His followers

I haven't seen many of the various Jesus movies, and only the first two of the Chosen series. My images of Jesus travelling are Him with a big crowd on a hilltop (lousy acoustics), in a boat facing a full beach (good acoustics), in a overcrowded boat with the 12, or walking along a path with a dozen men tagging along.

But John 6:66 (hey, I didn't label these things!) says many of His disciples "were not walking with Him anymore." The Pentecost upper room had 120, probably a fraction of the total. At least early on, there must have been quite a crowd following (literally) the rabbi. (Luke 14:25, Luke 8:1-3) Not just men, but also women. Sometimes Jesus talked to them all, sometimes to 12, or 70, or only a handful. The boat they have could have held a dozen assuming the boat had sides, so maybe the full boat image is still OK.

Guessing here: the 12 were always with Him, unless sent out; another 100 or so were consistently following Him around, including men and women; probably another hundred or two that went along part of the time, as their family and finances allowed. And in towns, as many showed up as would fit the venue, and then some. I'd guess that most paid their own way, but not all could.

Judas must have been a busy man.

---

On the road to Emmaus, I wonder if while Cleopas (=Clopas in many traditions) was saying "They had also seen a vision of angels who said that He was alive," his wife Mary was nodding vigorously.

Joys of travel

No runway lights at Robertsfield again, and maybe not radio either--the pilot's statement is ambiguous.

The pilot circled for half an hour and then flew to Freetown. The airport authority said later that they had power, but "there was a “technical glitch”. According to the airport management, the issue was resolved in record time." Unfortunately, I suspect that the "record time" part of their claim may be true.

Another thing to factor into one's travel plans. Luckily we don't even have a rough date yet.

Tombstoning

You buy online space for your ad, but what will the headline be?

Jerusalem Post: "Nearly half of Israelis fear a second Holocaust is coming - poll"

The ad under it: "Full catering and beverage packages available."

It's an animated ad, of course, but by the time I'd scrolled down the bit about "The Brink Lounge" had vanished.

Forgotten victims

Gotz Aly was interviewed by Spiegel about his new book The Burdened about Nazi euthanasia. He has a disabled daughter. The matter is very personal to him.

"You too were once a protagonist of the leftist movement, but you have now distanced yourself from some of its causes. You write in your book that the ideology that leads to euthanasia was inspired by the reform movement, which essentially came from the left. What brought you to that realization?"

Aly: There was no resistance to the euthanasia murders from the leftist or secular side of society. The notion of a healthy society, of capable people who are able to enjoy life, arose in the liberal, middle-class, leftist and non-religious segments of society. The euthanasia idea came from neither the radical right-wing nor the conservative corner. It was and remains part of the modern age and progressive thought. It's just that nowhere in the world was this way of thinking put into practice quite as radically as in Nazi Germany. Assisted suicide is a very accepted practice in some European societies that are closely oriented toward modernity.

"The son of the Dutch queen has been in a coma since he had a skiing accident, and he is being cared for in England because there are almost no facilities left in the Netherlands that handle such patients." Assisted suicide is the reason why.

"There is a beautiful and very radical notion in the bible: Man is made in the image of God, no matter how sick, poor or damaged he is. We should try to transpose this maxim to our secular and constitutional self-image."

Or perhaps one might try the radical notion of taking the Bible seriously by itself.

LED bulbs and interference fringes in soap bubbles

We've probably all seen the rainbows you get as soap bubbles thin out to the point where their thickness is only a few multiples of the wavelengths of light. They're quite pretty. Light reflected from the back of the film and light reflected from the front interferes, and when the distance is right some colors can cancel or can be made brighter.

Since an LED bulb only uses a few frequencies/wavelengths, the resulting "rainbow" is much sharper and more dramatic. Tilt a ring or hoop with a soap film across it so that it reflects the light from an LED bulb, and watch as it thins out. Near the top you'll see several narrow bands of "rainbows", and as the bubble thins they'll get wider.

Ready for Reports!

A little after mastadons stopped wandering the earth I was working on a proposed tracking chamber for the Superconducting SuperCollider (SSC), and I went to a detector simulation workship in Waxahachie. Inside a warehouse was a cube farm. I learned that a firm's worth of administrators and secretaries had been hired to manage the reports (environmental impact statements just the simplest of these), and that of the several hundred employees only about 1 1/2 were scientists. But volumes of the mandatory reports and plans and purchasing schedules were on the way.

I should have taken warning from that. From the chapter "Plans and Plants" in Parkinson's Law:

Examples abound of new institutions coming into existence with a full establishment of deputy directors, consultants and executives, all these coming together in a building specially designed for their purpose. And experience proves that such an institution will die. It is choked by its own perfection. It cannot take root for lack of soil. It cannot grow naturally for it is already grown.

Why? Parkinson explained: ‘A perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse… Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is not time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done."

And we know the rest of the story. In its infinite wisdom our legislators decreed that all business be done with American firms, at which point the French and Russians and Germans and every other potential partner said "adios." The auditors in Washington decided to experiment with honest cost projections instead of the usual military cost estimators, and got sticker shock from the result. We arm-twisted the Japanese to come on board anyway, and at the banquet at which the announcement of Japanese support was to be made, Bush lost his dinner on the Japanese Prime Minister. Last I heard the tunnels were being used to grow mushrooms.

---

The design I was working on wouldn't have worked, as was made quite clear during the workshop.

Scleral Rings

Some years ago I puzzled over the eyebones of Dunkelosteus. I didn't do quite enough research Mea culpa. The layout of the skull and bones mislead me into thinking that the bones were above the eye. But no, other examples clearly showed they weren't--I'd forgotten about the skin and muscles over the bone.

In fact, far from being unusual, they're quite common. All birds have them, for instance, and all reptiles except snakes and crocodiles. They're just not so big and obvious. Different species have different numbers of bones, and the number can even vary from left to right eye.

Notice where the lens is in relation to these bits of bone in bird's eyes. The one at the bottom, labeled "tubular", is from an owl. (Hummingbird scleral rings are almost tissue-paper thin.)

I got these images from Why are bones in vertebrate eyes?.

Why? Night-active creatures seem to have larger and more conical ones, day-active ones have smaller holes. Yet they have irises also to control the amount of light, so I don't quite see the benefit.

Some say this helps keep vision sharp, possibly by holding the eyeball more stiffly in place. If you live and die by your vision as birds do, I can imagine that reducing jitter might be important. Though in the human eye a little jitter (saccades) seems to help give individual rods/cones time to recover by spreading the signal around a bit. Or something--there's disagreement. Birds have saccades too.

There are other plates in some eyes too--near the lids (if present).

From this reference: "The function of the ocular skeleton is not well understood but is believed to be as follows. The scleral cartilage cup provides structural support to the delicate retina. The scleral ossicles either assist in visual accommodation by preventing the eyeball shape from distorting as the cornea changes shape to focus light onto the retina or it also provides structural support."

They wouldn't have them if they weren't useful. Mammals don't have them (except for the platypus, which has cartilege ones), so they aren't essential. But how do they help?

Ideal vacation

A few weeks ago we tried a "guess the vacationeer" at work--which of us wants which ideal vacation?

Resting on the Isle Royale shore, Prudhoe Bay to Key West, Shetland Islands, hiking in the mountains, cabin camping with friends, "everybody else goes on vacation and I stay", and "visit an old city and stay with friends who show me their city as they see it."

That last one makes a lot more sense than treating an old city as a museum and just seeing the tourist book highlights. The Eiffel tower may be cool, but what does a Parisian see in it? Visiting with friends enters you into the life of the city, not just its monuments. The sights and sounds and meals are better when shared.

Genealogy records

David's children are listed, and some appear in genealogies. Solomon though--only the one son is listed (although the Ethiopians claim Menelik I was also his son). I wonder why. Maybe he only had the one (think "Henry VIII" except that he didn't have to get rid of any wives). Maybe, given the civil war that quickly ensued, Rehoboam made sure that his brothers got left out of official genealogies to forestall any other claimants. Maybe too many were from non-Israelite mothers, and rather than sort out who was who (and maybe make Rehoboam mad, since his mother was Ammonite) they just left the mob out.

Maybe Solomon just wasn't as important as David for inclusion of all his details in the Chronicles--the chroniclers were different people too. Later kings didn't have the iconic status of David, or even Solomon, and I imagine the full family tree would have been long and tedious, so they just listed the heirs.

...

In looking this up I found that some ancient sources identified Nathan the prophet with Nathan the son of David. "Nathan the time traveler, confronting his father before he is born?" Weird.

Searching my own blog

From time to time I check something I wrote before. I've been relying on google--logically they'd be the best since blogger is a google product--but google search is no longer returning very many references. I don't know why--probably most blogs are just noise for ordinary searches. They've cluttered some of my searches in the past...

Since google is no longer providing the info, I have to do this myself. using takeout.google.com you can backup the whole thing, and get an emailed link to a .zip file that contains the lot. When you unzip it you'll find a "feed.atom" file that looks like a fairly simple XML file.

I figured BFI was the way to go, and so I settled on making a copy of the text contents, one line per post. The simple approach is something like

grep -i horse searchable | grep -i boy | grep -i lewis

which gives me the full text, along with a lot of clutter like

The Last Battle</U>.</P> <P>I think

that is trivial to clean up.

If you're interested in trying it too, I used the following (no error handling or sanity checking, sorry) awk script as

awk -f makesearch.awk feed.atom > searchable

BEGIN{ready=0;}
{
        if(index($0,"<id>") > 0)printf("%s ",$0);
        if(index($0,"<content") > 0){printf("%s ",$0);ready=1}
        else{
                if(index($0,"content>") > 0){printf("%s\n",$0);ready=0;}
                else{if(ready==1){printf("%s ",$0);}}
                }
}

Then I put the file somewhere I'll remember it and put a reference to it in .bashrc, and I should be good. At least WRT searching old items in my blog.

UPDATE: Yes, I know about the search feature in the blogger home page, but I am not always logged into my gmail account when composing and searching--nor should I be. Why should random cookies for random sites have any extra information about me?

When good things increase

those who consume them increase. So what is the advantage to their owners except to look on?

How many cabins can you sleep in at once? If the sea is a trifle too heavy, or the sunset a hair too bright, you have your choice of suites on different levels and sides. Maybe the boat is steadier in high seas.

There's room to bring along each specialist masseuse--even the one for your big toes. You can bring along an orchestra for live music. And a film crew to record your every gesture. Your harem, of course, just in case your favorites don't suit you one evening. And cooks and cleaners and doctors and police to manage that mob. And... give me a hand here ...

You can't spend quality time with as many passengers as could fit on that thing, so you must want them to enjoy themselves without you, or give that impression to others. So you're "looking on," just as predicted.

Scientific honesty

The MIT press published an essay Scientific Integrity and the Ethics of 'Utter Honesty' It does well, up to a point where Pennock seems to step off into the air.

He takes as his starting point the Manhattan Project, which he says many scientists regretted getting involved in. Using "gain of function" research he explains that "In this sense, one must assume honesty as a core virtue even if we conclude that there are instances where the possibility of severe public harm requires secrecy, in that it was involved in discovering the danger in the first place. What is really going on in such cases is that scientific honesty is taken for granted but must be weighed against other more general social interests that come into play and ought also be taken into account."

"Sometimes doing the right thing may mean not being completely honest in a larger social setting in order to prevent a great harm."

That kind of rule has unlimited scope. History is full of "great harm" like "lese majeste" or somebody's revenue stream drying up, and exact parallels appear in the USA today.

If you find a way to make a nuke from a ham radio and a can of pork and beans, yes, I much prefer that we not publish that information. But let's define the risk and balancing more carefully, and not hand out blank checks to the powers-that-be.

And yes, I would have published a thing or two in his suggested American Journal of Discarded Hypotheses

.

It doesn't seem overstated

This quillette article claims that the housing market has been distorted for the benefit of the rentier class--that nominally environmental and social goals have had the at-best-unintended consequences of sending housing prices sky-high and making home ownership extremely hard. This hits the middle class hard, and reduces the middle class's relative independence of the elites. It is horrible for the poor, who are already dependent.

You are at liberty to believe the consequences were accidental.

Not good news for the mammoth cloners

A "junk DNA" study suggests that one of the functions has to do with identifying DNA belonging to "me"--this species--to keep it from being discarded ("chromosomes scatter and start to leak out of the cell’s nucleus.") That seems like a possible defense against viruses.

I complained before that the host egg cell wouldn't have perfectly matching RNA and that that probably would cause failures to express the DNA correctly. If this study is correct, cross-species cloning faces an additional problem.

I don't quite see how the claim about germline cells (at least as the article purports to explain it) makes sense. Perhaps they mean that for meiosis, one of the daughter cells is sacrificed to give the other the full complement of the required sequences needed to keep it "young". If that happened every time, I don't see how the germline cells would reproduce. You'd get a fixed number and a division would produce another and a not-quite, keeping the count of good ones the same. The article didn't have a link to the paper.

Looking away from the keyboard

My daughter next door spotted a pheasant out back last week--we're not sure what it was doing in the city.

Hope springs eternal in the hearts of woodpeckers eyeing our home's siding. I went around the garage to chase one away last month and found a chickadee doing the pecking. You learn something new every day.

Every year February gets so shortchanged in days that I think the powers that be have decided to give it a whole year to play with in compensation. It is snowing again. True, the morning snow melted, but still--evening snow too? The elementary school's garden club planting schedule is something like 3 weeks late, maybe 4.

The last enemy

Father Ofadiran closed his case and set it down.

"Can you stay a little longer?" I begged him.

"Oh yes," he answered. "For my good brother Joseph?" His smile shone in the softly lit room.

My father smiled a little and reopened his eyes. "Thank you," he whispered. "I won't be long. I'll be seeing him soon."

"Do you mean Betty?" asked our priest.

"No," he whispered, and his eyes begged me to explain for him.

"Great-Aunt Chemille couldn't tell us if it was a gift or a curse, but we Dylans can see the Angel of Death coming in the last moments. Sometimes he even answers."

"The Angel of Death?" The priest looked skeptical.

"That's what my great-great grandfather told us he said."

He leaned over. "You needn't fear death now," he said to my father.

Father smiled, and then his eyes went wide and the smile faded as he stared past my shoulder. I saw nothing behind me except the disconnected blood pressure monitor.

"Do you like doing this?" he whispered.

I didn't hear a reply, but Father looked astonished.

"Death will die," the priest urged him.

"Did you hear that?" Father whispered as triumphantly as his strength allowed. "Resurrection for me, death for you. What do you say to that?"

The quiet room seemed to grow darker. We leaned forward to hear Father.

"You too? New name?" He had no breath to say more, no breath at all.

Father Ofadiran crossed himself and prayed quietly. I tucked Father's hand by his side and pressed the button to summon the nurse.

magic kingdom

College can be a continually refreshed fountain of the naive. They feel they can fly, and don't learn better in time to warn the newbies.

All sort of economic theories are on offer, and because you're not obligated to work or have the public buy what you're selling you don't learn their effects. All sorts of sexual ideas and opportunities are on offer, but you're not likely to learn about the side effects for at least a few years--by which time you're gone and naive new students have taken your place. All sorts of social theories are on offer, and they seem good to you and your friends, but you really don't know that many different kinds of people yet. By the time you start to get past your college parochialism and meet them, you're gone.

Yes, I know people who worked their way through college, and first generation-ers, and so on. The "college experience" is pitched at the group I describe.

copyist fidelity

Our eldest told me that he had attempted to explain to a co-worker the extreme care with which Jews copied their scriptures, and some of the methods they used for verification. The co-worker didn't believe him.

That's probably not a surprise. We produce new editions of books all the time. Books are rewritten for different audiences, rewritten to turn into movies, bowdlerized to fit the current social fashions--books are mutable. Why would a religious book be different?

The only things I could think of that we treat with the same literal care these days are contracts and treaties. Maybe he could try saying that they treated scripture as if it were God's contract with them.

What's in a name?

It is, we of heaven agree, a thing indifferent;
but any indifference may become sometimes a test.
Will God dispute over words?  no; but man
must, if words mean anything, stand by words,
since stand he must; and on earth protest to death
against what at the same time is a jest in heaven.

Charles Williams: The House of the Octopus

A hard man

‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’

The excuse always seemed to me to be slightly irrelevant. He accuses his master of being grasping--what has that to do with using the money? It hadn't occurred to me until one of the men pointed it out this morning, that he could be understood as accusing his master of being a "rent seeker" and benefitting from his employees' labor while not contributing any labor himself.

That fits better--perhaps the one-talent guy is claiming to be idle on principle; getting back at "the man."

Or maybe that's anachronistic. It seemed an interesting approach, though.