How do you focus X-rays? They can be scattered in coherent ways by crystals--suppose you used little slices of crystals tilted at increasing angles and stacked in rings?
Turns out somebody else thought of the idea first. The Laue lens uses crystals in concentric rings. You can get pretty decent focus, too: 8.4nm × 6.8nm .
Possessions aren't just things, of course. We can collect experiences, or knowledge. Those are all good things too. I've not been one to try all sorts of new experiences unless they are somehow integrated into my life (and don't unduly risk said life or involve heights). Adventures? "Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!" I loved walking the jungle as a kid, though, and wandering is still a joy, albeit sometimes knee-limited and mosquito-haunted. Knowledge, though--yes, I've been pretty greedy for that. Luckily it isn't a limited resource--nobody loses if I gain.
I wonder--how many of these things are paying returns for the God who entrusted them to me? "Love, joy, peace, patience etc..." I try to distill what I've learned and explain, and point people to useful or interesting things, but I'm not sure the ROI has been that large.
Bjercke would get an apartment and a car - and an attractive annual salary of about £250,000.
"I was thinking: 'What is my job going to be? What are the things that I'm going to have to do for this company?'" he recalls.
"And he said: 'Well, first of all, they need a blockchain. They don't have a blockchain today.'
"I said: 'What? You told me it was a cryptocurrency company.'"
The agent replied that this was correct. It was a cryptocurrency company, and it had been running for a while - but it didn't have a blockchain. "So we need you to build a blockchain," he went on.
and then
In May 2015, already a very successful MLM seller, Igor Alberts was invited to a OneCoin event in Dubai, where he met lots of people, all apparently making fortunes with this new currency. Dr Ruja herself made a powerful impression too, with her "princess's dresses" and her vision of a financial revolution. Igor returned with a new mission - and gave new instructions to all the salespeople in his downline: stop whatever you're doing, and start selling OneCoin. "We gathered the teams together and we started to work like crazy," he says. "We made in our first month almost €90,000 out of nothing. Bang!"
After Ruja disappeared, people started trying to track the money
I went to see Oliver Bullough, an expert on what he calls Moneyland - the shadowy parallel world where criminals and the super-rich hide their wealth. The problem, he explains, is that following the money isn't as easy as it sounds, because criminals structure their companies and bank accounts in such a way that their assets seem to disappear. "They still exist", he says, in his garden near the village of Hay-on-Wye. "You can still use them to buy things, you can still use them to buy political influence and nice houses and yachts. But when it comes to someone trying to find them - whether that's a journalist or a police officer - they are invisible."
...
Ruja bought a very large property in central Sofia. Technically it was owned by a company called One Property. One Property was owned by another company called Risk Ltd. Risk Ltd was owned by Ruja, but was then transferred to some unnamed Panamanians, but it was still managed by another company called Peragon. And Peragon was owned by another company called Artefix, which was owned by Ruja's mother, Veska. And then in 2017, the ownership of Artefix was sold to an unknown man in his 20s.
...
I show his results to Bullough, who immediately notices how many British companies there are. "British companies are the companies of choice," he comments. "They're very easy to set up and they look legitimate."
...
"This is supposed to mean that you can no longer use a British company to hide behind," he says, as he scrolls down the page. "Oh, hey presto, they haven't filed a person with significant control. That's illegal… That is an anonymous shell company, as anonymous as anything that you can buy anywhere in the Seychelles or Nevis or the Marshall Islands or Vanuatu."
So much for following the money. In an interconnected global economy, assets can simply vanish, and you end up chasing shadows.
And there are some hints that some Eastern European crime mobs got involved too. And several billions went astray--and not just from first-world investors. It turns out that multi-level marketing reaches all the way to poor farmers in Uganda.
The second best allegory in English, after Pilgrim's Progress, is acclaimed to be The Holy War>, aka Mansoul, aka much longer titles--also by Bunyan.
The type of story is much different, of course, but it is still good reading. And worth thinking about. As Kipling noted, some things don't change much
The craft that we call modern, The crimes that we call new, John Bunyan had 'em typed and filed In Sixteen Eighty-two.
Which points to an interesting (to me) question I hadn't started researching properly yet. Pick rich countries in history. How many of them developed something like the roller coaster--an amusement that provides a safe experience of fear?
Maybe the Roman animal show counts--in theory the tiger could leap up into the stands, though I doubt they ever did.
And maybe ghost stories are related, though I don't know if other cultures treated them the same way we do. I suspect they were often more for warning than amusement--they certainly don't read like entertainment to me.
It's no trick to find people (mostly young men) engaging in risky behavior--a Maasai lad isn't a man until he kills a lion. But the danger is real, and is the point--it isn't safe.
Nothing comes to mind. Are we the only culture to provide tame fear?
“It is becoming increasingly difficult for a cash based economy to contribute on a cash based. the sooner we put that in the back of our minds and look for options using electronic works, using other digital financial tools, increasing the numbers of ATMs and increasing the numbers of points of sales, the better it becomes for all of us,” he said.
and
“Whenever we go the bank, they give us tear (torn) money. And when we want our money, they will say system down. It should not be like that. The system should not be down for us because when we go there to deposit our money, they can’t (never) tell us system down. This system down English (talk, excuses) is not doing well for the marketers. Let the system be up for us this holiday season,” she said.
Universal electronic transactions when the bank's systems are either down or lied about? That has got to inspire confidence.
One little change was that for the month of December, they are suspending the 25% policy--25% of all remittences into Liberia have to be converted into Liberian dollars, but for December you can keep your hard currency. A little something for their 25'th.
I get it that the prison towns want the population count, since state funding often flows on the basis of population. And since crime is higher in the large urban areas, that means the political clout of the already powerful cities becomes even greater. On the other hand, the place that is likely to need the additional funding is the town the prisoner came from--where there may be dependents without support, for example. The prisoners don't contribute much wear and tear on the roads, or use the schools much. And the prisoner's home town could probably use a little help after the damage the criminal did.
Hmm. If there's no home or other fixed address, then sure, stick the count in the prison town. Otherwise, put the count in their home town. It's probably too complicated to keep 2 census counts--one of nominal residents and one of voters.
I wonder which party that aligns me with? I should go read the rest of the story to find out. Democrat.
In an effort to keep students who fail early in their high school careers from falling completely out of school, ninth-grade teachers at Madison's West High School are planning to give classroom grades of no lower than 40%, eliminate extra credit and allow up to 90% credit for late work in required classes.
"mean no assignment could receive less than 40%, regardless of whether it is completed. A 40% would still result in a failing grade"
The alleged motive is that a super-F (i.e. a 0%) is almost impossible to recover from, while a 40% you can, at least in theory, make up for. The fact that they plan to get rid of extra credit tells me that isn't anywhere near the whole story.
This is sympathetic magic: if you get a grade of 40%, you must have learned 40% of the material, right? And no extra credit means nobody gets to be outstanding, so nobody gets embarrassed by being outclassed.
"In Memphis, though, the use of grading floors was banned by the superintendent in 2017 after an investigation found the practice was used to make unwarranted grade changes."
Del Underbakke seems to have some common sense: "a grading floor could result in moving under-prepared students through ninth grade. By definition, at-risk students may require more than four years to complete high school." On the other side, I have to conclude that Boran and Hernandez care more about "equity" than educating students.
So long as the grade is a measure of what the student is learning, use it. If you want to experiment with retaking tests or other approaches, fine--the goal is supposed to be that the students learn--but please don't give up trying to figure out if the student is actually learning.
I wonder how much of the recent educational innovation is driven by fear of being accused of bias.
The song isn't good by any stretch, but I didn't want to include it among the evil ones because it seemed to me more like a cry of despair more than anything else. Job 6:26 seems apropos (at least the NASB translation) "The words of one in despair belong to the wind" Unless they insist on despair, I cut a little slack.
Of course the last couple of times this was tried there was a war, with the losers forcibly constrained to stay with the country, or mostly emigrating to what became Canada and Louisiana.
Similar principles were applied in a slightly different field. When economies of scale made is profitable for business owners to systematically squeeze their workers, many of them did. For a long time governments sided with private power, but eventually unions succeeded and grew to have political power of their own. I'm not concerned with subsequent history, but with noting that there's precedent for collective efforts to oppose private oppression, and against alliances between the government and private firms. It took a while, with some violence along the way, but for a while we achieved a balance of powers (both sides need each other). (The industrial union adversarial model is problematic for public-sector workers--the result is inevitably adversarial, inescapably political, and as experience shows, often becomes a Praetorian Guard.)
One route for dealing with oppressive private firms, frequently tried elsewhere, has been to put the government in control of the private firms--with predictably miserable results.
Our federal government is not attempting censorship, or harassment and firing of people high officials disagree with. Private firms are, and are attempting to enforce conformity with their socio-political views. But since they're private, the Constitution says nothing about them. That does not mean they are not power centers. They are.
Curiously enough, even totalitarian governments don't actually need to do this sort of thing themselves. The real power wasn't vested in the official channels or the Soviet constitution.
You can take a light-hearted view of the system we are being constrained to live under, but we are concentrating a great deal of political and social power in the hands of a few people who answer to nobody I know of. Given how frequently firms ignore the empirical "go woke go broke" rule, I wonder if they are even answerable to shareholders anymore.
I wonder how this is going to evolve. I don't want the government taking sides--that almost always turns out badly. And, as we saw before with industrial labor unions, collective action will probably be prosecuted as "restraint of trade." And there will, as always, be some nasty characters on both sides. This time, though, the power of the controllers is much more far-reaching--you can't just leave town and find another job elsewhere.
I'm afraid I don't have good answers or compromises in my back pocket. We're told "just create your own competitor," but that's not very practical. Boycotts? Hard to do, as Dr. Boli points out. AVI has a thought.
Every society has ways of trying to ensure conformity. That's not objectionable by itself--but the unaccountable imbalance of power is.
I was reading about Innocent III yesterday. Who knows, maybe the church will become a secular power center again. That's not a pleasant prospect.
Since knee problems have been a live issue in our home, I wondered if one's stride had something to do with stress on one's knees.
The first question is epidemiological: Is cartilage deterioration more common here than there? Unfortunately that's not easy to answer, thanks to radically different health care systems and reporting. The rate of meniscus repairs will be a lot lower there, no matter the relative need.
So, off to sports medicine. You name it, somebody claims it. Heel-first is 6% more energy efficient, and early hominid footprints tell us they did it too. Ground force vs time plots are distinguishable, but the curves don't show (for me, anyway) a true winner. Runners run using the front of their feet because the angle of a runner's body wrt the ground demands it.
Barefoot is better. Or maybe it doesn't make any difference. Or it depends on the footwear.
You'd think intuitively that the stress on your knee would be less when your foot flexes with impact rather than when you strike hard with your heel. But it seems that the heel pad cushions the blow well enough to make it pretty much a wash. Unless it doesn't. Running is good for your joints, possibly simply because it keeps you leaner and stronger. (Apples to apples comparisons are hard here.)
Combing out the folks who want to sell you something or make a name for themselves, and just looking at the studies, is taking more time than I thought it would.
I think I'll try to take a walk using a different stride and see how it feels. I predict "awkward." Maybe it's all cultural, and all a wash--just so you don't overdo or underdo things.
Social Media App: "You have been reading Facebook for 30 minutes. Did you forget the brownies?"
Car: "Look at oncoming traffic instead of your date's tanktop."
Car: "Despite what you hear, the children in back are not murdalizing each other. However, you are about to run a stop sign."
Music App: "You play a mean air guitar, but did you notice that two men have been following you for three blocks?"
Ebook: "Before we start the next chapter of Treasure Island, finish your algebra homework."
I hadn't heard that their intelligence was adept enough that they knew about the Trinity test, and knew that and when B29s of a special task force were coming. Both times.
Assuming this documentary is true, of course... I speak no Japanese and am not expert on their WWII history. (As far as I know this could be the product of the Japanese equivalent of The History Channel.)
It might be simply the usual hindsight, where the one guy turns out to be right after all.
The pattern is easy to see and extrapolate.
What's the most compact way you can describe this?
Whereas under the Merovingians a monastery might be considered a royal monastery if it enjoyed special privileges from the kinds and queens, in the Carolingian era the giving of gifts went the other way: monasteries were expected to make gifts to the kings. This expectation was spelled out at Aachen in 819, when Louis the Pious ordered twenty-five Frankish monasteries to give him dona--an order also extended to dozens more monasteries in the Midi and east of the Rhine. For each Louis indicated whether each owed him dona, dona plus military service, or merely prayers for the royal family. Even here it was clear: those prayers were owed, not just something the monks were glad to offer.
The military service was indeed expected not just of monasteries but of bishoprics. A generation later Hincmar or Reims tried to justify churches' property holdings--which he recognized was contrary to the New Testament account of early Christians getting rid of all their possessions--in part by noting that Frankish churches were obligated to provide military service to the state. This obligation cost a church, he estimated, a fifth of its income to pay for its soldiers, because they were not given a stipend "from public resources." Such military service seemed perfectly normal to Hincmar; it was what the Carolingians required.
Things have been worse from time to time.
How did it start?
"A Merovingian king was concerned about the "illegal attacks by evil men" on
a monastery and placed it under the protection of his mayor of the palace, sub mundeburde del defnsione. ... The concept that mayors of the palace would exercise such "protection" was immediately taken up, even without an illegal attack by evil men."
The headline rule applies, I'm afraid. If the headline is a question, the answer is "no."
She's hopeful, and convinced that multilingualism will be its foundation ("calls upon the French to become polyglot").
"But tolerance is only the zero degree of questioning; when not reduced to simply welcoming others, it invites them to question themselves and to carry the culture of questioning and dialogue into encounters that problematize all participants. This reciprocating questioning produces and endless lucidity that provides the sole condition for "living together." Identity thus understood can move us towards a plural identity and the multilingualism of the new European citizen."
Like hell it will.
Endless questioning produces endless fuzz, and there's no mention of any positive statement; no central value or belief. Everything she describes is process.(*)
In a footnote she cites Augustine as saying that "in via in patria": "there is only one homeland, which is the voyage itself." I can't find that, though I do find that he said the exact opposite: "Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee." I suspect she doesn't understand him.
(*) People often write about democracy being an American value. I'm not persuaded that's right. Liberty is an American value, and the democracy is a procedural tool that follows from, and is supposed to help ensure that.
There are lots of interesting details at the link. (I don't put a lot of trust in the "German Punk movement" answer, though.) I'd heard almost none of this before.
All humans have partly corrupted wills, so that just about everything we do is from mixed motives. We sell land and give the proceeds to the church, but hold something back. If we persist in trying to do right, and hold our evil passions in check, we will become better--though only relatively so. We ought to applaud those who try for virtue, even though we know they can't perfectly succeed, as inspirations to each other. God will be the final judge, and none of our tainted righteousness is of any value before Him. There may be a lot of good drink in our punchbowl, but there's still a turd floating in it--even if it's just a little one.
When faced with our shortcomings, we can try harder (albeit never perfectly), or double down on evil (again, not perfectly). If we were simple creatures, our striving to be better would bring us closer and closer to perfection -- exponentially close -- but never quite there. We're not simple creatures; we have "islands" of greater or lesser self-awareness and obedience, and we have active enemies (world and the devil, as well as the flesh). So more realistically, we'd never get close. We need God's grace.
Given the opportunity to accept grace, we can accept (with caveats we never mention to ourselves). To those who have a little obedience, more opportunity for obedience will be given. Those who have not lose what they have as they turn farther and farther away. Given those unmentioned caveats we(**) use, it doesn't seem that we hang onto grace by our own good will alone.
(*) There is a lot of it. I'm digging in a little more before calling my chapter done.
(**) Me and those I've had opportunity to observe closely enough. I extrapolate from there.
Suggestions included "buy silk!" Buying in bulk sounds like a plan too. And other things that demand a fair chunk of up-front money.
If virtue was a thing that money could buy...
And Jesus said unto them, 'Who do you say that I am?'
And they replied, 'You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our interpersonal relationships.'
And Jesus said: 'What?'
We've moved away from trying to define things in terms of essence, and tried to define things operationally instead. Ask a scientist what's an electron, and you'll get what boils down to "something that acts like thus and so, with a negative charge, mass of 511KeV/c^2, etc." If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, its a duck.
Studying operations has been very fruitful in mathematics; ditto mappings. Turning from "what is it" to "what does it do" is what much of science is about. i.e. "Shut up and compute." That's helpful in designing systems, and it helps avoid arguments about a whether will is associated with a person or a nature.
Seriously--when you talk about Jesus' nature as human and divine, you have to remember that "nature" doesn't have quite the same meaning when referring to the Origin of all nature. I suppose I should spend a little time researching whether Divine Simplicity shows up in Christological analysis. The first pages didn't turn anything up, but google is hardly ideal for that sort of research.
And yet... We easily take "operationalism" too far. Twins may look and act alike, but they are different people. There's an essence-ial difference.
I don't know where it is proved that we can only know things by comparison with other things. The claim that all knowledge comes through the senses presumes that there is no intrinsic knowledge, it doesn't prove it. I think there is such a thing. So long as we are careful to understand the limits of our words (another thing philosophers love to squabble over) we should be able to say true things about essentials, and not just interactions.
You'd think this would be a more popular notion, given the current "trans" fashion that claims that their essence doesn't match their bodies, and that a little cargo-cult magic will make everything right.
I don't disbelieve in ghosts.
I hate the adult-oriented ghoulishness. It races to maximize ugliness and hatred. Even if the hatred is just make-believe, it still feels like hatred.
Do adults try to take over kid-holidays because they want to be kids, or because there aren't enough kids?
Most costumes are pre-made. Some of the home-brew ones are quite clever. Either way they are way fancier than those of my youth, but the kids are still all excited about TrickOrTreating--except the very little ones.
Decisions, decisions--do I give out plenty and risk running out, or just a few and wind up having to eat the leftovers?
I learned my lesson years ago about answering the door in costume. I tried wearing an African robe and authentic mask. The young lad shrieked and hid--I had to take off the mask and give extra, while his mother glowered at me.
One of my friends in Bible study said he would take a fire pit and grill to the front of his driveway and serve hotdogs to the parents. I don't know if making s'mores would be appropriate when people are wearing complex costumes.
The sidewalks are mostly clear, and the lawn has only a couple of inches of wet snow, but the table on the deck has 8" of snow on it.
I've been looking into Better Angels--and find that some of their techniques are ones I've been using already--not in politics, but in religious discussions. We commemorate the start of the 3rd great schism today. "By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another."
You should read David Warren's dream today. No, it wasn't a happy dream.
I don't mean songs that have been used for evil purposes, or which have evil connotations now. Dixie's lyrics aren't exactly wicked. Nor, curiously enough, are Deutschlandlied's.
And I think for the moment I'll classify those that go out of their way to praise evil as "explicitly evil." I'd lump the "I'm so bad" rap songs in here too.
I'm wondering now about the "seductively evil;" songs that seem innocent but aren't.
"Imagine" is pretty obviously a wicked song, cloaked in apparent kindness. Another that jumps to mind is "Gentle on my Mind:" abandoning the lady and expecting her to wait for you is made to seem so natural. "Different drum" has always seemed to corrode the possibility of any relationships--not just romantic.
My impression is that there are a lot of songs designed to aid in seduction; playing up the urgency of the moment and playing down conscience. And I hear of (but don't make a habit of listening to) a number of nihilist songs, many of which seem to be not-so-seductive cries of pain.
I'm not sure searching out and ranking "seductively evil" songs would be good for the soul. But maybe recognizing them is a good way to resist them. What you immerse yourself in effects you.
The cover art was not promising--it is a map of Liberia divided into regions with tribe names scattered about--many in the wrong places. The internal map is better, though.
Upsides:
He ends the chapter with "It is the duty of every Liberian of the hinterland to fight for what their ancestors tried to achieve by sacrificing their blood for what the Kru termed "mu joboe bo." The world should be the limit. There should be no country on earth of which a Liberian is not a citizen." mu joboe bo means to go toward the sea, in context meaning to migrate for opportunity.
Downsides:
After giving a list of different cults (Leopard society, Water Leopard and Crocodile society, Bush Hog and Weaver Bird associations, etc), he wrote "It is not in the best interest of the reader to know the details or which tribes practice the various cults but suffice it to say that they exist in Liberia."
The meat of the book is about how the tribes and the "Americo's" got along, and how lies and oppression (including slavery) won out. Sort of. The Vai appealed to the British for protection, and so large chunks of what might have been Liberia wound up part of Sierra Leone. (This, though the author doesn't mention it, include some diamond mining areas--the Blood Diamonds might have been set in Liberia instead.). He describes several of the rebellions against the Americo's and includes a chapter of Albert Porte's description of the rice riots in April 1979 that eventually led to the coup against Tolbert.
Interestingly, Wulah sides with Tolbert about the rice price rise--in general. Tolbert had a rice farm business that would have benefitted greatly and thus a vested interest in a price rise, but there was really no other way to encourage self-sufficiency in rice, except by letting the price rise.
The tribes might have been integrated into the nation, but even if the Americo-Liberians had been interested in sharing power, the paradigm of government was wrong--you would need a model more like the Swiss than the US; very strongly federal. But given how often the tribes fought each other, it isn't obvious that even a very federal system would have worked.
Other little bits along the way: the hinterland tribes believed in reincarnation--but only about a dozen times or so.
On the issue of marriage, there is a misconception that Liberian tribes are polygamous. Accordingly, we are constantly told that at one time our ancestors had only one wife. In Liberia, as well as the United States and elsewhere, polygamy is the privilege of the well-to-do. Because of a taboo in Africa against sexual intercourse between the parents of a nursing child, polygamy is an institution that is absolutely necessary.
It may be something of a specialty interest, but it is worth reading if you have the interest.
I was looking for a passage from one of his short stories. An American couple is traveling in Mexico after an unspecified disaster has struck the US, and one of the men they meet explains that when he was young and stupid and lived in the city, he read the papers every day and went wild with anger. Today he lives in the country, and only reads newspapers that are 2 weeks old, and now is amused at the stupidity on display rather than impotently furious. I've remembered the gist of the passage, but not the wording, and goodreads has 82 pages of quotes from him. A few:
"Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all." - "Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher." - "You can’t learn to write in college." - "They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves."
But the area is also under Turkish control, and nothing has yet showed up about them being notified. "Age the news;" the whole story isn't out yet, and maybe never will be if the Turks did give permission for the operation. They've seemed to be pretty chummy with ISIS.
I'm trying to figure out what sorts of people will be likely to advance to be the new #1. People who unabashedly love power might think twice if they have reason to worry that US special forces will eventually find them--unless they have guarantees of protection from some powerful nation. Otherwise I think the candidates would be true believers, who don't worry so much about death--and would be less interested in negotiations with impure apostates and infidels.
Maybe we're all better off if, as seems likely to me, Turkey replaces Baghdadi with somebody of their own.
But "age the news."
The book is just what the subtitle says. He describes the people involved, and cites memoirs and declassified documents and puts it all together with a explanations of what the engineering and physics involved looked like.
In one episode, Soviet scientists in Leningrad buried their cyclotron to keep it from being stolen or damaged when the Germans approached (the Soviet war effort would have snaffled up the parts too). While the city was still under siege, a group of scientists had to come back into the city, dig it up, and ship the parts out--to a background noise of incoming artillery. You never knew physics could be so exciting.
Stalin was, of course, very well informed about the Manhattan Project thanks to spies, and to a somewhat open environment behind-the-wire in which American scientists were encouraged to share what they were doing with each other. And he really wanted the bomb. Beria was tasked with getting one built.
As plenty of others have noted, the biggest secret was that the bomb could work at all. After reading the book, I have a much better appreciation for how hard it was, and how many details the devil hid in. And why, even after many years, our military still wanted to do nuclear tests. (It isn't to show off.)
Prof Pondrom uses a number of back-of-the-envelope calculations along the way, but you won't hit any serious math until the appendices, and even there it is just linear differential equations. That matches what the bomb-makers had--you need computers to solve the big hairy hydrodynamic equations, and nobody had them.
Some things are still classified, but there's a lot of detail here.
From Appendix F: "This presentation has been at the level of an undergraduate physics course. If the reader works through this Appendix, and follows the arguments, it does not mean that he/she can build a nuclear weapon in the basement. Weapons design drawings require much more careful analysis than is presented here."
In case you were worried...
Yes, read it.
The site is "animation resources" and I just spent more time there than I ought.
I'm not sure I like their phrase "golden age." There was some great stuff last century, and some great stuff this. And lots of dreck in both.
A widely-used gas that is currently produced from fossil fuels can instead be made by an ‘artificial leaf’ that uses only sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water, and which could eventually be used to develop a sustainable liquid fuel alternative to petrol.
...
Syngas is currently made from a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, and is used to produce a range of commodities, such as fuels, pharmaceuticals, plastics and fertilizers.
OK, sounds interesting. I've been wondering what we're going to make plastics out of when we run out of oil...
The perovskite photocathodes maintain selective aqueous CO2 reduction for one day at light intensities as low as 0.1 sun, which provides pathways to maximize daylight utilization by operating even under low solar irradiance. Under 1 sun irradiation, the perovskite–BiVO4 PEC tandems sustain bias-free syngas production coupled to water oxidation for three days. The devices present solar-to-H2 and solar-to-CO conversion efficiencies of 0.06 and 0.02%, respectively, and are able to operate as standalone artificial leaves in neutral pH solution.
It seems the perovskite cathodes can be sensitive to moisture, and have to be protected. Very much not quite ready, but interesting. The process does not produce CO2, which I gather is why the headline writer though it was "Clean Gas." Whether this is because CO2 is evil, or because the result is supposedly entirely syngas (betcha there's a lot of water vapor in there too..) I can't say. FWIW, the energy efficiency of photosynthesis is of order less than 1%, though that isn't usually achieved because plants aren't interested in overproducing. (Sugar cane is 3.5%) I'm not sure if that's the same efficiency as quoted in the abstract.
Chaotic Waterside Market offers almost everything for sale, including colourful textiles, shoes, leather goods and pottery, all with a dose of foul smells and lots of noise. Haggle hard, smile, and embrace raw Monrovia to its fullest.
and
This lighthouse can be climbed for an outstanding panoramic view of the cape. Although no longer functional, it's on a UN base, so get permission first, and don't attempt to scale the small, slippery steps during the rainy season. Don't miss the stunning, palm-lined beach at nearby Fish Town (not to be confused with the larger town of the same name), but take care with the currents if you swim.
I'm told that the surfing is amazing. But do take care with the currents--at Thinker's Village (good food) we were told that drownings are fairly common--a few tourists a year in the country.
Ebola is gone for now, and I don't hear any murmurings about civil war these days. So, do you want to take Lonely Planet's advice?
Not so for "MLB To Speed Up Games By Replacing Umpires With Bears". The headline is promising, but the story is lousy. Let me do it right. Or at least better.
In response to long standing fan complaints that the game has grown far too slow, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced today that home plate umpires will be replaced with brown bears, and pitchers will be required to wear a vest festooned with fresh trout.
So long as the recently fed bear is entertained by throwing and swinging, it will usually sit watching contentedly, but if it becomes bored, or the game lasts long enough for it to become hungry again, the bear will head for the trout. The pitcher has a 70 foot head start, but the bear runs 30 miles an hour.
During face-to-face negotiations, the Major League Umpires Association voiced no objections.
Hot dog vendors will be issued Tazers.
Several stadiums are planning to expand the program and use bears to enforce their "No bringing food into the stadium" rule.
UPDATE: If the Bee wants to borrow this, they may.
He believed in nurture above nature. Newly acquired traits would be passed on to offspring. His supporters claimed to be able to transform rye into wheat.
Stalin liked him. "Criticism of Lysenko was denounced as "bourgeois" or "fascist"." Scientific evidence was not a defense. Critics were considered elitist opponents of the wisdom of the peasants. Many opponents were fired, some imprisoned, some executed. Wikipedia says the ban on criticism of Lysenkoism was only lifted in the 60's.
I am informed that apparently substantive differences between people can be made to vanish if the right words and role models are invoked. I am informed that punishment causes crime. I am informed that math is racist and that the experiences of the disadvantaged should play a role in math. I am informed that speech is impermissible violence and violence is protected speech. I am informed that a man is not a man and a woman is not a woman. I am informed that people are harassed and fired and fined for denying these things.
So far no executions, though.
After Lysenko's rise, a similar attack was made on the "idealist" and "bourgeois" theories of quantum mechanics and special relativity. Luckily for the physicists, Stalin wanted a nuclear bomb very badly. Kurchatov warned that the bomb could not be made without scientists who knew these theories, and when Stalin was appraised of a meeting of Lysenko-types to challenge the scientists, he famously said "Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later." For some reason the meeting never happened. (Lee Pondrom, The Soviet Atomic Project)
Of the Shame Which Attends All Sexual Intercourse. Augustine never married. He had a concubine that he loved, and had to give up for his engagement, and another while waiting for his fiancee to come of age. He eventually broke off the engagement and sent away the other concubine. I wonder if that may have skewed his description of sex. "This right action seeks the light, in so far as it seeks to be known, but yet dreads being seen. And why so, if not because that which is by nature fitting and decent is so done as to be accompanied with a shame-begetting penalty of sin?"
I think he suffered a failure of the imagination here--perhaps he should have asked some married friends about the matter. Wanting Privacy ≠ Shame. For that matter, Embarrassment ≠ Shame. Even something as simple as writing poetry suffers tremendously when other people hang around--in fact it can feel embarrassing for others to see it "half-done" and "in process."
Of course there can be plenty of reason for shame if those involved are not entitled to be involved, or are indulging cruelty or vice. But the basic marital act is a husband and wife giving themselves to each other, not to kibitzers.
What is involved in being an incarnation? That's a union of different natures--which isn't a very useful definition. Maybe something operational...
The actions of the body have a purpose that isn't determined by the body's environment and reactions. The body expresses some aspects of the soul--and makes that expression possible.
Clearly this expression can happen through actions. But can the body express purpose or meaning through inaction? Through "just being," or "just being" in a way that is apparently determined by the body's environment and reactions?
That sounds kind of Zen, doesn't it? "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.". Undoubtedly the body is having an effect on the soul, but it isn't obviously an expression of the soul through the body.
Despite a more amazing incarnation, Jesus had about 20 "dark years" about which we know nothing directly, though we can infer from his townsfolk's reactions that nothing dramatic happened. Of course, people can get used to pretty nearly anything, and a perfect carpenter who doesn't preach might be easy to get used to and ignore. Or maybe not--but their reaction tells me they weren't expecting anything unusual.
"Do little things with great love?" Maybe that's the answer to the "just being" question: doing the "reactive" ordinary thing consciously with love. Who sees the difference? Maybe just God.
Trying to be intentional about each action tends to pull my attention away from God, so I'm not persuaded that that is a useful exercise by itself.
If I have the Holy Spirit in me, what I do and am needs to somehow incarnate that. Pew-warming is probably not the most expressive way. Study ought to reshape my mind and heart, but somehow that still doesn't quite seem fully expressive either. Maybe the best approach is concentrating on doing one thing (with love) at a time, and letting everything else be reactive. Start small. As distractible as I am, that's hard enough.
I omit the link to protect the guilty--spell-check is not your friend.
One of these days I need to assemble a fecal roster of fake experts, whose use in a news story suggests that the reporter isn't doing his job. And organizations. It could get pretty long.
That promptly led to hedgelaying.. (They apparently use the "cubit" to describe an elbow-to-finger measurement.)
I remember Tolkien writing about elves creating things out of living plants--like homes out of trees--and was pleased at his imagination.
It looks like he was expanding on familiar practices from the English countryside. You cut and bend stems of young trees to grow horizontally so they can be woven together to make a sturdy live fence. "The theory behind laying a hedge is easy. The practice is much harder, requiring skill and experience."
If you don't maintain them, they eventually grow into a messy line of trees.
There are some nice how-to pictures here.
Want to get involved? Oops, it's in the UK. Some US suggestions include: "American Hazel, Black Chokecherry, Chokeberry, and fragrant Sumac"
Somebody is always putting out lists--The Classics of Science Fiction V5 is available. They're ranked by "citations" here. As usual, their ranking bears no relationship to how I judge the books, and there's a cutoff--I stopped having so much time to read, and I didn't spend as much time browsing the SciFi shelves of the bookstore. I never heard of a lot of their titles before.
Of their 108, I read 36 that I don't care to read again. The Left Hand of Darkness was well-thought-out and well-written and it will never again bubble up to the top of my reading list. Frankenstein was fun, but once was enough. On the other hand, Childhood's End struck a kind of mythic chord--I'll never read it again (I've had kids since then, and grown somewhat myself, and I no longer like it) but I read it more than once when I was younger. 22 of them (e.g. Canticle for Leibowitz) are on that "I read it several times" list. 6 are in the never-read-and-never-will, 25 are maybe-if-it-was-handy, and the other 19 I don't know enough about--most of them are recently published, of course.
So, about 2/3 once to 1/3 many.
"Have I wanted to re-read it?" is a slippery measure for how good I think a book is. I see different things in Canticle each time I read it, but I've re-read others simply because I was in the mood for the experience I knew the book was competent to provide. (I'm thinking of H Rider Haggard here, but there are plenty of other moods.)
Now and then I have admonished some of our kids to "Read something different!" But I get it.
That bolded bit jumped out at me tonight. Being generous, I pick the long cubit, which was about 52 cm, or 1.7 nanoseconds. In one sense it is indeed a "very little thing."
In another sense, it is much easier to figure out how to lay hands on some food than to figure out how grab ahold of some new time. It turns out to be tough to postpone dying when you're in the middle of it, or have the sun stand still for a bit to keep the afternoon going a little longer. We're not designed to manipulate time that way; we are designed to manipulate stuff like fruit and fibers.
In God's eternal Now a million years is a very little thing, and He can manipulate time as He sees fit. Not me: and unless I in some way join Him in that Now, I don't see how time can ever can be little for me.
It turns out lot of places along the rivers look like this. I didn't see much of that near the coast.
Want to try a portage?. Or, if you're more ambitious, here...
He wrote Journey Without Maps about his trip, on which he nearly died.
He brought along his 23-year-old cousin. She wrote Too Late to Turn Back about the trip. She viewed things a little differently, of course.
One of the surprises she found was that it was not an "adventure"--except perhaps in the sense of being a nasty uncomfortable thing that made you late for dinner. It was tedious, and the heat and monotony drained body and mind. At the end of it all, she said it was worth it.
I spent almost all my time in the developed area on the coast, and what wasn't there was spent close to main roads and extractive industries. I never saw what she did in the interior. And the Monrovia I saw was a much bigger and richer (relatively) city than the one she saw.
Read it. And Graham's too. They each see Dr. Harley differently.
UPDATE: The waterfall they each describe can be partially seen illustrating this BBC story.
Augustine covers Heaven and Earth, and has to pull himself back on track sometimes.
To counter people who claim that miracles ceased, he describes some he saw, and others he heard from sources he trusted--and the list is quite long.
He sometimes uses close reading of Scripture, and sometimes explains passages metaphorically. Some of the passages he closely read were ones I considered metaphorical ("Not a hair of your head shall perish"), and he used a version of the Septuagint that seems not quite precise. He knows Jerome's "new" Latin version, and cites it a time or three, but doesn't rely on it much. When his close reading hits a passage that was ill-translated, it's a bit jarring.
He cites books no longer extant--which is frustrating, since I'd really like to have learned more, but most of (e.g.) Varro's work is lost.
The earlier chapters describe details of Roman religion that didn't show up in Bulfinch's Mythology. It's a good reminder of what real pagans are like.
He chews up the pagan philosophers. That isn't hard to do--and they did it to each other with gleeful abandon too.
He has a large chunk of parallel histories of Israel and the rest of the world (Assyria is his generic term for all the empires of that region, fyi), which is interesting, even if his chronology is not 100%. OK, quite a bit less than 100%. Some things he gets wrong--I suppose nobody could read cuneiform by then, and not much hieroglyphic text either, so maybe some of the histories had been lost. I had thought that the claim that all (or almost all) the pagan gods were deified heroes was a late notion, but Augustine cites Roman authors explaining that Mercury and Isis and many others were deified after their deaths. (Isis taught agriculture to the Egyptians?)
He's eager to explain how everything in Israel's history and scripture points to Jesus, and stretches some points way beyond reasonable limits.
When he discusses prodigies, I felt a sharp wish to be able to sit him down and explain a little chemistry and physics. Yes, he mentions the salamander, and a worm that lives in boiling water--and of course the latter does exist though he couldn't know it. And on several other points (predestination) I didn't think he had a solid handle on all aspects of what he was discussing.
Nevertheless, it is interesting.
Of course, while he was alive, John never did any miracles. John 10:41.
So for Herod (or "people") to think John would start now says something interesting about how they viewed resurrection.
We bought a van without the extra bells and whistles. A backup camera would be very nice to have, but I don't like power doors (untraceable short circuits drain the battery very quickly--I learned that the hard way) and the temperature sensors get scraped off in snow banks, and I think I'd rather drive than fiddle with getting bluetooth synced at highway speeds.
You'd think sooner or later people will either vote with the ballot or their feet or with surreptitious bear spray to deal with the problem. But I remembered India's sacred monkeys. They get to run wild, and even run violent, because they're sacred.(*) Our priests define vagrants as victims, and therefore also sacred.
You'd think people would notice the difference between the generic and innocuous "homeless" and the disreputable "vagabond" or "vagrant," but our priests insist on blurring the language to keep the rest of us from noticing. I'm not writing about the generically homeless here.
There seem to be Indians here and there who are fed up with being harassed, but the risks of offending the believers are high. Likewise here.
(*) Although sometimes they destroy enough crops that the governments take notice. The story is about a matching fund to save monkeys. "Killing monkeys is a sin. Those killing monkeys would invite the wrath of god and to save people from calamities, a balancing act of saving monkeys is required."
We got wedged into this situation by politics, and we'll have to get out by politics.
One obvious solution is to replace the people who are busy wedging us ever harder into this mess. That's been tried--it isn't easy at all, and hasn't seemed to happen yet.
Another is to find a way for the existing elite to save face in a flip-flop. If they can find someone to blame they can change course without endangering their hold on power. They could, for example, find a crying need for mental health care among the homeless, a need that was thwarted by the callous closing of mental health hospitals by Reagan and the other evil money-hungry sorts. (That particular claim wouldn't be true, of course, but that's no bar in politics--truth seems to be an impediment to be avoided at all costs.) The homeless need hospitals, and the progressives are just the people to help them!
Of course, there would have to be something in it for the well-connected. And the existing experts-for-hire would scream unless you found ways to work them into the plan. And the elites would still be the kind of people who double-down on craziness. And they'd still need to find a way of enforcing drug restrictions without harshing the mellow of an important subset of the San Francisco voters. But if a sacrificial lamb can be procured...
Many Chinese cities were walled and fortified, and some of the fortifications were quite large. Pingyao's city wall approached Ninevah's in height. The Forbidden City is effectively a large castle.
But since China usually succeeded in centralizing power, it didn't need as many non-frontier fortifications as the European patchwork of mini-states did--in fact, they would be a risk to the central state. I suspect I'll learn that warlords' castles were dismantled when the new Emperor conquered them.
But there were families with fortified compounds too. There's probably a lot of history in there.
In the earlier case "Goins was initially held on a \$10,000 cash bond, which was reduced in May to a signature bond with GPS monitoring." Now "Judge Ramona Gonzalez ordered a \$25,000 cash bond Friday, saying if he posts the cash bond he will be required to have no weapons and comply with GPS monitoring and house arrest."
I'm kind of puzzled. Isn't there enough evidence to give him a permanent address, pending trial? The GPS bracelet says he was on the woman's block then.
One thing is clear--he was telling the truth when he said the police couldn't stop him. Neither does GPS. It just makes it easier to tie the criminal to the crime after the fact. It does nothing for crimes of poor impulse control, or crimes where the criminal doesn't think he has anything to lose, or is simply feckless, or thinks himself invulnerable. A catch-and-release police/prosecute policy will cultivate that attitude in people.
I'd think that GPS monitoring would deter people from further crimes who have good impulse control, are forward-thinking, and feel they have something to lose by getting re-arrested for a new crime. I suspect those folks commit some, but nowhere near most, of the crimes.
And GPS doesn't deter fraud, or other crimes that don't necessarily require physical presence.
But hey, we've got some nice high-tech toys--they have to be useful!
The stars were quite clear, and the air was a bit thinner. As I watched the sky, a meteor came almost straight down at me and burst.
I heard it. Simultaneously with the burst.
No, I did not have long frizzy hair, but there was a metal wire fence nearby.
Yes, you can hear them sometimes. With a track along the sky, some people hear crackling and popping. The topic is getting more serious attention, but the effect has been observed for years: China 817AD, England 1719AD.
According to this paper the meteor track can be a meter wide. That's potentially a lot of ionized gas. If an oxygen atom boils off the meteor and is ionized, it is initally moving at about 1.1 to 7.2 E7 meters/second. The Earth's magnetic field isn't very strong--2.5-6.5 microTesla--but with such a large speed the V cross B isn't negligable. The initial force is of order 2 to 75 E-19 Newtons, which given that the oxygen atom is only about 2.7 E-26kg, gives quite the acceleration.
The full MHD solution is way harder than I can solve on the back of an envelope, but that initial acceleration sounds pretty promising.
Suppose you have a cylinder of ionized gas moving at meteor speeds. It will slow down very rapidly, but in the meantime MHD forces will push the positive ions one way and the electrons the other. When they slow down enough, they will pull back together to recombine. If this second timescale is long enough, you should get a column of postive and a column of negative charges moving toward each other, which should create a low frequency radio pulse.
The only problem with this model is that it doesn't work: radio wave generation is rare!
You can detect meteor tracks from the way they reflect radio waves, but they usually don't seem to make any themselves. For starters, this naive model assumes no turbulance, which isn't even close to reality where gas gets mixed quickly. And it doesn't deal well with a bang at the end. But it gives an idea of what some of the forces are.
Now that I think of it, I wonder how much lightning you get along meteor tracks. They're far higher than thunderclouds, but the sprites are quite high too, and there have to be interesting electric fields with the sprites. Whether the same sorts of fields exist away from above thunderclouds I don't know.
In 1993 we noticed even more peculiar random variations on the energy signal during the day – with the exception of a few hours in the middle of the night when the signal was noise free. Everybody had their own pet theory. I believed it was some sort of effect coming from planes interacting with the electrical supply cables. Some nights later I could be seen sitting in a car park on the Jura at 2 a.m., trying to prove my theory with visual observations, but it was very dark and all the planes had stopped landing several hours beforehand. Experiment inconclusive! The real culprit, the TGV (a high-speed train), was discovered by accident a few weeks later during a discussion with a railway engineer: leakage currents on the French rail track flowed through the LEP vacuum chamber with the return path via the Versoix river back to Cornavin. The noise hadn’t been evident when we first measured the beam energy as TGV workers had been on strike.
...
took a look inside the beampipe using mirrors and endoscopes. Not seeing anything, I frustratedly squeezed my head between the vacuum flanges and peered down inside the pipe. In the distance was something resembling a green concave lens. “This looks like the bottom of a beer bottle,” I thought, restraining myself from uttering a word to anyone in the vicinity. I went to the opposite open end of the vacuum section and peered into the vacuum pipe again: a green circular disk this time, but again, not a word. Someone got a long pole to poke out the offending article – out it came, and my guess was correct: it was a Heineken beer bottle, which had indeed refreshed the parts no other beer could reach, as the slogan ran. A hasty search revealed a second bottle. Upon closer inspection it was clear that the control room operators had almost succeeded in making the beam circulate despite the obstacles: there was a scorch burn along the label, indicating that they had almost managed to steer the beam past the bottles.
And what will the future hold? "Digging a 5.6 m-diameter hole disturbs rock that has been there for millennia, causing it to relax and to move."
Wikipedia says, not surprisingly, that Canada has a number of tall tales, and Australia, and it mentions others from Europe (e.g. Finn MacCool creating the Giant's Causeway), but doesn't mention anything outside the Euro-Anglophone west.
It seems unlikely that other cultures wouldn't have them too. But...
I remember reading a book on Chinese humor (though I don't remember a lot from it), and finding some examples quite opaque. If I can't always recognize humor, I'm probably not enough in tune with the nuances of the literature to spot when something is exaggerated for humor. Or possibly some cultures don't use "tall tales," finding something else funnier instead. Or maybe I should broaden my definition to include "just-so" type stories like the Anansi stories.
If your religion is more one of orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy, then:
The worst believer is better than the best nonbeliever.
Because your relationship with God is infinitely more important that your relationship with anyone or anything else, it follows that even a wicked believer is better before God than the most virtuous person who rejects God.
(A Christian might object that you can't hate your visible brother and still love the invisible God--which brings in a bit of orthopraxy.)
The principle applies in many religions--including only-formally-secular state worshipping religions like Communism. And do you recall how many women jumped to Clinton's defence--even excusing him? Clinton was orthodox in his support of abortion, and that mattered more than taking advantage of interns. He was a believer.
You can classify these as instances of AVI's tribes, and fruitfully examine them that way, but I think looking at things from a religious standpoint makes it easier to see how some of the extreme positions can get their self-righteous power.
Has anybody done any research on what sorts of stage mixes elicit the best singing response from the congregation?
I know you have to hear your own voice, and some lead singer, and your neighbors. But do drums really help? Is it better for the lead singer to be a soprano or a baritone--or is it good to have a mix so every voice range has something to listen to? Lots of instruments? Only a piano?
You also want the Least Astonishment--the worshipper should be able to predict fairly well where the melodic line is going. People will sing the familiar more confidently. But that's a different issue.
I admit that I was dubious about this from the get-go. I've been listening to "impeach"/"25th amendment"/etc for several years now, with varying claims but the same goal. The accusers have called wolf so often that I can no longer assume good intentions and different values--they have lied too much.
I'm old enough to remember the Clinton's impeachment. "Lying under oath and obstruction of justice." Yes, he was plainly guilty of both. The former doesn't quite seem to fit the "high crimes" and the latter was done through means that seem quite common in DC--means that are legal and unethical and bipartisan. Yes, I read the Starr report, and drew my own conclusions.
(Clinton was, in his prime, a superb politician--and I mean that in the worst possible way. His wife, not so much, as was obvious years ago when she bungled the medical care reform effort. She doesn't seem to have learned much since.)
The shoe's on the other foot, and once again, the impeachment is driven by politics and not by any finding of serious crimes. That was true for Andrew Johnson's, too. It seems to be a habit of ours--and like smoking in bed, it may catch up to us someday.
The Trump years have been full of panic and outrage. I suppose that's a handy weapon to have, and maybe it's use is a policy decision not related to its target: "Scream till their ears bleed!"(*) Sometimes I think I detect a more personal motive, though. Trump has made fun of them, and gotten away with it, and they cannot endure to be mocked. AVI noticed that some traditional forms of humor are being squelched too, with very similar fervor.
(*) We changed the way we judge a person's character some while back, and now consider the person greater if their passions are greater--not their control of passions. Obviously if they can't control their passions, it is because their passions are too great. So if I exhibit fantastic outrage, it is because my sensitivity and character are much greater than those of you dull and lazy sorts.
True, the Babylon Bee succeeded in a limited parody of the fiasco, but the ritual was such a reductio ad absurdum that you have to wonder if anybody participating was serious. I hope not. Psalm 115:8, anyone?
A liturgy is for public worship. It involves more than one party--maybe there's only one worshipper, but there's also the god. If you have a framework of acceptable practices, it isn't implausible that you can vary this--provided your fellow worshippers agree. And that your god agrees.
But how do you create a liturgy from nothing, with no knowlege of what your god wants from you?
Maybe I have "experimentalist's bias," but if your theory leads you to do stupid or wicked things, maybe your theory is incomplete.
Dale Matson, commenting on this article wrote: "'A sin confessed merely to a plant is a sin which cannot be forgiven...' Now I know what the unforgivable sin is."
The signs held by the Youth Climate Action Team called for a climate strike--which seemed a little strange at 3:50 on a Friday afternoon when everybody was going home anyway.
The WSJ says they called on Gov Evers to declare "a climate emergency." I'm not quite sure what that means. Perhaps the teenagers think it would give the governor dictatorial powers, and that he would necessarily do the right things thereafter. They also want MG&E to "reach 100% renewable energy by 2030 instead of the utility's goal of hitting net-zero carbon electricity by 2050 that was set in May." 2050 is a pretty aggressive goal, given current technology. 2030 is a joke.
When we look for policy goals we always look to our teenagers, right?
Richard Armour. (from The Medical Muse)
Who knows each illness, knows each cure? Who never doubts, is always sure? Who gives advice to learned scholars And shrugs aside their thanks and dollars? Who is this awesome fellow, friends? Who is the chap who condescends To chat with men like Mayo? Who? It is the intern, young and new, Who knows more than all other men. He'll never know so much again.
I did come up with a not-altogether-unserious proposal for mitigating internal misuse of arial drones by mobilizing our distributed civilian expertise and firepower: Hunt drones. In peacetime nobody would buy in, but maybe the virtues of the idea are a little more obvious now.
Sell hunting licenses for them. A downed drone becomes the property of the hunter. Within city limits, allow birdshot or launched nets only; a few other minor restrictions seem reasonable. Damage or injury caused by the crash is the responsibility of the most recent controller of the drone. Sorry, Amazon; yours are targets too.
Yes, I know nighttime hunting wouldn't be popular, and the machines are useful in finding out what's going on in disasters.
BTW, Grim recommended a New Criterion essay about Solzhenitsyn; I second the suggestion.
But with some hunting and gathering skills, and enough of a surplus, why couldn't somebody travel, e.g. for trade?
Science News says a grave site shows signs of not just trade but people's customs reaching from Superior to Georgia--and possibly the people themselves. The article says that this kind of interconnection was supposed to have only begun about 2000 years ago, but the Georgia site is 2000 years before that.
Trade and travel might have come and gone over millenia, with the fall and rise of unfriendly cultures along the routes. Or bad harvests that cut down on surplus food for travel reserve.
I'm not at all well versed in the various American Indian stories. I wonder which cultures have stories of traders. They'd be fairly recent stories, not 4000 years old, but they might shed a little light on how long distance trade might have been done.
Let me try again. This won't be the last such strike. I wonder how vulnerable our refineries are. I'd hope there's some inconspicuous AA equipment operating, but I've heard of other vulnerabilities in other energy producing/distributing that make me wonder. Generals famously try to fight the last war, and politicians tend not to notice unsexy stuff. Salamander frequently complains about infrastructure shortcomings in the Navy--simple stuff but not sexy.
Attorneys are quitting at least partly because they’re swamped by the amount of video footage they have to review from police body-worn cameras.
...
“It is completely overwhelming,” said Robert Moody, a public defender in the Newport News office. “There’s no way physically possible I can watch the (video) data dumps they give me.”
...
“It’s a razor thin wire, because you’re looking to be sure your client’s due process rights are preserved,” he said. “On the other hand, I have 120 other clients. I have to preserve their due process rights too.”
Only one choice seems to be respected, and it has nothing to do with your state of mind.
Remind me not to get sick in the Netherlands.
Apparently quite a lot of people leave their cars running--in the summer and fall! In winter--that I understand, though I'd never do it. Cars sometimes need to warm up a bit.
In one recent incident there were 4 stolen cars in a single parking lot--stolen from a variety of jurisdictions. I get the impression this isn't just joyriding (or joy-crashing), and it doesn't seem to be chop-shop or resale that much either. Probably dealers and armed robbers and "We need to give them a warning" shooters want "burner cars." We're seeing a rise in those last 3 crimes too.
I wonder how much the thieves get per car.
Oh well. That would have been a very interesting exploration of what sainthood means--and I think a useful one.
You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
The number of video games I played as a youth was, of course, 0. And as a young adult--you could number them on your thumbs. It was an expensive hobby, and would clearly suck far too many quarters away from my second-hand book fund.
That particular non-predilection seems not to have been hereditary, though perhaps the gene was merely latent.
I get the appeal in playing the games, and if I spent the time to get involved, I would probably get involved.
And I suppose kibitzing is a grand old tradition, made more attractive by the greater emphasis on storyline in video games.
And who has 30 hours to devote to solving a new game? Or \$60 that doesn't have a better home?
Still.
