What next

"Our real and immediate interest is to rebuild the character of our civilization; to recover that common understanding of up and down; of right and wrong; of what is worthy and what is unworthy; of what is godly and what is ungodly; along with the telling power of example. Let the world titter in its cynicism: the recovery begins when we fast and pray."

Paleo diet

It turns out that 400,000 year old skulls had tartar. Tartar is porous, and stuff can get entrapped. Researchers found "charcoal from indoor fires; evidence for the ingestion of essential plant-based dietary components; and fibers that might have been used to clean teeth or were remnants of raw materials." "Within the calculus, the researchers also discovered small plant fibers, which they suspect may have been used to clean teeth—prehistoric tooth picks."

There are also traces of fatty acids and bits of starch, presumably from nuts and other plants.

The real paleo diet didn't prevent tartar buildup. I wonder what else it didn't prevent. Attacks by cave bears, ...

Reporting from Russia

Another headline: Putin ally tells Americans: vote Trump or face nuclear war. A headline calculated to get your back up, no?

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a flamboyant veteran lawmaker known for his fiery rhetoric, told Reuters in an interview that Trump was the only person able to de-escalate dangerous tensions between Moscow and Washington.

That's way less dramatic, and a lot less impertinent.

But for still more information, it might help to check somebody who knows the players a little better: a Czech string theorist.

You know, he is a boss of a nationalist party in Russia – one of the four parties in the Parliament. No self-declared anti-Putin party has made it to the Russian Parliament. So Reuters calls him "a Putin ally". It's a very problematic label, of course, because he is still leading a different party that competes with Putin's. Putin is mainly an old-fashioned conservative politician not too different from Helmut Kohl and many others. Zhirinovsky is the head of a highly idiosyncratic nationalist party. To say that they're "the same" means to show the lack of understanding for Politics 101.

Also, I've been watching Zhirinovsky for some 25 years. He's been a part-time clown. All of his famous propositions that have made it to the media were tainted by some conspiracy theories or immense exaggeration – and, I believe that in many cases, intentional humor (which is a good thing in Russia because they usually have a shortage of it). In some cases, I could feel a sympathy with the "core" of his proclamations. Sometimes, I disagreed. But I don't remember that his propositions could have been considered as accurate, trustworthy predictions or realistic plans.

Is Lubos more accurate? Maybe. He's been a bit of a Putin apologist: sometimes even a lot of an apologist. He wasted a lot of bits arguing that Russians didn't shoot down Flight 17 when obviously they did and were seen high-tailing it out of there. He's worth paying attention to, though.

Physics had some visitors from Poland back when Solidarity was making headlines. They read emails from back home, and told us that even the best US papers generally missed the point of the events they reported on. A local may have a bias in his views, but he probably knows the situation better than foreign reporters.

Some years back Rantburg had a Greek commenter who often had very contrary views about the EU. The Greeks had dictatorship and near civil-war within living memory, and it would hardly be surprising if they thought that, on the whole, even a suffocating central government was better than what they'd had on their own. I was sorry when he dropped off the site. I didn't have to agree with his take, but it was good to have somebody near the scene who understood other aspects of what was going on.

Headlines vs body

"Electronic spoons which make food taste sweeter on horizon". Or on Drudge: "veggies taste like chocolate."

Wow! Except here's what's in the body of the story

For sweet tastes there is a channel called TRPM5 which is temperature sensitive, so people taste more sweetness when the food is hot than cold. So to mimic sweeter tastes the device changes the temperature of the tongue rapidly from 77F (25C) to 104F (40C.)

So it warms up the tongue just a bit to make some foods taste sweeter. What a let-down.

"The team say that they are also working on producing different tastes which they claim is time consuming because even the difference between a lemon and a lime is vast."

Preparing for elections

AVI has posted a series on the election and our role and influence. As of this writing he's presumably got a few more in the pipe.

Somebody pointed out that while contempt of congress is a crime, contempt for congress comes naturally. That's fine--if you insist on being in the public eye, you'll be judged. Not always wisely, perhaps, but that's life.

It is interesting to hear what people say about this election. Not pleasant, but interesting. This is Dane county--Trump comes in for matter-of-fact abuse. (Not many Hillary signs out, BTW--more for senator or representative.) The vicious invective is reserved not for the candidate, but for his supporters. I had a brief email exchange with one of the local reporters asking him who they were (I didn't know any personally), and his final letter casually dismissed them as stupid and unworthy of attention because they were Trump supporters.

"Everybody knows" that Trump supporters are racists, terrified of change and hating people different from them. Hmm. I could with equal (perhaps better) justice claim that Sanders supporters are envious ignoramuses, who just want free stuff at everybody else's expense; and profess myself duly horrified at how many fellow Americans have descended to this level. However, I think the Sanders phenomenon wasn't really an endorsement of socialist economics, but a kick in the pants for the Democratic party and an assertion that the status quo is broken--the big financial institutions are making the rest of us assume all their risks while they rake it in.

Likewise I think the Trump phenomenon is a kick in the pants for the Republicans, and an assertion that that the status quo is broken--the governing groups are disconnected from the public interest and the public will.

The critiques are similar, and the differences have more to do with the values the groups hold. BTW, I doubt that Sanders voters will sit out the election--they'll hold their noses and vote for Hillary even though they despise her, because she, even if distantly, claims to support their tribe's values.

So why the viciousness? Is this the default setting? A radio show suggested that WW-II produced a generation of politicians used to fighting on the same side to preserve the US, and suggested that though the politics might be wildly divergent, they had a sense of being in the same boat. Maybe so.

OK, assume this is the true normal. I don't think this kind of bitterness is something Jesus would approve of. So how do we combat the bitterness and do better than normal? I can hear some folks already: "Compromise--do it my way." Or words to that effect. Maybe instead "Dine with a Democrat" or "Share a Repast with a Republican" or "Lift a Libation with a Libertarian?" Find something in common--but that may be harder than it looks, given the way preferences seem to cluster. Better might be "Haul sandbags together while the river rises." Which I suppose is the WW-II unification hypothesis with a different enemy.

Something about the name

On our outing yesterday, Better Half noticed in a restaurant a sign advertising the use of Kronos Foods. Does that make you think twice about eating there?

BTW, Frog Alley Road connects to Pheasant Fields Drive, which connects to Turtle Run and Shallow Waters Circle. Yes, there are houses there. Pheasant Fields I understand an attraction for, but for me Shallow Waters bring mosquitoes.

Cosmic rays and Cerencov light

This Forbes article by Siegal is a nicely illustrated explanation of how these telescopes looking for cosmic rays work.

The devil is in the details, of course. How much energy did the thing have? You can sort-of reconstruct an estimate based on how much light you saw on the ground and what angle you reconstructed the cosmic ray came in at. But--the light produced will depend a bit on the type of cosmic ray it was (proton, oxygen nucleus, iron nucleus, whatever). So you wind up with different numbers depending on what you think the particle was. The proportions of nuclei seen seem to vary with cosmic ray energy, too. We have no way of identifying what a cosmic ray was before it interacts. You can guess--for example there's a strong probability that the very highest energy particles were iron nuclei.

And the interactions in the atmosphere are random. If you happen to produce more muons early on in the shower, they'll carry more of the energy--but not show up any brighter in your detector. Result--you see less light, and think the original energy is lower than it really was. The only really good handles you have are statistical. When you see a lot of the cosmic rays you can get a distribution whose shape will tell you things about the original energy distribution--the outliers won't matter so much.

By the time the shower reaches ground level there's not much left but muons and photons (and neutrinos--lots of neutrinos).

FWIW, the highest energy core of a cosmic ray shower can sometimes (1/few-thousand events can have hundreds of muons) be surprisingly intense and narrow--10meters or even smaller. (muon bundles). And you, gentle reader, were probably struck by at least one cosmic ray shower muon while you were reading this.

Mosquitoes

We had a family rule: "Bugs in the house get stomped; bugs outside you leave alone." We had clear exceptions: fireflies and ladybugs got escorted outside, and mosquitoes were fair game anywhere.

"God in His wisdom made the fly, and then forgot to tell us why." I gather He wanted us to figure it out for ourselves.

JSTOR reports that mosquitoes may actually be good for something. Two things.

MacDonald cites a study that found that mosquito larvae were part of the ecological balance in stagnant water: without them protists multiplied like mad and some bacteria which the protists ate dropped in numbers. They're not sure yet what the consequences of that could be.

And apparently they are sometimes pollinators too.

Only female mosquitoes suck blood and that phase only lasts while they are breeding. Most of the time, mosquitoes of both sexes eat plant nectar, making them important pollinators as they move from plant to plant. Some orchids, for example, rely heavily on mosquitoes, and these rare plants would be at risk without their buzzing partners.

I'm still going to swat them. I've had malaria already, thank you, and I don't want West Nile. Or even a tiny welt.

16" shells

The deadline for submitting proposals is past, and unfortunately "Open Burning and/or Open Detonation (OB/OD) are not permitted technologies for any end item(s) or component(s)."

There might be a loophole there, though. If the detonation were underground... You'd need to keep people at a substantial distance, but perhaps it might be an alternative to Burning Man.

If you insist on being boring, try to imagine how to safely disassemble something full of Explosive D: a combination of picric acid and other substances. Maybe it isn't so boring...

A little here, a little there

Mistakes add up sometimes.

A gas explosion in Fitchburg:

said the first oversight occurred in 2011 when his client, ... had his gas-powered dryer replaced with an electric one, and the dryer installer failed to cap the gas line during the job, ...

The second mistake happened on Aug. 25, the day of the explosion, Rottier said, when tree trimmers working on Grittner’s property needed water and asked Grittner to open a water valve in the basement to allow for that.

But Grittner, according to what Rottier told 27 News, first accidentally opened a gas valve attached to the uncapped line instead, allowing gas to accumulate in the house and some hours later trigger the explosion at 6:45 pm.

Nothing disastrous in itself, but together...

Looking back, I think I've done as many two-step as one-step screw-ups.

Time travel

James Gleick's article in Nautilus about time travel is a good overview of what people have been thinking and hoping about the subject, but he omits Larry Niven's demonstration that past-altering time travel will not happen. (Note that Niven did not argue "is impossible.")

For those not familiar with the argument: If time travel can change the past, then the present also changes. This can happen again and again (see Dinosaur Beach for an excellent story on the subject), until some random grandfather biting the dust prematurely means the time travel method is no longer discovered. A "no time travel" state is the only stable history, and will therefore become the only one that exists.

And he concluded with a flourish—the kind of thing Hawking could get away with in the Physical Review. He had more than a theory. He had "evidence": "There is also strong experimental evidence in favor of the conjecture from the fact that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future."

Of course you might ask whether UFO's were visiting from the future instead of Proxima Centauri.

FWIW, there are some features of quantum mechanics that seem to allow states that are a little ambiguous about time. But even if that's what they turn out to be, at human scales you wouldn't notice. h is small.

Cotton Kingdom

AVI referenced a First Things article about Frederick Law Olmstead, which mentioned some of his books. He was described as an excellent observer, so I looked up Volume 1 of Cotton Kingdom (Volume 2 is hard to find by itself).

FYI, I found it inconvenient to use the laptop to read it, so I downloaded the EPUB version to read on a portable system. It was handier to carry around, but the OCR was terrible: Red River frequently turned into Eed Eiver or Eed Kiver, and footnotes got mingled with the regular text. I wish the OCR programs would put in a symbol for end-of-page--that would help get the lower bound on a footnote, at any rate.

He started in Virginia, and found startlingly poor people and transportation. He considered slavery evil, but testified accurately about what he saw and heard--when it supported his opinions and when it didn't seem to.

Some things happen "off-stage:" he didn't see much whipping, though people talked about it. The poor whites were almost always not just poor but feckless. Most slaveowners weren't rich, and not all approved of slavery. On many farms slaves got financial incentives to perform. Conversations are jarring. Travel was fraught with difficulties: one trip by riverboat didn't leave on time, or the next day, or the next day, or the next day...

Read it.

Scrolls again

The Herculaneum scrolls I wrote about may be even closer to being read. The Ein Gedi Scroll turned out to be Leviticus, which we already have. The Herculaneum scrolls may be the writings of the house philosopher (and probably only of very specialized academic interest), but I'll be interested to find out.

Foundations

Madison is in the middle of an ancient glacial lake, and good solid stone can be quite a ways down. Sand. Builders drive deep pilings when they're building more than a few stories high.

Our home is on the edge of a (I suspect somewhat graded and shaped) ridge, and part of the foundation for the garage wants to move in a different direction than the rest of the place. Not badly--maybe in a decade or so we'll mudjack. Or maybe not.

That leads inexorably to the question: when you're building wide buildings on land that stands a chance of shifting in slightly different directions sometime in the next century, how do you plan the foundation to allow for movement? Cast one giant thick slab and trust it doesn't crack? Or put a buffer layer between the foundation and the construction?

Housing

We took the kids to Old World Wisconsin from time to time. It turns out that it is possible to fit a family in a room not much bigger than one of the kid's bedrooms.

I remember a little about some of the places we lived in before moving to Africa, and I remember visiting some relative's houses now and then. As a general rule, they weren't very big. But now: "Likewise, the median-size home has increased in size by almost 1,000 square feet, from 1,525 square feet in 1973 to 2,506 last year." (Our duplex seems to be less than 800 square feet--military housing from the 60's. We succeeded in making the basement legally habitable, though, so maybe our house is growing too.)

It makes housing a little pricey.

This story is strongly black-and-white--probably the regulators have something to say on their behalf--but it makes fascinating reading. Plausible-sounding rules have far-reaching consequences, and some groups seem hostile to the entire idea of small housing.

Revised micro-housing legislation proposes more expansive changes, including prohibiting congregate housing development in places zoned for neighborhood commercial centers and for low-rise multi-family buildings, such as small apartment buildings and duplexes. Such zones are exactly the parts of the city where most micro-housing was previously built and where it makes economic sense.

The linked article is about micro-housing--apartments, basically. When we moved to Illinois, we couldn't afford a 3-bedroom apartment, and were lucky that the third child wasn't yet born, because rules prohibited renting a 2-bedroom to 5 people.

Zoning rules push for more space between a new house and the street (old houses were grandfathered in), wider sidewalks, wider driveways--more land and more expensive. (The lots our duplexes were built on are now almost too small to lawfully build a house on!) Which presumably helps make apartments more expensive too, though there are some fixed expenses to recoup. In the middle, and especially the lower middle, housing eats up a huge chunk of the income, and leaves a lot of us "one paycheck away from disaster." (Ill health has driven several people out of homes in this neighborhood.) Or a fire, or a tree landing on the roof, or something else that has you paying for both the original house and for a place to live...

At the low income end once you drop below trailer court prices there doesn't seem to be anything left except public assistance.

True, some people don't do themselves any favors (the feckless, the slovenly, and the jerks), but there should be some sink-or-swim ways for them to fend for themselves. There's no place to build-your-own in the city (maybe in Detroit). There are tiny houses. (I'm not sure wood is a good choice for building rental tiny-houses--too easily damaged.) Policing is an issue in collections of small housing--the predatory have to be driven out, and if they're homeless as a result that's sad, but not unendurably so. (Those with serious mental illness are another matter--if it is severe enough there's not much we can do short of locking them in, and for others we can think of halfway homes.)

There's a lady who lives on a corner of the Capitol Square. Over the years she has accumulated a fair pile of blankets and whatnot. She's peaceful and clean and seems to get out of the way without hassle when there's an event on the Square, so I guess people just let her stay. On campus, groundsmen accidentally found a tunnel where someone had been living for at least a couple of years. They never showed up again, so nobody knows if this was a squatter or a student trying to save on housing costs.

This year's "Go Big Read" at UW Madison is Evicted. I gather it focuses on the landlords, if the NYT review is any guide. There may be other players involved.

Fluent in Math

How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math

Anybody want to try to replicate the experiment?

I suppose by symmetry I should be willing to try to become fluent in Arabic (I just didn't have time to spare) or figuring out which colors go with which.

Stupidity?

In the article circulating the past few days, Carlo Cipolla suffers from a slight poverty of language. Part of what he writes about is not stupidity but evil. His evil "bandits" are just one category of evil--other-destructive. Another is self-destructive. Or both. Dante had quite a list.

Touch and autism

Lots of folks on the autism spectrum are uncomfortable with touching (bundling tightly is a different kind of sensation), and a Flemish group had a look at one aspect of touching: namely the difference between what you expect to touch when you grasp someone and what extra sensations you feel. They used hands and touched different fingers. (If I poke something with my index finger, I don't expect sensation on my pinky, and interpret that as whoever-it-is touching back.)

OK, interesting idea. They see a difference in reaction. It's a small study, and I wasn't overwhelmed with the differences, but maybe they're onto a connection there.

Comet busting

Have a look at a comet breaking up. Or at any rate having chunks come off. Hubble got some good pictures. The breakup is slow, and some of the smaller chunks seem to break up to invisibility themselves.

Gaudium et spes

Gaudium et spes (joy and hope) is one of those Vatican-II documents you hear referenced now and again, and I figured I should see what the scoop was.

It is wordy. Very wordy. In some ways that's inevitable, because they were trying to draft something that could be applicable in some way from slums in South America to the super-wealthy of Washington DC. Each section is more or less stand-alone. It would have been much more readable if they'd taken examples and illustrated their religious and social points from the examples.

Some of the things may have been surprises to people ("If one is in extreme necessity, he has the right to procure for himself what he needs out of the riches of others."), but I'd heard of them before. I gather that the emphasis on self-determination was relatively new.

One section was rather startling. It emphasized that men are broken and sinful, and that men's governments are oppressive and greedy and violent, and then went on to assume that international organizations would give pure and righteous correction to us all.

Maybe my lack of surprise for the rest was because I wasn't immersed in pre-Vatican-II attitudes.

UPDATE: Yes, I know they were probably thinking of themselves in the role of "international organization", or of people like or inspired by themselves.