw most of a couple of her movies on TV, but her career arc and my access to media didn't mesh well--and I was more of a Night Gallery than romantic comedy fan.

I read a smattering of retrospectives of her life. They discussed the popularity of her personna. They shared a very odd assumption--that a virginal girl-next-door can't be intensely sexy.

Hospitality for Taliban talks

The BBC reports that the Pentagon wanted to pay for Taliban representatives while they were at peace talks.

This turns out to be forbidden, thanks to a clause inserted by Rep Visclosky:

None of the funds made available by the bill may be used "to pay for the expenses of any member of the Taliban to participate in any meeting that does not include the participation of members of the Government of Afghanistan or that restricts the participation of women", the legislation said.

"Mr Visclosky included the provision because the request for funding would violate laws concerning material support for terrorist groups, said Mr Spicer."

"Steve Ellis, of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said it was like "life imitating The Onion"."

I agree, but not for the reason Ellis thinks. I can see worrying that we might give up on the GofA and cut them out of the negotiating loop--and Visclosky might be worried about that. After watching the GoA for some years now I don't share that concern for the GoA. But "restricts the participation of women?" This is the Taliban you're trying to talk to. We're not in a position to dictate surrender terms.

Straight out of the Onion...

Why God? by Rodney Stark

His introduction eviscerates the conventional wisdom about religions and religious organizations in sociology. Is religion the way the oppressed cope? Nope--the elites tend to be more religious than the masses. Were religions designed as means of social control? Hardly. Do primitive tribes have primitive concepts of God(s)? Nope--There's a High God tradition almost everywhere. Many popular attempts to define religion and its role in society and personal life use name-calling rather than analysis, and lots of non-falsifiable definitions. (In a later chapter he apologizes for and then demolishes one of his own early works.)

He says he will do it differently--and he does. He lays out proposition and definition after proposition and definition, with explanations for why along the way.

Jesus is one of his examples of religious founders, of course, and Stark is so dubious about his details that I wonder if he felt he had to act more cynical than the facts actually warrant. Mohammad's life is attested only quite late, but he cites it without much caveat.

At any rate, he builds his theories on an entirely humanist and economic model. He is aware of The Idea of the Holy but rejects the principle for his purposes. That makes his framework shaky, because insofar as a human actually is in contact with the transcendent, the usual economic concerns no longer work the same way--and feedback can shape the nature of the beliefs and organizations that result.

On the other hand, the framework fits the way religions work around the world, how they evolve and fission--and sometimes merge. One set of his propositions (illustrated by examples) hold that it is the ecclesiastics, and not the average church-goer, who tries to move a church from a "high tension" relationship to the rest of society to a "lower tension" relationship. The clerics are more likely to turn atheist than the congregants. And one of his final conclusions is that some form of religion is a rational position.

One of the things that people have noticed for thousands of years is that women are more religious than men. He looks at that a little closely, and connects it with another way men differ, on the average, from women--much greater risk-taking, especially in youth. "Research on 1,148 newly ordained clergy in the Church of England found that their average score was well below the national average for English men on a scale of risk taking. Finally, the gender difference in religiousness is very large among Orthodox Jews but is nonexistent among Jews who do not believe in life after death and who therefore percieve no risk in being irreligious."

I'd like to see those distributions myself before I sign onto that hypothesis. For example, what is the distribution of religiousness among those Jews who don't believe in life after death? Is it skewed so low that male/female differences are no longer significant? Does male/female religiousness equalize with age, or is set early on and stable thereafter?

One of his observations is that the rich and powerful are more likely to get involved in a new religion, or more deeply in an old one--so presumably they feel a spiritual lack--presumably because they have the leisure to feel it and do try to do something about it. The poor have lots of this-world existential worries.

He insists on a definition of religion in which there is a supernatural, which excludes quasi-religions like worship of the state or political party or the glorious leader. While this is fitting and proper, the erzatz religions need to be accounted for somehow, since they fill the same sort of role. I suspect they follow the same sorts of principles too, and will, over time, evolve in the same sorts of ways. Devout environmentalists don't seem to come from the poorer classes (match)--are there splits in groups as "high tension" devotees become dissatisified with the "medium tension" big tent organization? (If so, another match)

Read it.

Experts sometimes see things differently

The Chicago Tribune reported "A judge allowed a 14-year-old boy to go home and come back Monday after he was accused of opening fire at the CTA’s Argyle station in Uptown this week." ... "the judge found that under the law he must be released because he was held in custody for 42 hours by the police and was not brought before a judicial office within 24 hours," (The "kid" targeted 2 men at the station--one is in serious condition.) The police said they feared for his safety. via Second City Cop

My first reaction was "What about the safety of everybody else?" But I read further, and got the picture. The "kid"s face was published. The gang he was attacking knows who he is, and the guy who assigned him the failed kill might worry about getting ratted out. I wonder where he is now.

---

UPDATE: He remained in custody because his mother never showed up.

On Monday, the boy’s mother told Cook County Juvenile Division Judge Linda Pauel that she was hesitant to take custody of him because of concerns about a retaliatory attack against her son.

“I am not a police officer to guide or protect him,” she said. “If I came to pick him up, they might see me with him and attack me, how would I handle that?”

Flu shots

You should probably get them, but I can testify that they aren't 100% effective. I've been downed by worse stuff, though.

Cool

I noticed a discussion on Althouse about California and "cool." There's an attempt to define "cool." A way I heard it described makes sense to me.

Up until age 7 to 9, you're cool automatically. You're you, and your interests are organic. When you're an adult, survival responsibilities push "cool" off the radar. The in-between adolescent years, when you and your interests are often heavily peer-shaped, is the only time you care about "cool." Of course some people never grow up...

That's a bit oversimple, since adults generally want to be accepted as much adolescents, and shape their clothing and language and political dialog accordingly. That adjustment doesn't seem to have that "fringe of stardom" aspect that "cool" does, though.

Ice XVIII

Super-compressed water seems to form a new state of matter in which the oxygen atoms form a lattice and the protons migrate around within it. That's not quite what you think of as a solid, nor what you think of as a liquid. It was proposed years ago, and appears to be verified by some new experiments. Powerful lasers blast diamond anvils, and the resulting explosion propels them into each other, compressing the bit of water in between them. Another set of lasers vaporizes iron at the side, letting the experimenters do X-ray crystallography.

Maybe Uranus and Neptune have some of this in their cores--or a mix of this and some other stuff. It might explain their weird magnetic fields.

I wonder what other bulk properties you could get?

Conjectures

Tracking down references from The Subtle Art of the Mathematical Conjecture, I ran across Art of Problem Solving, which bills itself as providing online courses ranging from "Introductory Math (Prealgebra to Geometry)" to "Advanced Math (Calculus to Olympiad Geometry)". It looks like an interesting resource: Twin Primes Conjecture, which leads to Brun's Constant (≈ 1.90216058) which might be a little heavy going for most advanced high schoolers. After the fact you can follow the proof, but coming up with it yourself would be challenging.

Anyhow, the Quanta link at the top is worth reading.

Mathematicians noodle around and find some pattern that looks interesting, and might be generally true. Then--you make a conjecture: X is true. Try to see if it is. If it is, publish. Or not, when the reviewer reminds you that it is a simple corollary of Bzirp's Theorem, published in 1905 in a Czech-language journal. (You have to know the jargon well to do a thorough literature search, and I'm not as well-versed as the pros. No, that didn't happen to me.)

Sometimes I've found my conjecture to be false, sometimes true and trivial, and most frequently I can't figure it out. The interesting conjectures are the ones that are simple, seem to be pretty easy, and take years--because the problem is really deep. Fermat's famous theorem was finally proved, but IIRC the journey there involved details about properties of elliptic curves and ran to hundreds of pages and several branches of math. I'm not sure he could have put it in the margin even with microfilm.

Swimming upstream

AVI wrote a series of posts exploring the essay "Who goes Nazi": here, continued, and
the original Harper's article. (alternative link) The thesis of the original article was that certain temperments and life-styles were especially susceptible to the appeal of a tribal and dictatorial philosophy. I use the word "tribal" rather than racist to generalize the claim. AVI noted that many of the "expected resisters" had already resisted groupthink in small ways.

We could distinguish the early embracers from the go-alongs. From You Call This Living?: "Comrade, I heard that you are a Christian" "A believer, but not practicing." "But you are a party member?" "Practicing, but not a believer."

If "everybody" else is doing it, well, "it is not good for man to be alone" and we're made for community--we're apt to adjust ourselves to that community. In the short term this can happen pretty quickly if your job prospects depend on not noticing that there are 2 sexes, or on not noticing that the Party can make mistakes. The next generation grows up with a new normal.

I spent my junior year bused to Little Rock Central High School. An experimental class on film-making called Project Tiger wrote and produced a movie on the famous integration of LRCHS in '57. I applied and got in on the script-writing team. We went through the archives, and were duly horrified at the racist calling cards and speeches; but we also watched some footage of protestors and I had a little epiphany of sorts. The folks I was watching were no better, and no worse, than the folks I saw on the streets outside. The only real difference was what sorts of evils were fashionable and accepted. Overt racism of that '57 sort (from whites anyway) was almost unthinkable in '72. But in '57 it was almost unremarkable in that town.

Were they hard-core racists? That depends on what you mean. They acted the part quite well, and got angry at the appropriate moments, and said the correct vile things. But some of those same people were alive in '72. I never tried to find and question any of them, which probably showed uncharacteristic wisdom on my part. But given how widespread the protests were, I undoubtedly knew some people who had supported the protesters. I'd bet that if pressed they would say that those were different times and they know better now. "Different times" = "different fashions" If you worked hard enough, and earned their trust, you would find a few that would say things in private that they wouldn't say in public. But most, unless I completely misunderstood the people I knew, wouldn't say such things even in private. (Some say that American society is and always has been irredeemably racist. Either they never learned what actually happened then, or they live in an echo chamber today--or they are lying for advantage.)

Could those attitudes come back? Sure. Similarly tribal attitudes are deeply entrenched in academia--not on the basis of skin color, but just as "othering" and angry. I've heard quite a bit of venom attached to the phrase "red-neck." Anything can happen. Who resists those attitudes? That's like the "Who Goes Nazi" question, but harder--since it isn't just a matter of rejecting the blandishments of a rising power. It's trying to swim upstream; the ideology is already in power.

It is harder than it seems to think outside the Zeitgeist. Orwell wasn't entirely right, but it is hard to think different thoughts when the language categories don't make it convenient. Suppose the category of "rights" wasn't part of the way people talked. "Duties" and "traditions" and "appropriate" and "outsider" and "family" and "clan" and "ruler" and "subject" ... how do you talk about "human rights" in that environment? If we're cut off from the thoughts of the past, we're especially vulnerable. And if we're cut off from God...

"The modern boy might think he too would stand nobly aloof from a degraded age as Columbus set out from Palos, refusing to participate in the expulsion of Jews, or going along with the Spanish version of the Inquisition, or watching slaves be sold in the market. But he would. Nearly all of us would, or would put up with it." America is claimed to be a Christian nation, but I don't think it would take twenty years for a shift to Chinese or Henry VIII-type state-approved churches to become the norm, and the members thereof be ready to complacently watch the punishment or even execution of the orthodox Christians. I'm not predicting this, but it is possible, and my point is that I judge that the change could happen very quickly. So could civil war, or a number of other bad things. But good changes can happen too. The Spirit of the Age has an opponent.

Other info: dutch and obit

If it's broke but it doesn't matter

The collaboration week (longer than a week if you include the pre-meetings) is finally over--perhaps now the lustre filesystem will quit wedging. I spent some good sleep time trying to get it back after the evening crashes, and our expert spent a fair bit of morning time on the morning crashes (and my typo). The talks were interesting, and so were the discussions offline--and the rule about experiments being believed by everybody except the experimenter is apt.

One researcher found a problem with how we unpack the waveform from the raw data. It's a real bug, and could conceivably have a detectable impact on low energy analysis and on analysis of events with very many signals. We have been gearing up to re-process all of our data and put the fix into the software running at the Pole.

Except: it doesn't seem to have any impact on any of the analyses! They look the same with and without the fix. We haven't heard from the low energy folks yet--they should have the answer next week. Or maybe later, thanks to the filesystem crashes. I suspect that we won't be implementing the fix anytime soon, and certainly not reprocessing the raw data. Not until the next big bug is found--provided that bug actually makes a difference. Then we'll lump all the fixes together.

---

FWIW, lustre is free (except for our time), and the rest of the pack is either not quite what we need, less mature, or eye-wateringly expensive.

Life's little joys

This evening while my son-in-law and I were talking outside beside the garden where we had been putting up a hardware cloth garden fence, a rabbit attempted to jump through the fence and bounced off. It took a while to stop laughing.

DOM

Off to the Smithsonian: one of our optical sensors will go on display at the Smithsonian--but probably won't see the public until 2026. That's probably appropriate, nobody is going to see the bulk of the installed DOMs for millennia--when the glacier reaches the ocean.

The article does have a howler: "The sensors, about \$5,500 each, must weather the extreme cold and pressure of the frozen tundra." No, the South Pole is a glacier; no tundra anywhere nearby. Over a mile of ice, yes--that's a lot of pressure.

The next stage of research for IceCube is burying more sensors to increase tenfold the amount of space able to be detected, according to IceCube lead investigator Francis Halzen.

The project, which will begin sometime after 2022, is called Gentoo, a nod to a penguin species living on Antarctica.

“That’s as close as physicists get to a sense of humor,” Halzen joked.

In case you missed it, Generation-2 = Gen-2 = gentoo

BTW, the next stage isn't Gentoo, but an upgrade project that is a proof of principle--a few more strings with different types of sensors.
The schedule is going to be very tight. Some systems are supposed to be ready by next March, but funds to start ordering boards haven't been released by NSF yet. Some people are going to be very very busy in the next few weeks.

Interest in science

The key is not to point out all of the women in science and say "You can do that too."

The key is to lead them to forget themselves and think "Wow! What is this?"

Spring cleaning

"Crap is the stuff you throw away. Stuff is the crap you keep."

Stuff is also known as "inventory." I have a lumber inventory. And...

Dean P

Alice pushed her unruly hair back nervously. In three years she had been called to the Head Mistress twice. That was bad enough. The Dean’s office was terrifying. She shifted on the hard bench and stared at the framed parchment with fancy Latin script. It was better than staring at the forbidding oak door.

She could make out a word here and there of the energetic conversation on the other side of the door, mostly from the sharp voice of her teacher. Her heart started beating faster when the talking stopped. She was about to be summoned. Alice thought about opening the door behind her and running down the hall and away, but she knew she had no place to go.

The door opened. “Send her in. You may leave.” Alice had never heard the Dean before, and her voice made Alice shiver.

“I should be here to explain the symptoms,” objected Dr. Franklin.

“I will not require explanations,” the icy voice said. “Send her in alone.”

Dr. Franklin gave in and left. He held the door for Mistress Coldwell and Alice’s teacher Mistress Beringer. Her teacher stopped halfway through the door and gently lifted Alice’s elbow. “Go on in now.”

Alice stood and her three accusers left. The outer door closed. She could hear the three waiting outside in the hall. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and walked slowly into the inner office.

“Close the door behind you and sit down,” the Dean commanded.

As she turned to close the door Alice got her first look at the wall and its rows and rows of books; books with grim titles like Economic Influences on Transmission and colorful books like Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Tales from the Cloud-Walking Country.

Without thinking she moved closer to the bookcase.

The voice behind her shocked her back to her predicament. “Ahem!” It didn’t sound quite as stern as before, but perhaps that was wishful thinking. Alice quickly closed the door. It shut with an ominous click. She sat in the furthest chair, smoothed out her mud-stained skirt, and finally dared to look at Dean P.

The Dean seemed taller in person. She wore a dark green suit and her just-turning-grey hair was pinned in a tight bun. She looked like Alice imagined a judge should look.

“Tell me what happened.” She had a folder open on the desk in front of her, and a sharp pencil in her hand. The harsh glare of the dry spring’s sun stretched across her desk like a barrier of fire.

“Must I?” Alice begged.

“Yes.”

“Do you know the cave in the steep side of the hill?”

“Yes.”

“I went in there to hide and then it wasn’t a cave anymore.” Alice went on to tell about the lake and the elves and the dark cloud and the wind-walkers. She stared in the Dean’s analyzing eyes, looking for signs of sympathy. She grew excited during the telling, almost forgetting her situation.

The pencil snapped, and Alice, startled, looked at the Dean’s clenched hands. The Dean eyed the ruined pencil and threw the relic in the waste bin.

The Dean leaned forward. The sunlight lit her face and the pins in her bun shone like gems. “Do you have family nearby?”

“I’ve an uncle in Hampshire.”

“That’s right; you’re an orphan,” she replied slowly. “So was I. I was older than you, but it was still hard—and I lost my brothers and sister too.” She considered a moment.

It had never occurred to Alice that the Dean had parents, or had ever been young. She tried to imagine the Dean as a third year.

The Dean went on, “Do you have a friend you can trust?”

“Jenny is my best friend.”

“Will Jenny believe you if you tell her your story?”

“Maybe.” Alice paused. “I think so.”

“Jennifer Hopkind is a sound child. Tell her. And tell no-one else.”

“Am I in trouble, then?”

“Not the kind you are thinking of. For now, go to class, tell Jennifer, and always …”

“Always Do Right,” they recited the school motto together. Alice had the sudden sense that that might sometimes be harder than she dreamed.

“You may go now, child.” Alice jumped to her feet to leave, and to take one more look at those fascinating books.

As Alice opened the door, the Dean said “One more thing.”

“Yes, m’am?”

“If Jenny does not believe you, send her to me.” The Dean’s regal smile went with Alice, but Alice thought she heard “Too old, too old,” muttered behind the closing door.

Relationship with God

It hadn't occurred to me until this morning at church, talking to a ring-shy gentleman, that the phrase might not have an altogether benign note to those of us for whom "relationship" is an "uh-oh" word. Popular mythology assumes that most of those are men. I can't say for sure--most of the men I talk to who use the word use it in a scientific or engineering sense.

Of course salesmen lunch with customers, so they can learn to trust each other. "Networking" and "cultivating contacts" is all about relationships. If Bill Gates called and explained that he was your long-estranged uncle and wanted to come to your birthday party next week--voila, another relationship. And if I could call the President and have him take my call that's another relationship. All are microscopic reflections of our relationship with God, and perhaps a little easier to handle than the "We need to talk about our relationship."

Purgatorio

The birthday cake I decorated with more enthusiasm than skill for mother, which I dropped into the sofa when I ran to show her--that was there. So was the time I turned to talk to Ben in the back seat and blew the stop sign and ruined Maggie's leg. And the time my great-grandson threw up on his date after getting tequila-drunk the way his grandad used to--who had learned it from me. It was all there.

I could see all of history, from the beginning to the ending, including all of my part in it. Much was horrid, some redeemed. I was eternally grateful to be part of the latter.

"I never knew the ripples from my choices could spread so far. She was tricked 140 years after I died!"

"I made you all to be connected to each other."

"I caused so much pain." I would say I thought a minute, but time didn't work the same anymore. "Can I take their pain back, make it fall on me instead?"

"Are you asking to help me wipe every tear from their eyes and make all things new?"

"Yes!"

I could feel that he was proud of me as he said "Be strong. Take my hand."

Snakes in high office

Are you sufficiently grateful that you don't live in the tropics?

UPDATE: He is back in his office in Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The presidential office was damaged in a fire in the Executive Mansion back in 2007.

Eyes

Driving back tonight with my eyes on the road and the sillouette of the steering wheel before me, the lights of the instrument clusters seemed to be dancing around. My first thought was: oh, crud--are my eyes starting to get old and lose their muscle speed?

I figured it out eventually--the instrument cluster was dancing around, as was the rest of the car--but the seat cushioning meant that I wasn't getting bounced as much, and since I was focussing on the distant road, my eyes weren't trying to follow the dancing instrument lights. Not going blind yet.

Car seat cushioning is a wonderful thing that we often take for granted.

Recycling

Large physics experiments are expensive. But if you find a "gold-plated toilet" in the budget, closer inspection will show that there's a really good reason for it--nothing else will work.

In fact, recycling and scrounging are important traditions. I knew some of the stories at the link--that CMS, needing brass for the material of an endcap, recycled Russian artillery shells. When an experiment ends, parts of the apparatus and the electronics become available--and some people are quite creative in repurposing detectors for new experiments.

I had not heard this story before:

Kephart recalled Lederman acquiring a 16-inch battleship gun to filter out particles traveling at the wrong angles. One of Lederman’s grad students was just small enough to slip inside.

“I’ll never have a grad student of that caliber again,” Lederman would joke.

Notre Dame

Other people have already said everything reasonable to say (and a lot of unreasonable things as well), and all I can add is that I hope they can rebuild it. The amount of volunteered money is encouraging, but a few noises suggest that jockeying for control has already started. The usual winners of these artistic contests seem not to have any great interest in beauty, much less Christianity.

If you haven't seen the robot Colossus, watch it. It could go where people couldn't, and keep watching, and keep the water flowing. And the Paris Fire Brigade borrowed some drones, and got the "geofencing functions" bypassed so the drones could fly within the city limits. Apparently the French bureaucracy can move quickly when it wants to.

The cathedral has been modified before. I think this time maybe they shouldn't go with oak timbers. Steel. And since the upper stone is probably weakened, maybe some additional framework on the outside. It won't look the same--but then it didn't look quite the same after each earlier remodeling.

But first and foremost, if they want to rebuild it with any meaning, it must be a church.

Entertainments

People spend billions on advertisements in the belief that they change people's attitudes. They seem to work. The shows must have an impact too.

To film a TV show you need to have room for the cameras and the lights and for characters to come in and out dramatically. The room being filmed is therefore necessarily large. So when you watch, you see something larger than life--or at least your life. How come the people like me have bigger houses and more stuff? And they don't have much work to do, either income-generating or household maintenance.

A play now and again might give you a sense of things you could aspire to. A steady diet of amusements in which everyone has plenty of stuff without obvious effort has got to effect you too. I'd think it would redefine what "normal" is. Work 9to5 isn't normal on TV, and even on shows where a character's job is significant, the work doesn't usually seem to be the center. I can think of exceptions, and you can probably think of many more, but on the whole that seems to be the rule.

A fantasy now and then is harmless, and probably good. We want something different from everyday life, with a little drama and conflict, or silliness that we wouldn't care for in real life. I don't want to watch an assembly line, or a man writing code, or another planning meeting.

I don't see how a steady diet of entertainments can avoid shaping your attitudes about what "normal" life is like--and not in a good way. A steady diet of "entertainments" that were "realistic" sounds cruel and unusual. It seems as though many of us grew up with one foot in a land where problems are solved and there are no trade-offs and everyone seems wealthy without effort. One candy bar is good, but a box of them...

Since we are, by and large, rich enough that existential problems are rare, we don't have as many reminders that the magic land isn't real.

A lot of the action in society happens from the tails of the distributions in attitudes. It doesn't take a very large change in the average to make major changes in the proportions of the political players, or the cultural players. Can you imagine someone 50 years ago offering to "celebrate her abortion?" That fringe wasn't nearly big enough. They were there, but didn't seem to be applauded by very many.

It hasn't been hard to find people in every era who believed that the vague "rich" were responsible for our woes, and that if they were found and properly shaken down all would be well. We have a significant number of them today among the nominally educated.(*) Open a newspaper Click a news-site and find what used to be fringe personality problems staking out self-important claims to be society leaders. Most of us don't care, but the tails of the distributions have shifted a lot, and that's where the cultural action is. And the political action.

Don Quixote lost his mind from over-indulging in heroic romances. At least he got a sense of duty out of them. Us--not quite so noble.

(*) Perhaps I am unduly snarky here, but most of these people I've met seem not to have spent much study in "subjects where there is a right answer or the bridge falls down" or in "subjects where there is perennial debate and good arguments all around."

Gene Wolfe

Died at age 87. The obituary says his wife died a few years ago of Alzheimers. That's a lot to endure, and to be kind through it all...

Some of us can tell stories wonderfully well--I wish I could write half as well as he did. Some of us compose great melodies--I'm listening to Strauss as I write this.

We all live a story. We all live a song. Sometimes we're too close to hear it.

For those who like building stuff

This is her latest.

You see, way back in 2011, when CDs were maybe(?) still a thing and Blackberries still thought maybe they could make a go of it, I decided to build a computer. Usually when I tell people I built a computer, they think I went and bought a power supply and an ATX motherboard and some silly neon lights and whatever else the kids do to play Crysis these days. Then I have to explain that, no, I mean I built a computer.

In this episode she starts trying to use a GPU. Recent posts have involved repairing a pinball machine and building a steam motor. ("I was completely unprepared for how much steam was released, and the force with which it comes out. Everything in a six foot area was completely soaked, I dropped the camera, and it took me some time to gather myself back up. The good news is, the blow-off valve worked perfectly! All in all, it was a great success and I learned more respect for 60psi of live steam."). That's the last of a long series of posts, btw.

Sometimes I wish I had a small machine shop too. Investing in the parts to repair my own brakes is probably more in line with my budget, though.

Black hole data

It turns out there's actually an IceCube connection to the black hole picture story.

The data had to be shipped back to the analysis center by freight, not by internet. If you look closely at the side of the box he's resting the server on, that's got a penguin in a tux and A-379-S on the side; it's one of our crates.(*)

The data transfer rate of a jet loaded with disks is very good. The transfer rate from the Pole by satellite is pretty slow, though between some US sites it can be much better. For example from NERSC to Madison it would take a little less than 6 months do move 5 PB. And 5TB is supposedly the total data set from all sites, not the amount of data each one sent.

If you remember your galaxy positions better than I do, you might wonder how it is that the South Pole Telescope managed to help image M87. (The EHT telescopes are in blue on that image.) After all, there's a planet in the way.

I haven't read half of their papers yet, but I know how I'd use the station. When you want to understand your detector, you need to know what it sees when part of it isn't working, and you want to know what it looks like if there is extra information. You can't bring Palomar along with you on a trip, but you can compare what your telescope sees with what Palomar sees when you are looking at the same thing, and that tells you something about what your scope can see by itself.

I'll bet they tried to use the telescopes to look at several nearby sources, and analyzed the data with and without the ones that couldn't see M87. That would have helped them calibrate their system--and it would have been even more fun if the source was near enough that they could have an optical comparison as well. That way they could get an estimate for what the resolution was--and you don't have a measurement if all you have is a number. You also need to know the uncertainty on that number. I gather that they deliberately blurred the image they reconstructed to match the actual resolution, so that people wouldn't think they saw structure in what were accidental artifacts of reconstruction. (People translate noisy pictures into "aliens on Mars" all the time.)

(*) Actually, I suspect that the photographer wanted a picture of him beside an Antarctic box, any box. The story just talks about shipping packs disk drives around, not servers--not even disk servers. (We also used Cabbage Cases). We ship our data on disks also, in two copies in case one disk fails (and they do). The summarized stuff we beam back by satellite, but sometimes you need the gory details.

A letter out of retirement

Benedict's letter seems to be causing a bit of a stir. The usual suspects hate it ("divisive!"), but there was enough fuzziness in reporting about it (*) that I decided to read it myself.

The translation isn't ideal, and there are clearly some philosophical terms in play that don't get clear explanation--I'm coming in on a conversation where I don't know all of the background, where a trial is described in terms of competing goods.

Aside from that, if the translator hasn't left things out, then I think Benedict is very tired. It reads as though sections were written separately, and some connective bits were left out. The reader can figure out what they are, if he makes the effort to understand Benedict.

He tries to remind us of one of those ugly little secrets from '68--the sexual revolution proponents were often very much ok with pedophilia. The collapse of sexual morality was dramatic. It had been in the works for a while, of course, as he mentions. Whether the antinomianism derived from the sexual greed or the other way round, or both developed together, is a point he should have tried to address--it would have tied his essay together better.

He touches on the rise of homosexual cliques which came to dominate some seminaries.

He describes the revolt against absolute truth, and links it to an abandonment of the use of "natural law." He seems to support the claim that a complete moral system can't be based exclusively on the Bible. The Bible doesn't address every single issue in that kind of detail, and a substantial amount of "common sense" is needed to deal with the rest. I admit I haven't considered the matter in that kind of detail, but it's a plausible claim.

He goes on in a long parenthesis to explain how the procedures and structures of church discipline made it difficult to convict/defrock an abuser. I don't know if the translation got in the way, or if I'm missing some important details about procedures here.

One victim of the failure to deal with abuse is the Church, in the sense of the body of the faithful who were scandalized and betrayed. Several news stories are deliberately obtuse about this point.

He wraps up with a call to focus on the Eucharist and not to think of the church as a mere political institution.

Franz Böckle, ... announced in view of the possible decisions of the encyclical Veritatis splendor that if the encyclical should determine that there were actions which were always and under all circumstances to be classified as evil, he would challenge it with all the resources at his disposal.

...

Martyrdom is a basic category of Christian existence. The fact that martyrdom is no longer morally necessary in the theory advocated by Böckle and many others shows that the very essence of Christianity is at stake here.

....

Above all, a criterion for the appointment of new bishops was now their "conciliarity," which of course could be understood to mean rather different things.

Indeed, in many parts of the Church, conciliar attitudes were understood to mean having a critical or negative attitude towards the hitherto existing tradition, which was now to be replaced by a new, radically open relationship with the world. One bishop, who had previously been seminary rector, had arranged for the seminarians to be shown pornographic films, allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behavior contrary to the faith.

There were — not only in the United States of America — individual bishops who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole and sought to bring about a kind of new, modern "Catholicity" in their dioceses. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that in not a few seminaries, students caught reading my books were considered unsuitable for the priesthood. My books were hidden away, like bad literature, and only read under the desk.

(*) Mainstream reporting about religion is always at least incomplete, and often completely wrong. It's like they're trying to report on a news story written in Chinese, by looking at the pictures.

Black hole image

Kudos to the team! I'm still reading the papers linked to here, and don't have anything to comment so far. This was a tough analysis.

They had 4 independent teams, blinded to each other's work, using different approaches, so that they could be sure they were doing it right. And, FYI, that ring you see? The light doesn't come straight. Photon paths are strongly bent around the black hole. And light coming from the side of the plasma disk that is headed our way has a huge Doppler boost compared to light from the receding side.

UPDATE: At the journal club today, Halzen said that one of the journalists at the press conference asked why the picture was so blurry. We got a good laugh out of that. If I understand correctly, this is the highest resolution image ever taken.

Information control

Satellites don't carry most of our communications between continents. Submarine cables do.

While people tend think of satellites and cell towers as the heart of the internet, the most vital component is the 380 submerged cables that carry more than 95 percent of all data and voice traffic between the continents. They were built largely by the U.S. and its allies, ensuring that (from a Western perspective, at least) they were “cleanly” installed without built-in espionage capability available to our opponents.

...

But now the Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies, the leading firm working to deliver 5G telephony networks globally, has gone to sea. Under its Huawei Marine Networks component, it is constructing or improving nearly 100 submarine cables around the world.

...

Naturally, Huawei denies any manipulation of the cable sets it is constructing, even though the U.S. and other nations say it is obligated by Chinese law to hand over network data to the government.

Bearing in mind that satellites are fragile and EMP isn't that hard to arrange (seriously, our infrastructure is horribly fragile!), what happens to communications when the cables work only at someone else's pleasure? Not to mention tapping, since the author already did.

On a related note, my wife is reading a lot about WWII as she writes a book set during the war. We didn't win because we were smarter. We won because a) we were able to read some of our enemies' secret messages and b) we were rich enough to be able to crank out lots of airplanes and tanks and warships. Without those things we wouldn't have gotten close enough to use an atomic bomb. Or been able to develop the better planes and radar-controlled artillery and other goodies. Right now I suspect our adversaries read pretty much all our secret messages (sometimes on the front page), and I'm not sure how fast we could ramp up production of our super-expensive weapons systems.

Incarnation

I don't have the skill to do justice to Jesus' Incarnation, nor even to the distant echo of it that is my own.

I'll limit myself to the shoe and the bookcase and hope I can manage those and not ramble too much.

I'm facing three large bookcases--2 of them 6' x 6'. I built them back when money was a lot tighter, and they've made several moves with us. I spent quite a bit of time measuring and drilling freehand, and learning the hard way about decorative brackets (an invention of the devil), and realizing after a few years that I had to bite the bullet and unload and varnish them.

My time and effort went into them, and if my time and effort are part of my life there's something of my life there. Ever since I made them they've been part of the background and tools of my life, and of my children's lives, and of my wife's life (sometimes to her chagrin, for I was far from an expert carpenter). Although it isn't good to be overly attached to things of this world, when we use something it leaves a mark on our lives and we leave a mark on it.

A shoe is almost silly. There's this reflection of my foot sunk into the material. If another one of those accidents at 1st and Washington takes me out, there'll still be this ghost of me in the shoe. It isn't an important thing, but it illustrates.

When our time ends, I suspect we bring into eternity what we put our selves into. Keeping the home clean is an action and not a thing; that comes with us too. My body has some trivial little quirks that don't seem important--the remaining hair keeps growing and needs to be cut now and then. Care for those trivial things is part of my life anyway. So is digging in the garden, an easy job that leaves a useful mark on the world. (but what inertia I have to overcome to do it!) So, I'm afraid, is procrastinating--and an absence of action is a very strange thing to bring into eternity.

The things we do and care for don't last in this world. The board is erased and the next boy steps up to the chalk. But I was put here to invest myself in work and people, for God. One way and another I've done that; put myself into things and people. This seems almost like a kind of incarnation of me in the things around me. I wonder what that will look like from eternity.

Opportunities for fraud

New ballot found in McFarland village president race decided by one vote.

McFarland Village staff found the unopened absentee ballot Monday morning in a bin used to store and transfer absentee ballots in last week's election and subsequent recount, Village Administrator Matthew Schuenke said.

"It was found sealed within an envelope used for absentee voting and it is not open," he said. "The contents are presently unknown, but it does appear to contain a ballot."

No. Just no. There is no clear chain of possession. Absentee ballots in general have that problem and in my not-so-humble judgment should not be widely encouraged. But this is just crazy.

At the cross

Isaac Watts' hymn "At the cross" is wonderful, but the refrain is marred by a ... um ... a lie? At best it's aspirational, or using the word "happy" in a deeply non-standard way. "At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light, And the burden of my heart rolled away, It was there by faith I received my sight, And now I am happy all the day!"(*)

The music directory's wife has Alzheimers. The pastor's wife has cancer. "Happy" just isn't the right word. It has bothered me as long as I can remember.

We can do better. Even I can do better. "And now you walk beside me every day." "And now joy in Jesus lifts each day." "; Jesus' love sustains me all my way." "And His love sustains me every day." There are lots of variations that don't mar the meaning or the meter, and that's just tweaking one line.

Maybe you've a better replacement--great!

We've seen some demi-competent attempts to make lyrics more inclusive, sometimes OK and frequently clunky. Surely we can get a grass-roots "theological" fix in place. Can I get an Amen?

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(*) I wasn't familiar with the Campmeeting refrain. It's OK, but it's kind of passive, and doesn't have the same movement as the Hudson refrain, or the rest of the song.

Ack

Sometimes you almost want to cry for the wasted opportunities.

Today was Engineering Expo day for school-kids, and I was helping chaperone. It was too cold for the IceCube T-shirt, so I didn't do a lot of IceCube PR.

The first thing the 6 under our care were curious about was a talk called "Changing the Universe." I will omit the man's name. He was a relatively slow speaker, which was a bad sign, but introduced himself as having worked on the ISS from the inside, and also on the IceCube experiment, which were good signs.

He started by introducing Ptolemy's model using an old illustrated picture that nobody could read, said things about planets going backwards, and then introduced Copernicus using a similarly old drawing and mentioned Kepler's contribution. Then he started explaining the 1/R^2 rule by describing a candle inside a sphere.

By that time 3 of the 6 kids were nodding off. We bundled them out.

Even for adults the lecture would have been slow and unclear. For 5'th graders it was awful. I later explained why the 1/R^2 rule made sense, by talking to them about lawn sprinklers, and getting more or less wet the closer or farther you were from it.

You may ask if I could have done better.

Sure!

He was using Powerpoint. That supports animations.

OK, show what people observed in the night sky. Animate it. Start with the Sun and Moon, which are nice and simple. People figured out those patterns early on, and it is easy to illustrate those with easy animations of the Moon's position against the "fixed stars." Yes, that requires a bit of animation-fu, but it isn't rocket science. I'm fairly sure there is educational software that does that sort of thing already.

Then show the planets, and how they move against the "fixed stars." That's a little trickier to animate if you want to do it right, but I assume you want to do it right. A little patter to point up "What the heck are those lights in the sky doing?" doesn't have to take very long, and you get to start out with a simple puzzle to try to catch their interest.

Illustrate Ptolemy's model with a clear animated cartoon, not a thousand-year-old illumination. Then remind them of the weird epicycle clunkiness of the model, and show them Copernicus's animated cartoon. It isn't hard to show, with a couple of lines drawn on that cartoon, that a Sun-centered model doesn't need epicycles.

Then, instead of saying that the Milky Way is made of lots of stars, show it. Zoom.

Instead of starting with 1/R^2, start with the question--how far away are these stars--and then talk about how you start with the simplest assumption: the stars are the same brightness (not true, but you have to start somewhere), and then you need a relationship between apparent brightness and distance.

You introduce the 1/R^2 relationship by talking about things from their experience. Parallax you introduce with cartoon illustrations (I've seen plenty of these), instead of the eventual trig problem. If the kids know trig they'll figure the connection out themselves, and if they don't there's no point in it. A cartoon gets the idea across just fine.

That's where we left.

I figure working up the slides to get this far would take several weeks. There's a lot of stuff to get looking right, and PowerPoint presentations always take me forever even without animations.

But afterwards even 5'th graders could walk out understanding how and why our picture of the universe has changed. You'd even have time to point out the shock a non-Earth-centered description was to naive thinking about our position in the Universe.

... Deep breath ...

On the other hand, the kids seemed to enjoy some of the other demonstrations, and making catapults, and directing robots, and making vacuum-formed plastic, and so on. Yours truly thought that making marshmallow towers would be a terribly frustrating exercise, but since you get to eat your failures I suppose it has its attractions. There was even a Candy Crusher, in which a machine used to test the strength and resilience of materials was used on different varieties of candy. "This springs right back after being squeezed, while this never does quite recover..." The reactor wasn't open this time.

GPS glitching

There's a bug in the GPS system.. April 6 is the change (a week-count rollover bug), and depending on the local receiver, the time may roll back right away, or maybe in a few weeks--it depends on the firmware. AFAIK it won't matter for consumer devices; they don't really care what time the GPS thinks it is, just where the cell phone is.(*) But that time is important for a lot of research systems.

Including IceCube. I heard a report on this last week, at which it was decided to switch from the old (the company doesn't exist anymore) receivers to the new pair of receivers. The new ones gave slightly better time resolution too, which is a plus.

The timestamp matters a great deal to IceCube, since we need to know the timing of signal pulses to nanoseconds--it matters. The GPS feeds the clock, which fans out to our detectors. To reconstruct a track using the signals from the phototubes we need to know their relative timing accurately. Most Multi-Messenger Astronomy doesn't require nanosecond timing, luckily. (In fact, different particle signals could be delayed by days wrt each other. Protons won't arrive at quite the same time as photons, and different production processes may happen at slightly different times.)

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(*) The old Honda's instrument cluster is completely out of stock, and junk yards don't have them anymore either. I could either have yanked it and tried to find and fix the intermittently broken wire, or used a cheap GPS speedometer. I went with cheap. I don't think it's going to go nuts on Saturday.

Not a panacea

My biggest takeaways from "Going off psychiatric drugs" are that

1. My intuition that using drugs for mental illness is a form of "percussive maintenance" is not that far off the mark. They're life-saving for some people, but just because A is melancholic doesn't mean A can benefit from B's meds for depression.
2. The process of stopping a medication takes a long time and can be harsh. Do-it-yourself scheduling is not a good idea.

Witch hunts

Last year there was a little flap about Strumia. I read his slides, though I haven't heard his talk. He shot himself in the foot when he insinuated that a woman with fewer citations had gotten a job he was angling for, simply because she was a woman. If he'd left that off, he'd have had a fairly bullet-proof talk--albeit clumsily done and seriously politically incorrect. Probably we'd have gotten the same "Particle for Justice" sign-up anyway, because even in physics we have a lot of PC-ism. I looked at the sign-up, and concluded that it didn't accurately reflect either Strumia's statements or reality.

Ferrets and physics

I'd heard a rumor of this story, in which a ferret was conscripted to try to clean out the FNAL accelerator beam pipe. (BTW, the usual notation these days is GeV, not BeV--for Giga-electron-Volts.)