Vacation

Superior, we're coming your way.

No ethernet, only rare cell phone reception, and a hike to the campsite: we won't have to pay attention to what passes for news.

Take care of yourselves while we're gone.

How scientists relax

The IceCube boot camp group had a chance to go sailing on Mendota yesterday, and most went to a barbecue that afternoon (leftovers served for lunch today). I decided to attend a Father's Day/Daughter Birthday/Wedding Anniversary celebration instead, but I gather that Swedes and Germans were introduced to BBQ chicken and brats and the apartment complex pool was full of scientists.

This morning after a fast-paced introduction to supernova neutrino theory (and an admittedly rather optimistic plan for studying neutrino oscillations), a discussion broke out at lunch break about soft drinks. Challenge and response; and a modified "Pepsi challenge" ensued. Greg prepared 8 cups of random beverage (he rejected my suggestion to mix a few) and those who claimed to be able to tell the difference poured samples, and guessed. 4/8, 4/8 and 3/8 correct. Heh.

A rematch at 4:00 attracted more grad students and some secretaries, and we histogrammed the results, which turned out to be surprisingly flat, suggesting that perhaps two distributions were represented: those who could tell the difference but weren't always calibrated correctly, and those who couldn't tell the difference. (A secretary scored 8/8 and a grad student 1/8.) A large group said that you could tell the difference for the first swig, but after that your taste buds were a little shocked by the acid and one was like the other.

Doesn't your office spend free time analyzing experiments?

Zombies revisited

A couple years ago I puzzled a bit over the meaning of "The Zombie Apocalypse", and along the way I discounted the interpretation of it as a race war as not being the whole story. It is hard to put a finger on this quotation or that shrug of the shoulders that leads me to reconsider, but I'm not sure I'd be quite so quick to discount that translation these days. I've heard too many people talking about being ready for it with an immediacy more pressing than "a collapse next year."

Several cities are now afflicted with "flash mob" gangs that use electronic media to coordinate maneuvers to converge and attack stores or people in overwhelming numbers and then fade away. It isn't difficult to find out that most of the mobs are young black men.

It does have something of the unexpected character of zombie attacks, doesn't it? Maybe I was naive in 2010, or maybe the zombie fad is morphing a bit, but I now think the racial aspect is larger than I did then.

Neighborhoods in college

A few years ago a late-middle-aged man lived in our neighborhood who I never knew to talk to anyone, and who walked with a loose slapping of the feet that I’m told is characteristic of neurological damage from syphilis. A late friend had abused drugs in his youth, and ended up with tremors and tics. I could point you to more than a few people whose love lives left them hurt, broke, even homeless.

While time and accident bring these kinds of troubles to us all, we can bring thing on a lot faster with stupidity and abuse. And while teenagers generally feel immortal, they can look around the neighborhood and conclude that a pack-a-day might be uglifying.

College is not a typical neighborhood. You find three groups: the old rulers and maintainers, overworked apprentices, and the bulk of the rest are the undergraduates, who are always young.

They are always young because they’re always being replaced; and they disappear either because they graduated or failed. Never mind those who failed academically (or because they ran out of money)—some fail because they did something stupid.

If the effects of some abuse (alcohol, promiscuity, what have you) don’t manifest right away, they won’t appear. If the effects are severe, they typically won’t linger because the students will fail or be asked to leave. Maybe some are shocked for a few weeks, but they pass on in a few years and nobody remembers—because there’s nobody to remind them. A new class comes, and there is always youth and opportunity and no sign of any consequences.

They get lectures about drug abuse and sex safety (like the "always get consent" mantra; as though consent were the sole criteria of goodness), but the community of the undergrads has no integral adults or living warnings and the lectures’ effects seem to last about as long as those of Algebra I.

They form a kind of standing wave of youth and sunlight with "Do as you please" as their motto, without Rabelais’ assumption of honor or Augustine’s “Love God” prefix.

Luckily some of them please to volunteer and spend part of their life out in the rest of the world, and some please to become deeply involved in the life of the mind and find a new community of all ages in some field of study.

But not for all.

How many other social environments do we have where people are induced to behave badly and when problems arise the problem people are "sanitized" away?

python

It is "boot camp" season and I'm trying to master a lot of interconnected software systems. And still keep the other things running, of course... And strip and re-stain the deck.

The glue that holds the chunks together is python. I'd never gotten around to doing much more than "Hello world" in it, but the past few days have been fairly intense and I'm starting to see why people like it. It seems to be built to be glue. It is easy to include other language's modules (you can even include a java environment to run java--kludgy but it works) and create new interfaces on the fly. I finally learned what the "lambda" was good for in function definition. And it looks like there's one approach to strings (C is full of traps for the unwary or fumble-fingered).

Nothing is perfect, though. Logical blocks are defined using indentation, and if you cut and paste from somebody else's program you're apt to wind up mixing tabs and spaces--and your program will mysteriously quit working. And I'm finding myself swamped in possibilities: which package do I import to make histograms again? And the expert chatter in the background suggests that programs that work in one release don't work in another...

Fun with mirrors

Once again something obvious that everybody has probably mused about briefly, but one man decided to study: wide angle mirrors with little distortion was patented.

R. Andrew Hicks (Optics Letters Vol 33 Number 15 page 1672, 1-Oct-2008) wrote up the requirements for calculating the curved surface needed to project a fan of light 45 degrees wide into a driver's eye without a great deal of distortion.

Hicks can customize his creations with exquisite precision. He achieves the desired effect first by characterizing the problem with sophisticated equations. He then programs a computer to spit out the coordinates for tens of thousands of points on the mirror's surface - each one tilted differently to reflect light in just the right way.

The data are then sent to B-Con Engineering, a Canadian firm that uses a milling machine to make the mirrors out of aluminum. The metal is ground and polished with a diamond bit until the smooth, curvy surfaces emerge - a process that takes up to a day for Hicks' unusual free-form designs, company president Brian Creber says.

Like Perline's bike mirror and the mirrors of ancient Turkey, Hicks' new automotive mirror is convex. This provides a wide, 45-degree field of view, instead of the narrow 15 or 20 degrees afforded by a typical flat driver-side mirror.

Objects in the prototype mirror also appear to be farther away; if more things are crammed into the picture, obviously, they have to appear smaller.

US law allows curved mirrors (with a warning) on the passenger's side but not the driver's side, so this will probably wind up being a popular add-on item. If I can figure some way of attaching it I'll invest in one. Or two. Though I don't think I can use his "vampire mirror."

One good reason people haven't worked much with this before is that shaping mirrors isn't trivial. You can get flat, parabolic, or spherical surfaces pretty easily. But other shapes need special grinding, as described above--and that is only really feasible with modern computer-controlled milling machines. Once you have the shape you can make a die or mold and make new ones much more easily, but the prototypes are very difficult. Notice that "up to a day" and imagine how much that costs.

Youth Group Leaders

Our church introduced a new youth (OK, high school and college) minister.

Do I need to tell you he's newlywed?

Pretty much everywhere I've gone, if the church had a minister for youth, that minister was a young recently married man.

Why so young? Imagine a grandfather as youth leader.

Reasons for a young youth leader:

• Stamina. Kids are exhausting, and a lot of young kids are even more exhausting
  
• Knows the au courant lingo; or at least a version only a few years old
  
• Can "relate" to kid's problems because he's been through them recently
  
• The kids can relate to him because he's an upper-level peer
  

Reasons for a grandpa:

• Knows a lot more about the problems of life
  
• Better perspective
  
• Can understand kid's problems because he's raised some
  
• The kids can respect him because he's an elder and not a peer
  

Thought experiment: imagine a one-on-one "Ask the answer man" time for a youth group. Ask the Answer Man anything, get an honest explanation. Who would you, as adults in the church, rather have doing that with the youth? Who do you think the youth would rather ask: a near-peer or somebody who's been through a few fires?

I've heard the claim that youth will only relate to peers or near peers, and so we need to "interface" them to the church using young leaders. It isn't obvious whether we are reacting to this narrowing of relationships or helping feed it, but I strongly suspect the latter.

I'm not getting into debates about women ministers. Similar dynamics would apply there too, and that's what I'm questioning.

UPDATE: My better half pointed out that our current church alternates large and small groups, and the small group leaders can be older.

"And the odd thing in Dad’s voice was the sound truth makes being said. The sound of truth, in a wild roving land of city or plain country lies, will spell any boy." Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked this Way Comes)

Foregone conclusion

The UW is reviewing their HR design, and the committee has allegedly been soliciting comments.
They've posted their final recommendations. I recognize an item or two in their comment vs answer section as a twisted truncation of my comments, and conclude that the compiler was stupid or stubborn and possibly both. There's no way to go from meaning A to meaning B. The answers to my and other complaints suggest that only trivial changes to their plan were ever likely to be considered, which in turn suggests that the plan was mandated, not developed. Square peg, meet round hole--all you need is a little hammering. (Does that sounds like HR around the world?) Update: fixed typo

Boating life

Though I was born in N.O. and lived in L.A. I don’t remember ever going on the ocean, or lake, or stream in any kind of boat until I was 8, when we boarded a freighter for Africa. (My father had been in the Navy—I’m told he was the one who got seasick.) In Liberia the shoreline drops quickly and the current is bad, so you don’t want to go swimming at the beach, and you really don’t want to go swimming in the creek. We lived where there were roads and (narrow) bridges, so there wasn’t much call for ferries.

Naturally I heard the song as "Michael rode the boat ashore" and figured he must be a passenger since everybody else was working.

Until I was into my late twenties I could count the number of times I’d been on a boat on the fingers of one hand, despite having spent about 15 years within 10 miles of the ocean. (We swamped an overloaded motorboat in a lagoon and spent the next half hour trying to find the tools that went overboard, and some relatives down in Mississippi took us fishing once. That’s about it.) So we moved to Madison where water sports are huge. Odd ducks we were, still not taking to the water.

At Devil’s Lake I was impressed into taking some kids out for a turn in a canoe. I had a theoretical notion of how to use the paddle, and I succeeded in not accidentally beaning any of the kids along the way. Though I dripped a lot of water on them, and we wound up pointed in odd directions.

A generous co-worker loaned the use of his cabin-on-the-lake, and now once you pry me out of the chair it is fun to pilot small boats around a quiet lake (not so sure about places with big waves). Wish I didn’t swim like a brick, though.

Soda jerks

I'm curious what audience Bloomberg is playing to with his proposed ban on big soda drinks. Grant that obesity is a growing problem. Are the rest of the city's problems so intractable that there is nothing better to do than try to tweak people's diets? That's scary.

In any event, restaurants and gas stations will simply install little refrigerators stocked with 2-liter soda bottles, just like the supermarkets sell. Just for convenience, of course: maybe with quarts of milk and juice alongside for verisimilitude. And give out a free foot-long fun-straw with each purchase.

FWIW, while there've been a few hot afternoons helping somebody move when I went through about a half gallon of soda, I rarely drink more than a quart in three months. A big-gulp seems grotesque.

Issues of scale

If I choose to be the only Republican in our neighborhood, my neighbors know who I am and I know who they are. If there is shunning, it is shunning with a face to it, and if somebody is going to yell at me he knows I can yell back. All the players have skin in the game.

If I create and fund a black propaganda campaign that purports to be on behalf of one of our senators, the public interest in honest debate demands that I be forced to come clean and admit my contribution. And the public interest in knowing who is buying influence requires that we know who the big contributors are to campaigns—whether as direct contributors or auxiliary supporters.

But in between those scales is a region where vulnerability meets anonymity. If, not my immediate neighbors, but a wider circle are notified of my political contributions there’s no face-to-face anymore, and I am vulnerable to organized intimidators. Yard signs are stolen all the time, and sometimes tires are slashed and windows broken. (typically those of republicans)

It isn’t legal to take my religious or political views into account when hiring me, but there’s no way to prevent searching contribution databases to look for who I might have preferred.

There are going to be tradeoffs in whatever election system we design, but right now we’re looking at a known problem--hidden influence buyers—which we can deal with by open records, and a growing problem with intimidation of small supporters, which open records makes worse.

I know that the link above is about studying how to suppress contributions, not intimidation, but California had plenty of examples of intimidation and vengeance recently after the big referendum.

The above does not accurately reflect either my neighborhood or my finances or my political party.

A smidgeon more

More Chesterton:

If, for instance, a reformer proposed to resist the concentration of capital in combines and corners, the dear old gentleman would declare that nothing could stop the growth of monopolies and money-rings, because we could not alter human nature. This only serves to prove that he was himself singularly ignorant of human nature, if only because he was singularly ignorant of human history .... His moral theory was entirely modern, and was in flat contradiction to the moral theory that is really ancient. Most of his ancestors regarded making a corner simply as a crime, like that of cutting a throat or picking a pocket. Forestallers, as our fathers called them, were often put in a pillory, or even hanged on a gallows, to stop them from doing what he declares they cannot be stopped from doing.

Biodiversity at the Triassic beginning

An article on biodiversity after the Permian collapse (summarized at SciTechDaily if you don't have an institutional subscription) describes the possible reasons for a very slow recovery from whatever it was that ended the Permian era so dramatically. Volcanic eruptions through coal beds or massive sulfur releases that turned the oceans anoxic are just a few of the options. There was a largish decrease (4%) in C^13 at the extinction time (the attribute this to dumping ancient carbon into the air), but much larger (10%) and suspiciously linear swings later were associated with increase in biodiversity. The Siberian Traps eruptions starting kicking in about the time of the Permian extinction and kept going for 6 million years.

There's some evidence for serious anoxia in the deep seas that started well before and got worse well past the extinction boundary--with the same sort of thing playing out on a smaller scale in the shallow seas.

Maybe. Figure 1 shows that the record is pretty spotty about that time.

And before I start believing that it took 10 million years to recover biodiversity, may I respectfully request some error bars on the numbers? Numbers for numbers of species, numbers for estimated vulcanism, anoxia rates, etc are all presented as 100% gospel with no effort at error estimates.

But if you can, by all means look at that Figure 1. Even allowing for a great deal of uncertainty, there's a lot of strange and dramatic history laid out there.

Update: You can't--the image at Nature is too small. This is easier to view: but I'm not going to include the captions--I don't think they'll stretch fair use that far.

As I was Saying by Chesterton

Chesterton again: As I was Saying

Read it. Some samples from chapters

About Germany; relevant to the recent crisis in Greece and Spain where a recent report says the Greeks do work hard

As a matter of fact, that industrial type is not generally any more industrious, if so much, as what we used to call the idle and lounging peasant of the South, who works hours before any of us dream of waking up, and sometimes hours after we go to bed; but rests in the heat of the middle of the day, not being a born fool. But, anyhow, in so far as it is true that the Germans are very industrious, did you ever hear of anybody loving anybody merely because he was industrious?

About pacifism

Men who have no intention of abandoning their country's wealth, not to mention their own, men who rightly insist on comfort for their countrymen and not infrequently for themselves, still seem to have formed a strange idea that they can keep all these things in all conceivable circumstances, solely and entirely by refusing to defend them. They seem to fancy they could bring the whole reign of violence and pride to an end, instantly and entirely, merely by doing nothing. Now it is not easy to do anything by doing nothing.

About traffic congestion (the two seasons of Wisconsin are Winter and Road Construction)

In the middle of a prolonged block in the Uxbridge Road, I have been known to exhibit a gaiety and radiant levity which has made me loathed and detested for miles round. I always feel a faint hope, after a few hours of it, that the vehicles may never move on at all; but may sink slowly into the road and take on the more rooted character of a large and prosperous village. Perhaps, after all, it is thus that our culture may return to the stability and sanity of the earth, which is now its only hope. I have sometimes felt inclined to get out of the car and make a little garden just outside it, staking out a claim and symbolically renouncing all hope of any further advance.

About censorship and culture

I do not believe in ignoring the Pagan morals all around us: it does not diminish the Paganism; and it only deprives us of the pleasure and advantage of denouncing it as Pagan. The assumption that tradition, and even convention, that virtue and even Victorian virtue, is still the rule, and anything else an exception, is all on the side of the sophists who defend vice. It is a rule by which we carry all the unpopular emblems of power, while they enjoy all the practical fruits of victory. They can flout us, because they profess that there is nothing to conceal; and we cannot fight them, because we pretend that there is nothing to fight. But, above all, from the point of the honest orthodox, the present one-sided truce has this enormous disadvantage: it prevents us from pointing out the one solid, staring, stupendous fact which is before all our eyes. It is the fact that we
have not only seen a modern materialist civilization rise, but we have seen it fall. We have seen industrial imperialism and individualism a _practical_ failure. It is no longer a question of using the modern machinery; but of cutting loose from the wreck of it.

About shamelessness

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. There are two meanings of the word "nervous," and it is not even a physical superiority to be actually without nerves. It may mean that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.

and

But for about fifty or sixty years nearly all our culture and controversial trend has been conducted on the assumption that, as long as we could get used to any sort of caddishness, we could be perfectly contented in being cads.

About Voltaire and Frederich the Great; with considerable insight into domestic politics

All Christian history began with that great social occasion when Pilate and Herod shook hands. Hitherto, as everybody knew in Society circles, they had hardly been on speaking terms. Something led them to seek each other's support, a vague sense of social crisis, though very little was happening except the execution of an ordinary batch of criminals. The two rulers were reconciled on the very day when one of these convicts was crucified. That is what many people mean by Peace, and the substitution of a reign of Love for one of Hatred. Whether or no there is honour among thieves, there is always a certain social interdependence and solidarity among murderers; and those sixteenth-century ruffians who conspired to assassinate Rizzio or Darnley were always very careful to put their names, and especially each other's names, to what they called a "band," so that at the worst they might all hang together. Many political friendships--nay, even broad democratic comradeships, are of this nature; and their representatives are really distressed when we decline to identify this form of Love with the original mystical idea of Charity.

Why the armor?

We’ve all seen pictures of Dunkleosteus, but refresh your memory with this:

Vicious-looking fellow, isn’t he? Those face bones would allow strong muscles to attach. I’m not expert enough to spot the tell-tale attachment points and estimate the bite strength, but others estimate it at over 1000 pounds of force. Apparently a lot of the prey was armored too. They could be about 20 feet (6m) long. Some varieties had bony plates all around the body, and some of them were 2 inches (6cm) thick.

But the thing that always seemed odd to me is the bones around the eye. Why? It isn’t as though you need huge strength to turn an eyeball in its socket.

On the principle that there’s a reason for the way things work, I assume that there’s some good reason for putting bones over part of your eyeball and pretty much all of your face.

If strength isn’t needed, it seems most likely to be for protection. The protection is pretty far-reaching, so the threat must have been extensive also.

• We’ve no evidence of anything larger in the sea with it—no bones, at any rate. That doesn’t mean there may not have been giant jellyfish or boneless tentacled beasts with a taste for fish, though how they might contrive to eat anything so large, even unprotected by bones, without at least a beak to gnaw with, is hard to design. A jellyfish couldn’t digest quickly enough to avoid being a target itself for scavengers. A keratin beak might disintegrate but still be fairly useful. So… maybe there was a boneless fish eater that had tough but non-bony gnawing parts and was big enough to be a threat to mid-sized Dunkleosteii.
  
• Maybe they ate each other too. There are scar marks on some Dunkelosteus fossil plates that match Dunkleosteus "teeth." That doesn’t quite explain the eyebones, though, unless they used fins or something to blind or distract each other. Which doesn’t seem very plausible given the way fish usually seem to fight.
  
• Maybe some of their prey objected to being eaten and lashed out with some kind of limbs or stingers. There’d be very good reason to armor up at least the head and eyes to avoid having chunks taken out by irate dinner prospects. We haven’t found such tentacles, but we very well might not. I like this option myself, not because it is obviously more likely but because it is more dramatic. Set the scene—a mollusky thing with an alien fur of tentacles around its opening is minding its own business when the water stirs and a fish appears trying to get a good grip to crush its shell. Mollusk goes into "full-flay" mode lashing with stingers to chase it off before it gets a good purchase.
  
• Maybe there were vicious parasites. I remember seeing a grim picture (National Geographic) of a whale’s eye with some small (1cm or so) feathery arthropods stuck in it, and being very grateful for having fingers. We’d not find any relics of such things, any more than we’re apt to find fossil mosquitoes (except in amber), so they might have been rare or ubiquitous.
  
• UPDATE: Or the bones of the face flexed so much when chomping through shells that the strain on the eye would have been painful unless it was buffered by connecting the eyes to a "floating" ring of bone. This would mean that appearances are deceiving and the eye was much smaller than it appeared.
  

That’s a fairly wide selection of options, with no obvious way to decide. And I can’t.

What brings up this meditation on possibilities is a set of the "Walking with" books Youngest Daughter brought home from the library. (Walking with Dinosaurs, Beasts, Cavemen, ...) The modeling is excellent, the settings very well done, the story arcs catch your interest, but speculation is too kind a term for the result.

They describe one of the species of "cavemen" as having no whites in the eyes, so they could not read each other’s emotions easily, so they did not have complex societies or interactions. (And they know this how, exactly?) That’s just the most egregious of the fantasies they indulge.

They pick the most dramatic possibilities (I have a liking for those myself, see above), but there’s no suggestion that this might be utter nonsense.

But of course it is BBC, and it looks realistic, so it has to be real, right?

Wisdom again

Age is supposed to bring wisdom. I’m not notably wise now, but I’m a bit more so than I was when I was young, so perhaps it’s true.

But what is the difference? Most of what I know now I heard long ago—I just didn’t think much of it.

Faithfulness, for example: I heard sermons on it when I was a babe in arms, though, now that I think of it, not much on how faithfulness played out in everyday life. Hmm.

Woody Allen said "90% of life is just showing up." Just showing up, day after day, is one aspect of faithfulness. When you persevere you make the choice day after day after day to ratify the original decision—a choice that spreads out over years and flavors all of your life. We’re not eternal, but faithfulness makes our lives reflect a little eternity.

I didn’t think much of that when I was young—I didn’t think of it at all. Since then I’ve had some experience of having vinegar on the teeth and smoke in the eyes—and realized that I’ve been that to other people. And I’ve seen what’s happened to the iffy. All this I sort-of knew before, but I hadn’t experienced it. Or I hadn’t internalized it.

What does it mean to have "internalized" some knowledge? We know the difference between rote and internal, but it is hard to articulate exactly how the knowledge has been made integral to our way of thinking and acting instead of just being something we can take or leave. Language is frail sometimes.

The song I’m glad there is you describes "this world of overrated pleasures and underrated treasures," and somewhere along the line you start to realize how underrated some of those treasures were—even by you, who gave lip service to knowing better.

"With knowledge you pat yourself on the back for being so smart. With wisdom you kick yourself in the butt for having been so stupid." Peter Sinclair

The first time is eerie, the N'th time banal

Haggard can be a fun read. He's the father of the mysterious lost land genre of adventure story, and although he's very far from PC he always tried to make sure that the natives were human--some vile and some more noble than the hero.

King Solomon's Mines introduced Alan Quatermain, who proved popular enough that Haggard wrote over a dozen more books about him. Haggard killed him off in one book, but wound up writing more anyway. And She had several sequels as well. Magic and reincarnation and Isis pop up all the time. (And I'm afraid a sampling of sequels suggests that they suffer from the usual deterioration.)

In The Ivory Child he sets the character for one lady by having her make mysterious pronouncements about her and the hero's lives having been connected before they were born, with a "mystic look come into her face."

That may have worked well enough a hundred years ago to outline a fey woman of mystery, but today it conjures images of a bored woman whose life hasn't been exotic enough and who has read a book of pop mysticism. Jarring. I'm not sure I'll finish it.

Didn't think of pictures in time

The past few years Google has found for me the records of many helpful people who found a problem and documented them for the aid of others.

The driver's window switch in my V6 Saturn (the gas mileage of a V6 combined with the get-up-and-go of a 4-cylinder) failed, so that the window would roll down but not up. This is unacceptable in winter. The shop said it would be O($200) to repair it. I found a few step-by-step fix-its on-line; none concerning the model I had.

I popped the switch console out and fiddled with it, bought a dental-probe affair and disassembled the last bits of the switch, cleaned out the melted plastic and swapped switches and it works.

And, after snapping it all back in place, I realized that I had missed the chance for a public service. I forgot to take pictures.

Without pictures... I'll try anyway.

Fixing the power window switches in a Saturn V6 console.

A switch console pries out easily from its location between the front seats, and if you can't figure out how to get the cable unconnected yourself just push it back in and don't bother reading any further.

The switch console has two rocker switches (and a lock switch as well if it's the driver's side console). It is made of an electronics board sandwiched inside three snap-together plastic housings, each held to the next with 6 tabs. A thin flat screwdriver and a little twisting will detach the housings from each other. Pop off the "lock" switch tab and the rocker switch heads.

Standing up high on the electronics board are the business parts of the two rocker switches, each held on with 4 tabs that you cannot pry away without using something like a dental probe. I bought some probes (not sharp) and found the plastic quite soft. I was able to pry the upper part of the switch loose from the tabs on one side easily, after which it came off quickly. I've never seen switches quite like it--the bottom (soldered to the board) part held two channels each with a metal strip (3 contacts underneath it) and the upper part of the switch had two short stubs that pressed against these metal strips--except that one stub was melted and the corresponding strip was covered above and below with melted crud. I scraped the strip and the contacts under it clean using a tiny flathead screwdriver, replaced the bad upper switch with the identical one on the same console, and reassembled all the bits.

Figuring it out took the longest time, and cleaning it came second. Reassembly was about 3 minutes. Strictly speaking this isn't a fix but a hack that swaps a heavily used switch for a lightly used one. But the window works now.

Heroin "statistics"

I went to a school session on heroin use in the area. The bulk of the time was taken up with a movie in honor of a DeForest youth who OD'd last year. The movie wasn't very illuminating--I already know heroin was bad--but his mother (who made the movie) was there and I decided against complaining.

Heroin overdoses are rising, and so are associated deaths--the majority aged between 16-30 and most of those out of high school. They advertise a medication that, delivered promptly, cures an overdose, but there aren't many doctors qualified to "prescribe" it to a heroin buddy. Overdoses are pretty easy to measure: you count the hospital/morgue visits and add a factor from repeat requests for the Narcan. The ratio of overdoses to deaths was about 10:1 in Madison and Sun Prairie.

Not all their statistics were quite as trustworthy. They had numbers on Oxycontin abuse and other drug abuse in middle and high school that are apparently self-reported. Umm, I think I want a little more info.

Apparently Oxycontin is easy enough to get hold of that it makes a good gateway drug.

One other little number was dramatic by its absence: the ratio of users to overdosers. I trotted back and forth a bit online to try to get a ballpark estimate and it looks like of order 50-25:1. (Don't use that number anywhere, OK?) Which would make heroin use remarkably dangerous, so maybe I made a mistake. But if I didn't then that means 250-500 addicts in a town of 16,000. Apparently there are two aspects to habituation: the brain's changes to lead it to expect opiates, and the rest of the body's changes, in particular the respiratory system. The brain takes a year or more to clear itself, but the body recovers in a few days. Which means that after being on the wagon for a week, the same dose you took before could kill you. At least so they say.

The story arc was that middle and upper middle class youth were starting to abuse Oxycontin et al in school, but finding the supply limited, were migrating to heroin. The supply of heroin is greater, but it winds up costing a great deal. Upper middle class kids typically were preying on family and friends, and turning to dealing.

The numbers weren't quite consistent from slide to talk. At one point they were talking about doses for \$25, and another for \$150. A factor of 6 seems pretty large to be a habituation effect.

The state is into "harm reduction" and provides paper lunch bags with heroin kits, and encourages addicts to never shoot up alone. I wonder what the overall effect is. The harm for any given addict is presumably less, if he isn't sharing infected materials, but if the addiction rate rises it isn't instantly clear that we've reduce the harm. (I'd not expect the rate of addiction to rise immediately. Instead I'd expect a period in which the bags slowly grow more normal in the background, and then a rise.)

Simple googling didn't find me the sorts of n-tuples I like to work with, so I'll let this be a back-burner mystery for a while longer.

General Philosophy by David Elton Trueblood

One nice thing about vacations is you can catch up on reading. I don’t like to think how long ago I first started this book.

This was part of my father’s library, and has some of his underlining in a couple of chapters.

As the title suggests, it is an overview of philosophy. Trueblood emphasized the back and forth questioning of issues, and filled it with illustrative quotations with appeals to read the original author. "The best way toward greatness is to mix with the great." Dialog is one of the best ways to sharpen your own thoughts, and he tries to approximate that in the book.

Samples:

A.N. Whitehead, The Function of Reason "Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study."

Or his own words in the penultimate chapter, on Society

The ultimate enemy is not any of these things or events to which we usually refer. The most terrible enemy is triviality. No society will be a good one, no matter how adequately people are fed and clothed, if it is not a society in which men and women can be made to feel, without deception, that their lives are important.
…

The ideal social order, then, must include many things, but three are preeminent. It must include freedom; it must include order; it must include a sense of meaning.

The book was an interesting journey through the to and fro of debate about the limits of proof and determinism and chance, and what can be built on the foundation of the certainty of error. (If you know that at least somebody in a debate has to be wrong, what can you infer about the existence of an objective order?)

He spends more time than warranted on the Oxford group that followed Wittgenstein, but their approach (philosophy is merely the study of the grammar and never tried to figure out if propositions are true or false) isn’t so much of a live issue these days. Which was inevitable.

It was fun to see where I fit in the spectrum, but I have a lousy memory for names and I'd have to re-read it to make sure I had the labels right.

Read it. Though perhaps Trueblood would say "Read Plato and Temple and..."