Origins of other life, and more on negative capability

From the NYT book review of "What Darwin Got Wrong," which was linked in the Dyson interview that was linked in my prior post:

How does one detect life on Mars?  One suggestion was to send up a sort of microscope, collect some dust from the Martian surface, and see if anything wiggled.  If it wiggles it is alive.  This seemed too unsophisticated for the space scientists. 

Instead they sent up a sort of vacuum cleaner filled with a nutrient solution containing a radioactively labeled simple sugar.  If the dust sucked up from the surface contained living cells, they would start to grow and divide, metabolize the sugar, and release radioactive carbon dioxide, which would be detected by a counter.  The Mars lander never detected any life activity although it was determined to be in perfect working order.  But that does not mean that there is no life on Mars.  It means that there is no life in Martian dust that grows on the sort of sugar provided.  This device certainly would not have detected a science-fiction Martian.  What the space scientists had done was to provide an ecological niche for a specific kind of life that they knew from earth, a niche that does not match a vast variety of earthly organisms.  If you do not specify the kind of organism you are looking for you cannot specify its ecological niche.  Perhaps the space program should look again for wiggly things.

This quotation is a casual aside in the review, but I liked it even more than the main body.  It's so difficult for us to think about the development of life in any way but our own, as if the development of DNA itself were not something of a long shot, and something we have no reason at all to suppose might develop spontaneously in parallel on another planet.

On the subject of the book itself, the reviewer notes the extraordinary hostility that has greeted its authors, who are viewed suspiciously as catering to religious extremists.  In fact, they mostly are complaining of a tendency to take literally Darwin's "metaphor" of natural selection and talk as if nature willed a new creature into being.  As evolutionary biologists often note with exasperation, evolution has no foresight.  The reviewer suggests that instead of “natural selection” we should talk about differential rates of survival and reproduction.  That's not very pithy, though, does it?  At least "natural selection" deftly gets across the idea that a few successful individuals are plucked out of the group in the sense of thriving where others fail, such that their descendants come to dominate the population.  The whole idea of calling it "natural" selection surely was to contrast this unintentional mechanical process with deliberate design of the sort that produced poodles from wolves.  But it's true that a lot of anthropomorphic nonsense is talked by supposedly secular biologists who would faint dead away if that tendency were equated with the worldview of the intelligent-design community.  As the reviewer observes:

The other source of anxiety and anger is that the argument made by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini strikes at the way in which evolutionary biologists provide adaptive natural historical explanations for a vast array of phenomena, as well as the use by a wider scholarly community of the metaphor of natural selection to provide theories of history, social structure, human psychological phenomena, and culture. If you make a living by inventing scenarios of how natural selection produced, say, xenophobia and racism or the love of music, you will not take kindly to the book. 

Even biologists who have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of what the actual genetic changes are in the evolution of species cannot resist the temptation to defend evolution against its know-nothing enemies by appealing to the fact that biologists are always able to provide plausible scenarios for evolution by natural selection. But plausibility is not science.  True and sufficient explanations of particular examples of evolution are extremely hard to arrive at because we do not have world enough and time.  The cytogeneticist Jakov Krivshenko used to dismiss merely plausible explanations, in a strong Russian accent that lent it greater derisive force, as “idel specoolations.”

Even at the expense of having to say “I don’t know how it evolved” most of the time, biologists should not engage in idle speculations.

Negative capability

A commenter over at Sarah Hoyt's place mentioned that Freeman Dyson used to run simulations of systems that might result in a decrease in the world's human population, and that the only factor that consistently worked was the introduction of reliable electricity to fast-breeding cultures.  I spent some time this morning trying to track down more information about that interesting line of inquiry, but failed.  Instead, I came across this refreshing interview with Mr. Dyson on the subject of the origin of life, in which he time and again declines the interviewer's invitation to express a view on a controversy about which he is either not fully up to speed, or about which any answer must be the rankest sort of individual speculation.

Keats famously endorsed "negative capability," the willingness to endure ambiguity.  It may not always be such a terrific idea in moral matters, where it often seems to take the form of choosing not to be aware of what we already know perfectly well, such as that it's not possible to excuse systematic lechery with the phrase "I'm a hugga."  Nor have I ever been convinced by his idea that poetic aesthetics trumps all other considerations.  Nevertheless, the capacity to remain "content with half-knowledge" is a fine thing for a scientist.  Dyson candidly refuses to pretend that he knows what he doesn't.

I particularly enjoyed this exchange:

Suzan Mazur:  You draw an analogy in your book between origin of life and the origin of body plans half a billion years ago, a "sudden efflorescence of elaborate body plans," during the Cambrian explosion.  Have you had further thoughts about this in light of the "evo-devo revolution"?  Did form come first or did form arise from genetic programs? . . . 

Freeman Dyson:  By the time of the Cambrian explosion is very late in the history of life and genetics had become very powerful.  But, of course, we have no idea what happened in detail. 

Suzan Mazur:  How soon do you think we'll get to the bottom of things regarding origin of life, i.e., make the breakthrough? 

Freeman Dyson:  Give it a hundred years, perhaps, but I don't think my prediction is worth anything.  It all depends on what nature says, because nature is always surprising us. And probably in this case too. 

Suzan Mazur:  A hundred years.  You think it's going to take that long? 

Freeman Dyson:  Well I would call that short.

The origin of life is one of my favorite scientific mysteries.  Where I always get brought up short is the explanation for how replication started in the first place.  Once you have both a metabolism ("defined in a general way as the evolution of a population in which some of the molecules catalyze the synthesis of others") and a replicating system, it's easy enough to see how the ones with a successful metabolism will out-replicate the others and glom onto more metabolic resources.  But how do you get started on this pairing?  How do clumps of chemical reactions start to replicate and compete?  Dyson thinks that a profitable area of study would be how pre-biotic chemical reactions spontaneously form a rudimentary metabolism, which they clearly do in the lab; advances in nano-technology are opening the door for better experiments in this area.  Next, he thinks that some kind of primitive self-replicating mechanism formed (rather as crystals automatically replicate) and made its living for a while as a parasite on the metabolic system.  Eventually host and parasite merged and became the earliest precursors to cells, in the form of lipid walls enclosing little globs of water with a lot of stuff dissolved in it.  Later, the replicating mechanism developed into the advanced form of RNA, setting the stage for the "RNA world" that's captured so much attention in recent years.

If he turns out someday to be right, that would make us mongrels at least twice over:  once from the mating of metabolisms and replicators, and next from the capture of mitochondria by their host cells.

A fitting memorial

Nothing argues more eloquently against the racist tendency to treat young black men on the street with suspicious caution than yelling "This is for Trayvon Martin" while you beat up and rob a citizen.  Dr. King would be proud.

Molon labe

More from the Daily Caller, complaints from the Children's Defense Fund in favor of the "common sense" gun-control legislation that they favor:

The U.S. has as many guns as people.  The U.S. accounts for less than 5 percent of the global population, but owns an estimated 35 to 50 percent of all civilian-owned guns in the world. . . . America’s military and law enforcement agencies have four million guns.  Our citizens have 310 million.  Has this made our children safer?

Yes.  Of course, it depends somewhat on from whom you think they need to be protected.

That explains it

Jamie Weinstein at the Daily Caller reports:

In 1988, Mahmoud Salam Saliman Abu Harabish and Adam Ibrahim Juma’a-Juma’a decided to firebomb a bus of Israeli civilians. 

The result was gruesome.  A 26-year old school teacher, Rachel Weiss, was incinerated, along with her three young children, who ranged from three years old to 9-months. An Israeli soldier who came to their rescue also died as result of the attack. 

Thanks to Secretary of State John Kerry’s nimble negotiating skills, Harabish and Juma’a-Juma’a will reportedly be among the 104 violent Palestinian terrorists released from Israeli prisons in stages as a goodwill gesture by the Jewish state in advance of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that are set to begin Monday in Washington, D.C.

My email feed adds:

TheDC Morning is starting to suspect that making John Kerry Secretary of State was a political ploy to make Hillary Clinton look competent by comparison.

Beginning Aristotle: A Disclaimer, a Request, a Plan

I am not a trained philosopher, nor do I play one on TV. The length of time from my first post until this post can be explained by two things: I don’t know how to write interestingly about Aristotle’s philosophy in a blog post, and I’m just exploring that philosophy, so I can’t be terribly informative except in the most mundane, “This is what I learned today” way.

For now, I’ve decided my posts on Aristotle will be a student’s thoughts rather than a synopsis or attempt to be profound (although the humor value of an attempt to be profound cannot be discounted, the prepositions would be all wrong (laughing at, vs. with)). Naturally, I welcome any discussion in the comments, but my request is that you would let me know either here or as we go what you might find interesting in a study of Aristotle. Maybe then I can tailor my writing to my audience a bit better.

Grim’s suggested plan of study:

Roughly, the medieval approach for students is:

1) Start by understanding his logical system. Getting a grasp on just what he means by "substance" and "attribute," and just what his categories are and how they work together, is very helpful.

2) Then read the Physics; the relevant article is here. This is a quite difficult work, and almost no one reads it today, but it's fundamental -- and, in fact, asks some very good questions about the nature of reality that our modern physics often elide past rather than engage.

3) Then read De Anima (see here (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/) and here (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/)). Once you've understood how he thinks the world has to work, from the earlier pieces, this work will help you understand how he thinks human beings relate to the world and understand it.

4) Then read the Metaphysics ... This will explain what Aristotle thinks about the ultimate ends behind reality. If the Physics explains how things are, this work explains why things are as they are.

5) Finally, engage the Ethics and Politics. These should be read together, because the purpose of politics is to provide a state that supports an ethical life -- a life, in Aristotle's terms, in which the pursuit of happiness is most possible.

That's the plan.

An Acceptable Excuse

A friend of mine is writing a Young Adult novel based in ancient Greek mythology. She asked me to review it for comments. I told her that, unlike other Greek gods who were portrayed as teenagers who spoke in ordinary speech, her male hero Prometheus was portrayed as an adult who spoke with great formality, especially when he addressed the female lead. "He doesn't speak like a teenager, which may make him seem strange to your audience," I said. "He sounds like me."

Her response was, "Well of course he does. He's not a man. He's a god."

Well that's... very flattering, really.

Coercion and persuasion

Or, as I like to call the alternatives, tyranny and liberty.   I have just finished reading Kevin D. Williamson's very interesting book, "The End Is New and It's Going to Be Awesome."  Though I'm not entirely persuaded of one of his central premises, which is that politics' flaw is its inability to learn from mistakes (more on that later), he's got a very appealing thought experiment in the Epilogue about an alternative to coercion in dealing with the inevitable bad actors among us:

Short of your Hitlers and psychopathic killers, there are some very good alternatives to coercion.  In a world of instantaneous information exchanges and complex social relationships, reputation is extraordinarily important.  We should be looking at ways to use technology to build on that -- something a little more sophisticated than Yelp reviews.

Williamson describes a hypothetical car purchase. You hand the salesman your card, only to see his face fall when he runs it.

YOU:  "My card has been declined?"   SALESMAN:  "No, your card has . . . declined us."  A second later your iPhone buzzes with a text message.

You have signed up for an account alert from BeCool Card Services, which warns you when you are about to conduct a business transaction with a company that has violated one of the principles you hold dear.   Perhaps your car is offered for sale by a company that mistreats workers on Liberian rubber plantations.  Shortly thereafter, the car company's head of marketing gets a similar text message.   Does the company immediately mend its ways in Liberia?  Probably not, but what does the board think when the VP of marketing reports 100 or 1,000 such messages in a single year?

It's an essentially democratic approach, but without the need for a uniform decision binding on any minority.  It's not winner-take-all uniformity.  The winning political party doesn't get to say how the car company treats Liberian workers and ignore what the losing party thinks.  But then, there are very, very few social dilemmas that require a uniform approach, and those arguably are limited to circumstances of outright theft and violence.  Other disputes over who should marry whom, how long the workweek should be, and whether the workplace is hospitable enough to someone of your gender, age, race, or religion might be better handled by the kind of ongoing collective decision-making process that's often called "voting with your feet" or ostracization.   In fact, Williamson argues that the "right of exit" is essential to any form of ordered liberty.  Nothing but the power of another person to say "that won't suit me; I won't combine with you in this enterprise" can ever really keep well-meaning nanny-bullies in check.

Williamson's example is deliberately commercial and impersonal.  We already have traditional social mechanisms for policing behavior by damage to reputation in more intimate settings.  And it's still possible to rely on the police for help with crime -- without dragging them into disputes over gay marriage or the minimum wage.

This "crowd-sourcing" of approval and disapproval certainly has its downside.  Social ostracism can be very costly, and there's no guarantee that what society collectively decides will not marginalize people we think should be heroes.  But that danger is hardly unique to free crowd-sourcing.  At present, a more and more intrusive government takes a vote and then cheerfully imposes the majority view on everyone -- and the government has more than a tarnishing of reputation in its arsenal to enforce the universally binding result.

How will everyone know how to judge all the myriad social evils out there that we now rely on Congress to regulate?  Well, how do they know how to vote at present?  And how to Congressmen know?  They mostly don't.  In practice, they'll vote on the issues they know and care most about and keep their noses out of the rest.

It's not an all-purpose system, obviously.  Williamson approves of voluntary arrangements under which people locked in close proximity with each other agree to adopt community standards for matters that would be unworkable otherwise.  In a city, for instance, the local garbage pickup and potable water systems are likely to be mandatory; if you don't like it, don't live there.  Out where I live, we're free to arrange for our own water and garbage services:  rainwater, wellwater, truck the water in, or support the development of a local MUD; burn your garbage, bury it, or pay for a weekly or monthly pickup of one, two, or three large containers by a private company.  But even in a city, close-huddled citizens probably can figure out a way to address the staggering problem of sugary drinks in oversize containers without calling in the awesome power of the state and demanding a unanimity of practice.

Too good to source

I can't tell where this originated, so I give up on giving CWCID:  George Zimmerman is reportedly changing his name, to ensure that neither the Obama administration nor the press will ever again pay him a moment's attention.  His choice?  "Ben Ghazi."

Which of course reminds me of this:

No, he didn't

Ace recently joked on Twitter that he wasn't even making jokes about Candidate Weiner; he was just taking his information straight from the press conferences.  So when he posted today that Weiner responded to his campaign manager's decision to quit by assuring the public that "We have an amazing staff," I figured he had made it up.   No, no.  As Ace mused,

Meh. I don't know about "amazing." Let's just say "famous" or "well-traveled."

Phony scandals

“If Gov. Christie believes the constitutional rights and the privacy of all Americans are ‘esoteric,’ he either needs a new dictionary or he needs to talk to more Americans, because a great number of them are concerned about the dramatic overreach of our government in recent times,” Paul senior advisor Doug Stafford said.

Washington Times.

Law schmaw

I don't find the President's answer to this interview answer comforting.

Yikes

Hacker stories that come a little closer to home:

“When you lose faith that a car will do what you tell it to do,” he adds after we jump out of the SUV, “it really changes your whole view of how the thing works.”

H/t Bookworm Room (guest host Earl).

Between the lines

I don't feel this brief account gives us the necessary insight into all aspects of this fascinating couple's lives.  It's the old story:  they met in something called a "hacky-sack" circle, agreed to marry, then quarreled.

Hall took his few possessions and moved out of his fiancée’s home and into a tree at McLaren Park.

Soon, matters took a squalid turn.  After the fellow got cold and decided to return home, he was disappointed to see his fiancée returning from a date with a Marine, who found it necessary to assist his date's ex-betrothed in regaining his composure.  Bear-spray ensued, and it all ended up in criminal court, but everyone decided there was no real harm done.

Can't we at least get a reality show out of this?

H/t Rocket Science.

The Delian Ship

Douglas is interested today in an old discussion we had, in which Bthun spoke of his father's ax.

I think I've mentioned dad's axe here once or twice before. The one on which my bro replaced the head and a decade or two later, when it came into my possession, I replaced the handle...

Yup , I surely cherish 'dad's axe.

This raises a puzzle that has been spoken of since ancient Greece, at least. The Athenians who used to debate it used as their example a ship that they had in the harbor, supposedly the same one that Theseus himself used on his voyage to defeat the Minotaur and save the Athenian youths from being sacrificed. Every part of the ship had been replaced over the centuries (as with our own USS Constitution), but had been done so in such a way as to recreate the old piece as faithfully as before. Annually this ship sailed to the island of Delos for a ritual festival celebrating, among other things, Theseus' salvation of Athens.

The ship plays an important role in the history of philosophy for another reason. It was because the garlands for this annual voyage had been put on the ship before the conclusion of Socrates' trial that he was not executed until the entire voyage was completed. The laws of Athens did not permit executions during this sacred festival, which began when the garlands were displayed on the ship, and did not conclude until the ship had returned from Delos. For that reason, Socrates was kept in prison for quite some time. If Plato is right, it was a very fertile time for Socrates' discourse with his students; or possibly, it was the point at which Plato realized he needed to start writing some of this stuff down.

Socrates himself wrote nothing down. He doesn't seem to have cared for the written word, apparently because he thought of the written word as dead. What he wanted (as professor Gregory Nagy of Harvard puts it) was the life of the living word: he wanted the arguments to live in the minds and speech of his students, who would carry them forth and continue to debate these high questions of the soul, the nature of the world, the nature of mathematical objects, of virtues, and other good things. Plato met him halfway by writing them down, but in a form that preserves the structure of a dialogue between people trying to figure it out. This is why Plato reads so differently from Aristotle, who gives you the old arguments but then explains his position on them clearly. Most of the time Socrates in Plato's works ends with an admission that he hasn't quite got the whole answer, but wouldn't it be nice to start fresh there again some time?

One of the last questions he takes up is the question of the nature of the soul, and he proposes an idea very similar to my own -- it occurs to me now that the chief difference between them is accidental, because my idea of it was available to me because we have different technologies to use as analogues for how it might work. His model is a lyre -- which produces a harmony -- and mine is a technology like a radio or television, which can be tuned differently so as to receive different signals. I think that may even answer at least some of the problems he raises for the harmonic model, though it leaves open the question of what is producing the signal that can be received by a properly tuned body.

Is that an answer to the problem of the ax or the ship? It seems to me it is. In fact, it happens all the time to us: every day, we eat food, from which our body takes elements and makes itself new again. Over time every part of you is replaced. We have no problem saying that it is the same you, do we? We do this with animate rather than inanimate objects because they have a soul: an organizing activity, I mean, which itself is doing the constant work of rebuilding and maintaining itself. The ship doesn't have a soul, but it has an organizing activity, which is found in its maker and maintainers. As long as we continue to remake the ship, it is the same ship.

But what if we stop? Can we rebuild the Constitution once it is gone? To say that is to say that if we should die, but some future being should remake our body in such a way that it was again tuned to receive our soul, then we would live again. That happens to be the orthodox position on the resurrection of the body, as a matter of fact, but is it true? Or would we necessarily be different, and not the same, in the way that a new Constitution would be a different ship?

In Which Monty Python Proves That Washington Irving Was Responsible For The Idea That Medievals Belived The World Was Flat

No, really. He has trouble getting started, but Terry Jones knows his stuff.

"The Blip"

You probably saw the hook for this on InstaPundit yesterday, but I finally had a little time this morning to read past it to the responses and counterarguments later in the piece. That's the part that's worth reading, because the optimist case is almost as bleak as the hook. The problem is one we often have discussed here: technology continues to improve, and we are learning to do amazing new things, but they aren't likely to produce jobs for people. They're likely to produce jobs for robots. Yet if they are going to provide goods and services that are economically viable, people have to be able to afford to buy the goods and the services.

They don't talk about biotech, which is what I would have thought the optimist's case would revolve around. People will pay for biotech if they can, because it is literally about life and death. So there's a potential for very robust, strong economic growth even with an aging society -- provided that the aging (and, ideally, everyone else) can afford to pay for the evolving goods and services. Standards of living may rise more in terms of health and longevity than in moving from ice boxes to refrigerators, but that still represents a huge potential for improvement.

If, that is, the market will bear the cost of the innovations at an adequate rate. It will, if it can, because the people in the market will absolutely want the good. The question is whether, or rather just how, we make sure that they can themselves be wealthy enough to afford to constitute a market that will bear the costs.

The Bee Plague

Alas, it may not be a simple thing to fix.

The ewww factor

From Jim Geraghty:

I suppose I should give some credit where it's due; some prominent women Democrats in California have finally awoken and recognized that A) the number of accusations against Filner is reaching critical mass, as are his increasingly lame and implausible excuses ("I'm just a big hugger!") and B) their double standard was getting glaring enough for even low-information voters to notice.  Had Filner been a Republican, he would already be at least as well-known as Todd Akin, with his face on the cover of Time magazine under the headline: "PARTY OF CREEPS:  WHY THE GOP'S PROBLEMS WITH WOMEN KEEP GETTING WORSE."

Dianne Feinstein adds, "[Weiner and Filner] have both admitted they need therapy. I think maybe that therapy could better be accomplished in private."  Geraghty "marvel[s] at how Weiner can make even the most basic statements exponentially creepier":

"I don't believe I had any more than three," he said when asked at a press conference how many relationships since his resignation were sexual in nature.

Standing Your Ground and Manhood

For the last couple of weeks, some of my liberal friends have been on a tirade against Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws. They are following the lead of the liberal press, about which more in a moment, and although my friends are thoughtful people the press normally is not. Thus we've seen some stunningly bad arguments fielded, which can be supported in the sense that you can send me a link to an article that makes the claim. It is only that the claims don't hold up.

Of course the leading wrong claim is the idea that the Zimmerman verdict had something to do with Florida's SYG law, when in fact the defense didn't reference the law and explicitly waived the pre-trial SYG hearing to which they were entitled if they'd care to make a claim under the law.

Equally wrong is the idea that the law is "new," a pure innovation of conservative gun rights advocates. Nothing could be farther from the truth. When friends suggest to me that Georgia should "repeal" the SYG law, I point out that this would accomplish exactly nothing, because our SYG statute merely codified what has always been the law in Georgia, as determined in over two hundred years of case law precedent (also known as common law). Even the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has to admit to this tradition since the Georgia State Supreme Court decided in its favor in 1898, three years after the US Supreme Court did likewise in an unrelated case (Beard v. the United States, which we will come back to momentarily, but for now note that this was not the last time SCOTUS endorsed it). The only thing that repealing the 2006 statute would accomplish would be to make the law harder to understand, as citizens would have to learn how to read case law instead of just looking up the legal standard in the Official Code of Georgia, Annotated.

All these laws about self defense are very old, as should not be surprising, and they all have roots in English law. The roots of those states that impose a duty to retreat are in the laws relating to the English peasantry, whose members were not allowed to defend themselves lawfully if they had other options.

The real root of "Stand Your Ground" isn't in self defense at all, but in the right of the citizen -- like that of the feudal English nobility -- to uphold the common peace and lawful order. It is related to the power to make a citizen's arrest. The real idea here is that you don't have to retreat from unlawful violence, but may meet it and stop it. You can't stop crime if you have to run from it. You can't protect a woman being raped, or a man being robbed, if you are required to retreat as soon as the criminal turns the force against you. You have the right to stop the crime that is hurting them. You likewise have the right to do so if you are the one being raped or robbed. A citizen has that power to confront the wicked and defend the law, as a knight had it. It is your duty as much as it is your right to do what you can to uphold the common peace and lawful order.

You may not be punished at law for doing your duty. That's what really underlies all of this, the same ascent of rights from the feudal bargain that also underlies almost all of the rest of the rights that the Founders secured for us, which were first secured to the knighthood at Runnymede and have since been extended to all free men.

Those of you who have been reading Cassandra's site for a very long time may remember this early conversation, eight years ago this month.

Q: What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate?

A: That a free man must give more attention to his duty than his rights; and that the most important duty, and the most important right, is to uphold the common peace. We must unlearn the notion that enforcing the law is the goverment's job, or that it is first and foremost "police work." The opposite is true, and has always been true in the West: it is the duty of the free citizen. The police are hired to assist us by being easy to call to our aid, and by patrolling to keep an eye on areas not often traveled by honest citizens. But it is our duty first.

The law is actually quite clear on this point: the police have what is called a "general" duty to provide protection for the community, but are never liable for a failure to render aid to a citizen in a specific case. There was a USSC case about that this week, which simply reasserted the old principle. The individual, however, certainly can be brought before the court if he simply ignored a crime or tragedy in progress. The case could be civil, or it could be criminal under several statutes: failure to render aid is an offense in cases of traffic accidents, for example; one could be charged as an accessory after the fact in some cases, and there are other ways in which you are liable as well.

The more citizens who take seriously the notion of being part of the law, themselves, the smaller the area in which criminals can operate. The more of us who become engaged in the performance of that duty, the more capable we will be of restraining the goverment's liberty-threatening expansion, which is always at its most dangerous when it claims to be protecting us. If we would be free men, we must protect ourselves.

By coincidence, this is also a national security issue. I've been talking a lot about 4th Generation Warfare at 4th Rail and elsewhere. One of the key problems of 4gen war is that the enemy blurs the line between civilian and military to the point that it can even vanish -- as in Iraq, where the citizens are now the primary target of the enemy, and must therefore become capable of recognizing and responding to the enemy because they will be the only force in readiness available to protect the common peace. This was true on 9/11, too, when the citizens on the one airplane realized that they alone could rise up to smite the terrorists. Because terrorists choose to strike when police and soldiers are not around, all of us must be ready to do our duty to the common peace at a moment's notice, to the best of our ability. The more we are able to do so, the stronger our nation will be against 4gen threats of any kind -- and the less we'll need Patriot! Acts, intrusive counterintelligence agencies, FBI spies in our own society, and the like.

Q: What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat?

Grim: Obviously, the converse: the notion that only government officials should be armed or trained in arms. A common argument against that is that this road has so often led to genocide or democide, and that is true. But even in cases when it does not, it leads to an unfree citizenry -- either because they end up surrendering their privacy to the point of surrendering liberty (see Mark Steyn's recent article on Britain considering a ban on the wearing of hoods or hats in public, because it interferes with government cameras ability to spy out criminals), or because they become incapable of defending their liberty even when they would.

If decent people can and will stand up and fight, each and every one, neither criminal organizations nor terrorists nor enemy armies pose any threat to our liberty -- and our government poses much less of one. If we can't, or won't, all of these threats magnify out of measure.

I might answer those questions differently now, but not because I've changed my mind on these points. It's only that I pay more attention to metaphysics than I used to, and less to political philosophy. Nevertheless, it remains a critical field. There are a thousand years of gains here to be defended. Stand your ground.

--

Having said all of that, Cassandra sends me this article from Dr. Stanley Fish, writing in the New York Times. Dr. Fish is actually on to something, which is that he recognizes the view of manhood and duty in play. The problem is simply that he thinks it is a construct of Westerns like Shane. What he doesn't realize is how much Shane was an outgrowth of an earlier heroic tradition: except for a few accidents of weaponry and costume, it reads exactly like large swathes of the Prose Lancelot or Le Morte Darthur.

But that there is at play a view of manhood and its duties is exactly correct. In the ruling Beard v. the United States, the Supreme Court ruled that "no true man" could be obligated by law to retreat when his wife was under attack by armed intruders on his own property. That's exactly right. No true man can be obligated to retreat from a criminal who is raping a woman, should the criminal turn a weapon on him instead. The law should not be constructed so that any conscientious and dutiful man must violate it. That is not a reasonable or a rational standard for the law, even if you are hotly opposed to the idea of men as heroes.

Why aren't banks lending?

Why, that is, apart from the puzzling fact that they don't act as though they were in business to help people realize the power of their dreams?  Noahpinion dismantles the conventional wisdom that quantitative easement should be inducing banks to lend, spurring inflation, and driving down the unemployment rate.

I always assumed that the purpose of QE was to permit everyone to continue lying to themselves so we wouldn't have to confront the impact of deficit spending and entitlements.  I can't say I'm surprised it's not whittling away at unemployment.

For QE and Krugman fans, though, here's a thoughtful piece on why Pittsburgh is recovering while Detroit is rotting.  It turns out the problem in Detroit is sprawl.  I think "sprawl" here means the incomprehensible flight of job-creators from a rotting city.  If only there were some way to force them to stay.

H/t RWCG.

Ghost towns

What is the purpose of a city?  The Sultan of Knish's analysis of Detroit is interesting, but in some ways I prefer the take of his most recent commenter:

Cities fundamentally exist, and always have, to facilitate exchange among groups and individuals.  Geography plays an important part to where a city exists. 

Among other reasons, cities go away when either their geographical location loses its importance or when some important part of what was previously exchanged goes away or becomes much less important. 

Once established, city government exists primarily to improve the possibility of secure exchange.  That would include public safety and transport (roads and streets, wharves, warehousing, etc).  Anything beyond that is gravy. 

Once there is a reasonable service base of security and transport those who make regular, routine exchanges tend to move their families in, provided that the city is seen as "a good place to live." 

. . . Ancient trade cities have vanished, the American West is full of ghost towns based originally on mining, and the upper plains are emptying out due to having fewer farmers. 

When an important part of the echange goes away, the city had better find something to replace or go away, too.

Instead, Detroit seems to think it can survive as a P.O. box for the receipt of welfare checks.

We're not smart enough

The NSA would love to comply with FOIA requests, but it's embarrassed to admit it doesn't have the technical expertise to search its own files.

I'll bet there are 14-year-olds who could figure it out if it were, you know, important to succeed.

Is it safe?

Kevin D. Williamson explains why he thinks conservative rhetoric falls flat with many voters:

Democrats are not buying black votes with welfare benefits.  Democrats appeal to blacks, to other minority groups, and — most significant — to women with rhetoric and policies that promise the mitigation of risk.  (Never mind that these policies don’t work — voters never sort that out.)  Conservatives routinely generalize our own economic confidence, assuming that it is shared by the general public, with catastrophic political consequences.  The health-care debate represented the most notable instance of this faulty assumption in recent years; every Republican politician who could get near a microphone was harrumphing about how we had the greatest health-care system in the world, but they all failed to appreciate the anxiety inherent in being tied to an employer-based insurance plan during times of economic uncertainty.  (In the 21st century, all times are times of economic uncertainty.)

Security and Hope

This is a great story all the way around. I've often wondered if we really need the security levels for high-level leaders that we invoke for them. It's true that there's a danger in rolling down your window, or getting out with the crowd, but there's also a very great good to be had from remaining one of the people. Perhaps sometimes it's worth running the hazard, in order to have the good.

Duty to retreat

From a commenter on Rich Lowry's article about Detroit:

About time somebody just laid it out about Detroit. I've seen Lefties try to blame it on conservatives, free trade, and "white flight".  Of these, only white flight comes the closest, but they wrongly attribute it to racism.  White Detroit didn't leave because of skin color differences, it left because of riots.  Crime.  As you say, a murder rate that went from 13 per 100k to 51 per 100k in just 9 years.  I guess that in instances like this, where white people are needed to fund the spoils system and corruption of a Coleman Young, said white people do not have a "duty to retreat" to someplace where they are less likely to be mugged, burgled, vandalized, raped, assaulted or murdered.  Far from having a duty to retreat, in the liberal mind they have an obligation to stay, out of guilt or penance.  Detroit marks one of those rare instances where an entire area was racially gerrymandered in favor of black voters by white voters leaving, and they are despised for it. 

Well, when you lose 60 percent of your population, it behooves you to adjust your spending, services, and pensions to reflect the new reality.  If you continue to spend as if that 60% is still there, eventually you're going to resemble Pyongyang.

Riding the Black Motorcycle

You know I was out riding tonight, and when I stopped and looked at my motorcycle I saw I'd worn the rear tire all the way down to the cloth. I guess I need another new tire. But I find I can't mind it. It's not just that I save the cost of a tire on gasoline, long before the tire is gone.

Maybe five things in life still matter to me. One of them is the free road.

God Save the King to Be

I can't forget the good the Queen has done for us in hour of mourning, nor the brother who walked like a warrior. So of course I must wish the newborn well, all things considered. It turns out he comes from a good family.

Redemption

What does it take to go into a fiery car and save a family? More, if your life is in danger if anyone recognizes you.

But sometimes a man just has to. We won't delve into why he had to do it. It's enough that he did it.

Resistance

Detroit has me thinking about the Weimar Republic.  A recommendation from David Foster:   Defying Hitler.

A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions. . . .  Now that these deliveries suddently ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed.  They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting.  So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation.  They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk.

                  *   *   *

To be precise (the occasion demands precision, because in my opinion it provides the key to the contemporary period of history): it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion.  There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live.  They began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities.  It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.

A couple of Mr. Foster's commenters prefer Diary of a Man in Despair.  Both on order now.  I'm looking to learn from these books how people try, and fail, to prevent the decay of a society into tyranny.

Summer Is A Great Time To Study A New Language

...but choose carefully!

The iKnife

Since Apple doesn't seem to be coming up with anything exciting lately, it's nice to know that others are at work on the next new iThing.  Someone has noticed that the cauterization devices that surgeons use put out a little puff of what only be described as smoke from burning tissue.  That little puff can be run through a mass spectrometer and analyzed; it may permit surgeons to use real-time analysis to guide their scalpels during cancer surgery.

H/t Rocket Science.

Job Creators, Two Arguments

These arguments are rather unlike one another, both in form and content. The first is easy to appreciate, brief and visual; the second takes longer, and although it's quite interesting, it deals with brushstroke versions of higher mathematics. They are both pointed in the same direction. They want a society of flourishing wealth.

The video piece is by a successful entrepreneur named Nick Hanauer, who argues that rich men (like himself) are not the real job creators at all. The last thing a business-owner wants to do is create a job, he says: he does it only when consumer demand forces him to hire on another worker. The real thing that makes for flourishing wealth is consumers, which means that you have to have enough distributed wealth to enable the flourishing.



The second article looks at the same problem -- creating a flourishing of economic activity -- from the perspective of the businesses themselves. How much are we able to understand, with our limited algorithms and processing capacity? Where we see real successes in economic flourishing comes from places where we've had leaps in the math:

ORION’s promise was and is clear: For each mile saved, per driver, per year, UPS saves $30 million. The mathematics required to arrive at some solution to the traveling salesman problem, even if approximate, is also clear. But in trying to apply this mathematics to the real world of deliveries and drivers, UPS managers needed to learn that transportation is as much about people and the unique constraints they impose, as it is about negotiating intersections and time zones. As Jeff Winters put it to me, “on the surface, it should be very easy to come up with an optimized route and give it to the driver, and you’re done. We thought that would take a year.” That was a decade ago....

For one thing, humans are irrational and prone to habit. When those habits are interrupted, interesting things happen.... People are also emotional, and it turns out an unhappy truck driver can be trouble. Modern routing models incorporate whether a truck driver is happy or not—something he may not know about himself. For example, one major trucking company that declined to be named does “predictive analysis” on when drivers are at greater risk of being involved in a crash. Not only does the company have information on how the truck is being driven—speeding, hard-braking events, rapid lane changes—but on the life of the driver. “We actually have built into the model a number of indicators that could be surrogates for dissatisfaction,” said one employee familiar with the program.

The two arguments aren't quite opposed to each other, but there's real tension between them. The first argument suggests that UPS' improvements in efficiency are in some sense harmful: they cut into the wealth of middle-class workers like the drivers and mechanics, in order to maximize concentration of wealth in the corporation. The corporation is of course turning around and re-investing much of that wealth (in projects like ORION), but that kind of investment does little for people outside the highly-educated classes.

A compromise position would be to raise taxes on the stockholders of UPS, but not on the corporation itself. That would leave the corporation with money to invest in its information improvements, while still ensuring consumers with enough wealth to buy whatever products are being efficiently distributed from factories to stores.

But a compromise is probably not wanted, because there are moral principles underlying -- and overriding -- the economic arguments. The unspoken moral principle underlying the first argument is that it's OK to take from the rich and give to the less-rich; some kind of ideal of fairness or common-good makes this something other than theft. The second argument has the unspoken moral principle that the people at UPS are working very hard to earn that $30M savings. It's their hard work that is making this possible, and it is very hard work involving the best minds and the fastest computers we know how to make. Naturally they are entitled to keep what they earn by the sweat of their brow, aren't they?

We have a fundamental disagreement on the moral principles, which means we cannot even begin to agree about what to do with the practical questions. There's some sense in which it is obviously true that you need consumers to have a consumer economy, and the first author's talk of a feedback loop between consumers and business is really right. It's likewise true that UPS is making new jobs, and better ones, in part out of the destruction of old jobs. But their efficiency is reflected in part in lower prices, which could drive job creation among small businesses that couldn't afford higher structural prices.

Could we come to a compromise? Yes; the two positions are not logically incompatible. Ought we to? People on both sides of the debate are nearly certain to answer, "No." Whether that preference for morality over wealth is praiseworthy or blameworthy, it is in fact the only point of agreement that unites us.

Avicenna's Heart Medicine

If any of you are interested in the subject of medieval medicine, you may find the journal article on Avicenna's cardiology to be fun reading.

The mentioned concept is now recognized as “drug targeting” in current medicinal sciences and is an important challenge and field of research in pharmacy. Drug targeting has its starting point just a few decades ago. whereas Avicenna considered the strategy 1000 year ago.

One of the assumptions we tend to make is that we don't need to go back to the old thinkers, at least on scientific or technical issues, because we've incorporated their learning into our own superior work. However, it's usually true that we haven't fully incorporated everything -- there remain important models and ways of thought that didn't get picked up and carried along, but which are there waiting for us to simply rediscover. It's still worth reading Avicenna on medicine, as it's still worth reading Abelard on formal logic and Plato on almost everything.

Political Electrons

A bit ago, I published on these pages an intimation of a breakthrough in quantum physics concerning the negative mass of electrons. 

Maybe not so breakthrough.  Perhaps the empirically observed impact of electrons on my mower battery flows from something else.  Herewith more on my direct observations of electron behavior and my mower's battery.

First, my initial observation, that my battery, discharging (apparently) a large number of electrons over the course of a mowing, gains significant weight, is confirmed.

Second, this time, associated with the tall and wet nature of my grass for this mowing, my battery failed to complete the task, and I had to terminate until the battery is recharged.

Plainly, the weight gain is not due to the loss of negative-mass electrons; it's due to accumulation of potfuls of normal-mass electrons.  But rather than contributing to improving the lot of the remaining electrons in the now resource-depleted battery by replenishing the battery and thereby alleviating the poverty of the electrons' environment, the accumulating electrons just sit around and commiserate with their less fortunate fellows while doing nothing at all constructive for their lot.

Just like Democrats.

Eric Hines

Detroit problem? Nothing to it

Holman Jenkins explains how the Detroit bankruptcy is racist.

Rand & Business

A site called "DeadState" -- I am not familiar with it before today -- has a post claiming that Sears was destroyed because of a CEO who decided to run it according to what he saw as Ayn Rand's principles. I'm not sure they prove their case, though. It sounds like it may be at least as true that trying to run a real business according to Wall Street principles doesn't work: Wall Street may be good at obtaining investment for businesses, and it is certainly good at digesting and re-investing resources tied up in failing businesses. It may not be very good at the long-term outlook required to sustain a successful business.

In 1977, 95 percent of distributions to shareholders came in the form of dividend payments. Today, more than half of the cash returned to shareholders of S&P 500 companies comes from buybacks instead of dividends.

Fortune magazine, in a story about what happens when Wall Street jumps into the retail business, reports that under Lampert, Sears has gone on a stock buyback spree. Between 2005 and 2011, he took what was once the company’s strong cash flow and spent $6.1 billion of it on stock buybacks. During the same time period, only $3.6 billion was spent at Sears on capital improvements. Lampert told investors that upgrades and new stores were not an “efficient” use of capital.

Sounds like a decision that focused on the stock position rather than the stores -- killing the goose that lays the golden egg, as it were.

He Was A Man You Ought To Have Known

In the last good movie but one, A Knight's Tale, a poor herald announces one of the competitors to the joust.

My Lord, the Count Adehmar, Son of Phillip DeVitry, son of Gilles... er... Master of the Free Companies, defender of his enormous manhood, a shining example of chivalry and champagne.

But the father of the man he announced was a real man, one worthy of your knowledge.

He, said to be the greatest philosopher of his age, wrote this:



Most likely he wasn't the greatest philosopher of that age, which produced many great names. But what have you done?

Biography and Philosophy, or, Action and Thought

Is it important to consider the facts of the life of a man, or just what he said and did? Or perhaps, just what he did: Facta non verba, as Eric Blair sometimes phrases it?

The question is raised in reference to Derrida, but with a passing reference to Aristotle, whom Heidegger described thus: "He was born. He thought. He died." The point is that what he thought is divorced from time and space, and to a large degree it really is: we can evaluate him and his thoughts today, and we will in doing so find them highly relevant to our very different world.

Yet that is not the only model from the ancient world. Socrates is the clear counterexample. Plato took pains to establish that he had credentials to speak on matters of virtue such as courage, as he does in the Laches. Hannah Arendt, in the last century, singled Socrates out for special praise among philosophers because he was a man who not only contemplated but did.

What do you think?

Glad I moved away

H/t Eric Kayne Photography.

Genetics and Photography

Now here's an interesting photo essay.

Questions no one should be asking

If Detroit files the inevitable bankruptcy, how in the world will it ever get back into a position to borrow massively again in the future?

Its population has shrunk from 2 million to 700,000.  It has no economic base.  Its own inhabitants are burning it down much faster than it could be rebuilt even assuming someone were trying to rebuild it.  Detroit's remaining inhabitants are refugees who just don't know it yet.

"I still don't understand what Trayvon Martin was supposed to do."

The Crimson Reach has a suggestion:  don't punch a stranger on the street.  It's not necessary to run away.  Stand your ground, if you like.  Call 911 with that phone you've been chattering into all evening.  Just don't punch the stranger, straddle him, and pound his head into the pavement.  Almost anything but that, and your chances of surviving a human contact in Racist America are excellent.

Even if you suspect he's a gay man trolling for partners, and that makes you mad.

Through the looking glass

The President asserts executive authority he doesn't have to alter the terms of a bill that Congress passed, and that he himself signed into law.  The House proposes a new bill to achieve exactly the same alteration (this time through incontestably legal means), and what does the President do?

Obviously, he threatens to veto it.

The bill, of course, is Obamacare (hey, even Harry Reid calls it that now), while the amendatory bill renders into constitutionally acceptable form the President's illegal unilateral attempt to delay the employer mandate for a year.

Nor is that all the House is up to today:  it's also considering a companion bill to delay the individual mandate for the same period.  House Democrats are working furiously to figure out how to avoid the consequences of voting either way on either bill.

Fantasy football on trial

The trial of the year for finance nerds isn't Zimmerman, it's the SEC vs. Fabrice Tourre, the young ex-Goldman Sachs rising star who had the misfortune to have used metaphors in emails to his girlfriend that were as vivid and comprehensible as the subject matter of his financial work was dull and impenetrable.

Before the Great Crash, Goldman not only traded in mortgage-backed securities but in investment vehicles called "synthetic" securities.  The securities were called "collateralized debt obligations" or CDOs, an unhelpful name that actually refers to nothing more complicated than a grab-bag of jillions of ordinary mortgages.  Packaging mortgages together like this is called "securitization," and it has the advantage of converting a pile of unique, individual, hard-to-trade mortgages into something homogeneous that can be split into standardized pieces that are more easily priced and sold.  As this helpful site explains, it's like turning irregular piles of meat and mystery bits into standardized link sausages.

So what's a "synthetic" CDO?  It bears the same relationship to an actual CDO that fantasy football bears to actual football players.  It's a bet on the performance of a list of real CDOs.   The gamblers don't buy the CDOs themselves; they simply bet on whether the whole list will increase or decrease in value.  Like every bet, it requires matching up two willing participants:  one to bet on one result, and one to bet on the opposite.

Tourre's alleged crime (actual a civil violation, which exposes him to fines and sanctions but not jail time) was to ask a hedge-fund trader to participate in the selection of the mortgage securities on which the synthetic-CDO participants would place their bets, and then fail to disclose the trader's role in the prospectus given to potential bettors.  To make matters worse, the trader then placed his own bet on the synthetic CDO--gambling that they would decrease in value--and won big time.  (Goldman itself bet on an increase in value and lost.)

It's never a good idea to fail to disclose the role of anyone involved in a deal, but I'm having real difficulty with the harm-causation theory here.  I think the idea is that the trader was particularly good at spotting which mortgages were most likely to fail, which gave him an unfair advantage; other bettors might have been unwilling to place their own bets--or might have insisted on betting the opposite way--if they had known of his involvement and his bearish stance.  On the other hand, to use the fantasy-football analogy, this was like asking a skillful scout or industry analyst to choose fantasy league players, and then allowing him to bet that the team would end up in the cellar.  Is that unfair to other bettors?  Should the other bettors be told who chose the players to include in the league, and that he intended to bet that those players would blow their season?  It's not as though he has any power to affect their games.  It's only a question of whether he's better than most at guessing how they'll play.  Perhaps to be more precise, it's a worry that he has inside knowledge of which players have been hiding an incipient knee injury or drug problem.

If you're having trouble following this scenario, you're not alone.  Apparently the judge, jury, lawyers, and witnesses are confused, too.  The SEC started out with a reasonably helpful analogy to a ship that takes on water and then sinks.  The equity investors are in the bilges.  Mezzanine investors are in steerage.  First-class passengers have the nice cabins with portholes.  When the water pours in, equity is submerged first, but if things get bad enough they are soon joined in their misery by mezzanine investors and even the masters of the universe sunning in their deck chairs.  Eventually the whole ship plunges to Davy Jones's Locker.  But then the judge, trying to be helpful, butted in with the opposite aquatic metaphor, a "waterfall."  In complex financial deals, the "waterfall" or "cascade" refers to the detailed directions for the application of income streams.  Favored investors get the first dollars, followed by junior debt, and equity gets whatever is left over.  This, of course, is the exact reverse of the doomed-ship scenario.  In the midst of this confusion, the judge reportedly asked why the prosecution's first witness had to go over the 90 minutes originally slated for his testimony, especially in view of the pole-axed expressions of the jurors.

I'm no litigation ace--much more of a back-office toiler--but even I know it's a bad idea to bore the beans out of the trier of fact.  One way or another, the prosecution and the defense had better find a way to connect all this law and evidence to something the jurors can evaluate in their guts.  The prosecution starts with an advantage, of course:  they can just keep repeating "rich people bad."  I'm guessing that the defense's best hope is for the presence of some sophisticated gamblers in the jury box.

H/t Rhymes with Cars & Girls

Fear The Gray Chili

I was amused to see the Daily Caller invoking the lair of the chili pepper. RateMyProfessors is a social media site that allows students to post comments and ratings on professors and teaching assistants at their various colleges. One of the ratings students apparently give is whether the professor is hot or not. The hot ones get red chili peppers by their ratings.

It's also worth viewing the videos at the Professors Strike Back page. Some of them are humorless, but not all.

UPDATE: "I don't like to think of myself as cruel and mean..."

Get More:
www.mtvu.com

Math is harrrrrd

An amusing story about outrage based in math confusion.  How can North Carolina be 39th in wealth and 12th in child poverty?  Ummmmm. . . .

Perhaps even more interesting to me is the dim woman's initial question.  "How can it be legal to have so much poverty in such a wealthy state?" asks the financially comfortable commentator flying home to her comfortable home and job.  Oh, I don't know:  the same way it's legal for you not to have given 90% of your income to those poor kids?  The same reason Massachusetts and Connecticut (fourth and fifth in income and famously liberal) don't voluntarily send foreign aid to North Carolina?

It's a strange way to think about "poverty" and "legality."  It's always someone else's responsibility to help.  Bad, politically incorrect someone elses!  What can account for them?

Salve Regina

'Swords Against Death!', Or, 'Humanities Against the Academy!'

I don't know if they read Fritz Leiber in the English Department, but he was one of the better writers of the last century -- if you like writers who spin a good tale, have deep roots in classical and romantic material, and can build worlds and images that you will not forget. Perhaps it is better if they don't, the Wall Street Journal suggests.

Every other academic subject requires specialized knowledge and a mastery of skills and methods. Literature requires only that you be human. It does not have to be taught any more than dreaming has to be taught. Why does Hector's infant son, Astyanax, cry when he sees his father put on his helmet? All you need to understand that is a heart.

So you see, I am not making a brief against reading the classics of Western literature. Far from it.

Why does Hector's son cry?

Not staying in the car

This teen was part of the solution.

The Problem With Rewarding Novelty in Scholarship

If you want to get hired or tenure, you have to get published. If you want to get published, you need to say something novel. Thus:

No art historian has ever put forward an alchemical interpretation to the representation of St George slaying the dragon...

Indeed, I imagine not.

Less research is needed

In which a health blogger gets dangerously close to putting her finger on what's wrong with climate science, but pulls back and zings several sacred cows in health research instead:

On my first day in (laboratory) research, I was told that if there is a genuine and important phenomenon to be detected, it will become evident after taking no more than six readings from the instrument.   If after ten readings, my supervisor warned, your data have not reached statistical significance, you should [a] ask a different question; [b] design a radically different study; or [c] change the assumptions on which your hypothesis was based.

H/t Rocket Science.

The internal nose

Saturday mornings bring the Not Exactly Rocket Science linkfest.  Some good ones today.  A kidney researcher complained to her advisor about some bad data she was getting from a kidney gene experiment.  It almost seemed as if there were scent receptors in the kidney.

He kind of looked at me for a second, and he was like "Scent receptors in the kidney.  That would be cool though, right?"  At that point we both still thought it was one of those crazy, stupid ideas you laugh about later.

It turns out that we have scent/taste receptors all over our bodies, in the kidney, in the bronchial tubes, in the sinuses, and in fact anywhere it would be helpful to switch a process off or on upon the detection of a particular molecule. It's possible that scent receptors started in our ancestors' internal organs and migrated to the external sensory organs fairly late in the evolutionary process.

A breakdown in one kind of scent receptor may explain why some people have recurrent sinus infections that don't respond to the usual surgical fix.

An Introduction

Some of you know me as the commenter Tom, and please feel free to continue calling me that. Grim invited me to post here as part of working on two projects in particular which might be of interest to the Hall.

The first is solving The Knowledge Problem: We have very short lives, and many demands on our time, both duties and desires; we must make vital decisions about how to spend those lives; we need reliable information to make good decisions. How can we sift through the oceans of conflicting information out there to find the best information for the decisions we need to make? How can we sort reliable information from un? How can we focus information to solve the riddles we face? And how can we  do all this while giving life's many other claims their due as well?

The second project is gaining a fundamental understanding of Aristotle, in which Grim has generously offered to act as tutor. Why Aristotle? Over the last six or eight years I have become convinced that it is impossible to understand the history of the West without at least a basic understanding of The Philosopher's ideas. After Aristotle, the intellectual history of the West is filled with two millennia of attempts to understand, define, modify, challenge, support, extend, apply, and refute his ideas. If we compare intellectual history to a dinner party, not knowing Aristotle leaves you out of the conversation.

I look forward to being part of the crew here, and thanks for inviting me, Grim.

Sum Ting Wong

Apparently the San Francisco local TV news anchors will read anything they see on the teleprompter.

A banana republic without the bananas

David Goldman examines politics in Egypt, noting that

There wasn’t before, there is not now, and there will not be in the future such a thing as democracy in Egypt.  The now-humiliated Muslim Brotherhood is a Nazi-inspired totalitarian party carrying a crescent in place of a swastika.  If Mohamed Morsi had remained in power, he would have turned Egypt into a North Korea on the Nile, a starvation state in which the ruling party rewards the quiescent with a few more calories. . . . .  The will of a people that cannot feed itself has little weight.

So the cash-flush Saudis will turn Egypt into a client state, in order to keep a lid on the Shi'ites.

The Old Orange Flute

It's the 12th of July.

Free thought

Via Maggie's Farm, a couple of good posts about the Asiana crash and the different cultural approaches to technical skill, education, and training.

It's here

Every so often in the history of cinema, a film comes along that probes man's inhumanity to man and muses on the enigmatic silence of God throughout human history.   Such a film eschews easy answers while engaging the audience in sensitive portrayals of ordinary heroes.  Sharknado is that film.  And the trailers are here at last.

It took "Snakes on a Plane" four words to sum up the dramatic premise that Sharknado achieves in one:  live sharks raining down on people.  Cinemaphiles have to reach back to "Mant" ("Half man, half ant:  all terror") for disciplined minimalism on this level.

I have a ban proposal, too

There's got to be a way to ban this kind of idiocy.  I think it involves the ballot box.

The DOE held a public meeting on Energy Conservation Standards Framework for Ceiling Fans and Ceiling Fan Light Kits in Washington D.C. on March 22, 2013, which followed its release of a 100-page Framework Document requesting feedback from members of the ceiling fan industry.  The Framework Document indicates that the DOE could impose a requirement for all ceiling fans to transition from AC motors to DC motors. . . . Although DC motors are more energy efficient and use less wattage on high settings, the cost is four to five times higher compared to AC motors. However, since most people do not run their ceiling fans on a high setting the majority of the time—using either medium or low settings instead—the difference in wattage is insignificant.

Interested readers may recall the War of the Currents between Thomas Edison, a DC enthusiast, and George Westinghouse, who favored AC.

The 20% Experiment

My Alma Mater, Georgia State University, is trying a novel program to try to encourage women to study philosophy. Apparently they have decided that the problem is that they don't get to read enough women:

Starting next year, graduate students teaching introductory-level courses in philosophy at Georgia State, who teach about half of all such sections offered, will use syllabuses that include at least 20 percent women philosophers. That's at least double the number included on most syllabuses for the course at the university. The effort is an extension of preliminary research by Eddy Nahmias, professor of philosophy, and several of his graduate students, Toni Adleberg and Morgan Thompson, into why male and female students enroll in introductory-level courses in similar numbers but women drop out of the discipline in much greater numbers.

There's a real problem with this approach, which is that an introduction course needs to focus on the most important issues in philosophy -- but women authors are not represented among the historically great philosophers. There are some notable 20th century female philosophers (I mentioned Elizabeth Anscombe recently, and we've often talked about Hannah Arendt here), but the 20th century is one of the driest and least important periods in the entire discipline of philosophy (for reasons entirely not the fault of the women, who were often among the most interesting voices). Even in the 20th century, you have to stretch beyond the very top voices to include any women at all (let alone to compose a fifth of your readings from their work). The problem only increases as you move to earlier and more vibrant periods in philosophy.

For an introductory course, then, you can achieve this mark only by harming the students: by denying them the chance to encounter the really great questions, and the most compelling arguments, in order to fill a fifth of their time with lesser-but-importantly-female voices. Generally watering down the content of a course is popular with students, as it is easier for them, but it's harmful to them in the long run.

It would be easier to achieve this mark in higher-level courses, once the introductions are finished. There are a number of interesting women writing today, including L. A. Paul, whose work in metaphysics I totally disagree with but nevertheless respect; and Kathrin Koslicki, whose similar work is really very good, although I think she's wrong about some key questions. You could construct a very interesting course on these metaphysical questions that had even 50% female-generated readings, if it were important to you to do so; indeed, you could do a course that was wholly about contemporary female writers in metaphysics or any other sub-discipline of philosophy.

I'm not sure why you would, though, since the important thing about what they've written is whether or not they are right about it, not whether or not they are female. They're worth reading, if they are, because they have interesting arguments.

Not that they aren't also interesting as people. Koslicki is a skier, and Paul has a black belt. Interesting to be sure, but Socrates was a veteran and Kant was a hypochondriac. That's not the reason you'd include them in a course. It may make it easier for students to connect with them at some level. If the students can't finally connect with them at the particular level of intellect, it won't matter how otherwise drawn to them they may be.

I would think the way to draw women into philosophy would be to engage them with the great problems, and get them excited about wrestling with them. (It might not hurt to suggest, which is actually true, that any university will be especially considerate of a female philosopher who wants a job -- you can be sure the academy is aware of the disparity, and will bend over backwards to help ensure their numbers reflect a devotion to doing something about it.) Engaging them is what will really qualify them to do the work, as it is only someone genuinely engaged with the questions who will perform at the level at which real contributions are made -- the kind of contributions that would justify your inclusion in a class reading list.

That's also the way you'd do best by your female students as students, which is the right way for you to relate to them if you are a professor or a teaching assistant. It is, perhaps, the only way you ought to engage them.

Rules

A comment from a substitute teacher on that same Maggie's Farm post, about two approaches to rules:

I especially noticed the difference in the two middle schools in one district. One was calm and the kids were learning. The other was a madhouse and not much learning was going on.  After a while I saw what was causing the difference. 

One school had a principal who had about a dozen rules, aimed at letting learning happen, and they were rigorously and quickly enforced.  The teachers were supported.  I had a lesson plan for the day [or more] waiting at the desk with all that I'd need. 

The principal was omni-present.  He met the buses arriving and leaving and seem to know all 300 or so students by name.  I never went more than a few minutes in the hallways without seeing him. 

The other school principal had what seemed to be a million rules that were haphazardly enforced if at all.  Teachers, especially subs, were left to hang on their own.  I never saw the principal.  Heck, I don't know whether it was male or female. 

So.  One place dedicated to learning with the expectations set for clearly.  One place dedicated it would seem to being a place to be for a few hours and no one seemed to know why.

It always seemed like a good idea to me to have no more rules than you were genuinely prepared to enforce.

The way home

Many of you may have read the description, widely circulated last week, of the howling chaos that is a class full of black kids in a failed school.  Without ever saying so explicitly, the author seemed to attribute the problem to race, though maybe he really was referring to a subculture, or wasn't trying to think carefully about the difference.

Anyway, it was a depressing piece.  Today at Maggie's Farm they posted another perspective on schoolchildren from an imperiled culture who were doing well in a charter school.  The author also described the experience of similar kids in an Outward Bound program:

Of course, taking 16 kids, many of whom came from troubled homes and whose lives were mostly confined to a few blocks in Brooklyn, into the woods for six weeks produced its share of drama.  Outward Bound crews go through a normal process that starts with a certain formality and descends into homesickness, alienation, irritation, and conflict, before people adapt and bond and shoulder their responsibilities and really get into it, and this course was no exception.  After a few days, one girl decided “this is b***s***” and set out to walk home – about 200 miles.  An instructor walked with her, mile after mile, until she got tired and agreed to go back.  She went on to complete the course, and cried at the graduation because she had to leave her new “family.”

That's my image of a guardian angel.  He won't force you to do what's best, but he'll follow you into hell and be ready to lead you back when you see your mistake.

Some kind of abuse, anyway

After both the prosecution and the defense rested in the Zimmerman trial, the prosecution popped out with its secret strategy:   they asked the court to drop the aggravated assault charges and instruct the jury instead on felony murder (that is, murder committed in the process of a felony).  What's the predicate felony, you ask?  Child abuse, because Trayvon Martin was 17 years old.

Kafkaesque.

Die Seele unbewacht

Perhaps the most beautiful music ever composed, especially the instrumental interlude and conclusion.  Some pipes on this gal, too.



Beim Schlafengehen, Vier Letzte Lieder (3/4)

Nun der Tag mich müd gemacht,
soll mein sehnliches Verlangen freundlich
die gestirnte Nacht wie ein müdes Kind empfangen.
Hände, laßt von allem Tun
Stirn, vergiß du alles Denken,
Alle meine Sinne nun wollen sich in Schlummer senken.

Und die Seele unbewacht
will in freien Flügen schweben, um im Zauberkreis der Nacht
tief und tausendfach zu leben.

                                    Hermann Hesse

Now that I am wearied of the day,
my ardent desire shall happily
receive the starry night like a sleepy child.
Hands, stop all your work.
Brow, forget all your thinking.
All my senses now yearn to sink into slumber.

And my unfettered soul
wishes to soar up freely into night's magic sphere
to live there deeply and thousandfold.

Barry Lyndon music

Douglas got me thinking about Bach:



And this other beautiful music, also used in "Barry Lyndon," which had just about the best movie soundtrack ever:



And this, not from Barry Lyndon, the "Knights' Dance" from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, Nureyev choreography.  Juliet's doting family tells her, "Fun and games are over, honey!  Time to step into the grinding machinery."

Right brain

I feel like posting music and movie clips that speak directly to my right brain and have effects I don't understand at all.



That was Philip Glass's "Opening" performed on the marimba.  It's perfect for that instrument:  simple repeating pairs on notes in each hand.  It sounds complicated only because the right hand is doing triplets over the left hand's doublets.  This composition is buried in the theme music for the under-appreciated movie "Breathless."  In the final scene, the modified Glass piece alternates with Jerry Lee Lewis's "Breathless," followed by the same song performed by "X."



I get exactly the same feeling from "The Piano":

Rest

An unusually well-structured hymn, number 652 ("Rest") in the 1982 Episcopal hymnal, by Frederick Charles Maker, 1844-1927.  Too many hymns have the tune structure a-a-b-a, but not this one:



The harmonies are unexpected, too.

Saint-Saëns

This Saint-Saëns piece is called "Aquarium," but I first heard it without knowing its title, and it always made me think of the scene in one of the Narnia books where Lucy awakens in moonlight and feels that the trees are just about to wake up.  This short film has something of the same feeling.

 

I heard "Aquarium" on the radio coming home this evening and noticed that the announcer pronounced the final "s" in the composer's name.   An internet search suggests that this is a result of the diaresis over the "e" in Saëns.

Belated Fourth

I'm fond of the "Titan" science-fiction trilogy by John Varley.  There is a race of centaurs who communicate in music.  They're puzzled by the human habit of playing the same piece of music over and over in what they consider a frozen form, but at the same time they go ape over some human musicians, particularly John Philip Sousa.  Well, who wouldn't?



Speaking of music, I attended my uncle's memorial service in the old San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio today.  Imagine my enchantment when the very beautiful harp music that was playing while mourners were being seated gave way to a fine mariachi band that led the priest up the aisle.  After the service, which included some thoughtful eulogies by my uncle's son and two of his grandsons, the same mariachi band played another song and led the crowd in a procession down the street (this was in downtown San Antonio near the Alamo) to the building where the reception was being held.   It was like a San Antonio version of a New Orleans funeral.

A fitting send-off for a grand paterfamilias.

Magic & The Occult in Islam

I haven't had a chance to watch this yet, but it comes well-recommended.

Ready To Die

Tex has been throwing us some good stuff. I think I like this popular trend against the law. It's old school for moonshine country, as some of them seem to realize. It's also past the racial divide, which is nice for those of us who have fought together with brothers across the color line. Who still cares about that? Some. Not us.



'Pistol Packin' Papa' is a clear play off the 1943 hit "Pistol Packin' Mama," which you can hear here:



The law lacks defenders among those who are supposed to be its chief champions, except when it's rhetorically convenient. Doubtless that's one reason support for the law as such is wearing away.

As a not-so-serious part of their ongoing effort to get rid of Obamacare, House Republicans in May started a Twitter fight they called #ObamacareInThreeWords. Rep. Darrell Issa got things started with a tweet that said simply, "Serious Sticker Shock." Rep. Michele Bachmann added "IRS In Charge." Sen. Richard Burr tossed in "Huge Train Wreck."

Democrats hit back, weakly, with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's "Good for America" and Rep. Gregory Meeks' "What America Needs." And then the White House stepped in with a killer line: "It's. The. Law." The tweet was accompanied by a photo of the president's signature on the Affordable Care Act, dated March 23, 2010.

Case closed: What part of "It's. The. Law" don't you understand? Just to add emphasis, in early June President Obama dismissed concerns that the national health care startup was not going well. "This is the way the law was designed to work," he told an audience in California. "Since everyone's saying how it's not going to happen, I think it's important for us to recognize and acknowledge that this is working the way it's supposed to."

Now, however, it appears the administration's bravado was all for show. At the same time Obama was expressing great confidence, White House officials were secretly meeting with representatives of big business to discuss ways to postpone enforcement of parts of the new law. And on Tuesday the White House announced that the employer mandate - sometimes described as a "crucial" element of Obamacare - will be delayed to 2015 from its scheduled start on Jan. 1, 2014.

Extra points if you can relate the discussion to Plato's Statesman. Turns out that Plato was interested in the very same questions. It's only the last third of the dialogue, if you want to read it and haven't.

Not a satire

Wish it were.

The Rains of Amicalola

Amicalola Falls is a special place for me: the playground of my youth, the place where I was married, the place of testing myself by running the seven hundred steps in the days before I went to war. It is impressive to see how the recent heavy rains have affected it.