Frivolous Science

This may be old hat to those of you with rugrats in the house. You can make a non-Newtonian fluid with a starch suspension, such as a mixture of a little less than 2 parts cornstarch to one part water, a/k/a "oobleck" from the Dr. Seuss story. (If you can add a little fluorescent food coloring to it, so much the better in the oogliness department.) It becomes more viscous when subjected to pressure, which means, among other things, that you'll sink in it like quicksand unless you run over it quickly:

Put it on top of a speaker, and it will form writhing tendrils.

Useful information gleaned from comments sections: if your little brother puts it in your hair, just add some vegetable oil, and it will slither right off.

Wandering in random YouTube-association land, I found a new use for liquid nitrogen. When I was a kid hanging out with my dad at work, he used to get me out of his hair by giving me some to play with. He produced amusing effects by gargling it (just don't swallow). I wish I'd realized back then what it looked like when you poured it on top of water:

I think the kid was risking asphyxiation when he swam into the thick cloud.

For extra science fun, type in "Is it a good idea to microwave . . . " on YouTube.

More Things We Wish the Government Would Please Not Do

You might think that T99's post, in which we learned about the Fed 'servicing' the needs of the banks, represents the low point of today's news about the functioning of our government. Perhaps it does; but there is, at least, some competition for the honor.

[A]gents, primarily with the Drug Enforcement Administration, have handled shipments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal cash across borders, those officials said, to identify how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and, most important, who their leaders are.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars?  That's not so bad....

[T]he former officials said that federal law enforcement agencies had to seek Justice Department approval to launder amounts greater than $10 million in any single operation. 

Wait, what?  You said "hundreds of thousands."  What happened to "hundreds of thousands"?  How'd we get to $10 million?

But they said that the cap was treated more as a guideline than a rule, and that it had been waived on many occasions....

So, on many occasions, they waived the rule limiting drug money laundering to not more than $10 million?

Well, at least if they're tracking that kind of money, it must be a highly effective operation.

So far there are few signs that following the money has disrupted the cartels’ operations, and little evidence that Mexican drug traffickers are feeling any serious financial pain.

*Sigh.*

We Must Have Missed a Decimal Point

So you thought it was a lot when TARP cost us $700 billion, right? Bloomberg News has pried information out the Fed via Freedom of Information Act requests, revealing that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke actually pumped as much as $7.77 trillion into the banking system. When these guys say they're going to prevent another Lehman on their watch "at any cost," they're not kidding: that's more than half the gross national product.

J.P. Morgan tapped the Fed's Term Auction Facility for more than half the bank's cash holdings. "The six biggest U.S. banks, which received $160 billion of TARP funds, borrowed as much as $460 billion from the Fed.

Ouija Science

Maggie's Farm sent me to a list of "Eight Warning Signs for Junk Science," including:

1. Science by press release.
2. Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of eschatological panic (“a terrible catastrophe looms over us if theory X is true, therefore we cannot risk disbelieving it”).
3. Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of moral panic (“only bad/sinful/uncaring people disbelieve theory X”).
4. Consignment of failed predictions to the memory hole (also known as "moving the goal posts").
5. Computer models replete with bugger factors that aren’t causally justified (if you don’t have a generative account that makes falsifiable predictions, you’re not doing science, you’re doing numerology.
6. Convenience (if a ‘scientific’ theory seems tailor-made for the needs of politicians or advocacy organizations, it probably has been).
7. Bad reps (past purveyers of junk science do not change their spots).
8. Refusal to make primary data sets available for inspection.

The comments section delivered several valuable similar links: Seven Warning Signs of Quack Science, Six Symptoms of Pathological Science (includes "criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses made up on the spur of the moment"), and Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough Is Wrong. I didn't understand most of that last one, but I enjoyed the author's conclusion that these are only warning signs, not disproofs. Even if a paper fails most or all of these tests, he cautions,"there might be nothing left to do except to roll up your sleeves, brew some coffee, and tell your graduate student to read the paper and report back to you."

One of the comments quoted this observation by my hero, Richard Feynman (in "Cargo Cult Science"): "When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition." His advice on the occasion of the Challenger disaster is apropos as well: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

Against the Counter-Thesis

Dad29 linked to a post on a longstanding historical debate on whether Islam, or internal dissolution, destroyed Western Roman civilization.  

With respect to the fact that the "counter-thesis" has been defended by some good historians over many years, I think we can say with some confidence that the counter-thesis is not correct.  Roman civilization in Britain, for example, was destroyed by pagan Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes.  By the time of Charlemagne, they had been re-Christianized chiefly by Gaelic monks who came from Ireland to what is now Scotland, and from Scotland south into the Germanic lands.

These Gaelic monks were never part of Roman civilization:  although the Romans appeared poised to invade Ireland from Chester, where they built a fortress for a legion ("Deva Victrix"), they did not follow through; and of course what is now Scotland was at the time mostly held by another civilization, the now-extinct Picts, who were beyond Hadrian's wall.  The Gaels (called "Scotti" by the Romans) had only begun to establish some footholds in what is now Scotland; even Dal Riada was not established until after 500 AD.

The collapse of Roman civilization in Britain happened before Mohammed was born; by the time he was alive, in fact, it was all over.

Islam may have been responsible for a similar destruction in Spain especially.  If the Saxons did it elsewhere, though, there should be a unifying cause that permitted both effects.  That will be found (I think) in the period of the barracks emperors; the consequent gutting of the native Roman military, and the civic culture that had produced it; and the rise of Germanic mercenary forces to supplant native-Roman ones, out of which grew Charlemagne's war band (and the Anglo-Saxon ruling system as well).

To put this in Aristotelian terms, Islam can only claim to be the efficient cause of the destruction of part of the Western Roman world.  The formal cause was the internal dissolution, which is universal to the areas affected by the various invasions.  

The final cause?  If we still believe in final causes in history, it would have to be something like the divine plan:  a will that there should be a Charlemagne, or a King Arthur.  Most Western thinkers today, however, don't believe in final causes in history anymore:  the idea has been discredited by Marxism (which argued for the inevitable collapse of capitalism from something like a 'final cause in the arc of history').

A Loving Portrait of Queen Victoria

The Telegraph insists on reading this in the base terms to which the age has become accustomed, but this is really a nice bit of portraiture.  Look at how the painter managed to capture the liquidity of the eyes, for example:  also the use of light, which shines on the eyes and nose at the correct angles to have come from a single source.

Photography spoils us:  anyone can get those details right with a digital camera and a little practice.  To have done it with oils on canvas is the mark of a craftsman.

Sex and Strategy

I don't feel we've spent enough time this week waging the war between men and women. The fertile comments section over at Megan McArdle's place sent me to a 2007 talk by Roy Baumeister engaging in the ever-popular game of using evolutionary biology to explain why men are from Mars and women from Venus. ("But that's no reason why they cain't be friends.") One of his more widely publicized explanations derived from 2004 research suggesting that our ancestral breeding population included twice as many women as men. In other words, women were twice as likely to have surviving progeny as men, so the reproductive competition was a game with much greater risks and rewards for men, who tended either to produce a lot more children than average or to suffer the extinction of their bloodline.

Baumeister concludes that this gender difference produced men who were willing to bet it all on risky ventures like discovering the New World, while women were content to stick with the status quo. He produces evidence that, although men and women may vary only slightly in their average capabilities in many areas, the bell curve is flatter for men, so the "tails" on both the negative and positive ends are greater for men. More geniuses, but more morons; more world leaders, but more homeless or incarcerated men. He believes this pattern can be explained by the effect of natural selection on the higher riskiness of male reproduction.

Myself, I wonder if you couldn't as easily argue that men, exposed to the risk of not reproducing at all, would be fiercely conservative and protective of their few opportunities, while women, virtually assured of reproducing no matter what, would be willing to throw caution to the wind and experiment. That's the problem with a lot of evolutionary biology, isn't it? It's fun to spot the patterns and try to reduce correlation to causation, but without a genetic mechanism it's hard to find a definitive answer. For instance, it's one thing to say that natural selection operated differently on men and women, and another to say that men ended up with the genes that worked well for men, while women ended up with the genes that worked well for women. In reality, of course, men pass their genes down to children of both sex, as do women. Unless you can tie a male trait to the Y-chromosome, or a female trait to the absence of the Y-chromosome, it's not easy to make a case for a genetic differentiation in the present generation on the ground of gender-based natural selection in past generations.

Baumeister's arguments may work a little better when he ties the unequal ratio of reproductive success to cultural norms rather than to supposedly innate heritable differences between men and women. He suggests that many cultural conventions make sense if you assume that only a few men can be expected to reproduce successfully, while most women can. This assumption leads a society to assume simultaneously that men should be the cannon fodder and that men should end up on top of the heap when it comes to wealth and power. As he points out, if half the men are killed and you're left with only the most successful half, you can rebuild your population fairly quickly. If half the women are killed off, you're in for a slow and dicey recovery.

At all events, I found Baumeister's talk highly entertaining, particularly when he analyzes the different areas where the sexes excel:

Research by Major and others back in the 1970s used procedures like this. A group of subjects would perform a task, and the experimenter would then say that the group had earned a certain amount of money, and it was up to one member to divide it up however he or she wanted. The person could keep all the money, but that wasn’t usually what happened. Women would divide the money equally, with an equal share for everybody. Men, in contrast, would divide it unequally, giving the biggest share of reward to whoever had done the most work.

Which is better? Neither. Both equality and equity are valid versions of fairness. But they show the different social sphere orientation. Equality is better for close relationships, when people take care of each other and reciprocate things and divide resources and opportunities equally. In contrast, equity — giving bigger rewards for bigger contributions — is more effective in large groups. I haven’t actually checked, but I’m willing to bet that if you surveyed the Fortune 500 large and successful corporations in America, you wouldn’t find a single one out of 500 that pays every employee the same salary. The more valuable workers who contribute more generally get paid more. It simply is a more effective system in large groups. The male pattern is suited for the large groups, the female pattern is best suited to intimate pairs.

Ditto for the communal-exchange difference. Women have more communal orientation, men more exchange. In psychology we tend to think of communal as a more advanced form of relationship than exchange. For example, we’d be suspicious of a couple who after ten years of marriage are still saying, “I paid the electric bill last month, now it’s your turn.” But the supposed superiority of communal relationships applies mainly to intimate relationships. At the level of large social systems, it’s the other way around. Communal (including communist) countries remain primitive and poor, whereas the rich, advanced nations have gotten where they are by means of economic exchange.

It rings true for me, anyway. I've always said I practice socialism under my own roof, and to a lesser degree within my small intimate circle, but I firmly believe competition works best for the country at large. And while I may not be an entirely conventional female in some ways, there's no doubt of my strong preference for small-scale social interaction. So the male-dominated institutional pattern of large, relative anonymous groups doesn't suit me, which is why I enjoyed practicing law in a big firm as long as I could toil away at difficult problems in small groups of like-minded professionals whom I trusted, but I hated networking and rainmaking and was perfectly awful at it.

Good Eyes

Reminds me of the shooting competition in Winchester '73.  The one where they're shooting dollars thrown into the air?  Then they start shooting postage stamps placed over the center of a ring, so they're passing the bullet through the ring itself.

With enough practice, I suppose anything is possible -- if your eyes are good enough.

Weatherproof agriculture

We must be thinking about this more lately because the rainfall here is so erratic, and because we lost so many plants this week to a completely unforecast freeze after nursing them through the drought all summer and finally getting some production off of them in recent weeks. I'm lost in admiration of the new book my husband received in the mail today, with detailed plans for a combination greenhouse and aquaponics system. There is a tall cylinder in the middle to hold a catfish tank, surrounded by a circular path, and lower aquaponics tanks on the perimeter. You feed the fish, and they feed the plants. This version is made from a kit meant for the top of a silo. The authors suggest that an alternative version would include a hottub surrounded by flowers.

Pressing Reform

Never let it be said that Congress isn't capable of coming together to tackle the important problems.  First horse slaughter, and now....

On Nov. 15, the Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously approved S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a provision to repeal Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).  Article 125 of the UCMJ makes it illegal to engage in both sodomy with humans and sex with animals.

This still has to get by the conference committee, because for some reason the House didn't think of this obvious improvement to good order and discipline.  Don't worry, though:  there's still time to get it done for the holidays.

I think every unit that worked closely with the Iraqi forces has stories to tell about the tender love between man and beast.  Perhaps this is all in the interest of cultural exchange?  Hearts and minds, I suppose.

Autumn Fire

Not chestnuts, but almonds roast on a steel plate this evening, each with a touch of chocolate.  

The hero of the hour on his favorite rug.

On Horse Flesh

I noticed with some pleasure that Congress has re-approved the slaughter of horses for meat today.

It's a terrible shame to see a horse put down for any cause.  Human beings and horses get along very well, and in an ideal world more men and women would have the chance to have a relationship with a horse.  Nevertheless, we are where we are, and the well-meaning attempt to ban the slaughter of horses has led to reliably worse results.

Horses who could no longer be slaughtered were instead left to starve.  Instead of a quick and painless death, they were rendered economically worthless.  The intention was, I suppose, that people should simply care for the animals until they died of old age; but rather predictably, what they did instead was refuse to lay out money for feed or hay for animals who could not promise any sort of economic return.  Trapped on dry lots, with neither food nor water, they were left to perish in the most brutal conditions.

If they can be sold for meat, they'll be sold by weight.  That means they'll eat, at least, until the end.  This may seem unkind but it is far better.  Good on Congress for getting one right, and for learning from its mistakes.  Let's hope it points to a trend.

Today's Great Accomplishment

Today, my neighbor's dog Callie wandered up the hill from her home in the valley below.  I generally like all dogs, and usually know all the neighbors' dogs (even if I don't know the neighbors, in which case I assign the dog a name.  I do know this neighbor, though, a fine older gentleman and the owner-operator of a log-hauling semi).

Now, Callie loves to play fetch.  So, I got a stick and threw it for her several times.  My own dog, Buck, was there also, but Buck never learned to play fetch.  I tried to teach him more than once over the years, but he would just watch the stick fly through the air and then look at me.  "Oh, well," I thought, "I guess he's just not interested."

Callie sure was interested, though.  She was running after the stick, biting the stick, and growling fiercely when I'd try to take the stick back from her.

Then one time I threw the stick through the air and Buck went chasing after it!  I'd never been able to convey to him what I wanted him to do, but watching Callie he had suddenly worked out the rules of the game.  Once he understood, he played with the same enthusiasm she has always shown.

There's the Order of Reason at work for you.

I never know that anyone is "thinking," except insofar as they can communicate something to me that reminds me of the internal process I identify by the work "thinking."

The lower animals are limited by the lack of language, and so they have a lesser access to the order than we have.  Yet to see one observe a game and learn its rules, across species?

Santa Anno

Here's a fine, brave piece.

My Kind of Male Character

Since T99 is putting up the challenge, I suppose I ought to think about an example of what I like to see in how men are portrayed.  I'd like to put forward an example from John Wayne -- Red River, surely, or Rio Bravo.  But the truth is that my favorite of all is from a 1980s movie of no special fame.



This rendition of the end scene, if you don't know the movie, is just as good even in a foreign tongue.



Here is one who has learned to live in fellowship with a horse or a hawk or a sword, and thus has every strength that might bring glory to a man:  but in spite of that he has not lost the most important thing.  If you don't know the film, perhaps you should see it, though in truth the music is terrible.  All the same, it may be the best we have ever done at capturing the ideal -- and at understanding the importance of lies and sin, embodied in the character portrayed by Matthew Broderick, in maintaining faith against the hardships of the world.  It is those lies that turn the warrior from despair and even suicide, and sustain him until the hour when God's grace brings him joy.

There lies a subtle lesson.

My kind of female character

If they're going to show cleavage, this is how I'd prefer they did it. Ziva's no wimp, and she can sing, too.

I didn't realize until just now that that's a Tom Waits song.

Schadenfreude

Little Red's comment made me think of the lyrics to this politically incorrect old shape-note song, Greenwich (183), with its grim satisfaction at the comeuppance in store for rich and powerful villains:

Lord, what a thoughtless wretch was I
To mourn and murmur and repine
To see the wicked placed on high
In pride and robes of honor shine

But oh, their end, their dreadful end
Thy sanctuary taught me so
On slippery rocks I see them stand
And fiery billows roll below

There's nothing like this in my 1980 Episcopal hymnbook, I'll tell you that. It would give the editors the vapors just to hear it. Sure is fun to sing, though: "But oh, their end, their dreadful end . . . ."

Averroes

Now let us turn our attention to this article from Humanities on Averroes.

There is some good work here, but finally the author misses the point both on the history and the philosophy.  Historically, the reason that the last Islamic philosopher of any weight was probably Averroes isn't the pressures Islam placed on his teachings; it's that Christian Spain conquered his city within fifty years of his death, and much of the rest of the peninsula.  Meanwhile, in the famous schools of Baghdad mentioned by the articles, the Mongol horde arrived.  The result was that Islamic scholarship was decimated at both ends; there was no one left to teach, and no one in the Islamic world with time to learn.

That is the historic reason that Averroes' torch passed to Christian thinkers.  Any civilization is in danger of destruction in every generation, if it fails to pass its lessons to its children.  To lose all of one's schools in a generation is a tragedy, and a blow, from which few if any civilizations have recovered.  Islam has a chance to recover cuttings of its old traditions from us, and restore them.  If it does, it may yet flourish anew.

Philosophically, the author misreads Averroes' contention about what philosophy is for.  Averroes does indeed say that "anyone who declares these interpretations to those not adept in them is himself an unbeliever because of his calling people to unbelief."  So does the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who holds strongly that a particular interpretation of a crucial passage in the Torah should not be expounded philosophically 'in the presence of two' -- and Jewish philosophy has, and Jewish philosophers have, continued to be at the forefront of the field.

No, rather, Averroes held that philosophy was the highest way of pursuing the questions of the divine, and that metaphysics -- he followed Aristotle's definition of metaphysics as the study of 'being qua being' -- was "either obligatory or recommended by religious law."  Since he was a qadi, a sha'riah judge, this opinion should carry some weight even today.

Those of  you interested in the subject may find Richard C. Taylor's article on the subject more interesting; sadly, it is not available online without a subscription of some sort.  However, even your public library can almost certainly obtain it for you, if you only know to ask for it.

Cornpone

My mother-in-law makes what she calls "hot water cornbread," which I think may also be called cornpone or corn dodgers. They should be simple to reproduce here at home, right? You just take cornmeal and salt, and add boiling hot water. How much? Well, as much cornmeal as you need for your batch, enough salt that they taste right, and then add water until the consistency is right. Then you form the piping hot dough into little pads in your palms about the size of a squashed egg, and pop them into an inch or so of oil heated to about the right temperature, cooking them first on one side, then the other, until they're the right color.

I'm experimenting with making the dough wetter (the two on the left) and drier (the two on the right). My third and fourth batches this morning are getting pretty edible, though they still don't taste like my mother-in-law's. One cup of cornmeal makes about six dodgers.

More on the Jobs Picture

Zero Hedge has a guest post that is really an advertisement for a report on what skills will be in demand in the future.  They don't get around to telling you what skills you'll need in the ad, but they do explain what the challenges are that will be facing future workforces.

The challenges they list begin with automation, which we were just discussing ourselves, and go on from there.  See what you think.