Some things stay the same

“Whatever is not nailed down is mine. Whatever can be pried loose is not nailed down.”. What does the slogan bring to mind? The early 20'th century robber barons to whom it was initially applied? Apple trying to "trademark" the letter "i"?

Or pop singers trying to trademark "Queen of Christmas"? (I'd have thought the Virgin Mary would get dibs on that name.)

Mummy faces

Egyptian reinterpretation? An Egyptologist with a revisionist book to hawk asserts that since the Egyptians had few mirrors, "they didn't know what they looked like" and therefore " “When people look at a face inside a mummy and say, ‘oh, they looked just like us’, it is just an illusion,”" Why? Because the mummies were being adjusted to be more acceptable to the divine.

Of course that was part of the reason for mummification, but the sine qua non was that the body actually survive, and I've seen nothing in mummies to suggest that the mummy faces were specially redone to look better. They put masks over the body, generally stylized. The dead wanted to "identify" as a god: I gather Price wants to indulge them in their long-dead illusions and have the rest of us join in that attempted deification, looking at the god-face rather than the human one. "no CT scans nor facial recognition imagery will appear in the exhibition" Or perhaps, as is customary, the reporter screwed the story up beyond recognition.

Timewasting

I didn't start a quest to find the most useless functions possible, just got to noodling starting with the prime question a bit earlier. Probably everybody knows the old faithful Taylor series for $e^x$: $\sum_{n=0}^\infty x^n/n!$. That's for all non-negative integers $n$. You know what $e^x$ looks like.

What do we wind up with if we try something similar but with the primes instead? Naturally there are plenty of possibilities. In what follows let $p_i$ be the i'th prime number.

How about just having products of primes in the denominator? $$\sum_i { {x^i} \over {\prod_{n=1}^i p_n}}$$

It falls to a minimum and then starts to rise again as you go negative. It doesn't rise as fast as $e^x$ for increasing $x$, unsuprisingly.

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OK, suppose we use factorials instead of just the products of primes. $$\sum_i {{x^i} \over {p_i !}}$$

For $x$ increasing it also doesn't rise as fast as $e^x$, but for negative $x$ it climbs faster than before. Both this and the previous have a minimum: the one about about -2.7 and the previous at about -3.27.

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One more, just for laughs. Pick out just the $e^x$ Taylor series expansion terms with prime powers of x.

$$ \sum_i {{x^{p_i} \over { {p_i} !}} $$

It has 2 inflection points, and rises with $x$ increasing and falls with $x$ decreasing--sort of like a cubic would. Curious.(*)

And not obviously useful.

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To wrap up, what started the exercise for me was, for $x \in [-1,1)$, $$ \sum_i { {x^i} \over {p_i} } $$.

Naturally this diverges almost everywhere, but it's cute.

If you've wondered why high school graphing calculators haven't changed in 20 years, this is why: it would do most of your algebra homework for you.

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(*) It looks like Mathjax fails with this command--it boxed the raw LaTeX instead of processing it. I wonder why. And to make the text fall below the images, I had to add "style=clear:both;" inside the paragraph command.

Census starts

Press Release: "the International Community wishes to encourage all not to politicize or disrupt the ongoing 2022 National Population and Housing Census. We have observed with dismay calls by some elements within the country to boycott the Census."

But who would boycott the census? unpaid census workers.

They planned big: biometric tools and on-the-spot ID card printing. It turns out the firm couldn't provide that, and all I've seen about that since is handwaving. I suspect they agreed to ignore the requirements. And they bumbled the training (more likely someone ate the money), and the census started two days ago (several years late) and is supposed to end next Tuesday. I wonder how long it will really take, and how many of the numbers will just be made up. The bigger the rush, the more imagination...

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UPDATE: President Weah just fired a couple of administrators of LISGIS "based on administrative reasons". I wonder if he's a fall guy or got caught.

They declared a National Census Day but didn't quite get the word out.

Testing Mathjax

It's well known that the sum of the reciprocals of the positive integers is infinite. It's less well known (ran across it a couple years ago) that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes is also infinite (Euler, 1737).

The linked article has proofs about the series $1/p_i$, but seems to only say that the divergence of the sum $\sum_{i=1}^{n} 1/p_i$ is greater than $\log\log(n+1)$.

I'd bet that $$\lim_{n\to \infty} {{\sum_{i=1}^{n} 1/p_i} \over {\sum_{i=1}^{n} 1/i} } \to 0$$ it seems obvious -- but I'm not sure how to prove that yet. Euler could probably have done it in his sleep. I'd need to mull over their approaches for a while.

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It looks like this works

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UPDATE: Yep, it's pretty obvious. The difference between the prime sum and $\log(\log(n))$ is finite, and so the numerator is close to $\log(\log$ and the denominator to $\log$ so the ratio tends to 0. Anyhow, this Mathjax tool seems to pass the initial tests.

When a child is king

I've a picture of small armies fighting on behalf of rival candidates for the throne--both of whom are little boys.

When incapacitated or even dead candidates win elections, it gets clearer that the candidate is only the emblem of the team.

Even for a candidate with all of his faculties, the job of senator or president is too huge for one man to wrap his mind around. He needs a group to help him, instruct him, direct him.

Unless my eyes decieve me there are three kinds of arrangements: where the candidate manages his own staff and organization, where the candidate inherits the system (Yes Minister?), and where the organization anoints the candidate.

Who is part of the package you vote for/fight for? Who is Fetterman's regent? Who is the power behind the WhiteHouse teleprompter? this month.

Didn't quite graduate to gearhead

AVI has a post about gearheads, and what it brought to my mind was pens. My father liked fountain pens, and when I was in college I tried out a Parker 45, and liked it a lot. It was cheap, easy to write with, and had a nice balance--but the cartridge refills got to be a nuisance, and over the years something happened to the nib. Oh well; in the drawer with it. Replacements cost quite a bit more money than I cared to think about.

I inherited a few pens, and in the process began to learn about what the "hobby" is like now. Paper is a huge deal. Apparently. I found that some of the cheap paper was horrible (bleed-through or feathering all over the place), but almost everything else was fine. I tried one of the wonderful paper brands (Rhodia) and wasn't excited about the difference.

The inherited pens had problems, so I read around a bit and learned that cultures that did a lot of caligraphy had plentiful fountain pens--China and Japan in particular. After arguing with different medium nibs for a while I bought a 5-pack of cheap Jinhao 911 finepoints (and gave most of them away) and have been putting Quink on printer paper and ordinary spiral notebooks and other deprecated media without a regret. Not on checks, of course.

Probably I'm a philistine.

More trivia

Another rabbit trail question: Why 8 1/2 by 11 for paper size?

It seems that nobody really knows. The 11 inch part seems to have an almost-official explanation: the wingspan of paper-makers constrained the width of the paper frames, which converged on 44 inches wide. Cut that sheet in half twice, and there's your 11 inches. But nobody seems to know about the 8 1/2. That got officially standardized for US government use not too long ago, but that's not an explanation--the size had already existed for a long time.

Legal paper is 8 1/2 by 14 (or used to be), which is pretty close to the golden ratio (a sheet is about 1/4 inch too long), and gold is probably a pleasant thing for lawyers to contemplate while using the sheets.

"Dog my cats"

An afternoon conversation's question: Who said that?

I remembered it from some cartoon, but couldn't remember which one either. (Pogo) And what did it mean? Obviously a dramatic interjection, maybe a "minced oath". If it's the latter it doesn't mean anything exactly, but maybe the first does?

Searching the infalible internet turns up the claims that the earliest known reference is in Huck Finn (or by O Henry decades later, through some amazing time warp).

Suppose the phrase is literal and the key word is the verb "dog". "Follow my cats around" isn't a compelling image. "Latch down my cats" has an arrestingly chaotic feel to it; I could almost believe that one. A random internet-er held that "my great-grandfather said" it was a sarcastic "Sic your dogs on my cats" to someone being too aggressive--um, maybe, but again it doesn't seem compelling.

I suspect the majority is right, and it was a euphemism for "damn my something-or-other". But I like my little folk-etymology.

The infamous "slavery" lesson's upshot

"Dane County Circuit Court Commissioner Scott McAndrew ruled in favor of former Sun Prairie Area School District teacher Mary Headington in a small claims lawsuit against the school district."

It was small claims because she and two others had agreed to quit after a flap when some parents got angry about a lesson plan based on Hammurabi’s Code. The students were given the situation of a Mesopotamian slave owner with a slave who refused to recognize his master--what do you do? (under the Hammurabi Code he was executed) The school district got bent out of shape, possibly from the publicity, and encouraged the teachers to quit--with a separation agreement which the school district then violated. SPASD Employee Relations Manager(*) Isabel Simonetti alleged that the assignment was "racist and offensive to African American students", but admitted "that she never viewed the whole PowerPoint. She received access to the scenarios only from parents’ emails and social media." She had circled on the separation form "that what the employee did was unsatisfactory and had an arrow pointing to giving a “racist/offensive assignment.”".

The Commissioner bothered to read the whole lesson plan, and found for the teacher. A federal court found for the school district when some parents sued about the matter. Words like "offensive" and "insensitive" were used in the opinions, but nothing racist or culpable.

We could do without the "services" of Simonetti. In her official capacity she alleged an offense she never bothered to check for.

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(*) The district's web page lists her title as "Assistant Superintendent for Teaching, Learning & Equity" Did I mention that I think they could save a lot of money and improve the social climate if they let go everyone with "equity" or "diversity" in their job description?

Messier 77

It's about 47M light years away, has an active black hole at the center, and gamma rays from the activity seem to be absorbed on the way out. But the absorbtion may enhance the emission of neutrinos. IceCube spotted them. This isn't the first time IceCube spotted a source--that would be TXS 0506+056--but it is the nearest.

Information on more sources is supposed to be released shortly--I'll update with the link when I get it.

UPDATE: Personal. I'm retired and not in the loop anymore, and I got the information pretty much when everyone else did. I have several questions--what sort of activity do other candidate galaxies show, are the other candidates different in gamma emission, are the rates consistent with the diffuse background (Olber's paradox--there should be lots more galaxies out there, and even ones we can't see should contribute some chance of neutrinos) (I didn't remember Edgar Allen Poe's contribution to astronomy.) And how much gas and dust does one need to block or transmute the gamma rays while not also blocking the high energy neutrinos--which interact much more strongly than low energy ones from the Sun or reactors?

Halloween Hitler

A man went to the State Street Halloween gathering dressed as Hitler. It made news around the world.

You might ask, what kind of idiot would do that?

Statements from the Children's Museum and Madison police said the man has cognitive disabilities.

"His work with the museum over the past 10 years has been closely supervised, coached, and supported. It is our understanding that he believed his costume to be mocking Hitler," the museum said in the statement.

So, of course, he was fired, but the museum says "its staff still hopes to engage him in a restorative justice process "that would redress the harm done to the community while allowing him to understand the effects of his actions and accept accountability.""

If the description of the man is accurate and he really didn't understand what reactions would be, I think restorative justice requires that the museum quickly re-hire him. It is too much to expect media and foundations to issue clarifications.

Do you feel comfortable driving?

One of the Mercury 7: When asked what he was thinking when he was inside their Mercury spacecraft sitting atop a live booster waiting to launch, his answer was: "This was put together by the lowest bidder."

Testimony about 2005 Camry software and a PDF of the slides: https://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FINAL_SCRUBBED.pdf Information about the details (like the number of Toyota divided the work into) was considered proprietary and scrubbed from the slides and the transcript (which has some weird systematic typos, like "parody" for "parity" and "cull" for "call").

Reading that the operations and the monitoring of the operations were both done within the same task should make your hair stand on end. Raising warnings is one thing, but you also want to know if the task is still running, and if the dead task is supposed to sit up and tell you that it's dead--I know tomorrow is Halloween, but even so...

https://xkcd.com/2030/

The Isthmus

The local free "alternative" newspaper is The Isthmus. I used to pick it up, as I once did the Chicago Reader, partly to see what wasn't getting reported in the main papers, and partly to see "how the other half lives"--kind of morbid curiosity. Sometimes they did report interesting things that should have been picked up elsewhere, and sometimes their article provoked a "you're nuts." For a while they carried Dan Savage--once again, I read from morbid curiosity, though not infrequently the answers were along the lines of "you're being stupid/greedy/lazy; shape up". It slowly dawned on me that I knew more about sex than he did--I knew how it worked, and he knew how it didn't work. connaitre instead of savoir

They had a great photograph the weekend after a very warm snap one winter: a lady sunned herself in a bikini on the beach while an ice fisherman walked across the still-frozen lake behind her with his fishing tackle.

As we quit watching TV its listings were less use, and most of the movie and arts scene was uninteresting or unreachable (babysitting and funds needed), and the sporadic investigative articles sat in a sea of hard left takes on local events. I picked it up by habit for a while, and then trailed off. I check it now and then when I need inside details of a leftist group. If I can predict the content, what's the point? The only reason I can think of is to immerse myself in its ideas and attitudes to make them more a part of me--why I read the Bible. The Isthmus doesn't resemble holy writ--at least for me.

Wuhan Institute of Virology

I'd have thought that if you want to work with biohazards like the big boys, you'd fund your facilities to operate like the big boys. But maybe you just build the facilities and check for political reliability instead. Vanity Fair has a report on the Wuhan facility and others in China. If true, they were much worse than I expected. "when Chinese officials “describe the solution to a problem, that’s how you find out what went wrong.”"

I didn't know that stainless steels were readily corroded by cleaning agents. I'd never heard of pishi before either.

stoves and furnaces

It feels like someone's doing battle-space prep when I read about how natural gas carries pollutants: "even low-level gas leaks from kitchen stoves when they are off can generate benzene concentrations in homes up to seven times California’s recommended exposure limit."

Last month, California air regulators approved a first-in-the nation commitment to phase out the sale of gas furnaces and water heaters by 2030—a move that will transition millions of homes to electric alternatives, such as heat pumps.

Never mind that gas is more efficient than electricity, and cooks better too.

The study itself cites others which found (in California) that only 30% of the methane leaks were from the pilot lights--which surprises me. CA's benzene limit is 0.5ppb in air (reduced in 2007 from 2.5ppb in 1990--a factor of 5. The old limit is about the same magnitude as the highest enhancement cited above. I don't know about your home, but in ours the furnace and water heater exhaust outside, and we generally run the overhead exhaust fan when we cook. This doesn't sound excessively risky. But I have friends who will take the report as proof that de-carbonizing is super-urgent.

18 months

Quilette reviews a rather grim memoir of what happened to a marriage when a man decided he was a woman. It's her telling, of course, but I've no reason to believe it isn't largely true. "You’re polished like a doll, now veiled like a widow, perfumed like a corpse."

I'll probably not look for the book. Reading about it is hard enough.

polarization oddity

If you apply an electric field to a chunk of metal, electrons will tend to migrate to one side, leaving it more negative and the opposite side positive--polarized. A proton is made of charge quarks (and neutral gluons and various virtual particles), which under an electric field should also, on the average, migrate to one side or the other. I say "on the average" because they don't stay put anywhere, but move quite rapidly.

A Science News article on "Protons might be stretchier than they should be." points to a Nature research paper about an anomaly in the polarizability they calculate for the proton.

They look at the reaction: electron hits a proton to produce an electron plus a proton plus a gamma ray. In short, e+p→e+p+γ, where the γ goes somewhere undetected. Because they measure the momentum of the electron and proton they can reconstruct the missing mass and select the events with missing mass near 0 to pick those events with a photon. There's a much larger set of events set where the third particle is something else (e.g. a pion). So far so good. They can predict the photon's momentum, and that quantity squared is handy for calculations--that's what you see in the plots in the second link.

A photon has (is) an electric and magnetic field and that field interacts with the proton. They claim that the interaction is higher than expected for a photon energy of about .59 GeV, or a q^2 of .35GeV^2. Everybody expects a smooth curve--they see a bump (as others did before). It's not as big a bump as the older experiments, but their measurements are a bit more accurate.

What does this mean? It could be that the proton has some unexpected structure, and at certain electric fields it reacts more strongly than at higher or lower fields. That sounds like some kind of resonant effect, and by an opportune pun there are particles called "resonances" that might be relevant.

For example, if you bounce a pion off a proton you'll get an interaction rate that varies smoothly with energy, until you get close to a center of mass energy of 1440 MeV/c^2. Then the interaction rate jumps, and the jump is due to creating a new short-lived particle.

You might expect something similar here, like p+e → N + e → p + γ + e. The unknown "N" would have a mass somewhere around the proton mass plus the photon momentum--and there's a resonance near that. However the cross section for the 1520 resonance decaying to p + γ is quite small (110MeV width * .004 branching fraction = 0.4MeV), which means the production rate is going to be quite small also, so it probably doesn't contribute much, unless I shouldn't have ignored the phase space factors.

Very odd. I wonder if the different groups use related monte-carlo programs.

UPDATE: If they looked at the reaction rate while requiring the missing mass to be that of a pi-zero, they might see a bump in the rate at that q-squared.

exorcism

I've read, though never personally heard, people asserting that Trump was divinely anointed to be president, to defeat the forces of evil threatening our nation and the world. As far as I recall these supporters did not include any major denomination leaders, though some may have been preachers of one stripe or another. I confess to not paying a great deal of attention to the matter.

Their rhetoric wasn't far different from calling him "a fighter against the Antichrist", but nobody of stature comparable to Patriarch Kirill has said so about Trump. Or called him "chief exorcist"--though I wonder if that's really a good translation of what Kirill called Putin.

Putin says the West is serving Satan. It seems a bit rich for Putin to be using that kind of language--if he's serious about Orthodoxy and Jesus he hides it well. But I'd be unsurprised to hear the accusation from Kirill, or from a scholar at Al-Azhar. From their standpoint the West endorses seducer/deceivers trying to pull people from the true path. (I had some impractical ideas about the "war on terror" about being proactive about that--oddly enough the Trump administration almost pulled off what I thought was the hardest part.)

That "chief exorcist" phrase is interesting. In the Orthodox church exorcism is possible for laymen at a lesser level: "the whole Church, past, present and future, has the task of an exorcist to banish sin, evil, injustice, spiritual death, the devil from the life of humanity." There are prayers to help. The language of the church involves phrases like "the demon of greed". Of course the official exorcists are a clergy-level office. They were originally supposed to prepare each catechumen to be able to renounce Satan.

So a layman is supposed to be the chief?

I'm trying to imagine Putin fasting and praying to drive out the demons from the West. You can't imagine it either?

We're always tempted to hope for spiritual victories though secular means. Given his history, I don't think Kirill is serious about his claim. I hope Putin isn't.

Census

Liberia has been preparing for a census, and planning big. The winning bidder claimed to be able to use biometric tools and print ID cards on the spot. (Turns out they couldn't do the printing, and I'd be astonished if the biometric stuff worked anywhere but the city--and probably not there either.) They started training some of the census workers--and "forgot" to pay or feed them.

"... some of the teachers are already regretting their decision taken to temporarily drop the chalk to serve as enumerators for the census." I invite you to think about that for a bit.

"Authorities of LISGIS, who have been consistently accused of substituting the names of those who qualified and attended the training in the various counties for others, now face a serious task of reconciling the listings for payment."

Doesn't that inspire you with confidence in the upcoming census? They can't keep track of their own trainees. Could there be a reason for the discrepancy? Wonder no more.

The lack of foreign-direct investments under the administration of President George Manneh Weah compels the score of government officials as well as hierarchies within the ruling party to implore I think he meant "explore" strategies or means to provide job opportunities for their immediate family members, friends, loved ones, and supporters.

Training for futility

AVI has had a morphing post about Tinder up for a few days--if you haven't read it recently you'll probably find more there now. The links at the end of the Day 8 section testify to some odd side effects of the tool and its algorithm--few find long-term relationships, and a surprising number are already married.

Genes/gifts provide us with a framework and the power to do things (sing, run races, find a mate) but the culture and our training shape the result. I was born with an aptitude for analytical thought, but I'd mostly be flailing around if I hadn't been trained, and some ways of training would be less than useless.

"You fight the way you train." You love the way you train too.

Tinder seems to help train its users for futility, if the links in AVI's post are true. A large fraction seem to end up concentrating on superficialities (not very stable) and practicing extremely short-term relationships (insofar as rutting with strangers is a relationship). Many claim they are trying to find a life partner. Clearly the Tinder training doesn't seem to help; if the stories are true it seems to make it worse. "Why" is another question, though some of the issues seem obvious enough.

The numbers for users "in a committed relationship" suggest that Tinder's attraction doesn't have much to do with finding a life partner. They already have one, and are looking for something else, and Tinder promises it--though maybe not explicitly.

Halloween Carols

A lunch table discussion: which is more suitable? When the Night Wind Howls or The Church's One Foundation?

The dedication is obscure

The Man Who was Thursday is a wonderful and mysterious book, and its dedication (to his friend Edmund Bentley) likewise mysteriously hints at youthful struggles against the spirit of the age (I think). And the spirit of our age.

Round us in antic order their crippled vices came—
Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.
Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:
Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.
Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;
When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us
Children we were—our forts of sand were even as weak as we,
High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea.

If you haven't read the book, do. I'm re-reading, and realizing I'd skipped the dedication. I had to look up some references. He called it a nightmare, and yet a nightmare that finds light despite overwhelming darkness isn't quite a nightmare.

Boring

After the past post I wasted some time with songs from Goldilocks (*), including I never know when. It's not great poetry, but "My dreams all bore me now" is a good line. Been there, done that.

It's a useful time--so long as you work to find out what the dreams were missing, and don't slide into aimlessness.

And no, most retirement dreams haven't bored me.

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(*) Leroy Anderson wrote the music. Light--songs like "No One'll Ever Love You (like you do)"

Gone With the Wind

In an auction: "A Gone With the Wind presentation script signed by cast members, given to the mayor of Atlanta in 1961" It is signed by many familiar names, and

"Ogden Nash" [the humorist whom Selznick was considering to write the book for the planned Gone With the Wind musical], "Leroy Anderson" [one of America's premiere composers with whom Selznick was discussing the musical]),

Apparently they collaborated on a few songs: This Lovely World "This lovely world in which we slumber..." Ogden Nash was good at bittersweet as well as humor: Speak Low from One Touch of Venus.

And Leroy Anderson could do more than just short peices--though I'm not terribly keen on his symphony.

But I'm having a bit of trouble imagining those two doing a musical of Gone With The Wind. I don't think of either of them in terms of drama--light music and humor/introspection, yes. Some parts of the story they'd be fine with. "Frankly, my dear, ..." not so much.

But maybe I don't know them well enough. Selznick thought he did.

UPDATE: Ogden Nash wrote some things that might be surprising. One verse's lyrics bother me.

Reporting priorities

LA Times: "Parents want more school security, but student activists push back." "As a group, Black students were less supportive but not strongly anti-police... Support for school police was higher among school staff and higher still among parents."

The usual ideologues are making the usual assertions. There's a claim that police in schools reduce overall achievement--which seems counterintuitive. I'm trying to parse the research paper on the subject and not finding some data I'd hoped for--I may report back on that later.

The question that bothers me is: Why does anyone care what students--teenagers with little experience and notoriously poor judgment--think about school policing policies?

nordstream video and guessing

My first naive thought was outside explosion, but I gather that internal issues can cause RUD too. Unfortunately the first publicly released video is short and doesn't show much. The top of the pipe shown is dented down, but that's not proof of an outside explosion. If you've broken a pipe you'll have seen that the last bit to fail is at the top, and the twisting around that last bit is apt to push the last contact point down into the pipe. My intuition could be wrong applied to such large pipes embedded in a trench, but it looks sort of like what's left after the previous chunk of pipe was wrenched up and away.

50 meters seems like a lot of pipe to rip away. There was a lot of gas pressure inside that thing, of course, and the sections looked about 12 meters long in the construction video (and in an estimate from the length and numbers, assuming by line they mean one of the pair). I'd guess that the pressure would blow a damaged section out of the way. One from each end, and one or more destroyed by the explosion, and we could account for the absent span.

So what would we expect to find? The continual blowing would have stirred up no end of mud (probably why we haven't seen images before now(*)), and rolled away some of the smaller debris. Unless you can find and sort-of reconstruct the pipe fragments from the point of the explosion it'd be hard to tell if it blew from the outside or the inside. They should be nearby somewhere.

The surrounding area might be partly protected from the blowing by the pipe being in a trench, which would help deflect force upward. If the water flow is largely upward, that might pull mud and debris in towards the pipe.

Let's see how well my intuition works. If the explosion were a high speed slug of hydrite ice bursting from the inside of the pipe, I'd expect the bulk of the pipe fragments to be distributed in a "cone" along the pipeline in the direction of the slug's motion, with some chunks ripped out by the initial pressure near each of the open pipe ends. Near the open pipe ends there shouldn't be much mud. (Video suggests there isn't a huge amount, but it's hard to see.) As some pointed out, there might be a secondary explosion as the hydrites evaporated on impact, which would make the debris field a little more symmetric.

If it were an external explosion (or some kind of weld failure), you'd still get chunks ripped out near each of the open pipe ends, but the main explosion point's debris would be more symmetrical, with more chunks still at the explosion site.

I wonder what they'll find.

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(*) I'd be astonished if there weren't submarines from several different navies on the spots within hours of the explosions, but whatever they were able to see is probably classified. The blowing would have stirred up too much mud for video, but I assume there are other ways to inspect, but how and with what kind of resolution would be secret. Sonar might pick out the big chunks, but the noise from the pipes would be a huge background. I'm sure private exploration was deprecated until the gas dispersed.

UPDATE: Swedes say sabotage--they detected explosive residues. So everybody's first thought was right. I really really really hope it wasn't our official doing. If it is, the disconnect between the actors and what the country as a whole wants and would benefit from is so huge that I'd worry about our stability. Best case is that it was a private party, and everybody starts looking to harden their infrastructure, and nobody starts a war.

Disciplines?

Saul had to wait 3 days blind in Damascus. The disciples had to wait 10 days after the ascension before the events of Pentecost. And those are some of the shorter periods of waiting.

We honor people who jump at opportunities, hit the ground running, and don't dawdle around when given instructions. Rightly so. (I'm afraid I'm given to second-guessing, and don't jump that fast.) There's something obviously muscular about acting immediately. Waiting doesn't seem to show strength--putting it mildly.

After today's sermon I tried to put myself in Saul's place. He'd just had a vision that turned his world upside-down; everything was in flux. Maybe it took a few days for things to settle down, for the shattered parts to come together in new ways, for new bones to start to grow. God seems to value perseverance and patience as well as action--so long as they're obedient. Maybe there are two kinds of spiritual exercise--immediate actions (pray now, help now), and waiting for however long that particular trial or that Sabbath lasts. Muscle and bone.

May I tear my hair a little?

Milky Way’s Graveyard of Dead Stars Found – First Map of the “Galactic Underworld” "A new study creates the first map of our galaxy’s ancient dead stars." OK, it's a Halloween themed clickbait headline, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but when I see the word "found" I expect some data. Nope, it's a model--"Here's where we expect to see old black holes and neutron stars" My first clue was the images of the Milky Way: edge-on and face-on. Neither of those exist; we just have models. Bummer. I expected better from scitechdaily.

Taken for what it really is, it's an interesting prediction of what the distribution should be--but unfortunately they predict that the relics would be spread out over an even larger area than the visible Milky Way, so they'd be harder to find that we might have hoped. It seems that a supernova that produces a black hole is apt to give it quite a kick--one was observed going fast enough to escape the host galaxy entirely.

Making videos

I downloaded Kdenlive and found its controls extremely confusing. Does anybody have experience with using OpenShot?

I'm trying to make some math animations and then dub them, but maybe I need to create the audio first and fiddle with the animation timing to fit.

I have a feeling I'm going to need some cuter animations than manim can create to keep my target audience's focus. A mascot owl or a chimp? I don't know how to animate either one, and I really don't want the project's scope to get out of hand.

UPDATE: I don't feel like monkeying with FUSE libraries. OpenShot doesn't even start without and earlier version of FUSE.

near Horicon

Goose Haven Gun Club

public blind rentals

black frogs of Chernobyl

Frogs seem to prefer to be darker in Chernobyl now. We all know melanin helps absorb UV and protect inner tissues from its damage, but radioactivity is quite a bit more penetrating--except for alphas, and they'll leave a trail of damage no matter what they're bulling through. So why would melanin be preferred? Fungi appear to be darker in high radiation environments: "the tantalizing possibility that melanins have functions analogous to other energy harvesting pigments such as chlorophylls." (Some chemical processes go faster).

I don't think of frogs as benefitting from chlorophyl (though some people have been experimenting with tadpoles), so I guess the benefit to frogs lies elsewhere. So, end speculation, and read the article.

"In addition, it (melanin) can scavenge and neutralize ionized molecules inside the cell, such as reactive oxygen species." That I'd not heard of before, but it would certainly make for more radiation resistant skin. How much more would need study.

Looking further through the links: "Melanization has also been associated with protection against diverse biotic factors, for example, host defense against pathogens, as well abiotic factors, including heat and cold, and osmotic stresses. The immune systems of some insects and nematodes is based on melanin, and some microbial pathogens use melanin to evade host immune defenses." It's complicated: "Melanin is recognized as an amorphous polymer of high molecular weight. Although it is known that melanin is formed by the polymerization of phenolic and indolic compounds, the detailed structure of melanin remains undefined. These polymers form graphite-like planar sheets that aggregate in a hierarchal fashion to form a colloidal particle."

This isn't what I meant by breeding for radiation tolerance. I was thinking of adding redundancy--this is cheaper, though not as thorough.

fusion

I've had an interest in cold fusion ever since I read Jones' paper (in a fax of a fax of a fax). Pons and Fleichmann's work sounded exciting until you looked at it closely, and it proved difficult (impossible) to reproduce. (I reviewed a more recent work claiming it could happen inside the Earth.) And experiments that seemed to almost get extra energy were already high temperature and pressure experiments that got maybe an extra degree or so out of the apparatus--not something you'd get good heat transfer out of.

Sabine Hossenfelder has a nice overview of the situation, including some updates I'd missed. No magic power breakthroughs seem to be on the horizon, but one hears "That's funny.".

Love of liberty

"What has most harmed modern government, including what we call representative government, is a certain quality that is seldom mentioned, though I think I have mentioned it, for I think it very serious. It is the loss of the old ideal which associated a love of liberty with a scorn of luxury. The first and best of the democratic idealists were always definite on this point. They demanded that a republican senator should show a republican simplicity." Chesterton

Chicxulub again

The Deccan Traps eruptions were roughly contemporary with the Chicxulub event; enough that there has been a lot of argument about which caused the extinctions, and I'd wondered about whether the latter could have triggered the former, as the shock waves refocused on the other side of the planet. It seems not, though the shocks seem to have triggered extra eruptions along the way.

The latest tsunami model displays, among other things, the estimated position of India at the time. The latitudes match (20N vs 20S), but their best estimate for the longitudes doesn't have India and Chicxulub on opposite sides, by about 60 degrees. A little more evidence against my theory.

Oklahoma City National Memorial

The Oklahoma City National Memorial is a beautiful park--a reflecting pool with tall black walls on each side, a field of named chairs (some appropriately child-sized) that are illuminated at night, a 'survivor tree' that used to be in the parking lot for the Alfred P Murrah building (it caught fire that day, but was rescued, and volunteer teams prop it up every ice storm), a plaza and a museum next door, and across the street a "And Jesus wept" statue facing a wall with little candle-sized niches for all those killed. Parts of the old building are still there.

There's even a marshal there to explain things to people--like the meaning of the numbers on the black walls on each side. It's beautiful, and there's lots of emphasis on the people who died--and a list of names of the people who survived, too.

I'm torn. It's good to commemorate the lost. They do tend to be forgotten. But doing it without memorializing the crime and criminals...

It feels a bit like that time back in 2002 when we were lowering flags to half staff to honor the servicemen killed in Afghanistan. That was wrong--"raise it high and promise to avenge them" would have been right.

This park doesn't seem to have enough of a "We won't let this stop us" feel to it.

Granted, the situations were different, in that one was a war and the other wasn't (AFAIK--I've heard doubters but don't know the details well enough to sort real from speculation).

But there's something to be said for inspirational, even heroic statuary--even if it would have embarassed the subjects. We can be too fastidious.

We can be too mournful too, and too superstitious.

There was a mass murder in a McDonalds in California, and the building was razed afterwards. That makes a kind of sense. Even if there was "closure" over the deaths, there'd remain a perception of risk ("It happened here: why was this place picked and is it still a reason?") and reminder of mortality in a "happy place." The store would have probably gone broke if it tried to stay (it opened a new store not far away).

But is there any land on Earth outside of Antarctica where some Abel's blood doesn't cry out? We just don't remember whose.

A death isn't a finite loss. Hope of the resurrection can help, but until the resurrection it doesn't cure. We have to honor the dead. When a man fell from a balcony at the NY Metropolitan Opera they cancelled the opera that day(*). But not the next. To everything there is a season. And closure, either by ritual or the death of those who cared. And there's a place, and a style for mourning.

A grave is one thing, a pyramid another. The scale changes the meanings.

If we want a large place, maintained in perpetuity, it should have additional purposes--to warn, to inspire.

What do we want people to remember or learn?

Learning who the dead were is important at first, but inevitably it becomes no more than names, as those whose lives mixed with theirs also die. We can "tell their stories", but are the stories true, and who has the time to write or read them?

We can learn the circumstances of their deaths. But why? It's legitimate to make people angry, but what goal is that emotion supposed to serve--to emulate the dead or to avenge them?

The Vietnam veterans memorial seems to be a giant tombstone, and that's all. There's no hope or inspiration or urge to revenge. Somebody decided there shouldn't be, and thereby got a lot of people mad, but most of them seem to have reconciled to a tombstone. Or the complainers died, and those who came after didn't care so much.

The OCNM has been a great expression of what people cared about 27 years ago. What will visitors 27 years from now now think of it? They'll have fresh tragedies of their own.

---

(*) Would it have made a difference if he was obviously a suicide? I'm not sure, but I think it would, and the show would go on. It's not as though opera is a "happy place" all the time.

flying

As the sun begins to appear above the horizon, the low fog fills in between the hills, except where the wind turbines sit in divots in the mist, looking like unshaven whiskers sticking up out of follicles.

And at night before one is high enough to see the outlines of the city, it looks like white and red and blue gems scattered on black velvet.

Chesterton again

While I transcribe my handwritten notes; a little more Chesteron: The Glass Walking Stick.

For "gentleman" below, read "cosmopolitan" or "Davos-ite":

I have said much against aristocracy and shall continue to do so, but I will never deny that aristocracy has certain queer advantages, not very often mentioned. One of them is that which affects European diplomacy: that a gentleman is the same all over Europe, while a peasant or even a merchant, may be very different. A Dutch gentleman and an Irish gentleman stand on a special and level platform; a Dutch peasant and an Irish peasant are divided by all dynastic and divine wars. Of course, this means that a peasant is superior to a gentleman — more genuine, more historic, more national; but that, surely, is obvious. Nevertheless, for cosmopolitan purposes, such as diplomacy, a gentleman may be used — with caution.

He will doubtless annoy a great many people...

For it must always be remembered in this connexion that masculine costume is different at root from feminine costume — different in its whole essence and aim. It is not merely a question of the man dressing in dull colours or the woman in bright; it is a question of the object. A Life Guardsman has very splendid clothes; an artistic lady may have very dingy clothes. But the point is that the Life Guard only puts on his bright clothes so as to be like other Life Guards. But the artistic lady always seeks to have some special, delicate, and exquisite shade of dinginess different from the dinginess of other artistic ladies. Though gleaming with scarlet and steel, the Life Guard is really invisible. Though physically, no doubt, of terrific courage, he is morally cowardly, like nearly all males. Like the insects that are as green as the leaves or the jackals that are as red as the desert, a man generally seeks to be unseen by taking the colour of his surroundings, even if it be a brilliant colour. A female dress is a dress; a male dress is a uniform. Men dress smartly so as not to be noticed; but all women dress to be noticed — gross and vulgar women to be grossly and vulgarly noticed, wise and modest women to be wisely and modestly noticed.

Nord Streams

You know about the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines: we can safely conclude they were sabotaged. Commander Salamander discusses it, and in the comments one finds that many people blame the US--not surprisingly, given Biden's -- shall we say ill-considered? -- remarks.

Trying to figure out why is a bit harder.

Russia already had them shut down, so what could they gain by breaking them? They could get credibility as a "we can do more than just this without going nuclear" as someone suggested at that link above, or demonstrate a bit of Stenka Razin-esque resolve (I won't let any benefits or joys distract me from the fight!)--but only if it is known that they did it.

I don't quite see how the US benefits, though there are factions here or in Germany eager to make permanent dents in hydrocarbon use--it's really scary if they've run amok. The pipelines aren't that deep; non-state actors could have done it. But I don't think Biden's handlers would let him actually damage the pipelines.

Ukraine, to try to damage Russian interests long-term--but these things can be fixed, and on the time-scale of the war would be if Russia cared to.

I'm missing something here. Maybe the internal factions have more freedom of action than I suspect.

UPDATE: The pipes involved are fascinating.

UPDATE2: I was out of town for a bit when this came up. An unmaintained gas pipeline with dropping pressure on one side can be a time bomb--and tinkering with it carelessly can trigger problems. So, maybe we can't safely conclude sabotage.

Re-reading

I mostly read things I've not read before, but now and then I re-read something for fun. The last four books I re-read for fun were Treasure Island, Descent into Hell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and A Canticle for Leibowitz. I wonder if that reveals anything profound about my character. Does your list?

Curious results

I asked Amazon for "domra instrument". Of the first 19 entries, one was a decal of a domra player. OK. I was also offered a blue kazoo, a bongo drum set, a harmonica, a jaw harp, an Otamatone, a "wave bead ocean drum", a portable analog synthesizer, six kalimbas and five steel tongue drums. The next page includes more of the same, a Tibetan singing bowl, a percussion box (the wooden one you sit on), and some sheet music for a domra--which is at least within shouting distance. Asking for "alto domra" gets me sheet music, recordings, and blood pressure meters.

It's hard to believe the algorithms are that wild. They can't be blocking Russian-related vendors, can they?

Nope; asking for a balalaika returns an offer for a violin kit, followed by several for balalaika prima (and that blue kazoo again, and a ukelele). I guess the domra is just not weird enough for quick recognition, so it isn't so popular. Or that sponsored offers are shoved in anyplace they might be remotely relevant. But I still don't understand the blood pressure meters. Maybe they figure you'll need them after the interminable search for what you want.

UPDATE: "domra folk musical instrument" finds one, mixed in with with the kalimba and flute and wave bead ocean drum.

Tiny bonds

How do they bond those tiny wires in a computer? No soldering tip I have is small enough. Heated air is used to solder pre-soldered components to robot-registered spots on the board. (Have you seen what a resistor looks like? -- a tiny box with metal ends.) But that's not the whole story; there are sometimes little wires involved too--often where you can't see them, like inside the epoxy.

Themosonic bonding: a little bit of heat, a little bit of pressure, and a little bit of vibration--none are enough by themselves but together they suffice to bond tiny wires together. And the heat is kept low enough to keep from damaging anything else.

Oh, and epoxy is nice for keeping light off of sensitive chips.

Do a fifth of Americans agree with QAnon?

QAnon's been in the air for a few years now. One of the members of our Braver Angels group has a friend who's a true believer. I'd had only the vaguest idea of what they actually believe (assuming they all believe the same things), but since they seem to have some staying power, I decided to spend a little time trying to figure them out. I generally assume that for anything anti-establishment, Wikipedia takes the worst case and expands on it--I don't think this was an exception.

One article seemed pretty scary--One in Five Americans Agree with the Core Tenets of QAnon. That's a survey I had to see.

Figure 1 explains it. There are 3 "core tenets", and they lump "Completely Agree" together with "Mostly Agree" to get their numbers. Oddly enough, "Don't know" was never more than 3%.

5%+11% at least mostly agreed that the "government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation." That seems pretty far out there--but look at the format of the responses. Completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, completely disagree. There's no option for disaggregating the bundle of claims. One could believe that the elite include some fraction of pedophiles (what was Epstein up to?), and that the elite cover for each other (what's new?).(*) How do you slot that belief into the questionaire's framework? "somewhat=mostly?" I don't quite get where the "Satan-worshipping" is supposed to come from--some aspects and actions of our elite seem satanic but I, with Screwtape, don't think they need to believe in the devil to accomplish them.

6%+16% at least mostly agreed that "There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders." This seems remarkably optimistic. I'm not quite sure who the "rightful leaders" are--nominally we pick them, though I don't know who voted for the "White House" that keeps walking back Biden's pronouncements. In any event, that the current elites will eventually be swept away is something history tells us--nothing lasts--it's the "soon" that is debateable. "If it can't go on forever, it won't"--but once again, there's no option for disaggregating claims.

5%+13% at least mostly agreed with "Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save our country." I seem to remember that this was an article of faith for the left back in the late sixties and into the seventies. Given the avalanche of panic-mode news stories we're buried in, I'm a bit surprised the numbers aren't higher.

Bottom line--I'm not persuaded that QAnon as such has as much traction in population as PRRI wants me to think. If their questionaire had allowed disaggregation of claims, or weighting of how certain their predictions are, I'd find it more useful.

---

(*) We always have a few pedophiles among us, including the elite. It wouldn't be terribly surprising that the incidence would be higher among the elite--there are always plenty of groupies, but a) one could get jaded and b) I suspect a lot of the groupies want something that their target may not be disposed to allow, such as political input, notoriety, etc. Some simalacrum of innocence might be attractive.

Si vis pacem

I read Commander Salamander for news about the Navy (if anybody knows something similar for Army or AirForce, I'm all ears). He has an all-too-regular post on diversity, about the things we spend time and money on instead of defense. I'm curious what our adversaries' frank opinions are. I can guess, but the real thing is likely more colorful.

Probably the best we can hope for is a Zhuge Liang bluff, with the city doors open and the general playing music on top of the wall, but I'm afraid the world has already seen these commanders at "work" and knows better.

Bateman

Althouse referenced an article on "feminist science". Charity demands that I ignore the "feminist science" aspect of the article, but the claim that Bateman's principle had been disproved was interesting. "Hogamus Higamus, Men are Polygamous. Higamus Hogamus, Women Monogamous" is the executive summary of the principle. Careful studies have both supported and deprecated the claim--wikipedia has summaries.

There's been some objection to that formulation for a long time--I don't think you can attribute it to the sex of a modern researcher. An old tradition (possibly thanks to the glorification of monk-hood) held that women were the dangerous sexual aggressors. (Dangerous to one's morals, as opposed to physically dangerous, of course.)

The reversal in attitude is interesting. I don't think it demands explanation, partly because I'm not confident in how universal those claims about antiquity are, but it seems reasonable that if the pool of available men becomes small thanks to high death or imprisonment rates, competition among women should increase. I wonder how Augustine would have interpreted twerking. "We've always seen African women gather in villages and wiggle their butts in loincloths, especially during rites of passage to signify that they are fertile"

I see that Razib Khan is addressing a related issue, but it's behind a paywall.

Predatory conferences?

Are there Predatory science conferences?

Yes. For about a dozen years I've gotten email invitations to speak at physics conferences where the topic had nothing to do with my field--sometimes it seemed to be more about chemistry. I couldn't be bothered to learn about them--if they didn't know what I did well enough to target me better, there was something wrong with their pitch.

Predatory journals aren't new either--I remember a student (who went on to better things, fortunately) who, needing a publication in his record, wrote up the meaning of the terms in the Bethe-Bloch formula and submitted it to a journal that took anything. Although, to be fair, I don't know if he had to pay for publication. Somebody does, one way or another.

"Speak no evil" rabbit chasing

The "See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil" Three Monkeys (or perhaps four: "Do no evil") may distantly relate to the Analects of Confucius: "Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety". At any rate a philosophy which used this 3-fold admonition may have come from China to Japan in the 8'th century, and the maxim became part of the folk religion of Koshin. The saying in Japanese is "see not, hear not, speak not", in which the negation part "zaru" is a pun on the word for monkey. Who could resist?

The tie-in of Koshin with the monkeys has to do with the Three Corpses (or Worms), malevolent creatures that live inside humans. Every 57'th day in a 60-day cycle, while the human sleeps, the creatures ascend to heaven and report on their host's deeds, taking special delight in reporting the misdeeds in hopes of punishment for the poor human. (your own personal accusers)

At first it was only the elite (the ones who first adapted the faith) who tried to stay awake all that day and night to keep the 3 from reporting, but apparently the notion of having a regular all-night party became popular. That there is a relationship between the monkeys not seeing or reporting on evil and the hope that the evil spirits will do the same seems clear enough, but the details aren't.

Things not good to say

I'd looked up one Godspell song, so youtube offered me "Turn back, O man." The lyrics sounded a little off, but my ear for lyrics has always trended mondegreenish, so I looked it up. It turns out to be a hymn from 1916, though with decidedly different music and choreography. And the "off" bit is in the original: "Yet thou ... Still will not hear thine inner God proclaim".

When I hear "inner god" or "god within" I don't think of "indwelling Holy Spirit" but either Hinduism or the semi-gnostic do-it-yourself denial of "organized religion" that's been so popular in our culture. As far as I can tell, that's what most other people think of too, so as AVI points out, that's what the phrase means now--unless you preface it with an explanation.

So if we want to use the old hymn and keep the intended sense (at least I hope the intent was orthodox), we should probably revise it, because the words, though strictly accurate, are no longer good to say.

I wrote before that: A husband may say of his wife: "She is mine." That is true enough, but it is much safer to say "I am hers." Likewise "Mother of God" is a true title for Mary, but a dangerous one to try to use. And a Christian, given God's Holy Spirit, with a changed and increasingly sanctified life, may truthfully stand to pray "God, I thank thee that I am not like other men"--but I wouldn't recommend it.

I've recommended Charles Williams' works before--but I probably should do that with care, since he frequently uses occult environments, and I know of at least one person who became interested in tarot after reading Williams. (The underlying themes of his novels are Christian, but an on-ramp can become an off-ramp.) I'm not sure I ought to say "Read him" to all and sundry.

The slogan "Blue Lives Matter" seems banal enough, but that's not the way it's taken--I'd use the phrase with caution. It isn't always a good thing to say.

By the same token, "Black Lives Matter" isn't always a good thing to say either, without some explanation. Does it refer to the banal plain meaning, or the political slogan that stands for a lot of claims--some true and some lies, or does it refer to the corrupt organization whose main interest, if their children's education material is any guide, is unusual sexual claims?

But

Am I God to tell you what you shouldn't say? Quite a few Catholics will assure me that honoring Mary in no way diminishes from their worship of God--and I know that's true for some friends.

Will people die because you pulled an Andrew May?

Are you God to tell me there are kinds of knowledge too dangerous to be learned?

Granted, I think we can agree that if you discovered how to make a 25kT nuke from a speakerphone and a box of Oreos we should suppress that information. But I decline to believe that closing your eyes and pretending will have much effect on already active realities. (Grim is more hopeful than I about that writer.)

Yes, I self-censor. I tried to teach the kids to too. But I object to you trying to do it for me. I won't do it to you.

Painless tattoo

Microneedles are made of ink in a soluble matrix, and bundled into a pattern that is pressed onto the skin for a few minutes until the matrix dissolves.

Prausnitz’s lab has been researching microneedles for vaccine delivery for years and realized they could be equally applicable to tattoos. With support from the Alliance for Contraception in Cats and Dogs, Prausnitz’s team started working on tattoos to identify spayed and neutered pets, but then realized the technology could be effective for people, too.

Bundling of the microneedles onto a patch sounds a bit complicated. Anything customizable would probably require a fancy machine to manipulate the needle stock (limited color palette?) to embed them in the patch. Doable, and if there were economies of scale it might be saleable. I assume you'd have to build up a market first, with standardized images and messages.

Two problems come to mind.

How stable is the delivery system? I assume that some of the microneedles will fall out with handling. Folding the patch would probably make an empty line, sort of like an electronic billboard with a glitch. That would need manual repair--the tattoo artist would still need to be there.

This lends itself to nasty pranks. Your buddy is drunk? Slap one on, and by the time he notices it's too late. Plant one on a beach chair; when the suntan is done there's a new tattoo on her leg, or mostly so.

Even painless, I think I'll pass. I kind of like my skin.

all for the best

In checking a sidenote to a study on Jeremiah, I looked up It's All for the Best. I concluded that the song had too much flippancy to be useful, though the solo of Herod/Judas singing "Some men are born to live at ease, doing what they please, richer than the bees are in honey Never growing old, never feeling cold, pulling pots of gold from thin air" and ending with "Someone's got to be oppressed" is perfect--beautifully cold.

They end singing "it's all for the best" on top of one of the twin towers.

In some sense that's true (following Romans 8:28), but it is hard to know how 9/11 worked for good, even for those who love God. Somehow.

Math for scientists?

In Quillette, Thornett says most STEM majors should skip calculus and learn statistics. I was in physics, which of course needs calculus and differential equations for the models the field uses--and more than just those. But most week-to-week research work didn't use anything beefier than trig--there were months where all I was doing was programming, or hardware work. On the other hand, there were (much shorter) spells when derivations were all I did.

More statistics would have been useful, especially if better targeted to hypothesis rejection, etc. Simple statistics should be taught as soon as possible, starting before high school. How to Lie with Statistics is good.

But I don't think calculus is intrinsically all that hard. There are only two main concepts to learn--what's a derivative, and what's an integral. The rest is just algebra--and the clever changes of variables and whatnot that nobody actually uses in the field. We look them up, or if we need numerical answers, use programs designed to do integrations in stable ways. (Just trying to translate your textbook equations into computer code is fraught with pitfalls thanks to the finite resolution of numbers in a computer.)

I think we can do calculus better if we divide it. One short course would be calculus basics (differentiation and integration), another would be calculus methods (how to play the fancy games), and then you go on to advanced calculus (with the fancy rigor). The first is the one you require of non-math majors.

True, a field geologist may not use much of it, but what happens when he wants to model crustal pressures? Even having just a passing knowledge of rates of change beats just accepting a black box result. I wrote earlier of different levels in math: arithmetic, understanding the abstractions when explained, able to use the abstractions yourself, and able to do research. I think a minimum for most scientists would be "understanding the abstractions when explained." The field geologist needs to know enough to know the tools to use, and have an approximate notion of what sort of results the computer program should give him and why. But how much more depends on what he'll be doing.

There's a story that Terry Pratchett was addressing some physicists, and explaining that he'd wanted to become one, but had problems with calculus and wound up a writer instead--and met with laughter, as people explained that they rarely used anything more than algebra. They were wrong and Pratchett right. If he wanted to understand the field, he needed to know the language. And in the event he probably contributed more as a writer than he ever would have as a physicist.

From "Physicists continue to laugh", translated by Lorraine Kapitanoff:

Group Questioned	Total	Knew	Don't Know	Answer
Writer-Realists	11	7	4	They argue until hoarse in smoke filled rooms. It is not known why they set up unintelligible dangerous experiments using huge apparatus.
Writer-Visionaries	58	58	0	They work on enormous electronic machines called electronic brains. They work primarily in the cosmos.
First year college students	65	65	0	They speculate a lot. They make discoveries no less than once a month.
Graduate students	30	10	20	They solder circuits. They ask the older ones to find the leak. They write articles.
Young scientific staff members, experimenters	19	19	0	They run to the equipment department. They scrub rotary vacuum pumps. They flap their ears at seminars.
Young scientific staff member, theoreticians	19	19	0	They converse in corridors helping to make great discoveries. They write formulae, mostly incorrect.
Older scientific Staff members	7	6	1	They attend meetings. They help younger scientific staff members to find the leak.
Members of the personnel department	5	5	0	Experimenters must arrive at 8.25 so that at 8.30 they can sit silently next to apparatus which is running. Theoreticians do not work at all.
Members of the guard force	6	6	0	They walk back and forth. They present passes upside down.
Representatives of the Ministry of Finance	18	18	0	They spend money to no purpose

Looking for ideas

The teaching garden in the park has had good crops of beans, and the early tomatoes were fine, and most of the flowers (the ones that weren't accidentally weeded) did well. The kids liked those, especially the flowers. (The rest of the tomatoes find it too cool to ripen, and the peppers are slow.) Carrots don't grow very big, but the kids recognize those. (One had been sure that carrots came from the store.)

But while onions and radishes grew very nicely the kids had less than no interest in them, and they don't believe that anything but iceberg is real lettuce. Squash looks weird. They'll take home bags of greens sometimes. The adults haven't been coming by much.

As you can see raspberries or apple trees are out of the question in the small containers, and for teaching purposes I think we want annuals anyway. A few weeks after the kids do the planting we have to have a little lesson on the how and why of thinning.

Any suggestions for kid-friendly zone-5 crops?

Before you get the wrong impression, my wife does the lion's share of the gardening and teaching over there; I'm an occasional auxilliary to do heavy lifting and try to show kids how to wash carrots.

Bertrand's Paradox

Simple question: Given a circle, what's the average length of a chord of the circle? OK, maybe that's too messy; try something simpler: What's the probability that a chord will be longer than the side of an inscribed equilateral triangle (radius * √ 3)?

Depending on what method you use to define the chord, you get 3 different answers, all of which look perfectly reasonable. The first is the most obvious--fix one point at one corner of that inscribed triangle, and then just pick other points on the circle to draw the chords to.

If you draw the picture, it seems instantly obvious that you should get 1/3 of the chords being longer than the specified value. But if you look closely, you might notice that for the same small angular range, the density of chords for points close to the original point is higher than for those chords reaching to the opposite side of the circle--is this the kind of uniformity of distribution we want? It would seem to give too many short chords, for a lower probability of long ones.

Other approaches give 1/4 and 1/2 for the probability. Therein lies the paradox--which of the 3 values is it? The video (3blue1brown) doesn't need much more than high school geometry; give it a whirl.

Bottom line--sometimes you have to be very very careful to define what you are trying to measure.

Icons

One of the problems with being the icon of a nation is that you get blamed for what the nation does. It isn't surprising to see things like ""Most of our grandparents were oppressed,” Mugo tweeted hours after the queen’s death Thursday. “I cannot mourn.”" She even gets blamed for not apologizing for slavery--which the UK particpated in but was instrumental in uniquely helping end almost a century before Elizabeth was born.

Kaiser Wilhelm got a lot of blame, but he wasn't just a symbol--he helped push the Great War.

That doesn't excuse the over-the-top nastiness the infamous CMU prof poured out, of course.

Puppies under the table

The passages about the Syrophoenician woman always seem odd. Jesus had already demonstrated care for gentiles, going out of His way to heal a demoniac. So why the strange remark?

The best I can do is try to visualize the scene and figure out what other people would have been thinking, and then guess--and since my guesses aren't consistent I'll leave them out and you can make your own.

Jesus left the majority Jewish region and is in the neighborhood of Tyre--reason unspecified, but there are probably a lot more pagans than Jews here. He enters a house--presumably a fellow Jew's, presumably welcomed, and with at least some of the 12. The passage doesn't say if they were preparing to recline at the table to eat, though that would have had to happen sooner or later. At banquets the Greeks and richer Romans reclined with the men eating first; I gather there's not a lot of evidence of Jewish practice here--and family meals were different. Greeks used chairs or stools around a table for family meals, low tables for banquets.

So who is present, and what's going on? This isn't a Jewish area, so I'm not sure they had the custom of open door banquets where non-guests can stand around and marvel at the feast and the wonderful guests the host has found. The door is open, though, for temperature control, if nothing else. If the host is introducing his family the children will be present, otherwise probably not.

You'd get dogs only at the family table--I leave to you to imagine what dogs would do at one of the low banquet tables. (Jesus' word for dog is a word for pet or puppy, not the street dogs of universal disrepute.)

Jesus' analogy is of a family occasion, and the gentile woman is included. What does the homeowner think of this? He'd almost certainly think of the wild curs if you mentioned "gentile dogs," not pets; and the assumption that the gentile woman is a loved part of the family would be a bit jarring.

Was the analogy intended for the woman, for the host, for the 12, for all of them? If it is a gentle rebuke to the woman, what is He rebuking? (We aren't always told the details--see Mark 9:18-19--why does He call them perverse and unbelieving?) If for the host, what attitude is He trying to correct? If for the 12, what is He trying to show (sent to the lost sheep of Israel--but we know He didn't limit Himself to them)?

Elizabeth

I've preference for monarchs who stay out of the way, but that may be something imbibed with the rest of our culture. Probably if I'd grown up with kings, I'd have a feel for the king as an icon of the people, and maybe if the king were sovereign even a respect for a king's authority. It's not part of my mental furniture, though. I wonder what it would feel like.

Elizabeth did her duty as a "monarch who stays out of the way." I wonder to whom she confided what she really thought about the ministers and policies. Maybe Philip; maybe nobody. Rest in peace.

At the side of my desk sit some coins and bills left over from Canada. I wonder how long they'll keep making money with her face on it.

And, of course, I wonder about Charles. I'm told he's unpopular; does he have the gravitas to be an icon?

Harassment

Antarctica is a hard place to work. You're cooped up with the same people for months working and sharing close quarters. Different people sometimes answer to different agencies. And some are jerks. A few years back the first flight to the Pole at Austral Spring brought a US marshall to arrest a man. I don't know what means they'd taken to constrain the culprit before the marshall arrived.

It seems the Antarctica program has had problems with sexual harassment. Apparently the bulk of this is at McMurdo, which has twice the population of all the other stations combined, and apparently has much laxer staff vetting. The upper echelons think most of it is alcohol-related, but complainants disagree. Because this is voluntary survey and focus-group based, there aren't numbers of incidents, much less broken out by who and when.

Harassment training modules are designed for workplace issues, and don't fit so well the environment where workplace and living place is the same place with the same people. They need better designs. Coordinating complaints and responses between (e.g.) the Air Force and the NSF seems like a no-brainer, but hard. (important things are always simple; simple things are always hard) Figuring out who causes problems and why (alcohol can breed misunderstandings) might go some way towards cleaning things up.

I've never been there. If I'd gone: I'm an older man and orders of magnitude less likely to be pursued, I'm not into the dating or bar scene so I'd not be hanging out with young ones who were, and I'd not be taking liberties with non-existent subordinates. I don't think I'd have seen any harassment. It'd be like different worlds.

Teacher at home

Milpitas teachers are struggling to afford housing. The school district is asking parents to take them in

The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Milpitas is now nearly \$3,000 a month, a 15% spike since last September... That works out to roughly half the annual salary for early-career teachers in the district, who earned around $68,000 last year.

Some districts are looking to create teacher housing on school property--but that's expensive.

Imagine the relationship a family would have with a live-in teacher. What sort of boundaries get set? Of course one model doesn't fit every situation, and I can't imagine everything being successfully firewalled. So how much extra help does Junior get from the teacher? How much extra help does the teacher get from the family?

Some years ago I mused about the possible increase in the number live-in servants. I should revisit that. We'd need some changes in home design.

Some background on Roman slavery

I got side-tracked into looking up Roman slavery: apparently its extent is not well attested and consequently estimates are disputed. I hadn't realized that exposed babies might provide a slave pool--I'd heard of exposed girls being raised to be slave prostitutes, so it makes sense that boys might be raised and sold too. Some might have been bought from captors outside the Roman Empire--the surrounding nations fought each other too. "Adverse moral judgments focus on the supposed greed and general turpitude of slave dealers, who were accused of tricking out their wares to defraud buyers, and likened to pimps"--note that the concern is for the customers rather than the slaves.

His estimate of the free population in the cities and countryside is 6.5-7.5M and 49-52M respectively, while estimates for slave populations are 1.3-1.9M and 3.5-6.5M respectively: 20%±2 slaves in the city vs 10%±3 in the country. They weren't all captives--children born to a slave woman (provided she was a slave throughout the pregnancy) were also slaves.

But what's known? There's no data from Republican Rome so: "We are reduced to the mere assumption that slave prices in Republican Italy ought to have been relatively low during the massive expansion of the regional slave complex."

The relative prevalence of private sales versus transactions arranged by professional dealers is unknown. In slave markets, slaves were displayed on platforms and could be undressed for closer inspection; new arrivals were marked with chalked feet. Slaves wore placards (tituli) advertising their qualities around their necks (including their origin, state of health, and propensity to run away), or special caps (pillei) in those cases where the seller would not offer guarantees. Extant sales contracts, primarily from Egypt with rare additions from Italy and Dacia, testify to the scrupulous observance of formal legal requirements, and give us a rough idea of the age distribution of traded slaves, dominated by individuals in their teens and twenties.

You'll probably have read already about diffences between Roman slavery and ante-bellum US slavery (and Caribbean slavery, different yet again). This is interesting background detail--and explanation of what's not known.

"Ideally"

I've read several times that having renewable energy sources charge up automobile batteries is the ideal future for automobiles. But if we're talking about "ideal", how about using renewable energy to synthesize octane or nonane? These have a high energy density; we understand the safety issues very well; we have mature technologies for delivery and for engines.

The only thing we don't have is the synthesis technology. But the phrase was "ideal", not "feasible anytime soon."

Even if it was feasible, right now it is so cheap to distill octanes from oil that I can't see anybody trying to synthesize n-octane for anything other than curiosity's sake. And of course there's the "what's the raw material?" question--we'll run low on coal one of these days too. CO2 or plant waste would be "ideal" raw materials.

Different "ideals" send you in different research directions. Batteries or synthesis?

Interferences

The Niagara Gorge rapids show places where the water seems to sweep high over some obstacle, but the signage assures us that the bottom is scoured pretty flat. Reflections off the sides of the river could produce standing waves where the reflections interfere constructively. It reminded me of shock diamonds, except with incompressible fluid and an irregular channel which makes the reflections show up irregularly.

When there's one road

Scores of travelers leaving the country via the Roberts International Airport nearly missed their flight on Tuesday due to the heavy and uncontrolled traffic on the RIA Highway caused by the United Methodist University’s graduation.

The airline was gracious enough to have delayed by an hour to give passengers a chance to board since half of its travelers were stranded in the traffic. The hour delay in Monrovia, however, led to many passengers missing their connecting flights from Accra, Ghana to other destinations.

There's no other good way to get there. Maybe you could get a ferry ride at SNAFU, but probably not on short notice. And I was complaining about Pittsburgh traffic...

UPDATE: The last time I was in Liberia, there was one working stoplight in Monrovia, and stop signs were meaningless unless enforced by a policeman.

Canoe Plants

Polynesians brought along plants on their explorations, so that wherever they might land, they could produce the foods and tools and medicines they would need to survive, and perhaps travel onward from there. The link lists 24 plants taken to Hawaii, many of them serving multiple purposes. One plant might just be used to make rope, and another produce food, medicine, materials for clothing and for building.

Of the 24, 11 were used for food, 1 for an intoxicant, 12 for building materials and tools, 8 for clothing and beauty, 15 for medicine, and 3 had religious use as well.

They varied from tall trees to small garden plants. Some went wild as invasives, and others required careful cultivation and, in Hawaii, are almost gone.

Math brains

"Are All Brains Good At Math"

Elizabeth Landau should have been clearer about what math is. Counting ability seems hardwired but needs a language that is the start for math. To be able to understand something in math when it is explained to you is another capacity. Being able to use the abstractions yourself is yet another, and being able to do research a fourth (and much rarer) thing.

The answer to her headline question is, as you instantly guessed, "No." She should have asked some parents about their children and math. Some take to the first three types quite easily, others get the first and sometimes the second but struggle to use the abstractions. Same environment, same genetics--random variation.

I believe we can do much better with the second type (understanding when it is explained) with better explanations. I'm trying some things myself. Youtube has some excellent teachers and animators (motion works so much better than little arrows on a page!)--much better than I. And as far as I can tell, Barbara Oakley is correct--you need a foundation of memorization. Perhaps one can find ways to make the requirements less frightening (timed tests could be scary), but there's no royal road.