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.

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(*) 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.

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(*) 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.