Eating for zillions, and a gold rush

Two weeks' pickings from Rocket Science, where I'm catching up after a long period indulging myself over at Project Gutenberg, and several days' worth of technical difficulties in our internet connection.  (It's heck living out in the boonies.)

First, an article about the surprisingly complicated study of breast milk.  It seems that a mother modifies the content of her milk in response to a variety of signals, including (possibly) the sex of her child or the
baby's having caught an infection.  Also, something that caught my eye, as I'm always interested in the emerging science of the gut:

Some human milk oligosaccharides—simple sugar carbohydrates—were recently discovered to be indigestible by infants. When my son was nursing, those oligosaccharides weren’t meant for him. They were meant for bacteria in his gut, which thought they were delicious. My wife was, in a sense, nursing another species altogether, a species that had been evolutionarily selected to protect her child. (A relationship immortalized in the paper titled “Human Milk Oligosaccharides: Every Baby Needs a Sugar Mama.”) In effect, as Hinde and UC-Davis chemist Bruce German have written, “mothers are not just eating for two, they are actually eating for 2 × 10¹¹ (their own intestinal microbiome as well as their infant’s)!”

On a completely unrelated note, earthquakes may stimulate the formation of nearly instantaneous veins of gold.  Small earthquakes can cause sudden local depressurations, with an interesting effect on fluids circulating nearby:

When mineral-laden water at around 390 °C is subjected to that kind of pressure drop, Weatherley says, the liquid rapidly vaporizes and the minerals in the now-supersaturated water crystallize almost instantly—a process that engineers call flash vaporization or flash deposition. The effect, he says, “is sufficiently large that quartz and any of its associated minerals and metals will fall out of solution”.

Easter

Then said he to Galahad: Son,
wottest thou what I hold betwixt my hands? Nay, said
he, but if ye will tell me. This is, said he, the holy dish
wherein I ate the lamb on [Holy] Thursday. And now hast
thou seen that thou most desired to see, but yet hast thou
not seen it so openly as thou shalt see it in the city of
Sarras in the spiritual place. Therefore thou must go
hence and bear with thee this Holy Vessel; for this night
it shall depart from the realm of Logris, that it shall never
be seen more here. And wottest thou wherefore? For
he is not served nor worshipped to his right by them of
this land, for they be turned to evil living; therefore I
shall disherit them of the honour which I have done them.

I owe special thanks to Dad29 today, who has been invaluable in my quest to see the cup.

White Men Are the Problem

Imagine if African American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year. Articles and interviews would flood the media, and we’d have political debates demanding that African Americans be “held accountable.” Then, if an atrocity such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings took place and African American male leaders held a news conference to offer solutions, their credibility would be questionable. The public would tell these leaders that they need to focus on problems in their own culture and communities.

Thus writes a pair of researchers who are as insulated from reality as any two people I've ever encountered. Can you actually imagine "the public" telling a group of 'African American male leaders' that their views were not relevant, and they needed to go focus on their own culture? Of course not. The American public is so afraid of being tarred as racists that they would never react that way, for one thing; and for another, when it actually happens that there is a huge number of gun murders in the black community, as it does regularly in places like Chicago, we look to those leaders as especially relevant because of their participation in the black community. Nobody has ever suggested that they should not lecture to us about how the broader American sweep of history affects their community, or what trends from the wider society might impact the problems we'd all like to see resolved.

When these researchers go on to say, "Unlike other groups, white men are not used to being singled out," I must assume they have somehow managed their academic careers without ever taking a course in history or literature. Aside from slavery, prejudice, imperialism, environmental damage, hate, capitalism and bigotry, I can't think of anything bad for which I've ever heard white men being especially singled out as blameworthy.

It's the common refrain on every subject. How stunning to realize that those making it apparently cannot hear themselves. Perhaps it's the fish/water issue: you can't see the sea in which you swim.

**

On the gun control/rights issue, by the way, my own native state of Georgia has recently concluded its legislative session. No new gun bills actually survived to pass, but we got close. Governor Nathan Deal was the obstacle to the passage of the bill, on terms that are very close to what we discussed here: guns would be allowed on college campuses as they are not currently (but as they are in most other public spaces), but only if permit holders took special safety training. Apparently Georgia Carry (who views the NRA as complete sellouts on gun rights) opposed the bill because it doesn't want gun rights to be entangled with any requirements or costs -- they're standing firm on "shall not be abridged."

They say Governor Deal has a "storied anti-gun record," but the governor's proposal is almost exactly the proposal I remember endorsing when we were discussing it earlier. I've long believed that the only viable response to terrorism of any sort -- including these mass shootings, which are a species of suicide terrorism except that the ideology underlying each act is usually limited to the single actor -- is to harden the broader society. However, we've allowed college campus culture to devolve into a sort of Saturnalia, especially on the weekends of home football games. Some extra steps need to be taken to ensure that the college students who assume this most adult of adult responsibilities are among the actual, and not merely statutory, adults on the campus.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen many other good recommendations on hand. I'm not immune to the idea of supporting new controls, if the controls are wise, likely to succeed, and written by people who actually understand the technology they want to regulate.

"At a Higher Rate"

Just how bad is Alaska? Well, like everything, women are hardest hit. (Probably minorities too, but the article doesn't treat that.)

A newly issued Alaska State Legislature report held some grim findings about women living in the Last Frontier: They earn less than men, were imprisoned at a higher rate during the past 10 years, and have a suicide rate that’s twice the national average, among other problems, including homelessness and a lack of health care.

I don't mean to make light of the genuine problems mentioned here, but I was really shocked to learn that women were imprisoned at a higher rate than men these last ten years. Given the relative rates at which men and women are imprisoned, that would not just be an outlier, it would be so shocking as to demand explanation.

So I delved a bit into the article and found the explanation, which is this bit from the fifth paragraph:

As for crime and imprisonment, the number of women going to prison in Alaska is growing: In 2007, women made up 6.5 percent of Alaska’s prison population, but that number had jumped to nearly 11 percent in 2011.

Oh, I see. Not "at a higher rate than men," but at a higher rate than previously.

A friend of mine who teaches logic was telling me about how he hadn't had time to plan anything at all for his lecture, so he had winged it. The lecture was supposed to go for an hour, but he finished after 45 minutes. To the delight of the students, he said he was going to let them go early that day: "After all," he said, "we got through everything I'd planned, and I only expected to get through half of it."

Hegel on the State

A striking quote in a section of the Philosophy of Right.

We should desire to have in the state nothing except what is an expression of rationality. The state is the world which mind has made for itself; its march, therefore, is on lines that are fixed and absolute. How often we talk of the wisdom of God in nature! But we are not to assume for that reason that the physical world of nature is a loftier thing than the world of mind. As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity, and observe that if it is difficult to comprehend nature, it is infinitely harder to understand the state

It is not too much to say that the more I understand Hegel, the more I understand how we got in this mess. The problem is more with those who followed him than with the man himself, but the errors of our age grew out of ground he cultivated.

A Question I Never Thought to Ask

Here's a fellow who wants you to know that your reading choices really ought to align with your fashion choices.

Why do you dress the way you do, instead of in, say, boot-cut jeans and Affliction T-shirts?

There's a certain type of character your clothing presents. I drink Scotch, play classical music, read philosophy, smoke a pipe, and these things drive a particular persona. You don't want to read Kant while wearing Aeropostale.

I've always had a form-follows-function approach to these issues. I wear a motorcycle jacket because I ride motorcycles. I often wear cowboy boots because I sometimes ride horses, and the cowboy boot's design is entirely structured by issues like the shape of the stirrup and the need for stiff leather to resist thorns. I wear a hat when it is raining, but because I now go everywhere on motorcycles, I have given up the old Stetsons for hats that can be stowed in the saddlebag when riding.

How surprising to learn that I've been going about it all wrong. I would promise to rethink my errors, except that I don't think I have it in me. A man's got to know his limitations.

How to deal with the government

Some satisfying suggestions from Coyote Blog.  H/t Popehat, which suggests that the trick to dealing with a butthead in an organization is to find the adult in the room.

Our quiet little community is having trouble with a game warden who apparently doesn't have enough work to do making sure people don't keep undersized fish or shoot whooping cranes because they mistake them for sandhill cranes in an area where you can't shoot those, either.  This fellow's mission in life for the last few years has been to end the scourge of golf-carts on sleepy little low-speed public roads on our tiny peninsula.  He never actually writes tickets, believing (reasonably) that he would only be embarrassed if the residents took the matter before a local judge.  The citizens are beginning to talk together about standing on their rights and insisting that he either write them a ticket or stop harassing them.

The game warden has no support for his golf-cart jihad among local law enforcement or county officials, but he is a state employee who needn't care what they think, and apparently his superiors in the state administration are unconcerned by suggestions received from both citizens and local officials.  Now, however, the county commissioners have gone so far as to ask the state legislature to change the transportation code to permit golf carts in the rural areas of our county, a proposal that apparently is going to work just fine.  It probably will drive the game warden crazy, but maybe he can find some frozen raspberries to obsess over.  Possibly the local schools will let him arrest children who chew poptarts into the shapes of guns.

Lessons

It's not true, as some say, that our schools have lost the ability to inculcate knowledge.

"Do Not Become The Market In An Illiquid Derivative"

I think this is a smart article (one in a series over the last week) about the London Whale.

Harden Your Hearts

Da Tech Guy titles a post about the Cyprus situation "Amazing what you can do to an unarmed populace." (H/t: InstaPundit.)

Maybe it is, but if you're going to make that stick, you'd better begin to think seriously about what will be required. We haven't begun to see this kind of thing here, but we will as we deal with our unspeakably huge fiscal crises.

Tex was saying the other day that any culture encodes lessons greater than its living members understand, so that living out the cultural mores is a way of aligning yourself with many wise and ancient lessons. Here's a part of our culture that is relevant. Start listening to the old songs. Learn the words. It will help you think about the costs, and just how much you are prepared to cede before you draw the kind of line he is talking about.



Be wise.

Rare and heavy

Or maybe not so rare any more.  It's hard to maintain a monopoly; someone always responds to crazy high prices by redoubling efforts to find a new supply, or a substitute.  China has been doing a fairly good job of cornering the market in rare earths since the 1990s, leading buyers in the rest of the world to charge that they cracked down on exports in order to induce other countries to locate their factories in China, where the Chinese would steal their technology.  Not all rare earths are really that rare, but the heaviest (and perhaps most useful) ones have proved elusive until recently.  However, Japan has just announced a huge find in deep seabeds off its shore.

Rare earth metals are the salt of life for the hi-tech revolution, used in iPads, plasma TVs, lasers, and catalytic converters for car engines.  Dysprosium is crucial because it is the strongest magnet in the world but also remains stable at very high temperatures.  Neodymium is used in hybrid cars, and terbium cuts power use for low-energy lightbulbs by 40pc. 

The metals are also used in precision-guided weapons, missiles such as the Hellfire, military avionics, satellites, and night-vision equipment.  America's M1A2 Abrams tank and the Aegis Spy-1 radar both rely on samarium. 

Washington was caught badly off guard when China started restricting supplies.  The US defence and energy departments have now made it an urgent priority to find other sources, but warn that it may take up to a decade to rebuild the supply-chain.  The US Magnetic Materials Association said America had drifted into a "silent crisis."

In other news, Japan is becoming increasingly nervous about Chinese saber-rattling.  Since World War II, Japan ostensibly has forsworn military solutions to international problems, while China seems to have no problem with them.

On the Jews

It's Holy Week. How much beef do we have with the Jews?

The standard answers are "A great deal" and "Not much." I'll consider any argument from the company.

"We need a measurement . . . ."

Actually, that's the last thing these guys need or want.  The very notion of the possibility of useful measurement is under increasing attack, because it implies that someone has an identifiable goal and that he should be judged by whether he's achieved it, with inconvenient consequences if he has not.  Two recent examples, the first in the area of the border security:

[A]s the immigration debate has gathered speed, even border analysts who praise the Obama administration’s enforcement efforts have grown frustrated with the Department of Homeland Security’s reluctance to produce data to assess them.

House committee members were shocked earlier this week to hear testimony from that DHS can't predict when or if ever it will develop and reveal a useful measurement for whether it is controlling the border with Mexico:

For several years before 2010, border officials used a measure known as operational control to describe the level of security along the southwest line.  But in 2010, Ms. Napolitano said the department would drop that standard, arguing it did not reflect a substantial buildup of agents and detection technology in recent years, and it was insufficiently flexible to account for the varying terrain and fast-changing conditions along the nearly 2,000-mile southwest border, where most illegal crossings occur.

Nor has the White House exactly been helpful:

Obama administration officials said on Thursday that they had resisted producing a single measure to assess the border because the president did not want any hurdles placed on the pathway to eventual citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.

All of which sounds a lot like the long-simmering quarrels over public school testing.   In Rhode Island, there is a movement afoot to require all graduating high seniors to pass a proficiency test.  A student group objected that the test is too hard, or too unrelated to their curriculum, or both.   To prove it, they persuaded a group of reasonably successful adults, including some state senators, to take the test.  Sixty percent flunked, unable to achieve even a "partially proficient" score.  Does that mean the test is bad, or that the adults were ignorant?  Neither proposition was attractive, so the discussion veered into a familiar rut:

Students are trying to push back against the idea that a single test score can measure the entirety of a person’s value, worth, and future success by inviting objectively successful people to take the test themselves and see how they do.

. . . 

“I would much rather hire students who have the creativity and strategic thinking to pull together this effort in which 50 Rhode Island leaders will take this test than” students who sit in class and get prepared to pass “the NECAP with flying colors,” [said a senator who flunked]. 

“I think my takeaway message from this is that the test is not a good indicator of whether or not someone is going to be able to achieve academically,” she said.  “It’s not a good indicator, taken on its own, to be an indicator of academic achievement or career achievement.  And placing this barrier on our young men and women in our high schools without giving them the resources previously to ensure that they are going to succeed is just setting them up for additional failures.”

Another state senator, Adam Satchell, criticized standardized tests more generally, "arguing that a one-size-fits-all model cannot properly assess twenty-first century skills." Which are?

We’re trying to teach students twenty-first century skills--how to speak, how to use technology. That’s not what this test measures. It’s not an accurate measurement of our students.

It's a familiar complaint.  Somehow we're always designing tests, disliking the results, and arguing that they don't really measure the right thing, or that the tests are OK in their way but are being used for the wrong purpose, though it's not always easy to see what the right purpose would be and how it's different.  The Rhode Island students argue, for instance, that the standardized test under discussion for their school district was "explicitly not designed to be used to make decisions about individual students," which certainly would make it an odd test for the school district to have invested public money in.  Similarly, the border-security test now mysteriously doesn't quite measure border security:

In a recent interview, David V. Aguilar, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said he had first proposed the concept of operational control years ago when he was the chief of the Border Patrol.  He said it was meant to describe immediate conditions in limited patrol sectors, and he lamented that it had become the broadest measure of security advances across the entire border. 

“It was never meant to be applied that way,” Mr. Aguilar said.

I see only one solution.  Stop the testing.  Quit making the compensation of any state employees dependent in any way on the tasks they achieve, which only leads to bickering and resentment.  Fund border security according to a committee's estimate of the number of illegal border crossing that might have occurred under other conditions, using the models previously developed by AGW enthusiasts.  Fund schools on the basis of bums in seats, an easy metric. Better yet, since it's not their fault if the kids don't show up, pay them on the basis of citizens of school age with a pulse, whether or not they're in the classroom. In fact, to use the developing voting system as a guide, why require a pulse?

On The Other Hand, This Solves That Title IX Issue

Apparently at some point while I wasn't paying attention, someone decided it was OK for a "transgender" male to beat the crap out of women in Mixed Martial Arts. Steven Crowder writes a column opposing the idea, which indeed ought to be opposed as pure nonsense.

But let us be generous and open-minded. From a purely Roman gladiatorial perspective, I can see why they might think this idea has appeal. And I suppose it answers the PUA crowd's concerns about the bias of Title IX. As long as we can find enough men willing to "transgender" themselves, we could soon have both men's sports and "women's" sports equally dominated by men. Think of the scholarships! It might solve the disparate attendance at college issue, too.

There's just a small price to pay. Well, especially for the PUA crowd.

Here's Something You Don't See Every Day

Given his early performance, I wonder if our new Pope has one of these.

Warning from D.C.

Authorities On Alert As Hundreds Of Crazed Sociopaths Enter Congressional Chambers

Steubenville

I don't have much to say about this case, except that when I was a teenager I can remember coming across several women who were drunken to the point of incapacity. It always struck me that my duty for the evening included watching over them to make sure they were OK in the end. The young weren't any brighter or better able to handle their early experimentation with alcohol back then, but nobody got hurt on my watch.

I'm not sure why young men today don't feel the same way about things. I am sure they ought to.

Pope Francis on Gay Unions

It sounds as though, before his election to the Papacy, our new Pope had a similar notion to the one we were just discussing: a kind of legal union (what I am calling, after Aristotle, an ethical society of friendship) ought to be available for non-marriage cases. He seems to favor retaining the distinction between the institution of marriage, which is founded in the organic family, and the new institution, which is ideally founded on the manner in which a partnership of friendship can encourage virtue in each of the parties.

We'll see where this goes, now, but it points to a way in which a settlement is possible -- assuming people can accept that a family is different from a friendship, even a very close one with common property (on Aristotle's terms).

Against Keeping Score

Some advice against husbands and wives keeping a log of housework in order to ensure equal distribution:

Andy Hinds, in a response to Bradner, toyed with the idea of keeping track of the hours spent on chores. "If my log shows that I'm putting in as many hours as she is, I'm vindicated. If it shows that I'm not, then I have impetus to step up my game and make my wife happier. Win-win."

Hinds's solution here gets at the heart of why this kind of quantification is pretty much useless when you're talking about domestic chores in a relationship. Imagine that Hinds discovers that he is in fact putting in as many hours as his wife. Is that actually going to make his wife less unhappy? Here, honey, I have data showing that you are complaining for no reason. My figures confirm that your unhappiness is your own damn fault. Now, I've done my hours for the week, so I'm going to watch the tube while you fold the laundry. Ain't objectivity grand?

Objectivity, it turns out, is highly overrated.

Russian Thinkers

The Russian leadership may be tyrants in league with criminals, but at least they're smart?

It’s instructive to view ourselves through a Russian mirror. The term “paranoid Russian” is a pleonasm. “The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry."

There's probably some truth to that.