Sigh no more

My linguistics reading of late is alerting me to survivals of archaic forms in popular culture.  The genius of Shakespeare and the King James Bible translation ensures that we never quite stop incorporating the English of 500 years ago into modern speech.  Last night I spent enjoyable hours watching Joss Whedon's recent production of Shakespeare's comedy "Much Ado About Nothing," staged in the present but using the original text.  Beatrice and Benedick are two young misfits everyone knows have to get together, though they think they hate each other.  They ultimately join forces to solve the problems of the secondary couple, Claudio and Hero, who have been tricked into an apparent tragedy that all comes right in the end.

Shakespeare often included bits of doggerel or folksong into his plays, with language that was archaic even in his time.  Modern adaptations tend to set them to tunes either in a style they take to be period-appropriate or in a style that's current for the production.  The song that caught my ear last night was "Sigh No More" (or, as we'd say today, with our Celtic restructuring of Germanic grammar:  "Baby Don't You Cry").  It uses the old-fashioned trochaic meter (DAH-duh), to which Shakespeare often switches from his usual iambic (dah-DUH) when giving voice to the old powers, like the witches in "Macbeth" ("Double, double, toil and trouble/Fire burn and cauldron bubble") or the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream ("Lord, what fools these mortals be!").

"Sigh no more" is a lament over the inconstancy of men, the counterpoint about male infidelity set into a play about the deadly consequences of even a false suspicion of female unchastity:

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more;
    Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea and one on shore,
    To one thing constant never;

        Then sigh not so,
        But let them go,
    And be you blithe and bonny;
Converting all your sounds of woe
    Into "Hey nonny, nonny!"

Sing no more ditties, sing no more,
    Of dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,
    Since summer first was leavy.

        Then sigh not so, 
        But let them go,
    And be you blithe and bonny;
Converting all your sounds of woe
    Into "Hey, nonny, nonny!"

Kenneth Branagh's "Much Ado" of a few years back set "Sigh, No More" to a pretty, old-fashioned tune and has the partygoers break into a fine barbershop-quartet performance.  Great stuff.



Joss Whedon adapts the same song to a nice jazzy lounge number, suitable for some relaxing entertainment at an elegant house party, with pretty acrobats out by the pool.  (The film was shot in twelve days at Whedon's home while he was taking a break from final editing on "The Avengers."  The actors are many of his regulars.)



Here's a snappy 1940's take:



Branagh directed a playful "Love's Labour's Lost" (a financial flop) set in the 1939 and using show tunes and modern dance, including the "Charleston."  He emphasized the play's iambic beat by setting the lines "Have at you now, affection's men at arms" to a tap-dance exercise, then breaks into Irving Berlin's "Cheek to Cheek":



I'm sorry that film didn't do well.  It's the kind of thing that makes my husband run out of the room, but I love dramas in which people spontaneously burst into song and dancing.

Aristotle on Causality

I'm moving into Aristotle's Physics and it depends heavily on his theories of causality, so I thought I'd start with Andrea Falcon's SEP article on that.

According to Falcon, Aristotle proposes that we have knowledge of a thing only when we understand its causes, and he proposes four possible causes: material, formal, efficient, and final.

The material cause: “that out of which”, e.g., the bronze of a statue. 

The formal cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue. 

The efficient cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child. 

The final cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, e.g., health is the end of walking, losing weight, purging, drugs, and surgical tools.

The final cause for a statue is the statue itself.

With the final cause, Aristotle's theory is teleological; the purpose of a thing is a kind of cause of it. Because of this, he has been accused of anthropomorphizing nature, attributing to it psychological reasons for the way things are. However, while the theory can take desire, intention, etc., into account, the final causes of natural things don't require psychological causes. For example, Aristotle explains that the 'final cause' for why frontal teeth are sharp and back teeth are flat is because that is the best arrangement for the survival of the animal.

A couple of other key points are that, in studying nature, we should look for generalities. We aren't concerned about exceptions; we are trying to discover the rules. He also doesn't require that we use all four causes. In some cases,  like the bronze statue, the formal and final causes are the same. In some cases the efficient cause is enough. For example, Aristotle explains a lunar eclipse with an efficient cause: the earth comes between the moon and sun.

The idea of a final cause was controversial in Aristotle's day. (I think it became controversial again in the 18th or 19th century.) Many philosophers* proposed that material and efficient causes were good enough. Aristotle claimed that material and efficient causes alone failed to account for regularity. If we ask, why are front teeth sharp and back teeth flat, material and efficient causes alone leave us with coincidence; animals produce offspring like themselves, and that's it. There is no reference to this arrangement making survival easier. Final causes, on the other hand, allow us to say that teeth are arranged that way to make survival easier; they explain the regularity in ways that material and efficient causes do not.

Leaving Falcon behind for a moment, why did final causes become controversial in the 18th or 19th century? Because teleological explanations seem to imply Nature has a personality. Before this time, Christian philosophers who adopted Aristotle would often point to God to provide final causes: Why were front teeth sharp and back teeth flat? God designed the animal that way to improve its chances of surviving. But God had to be killed in the Enlightenment (Hegel proclaimed it long before Nietzsche) and all that sort of thing removed. Biology today still uses teleological terms, but they intend them in reverse: the animal survives better because the teeth are arranged that way, and survival means a better chance of reproducing, which produces offspring with teeth arranged that way.

Next up, a dive into the Physics.

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* Science as the organized / methodical study of nature was a branch of philosophy up through the Scientific Revolution, and some branches of science (such as physics) were still called 'natural philosophy' up into the 19th century.

Pix

Some great nature shots at this Atlantic website, but the last one is truly amazing.

Lost arts

From the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry on "Turkey" (the bird kind).   You can't find genteel trashtalk like this any more:

The bibliography of the turkey is so large that there is here no room to name the various works that might be cited.  Recent research has failed to add anything of importance to what has been said on this point by Buffon (Oiseaux, ii. 132-162), Pennant (Arctic Zoology, pp. 291-300)--an admirable summary--and Broderip (Zoological Recreations, pp. 120-137)--not that all their statements can be wholly accepted.  Barrington's essay (Miscellanies, pp. 127-151), to prove that the bird was known before the discovery of America and was transported thither, is an ingenious piece of special pleading which his friend Pennant did him the real kindness of ignoring.

It's Not A Double-Standard If You Never Thought Of It

A friend of mine sent me this picture, which I found rather surprising. I don't think it's a double standard, so much as their just not being interested in the quality of boys' toys to the same degree. I had honestly never thought of their point at all. Of course I remember He-Man, who was just a cleaned-up kids version of Conan, a physically similar character.

All three are really popular, which may say something about what is really going on here. When we talk about Conan books, the usual screed against them is that they represent a simple kind of male wish-fulfillment. I think that's unfair: at least the original R. E. Howard stories are really quite good. But it might be true for He-Man.

My New Favorite Syllogism

The moon is made of green cheese. Therefore, either it is raining in Ecuador now or it is not.

In our earlier discussions of logic, the failure of modern logic to take relevance into account seemed to me a great failure. Specifically, I maintain that the forms of natural language cannot be entirely separated from the content, no matter how many logicians deeply pine for such a situation.

Now, to the extent that modern logic is a branch of mathematics, I have no problem with it. It has found uses in computer programming and probably other fields, and it's an interesting intellectual exercise in itself. It is to the extent that modern logic attempts to use natural language to create or understand meaning that it fails.

Relevance / Relevant logicians have tried to develop formal expressions of relevance and have come closer to making premises and conclusions relevant to each other, but they haven't solved the problem entirely.

As for me, while I fully understand there are practical uses for modern logic, it seems that Aristotelean logic is superior for analyzing arguments in natural language. Else, it is either raining in Ecuador, or it is not, because the moon is made of green cheese.

Project Euler and Self-Directed Learning

Problem 2

Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be:

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ...

By considering the terms in the Fibonacci sequence whose values do not exceed four million, find the sum of the even-valued terms.

Apropos of Tex's recent post on child-centered learning, I thought I'd add this.

Computer programming is a hobby of mine and something I am very interested in getting better at, but I was never good at math. Call me lazy, but the most difficult thing in math classes was keeping my eyes open; after missing the instruction, the problems were often impossible. (If it's impossible, it's not difficult, you see.) The textbooks were even more boring than the teachers, so they were no help, either.

In the last few years I've become increasingly interested in learning more math, but the problem is where to begin and how to approach it. I dread taking university math courses, an expensive cure for insomnia in my experience. Then I read James Somer's article, How I Failed, Failed and Finally Succeeded in Learning How to Code, where he introduces Colin Hughes, a British math teacher and the creator of Project Euler.

The core of Project Euler is a set of math problems designed to be solved by simple computer programs. Currently, there are more than 400 and Mr. Hughes adds a new one each weekend during the school year (he takes summers off). Interestingly, other than a simple explanation like the one above, he provides no instruction in math with the problem, but after you give the correct answer, it opens up a discussion thread for everyone who has solved the problem to share their solutions and comments with each other.

My route to solving these problems has generally been either to just start writing the program, if I immediately grasped the problem (like Problem 2 above), or if I didn't, to look up related math topics on Wikipedia, which has a surprisingly large number of helpful articles. I try to find a principle that will allow me to solve that type of problem (I avoid simply searching for  the problem itself; some unsporting types have posted their solutions publicly). After solving the problem, I go through a dozen or so solutions from others who have also solved it.

Hughes explains his method like this: "The problems range in difficulty and for many the experience is inductive chain learning. That is, by solving one problem it will expose you to a new concept that allows you to undertake a previously inaccessible problem. So the determined participant will slowly but surely work his/her way through every problem."

That seems to be how it's working for me. While the problems have gotten more difficult, I've become quicker to pick up on patterns in numbers and, when I don't understand a problem, I have a better idea of how to approach finding the answer. I've built up a better understanding of how numbers work together, a clearer understanding of some math concepts, an appreciation for different types of math (number theory, graph theory, combinatorics, etc.) and am solving the problems faster. I am, in fact, learning math.

My proudest achievement there so far has been solving problem 15. Wikipedia was entirely useless (I later found out that I was looking in the wrong articles), so I had to sit down with pen and paper and work through simpler versions of the problem until I found a pattern. Then I created my own formula to solve the problem, implemented it, and it worked. It took me nearly a week of spare time. Then I went into the discussion forum for that problem and found two vastly simpler ways to solve it, and of course I got a good laugh out of that. Then it was on to the next problem.

Are Republican insurgents reactionary?

To the contrary, Richard Fernandez argues that they're the only ones looking forward:

The elite can only continue to sustain itself by borrowing.   That was what the crisis was about, borrowing. Obama’s basic demand was simple:  let me borrow and borrow without limit.  His ‘victory’, if so it can be called, is the victory of a bankrupt who has compelled his relatives to mortgage the farm so he can return to his losing streak at the casino.

. . . It has been argued and proved by natural disasters that the entire fabric of civilization is but nine meals from anarchy.  After 3 days without food most people are willing to do anything to anybody to get a meal.  The hard reality is that the current deficit system will inexorably create a situation when the grub literally runs out. 

. . . [William Galston's OpEd at the WSJ] argues that the conservative insurgency is rooted in some kind of atavism; that it arises from a nostalgic hankering after an America long past in the face of new demography.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The hell with demography.  People would be just fine with changes in demography if only times were good.  When times are bad homogeneity is irrelevant.  Rats of the exact same breed will fight to the death over the last piece of cheese. 

It’s the cheese that matters.  The conservative insurgency is rooted in a lack of money.  And so will the coming liberal one.  The unrest is not driven by a desire to return to the past.  On the contrary it is propelled almost entirely by the growing belief that there is no future.

Government work in its purest form

More on yesterday's subject of how the executive training for President that consists of running a successful campaign doesn't necessarily translate into the expertise needed to run the nation's healthcare system:

Complex regulations, the flexibility of peanut brittle, and a system that rewards rule-followers and connections, not ability to do good work?  Now that the problem has been identified, we learn that it couldn’t be fixed because of fear of transparency and political liability, and that no one will be held accountable for it.  That’s not an isolated problem of government function.  That’s a distillation of government function, a metaphor for the entire thing, and again, it was faith in this entity that animated Obamacare.

The budget that isn't

Peter Schiff nails it:  "Whatever the crisis, the real one will be much worse because we did raise the debt ceiling. . . . The debt ceiling is not a ceiling.  We should just call it the debt sky!"   I'm increasingly impatient with stories about the cost of the government shutdown, the danger of default, the "gridlock" in Washington, and all the rest of it.   Yes, it's all unappealing, but it pales in comparison with the alternative, which is a cheerful, cooperative status quo. When a boat is about to go over the falls, a snag in the river is the least of its worries.  I feel more like Michael Walsh at PJ Media:

The GOP is not, in any meaningful sense, a conservative, first-principles, Constitutionalist party — and unless it’s subsumed by the Tea Party, it never will be.  Rather, it’s content to be the lesser half of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party as long as it can collect some of the pork scraps from underneath the table of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Government.  No wonder they keep losing — they like it.

Update:  While Fitch generated some spookified coverage earlier this week by putting the U.S. credit rating on a downgrade watch, the Chinese rating agency Dagong went ahead and made it official.  One big difference between the two, besides decisiveness, is that Fitch blamed its action on "political brinksmanship," as if a soothing compromise could fix the problem.  Dagong, for its part, issued the downgrade after everyone got chummy on a compromise:

[T]he temporary fix of the debt issue would not defuse the fundamental conundrum of the U.S. fiscal deficit or improve repayment ability in the long-term, but could trigger defaults at any time in the future. 

"The deal means only an escape from a debt default for the time being, but hasn't changed the fact that the growth of government borrowing has largely outpaced overall economic growth and fiscal revenues". . . .

Who care what China thinks?   Admittedly I don't look to a Communist regime for economic wisdom.   On the other hand,

Dagong estimated that the U.S.'s foreign creditors could have suffered an estimated loss of $628.5 billion between 2008 and 2012 due to a weakening of the U.S. dollar. 

China, sitting on the largest stockpile of foreign exchange reserves in the world, is the biggest holder of U.S. treasuries.

For now, China seems not to have much choice but to invest in U.S. treasuries.  It will be interesting to find out what happens when that changes.

The martial metaphor

Jonah Goldberg takes on the question of how government can be so good at somethings and so inept at others.

Whenever I make the argument that government is very bad at doing things like Obamacare, the liberal response is invariably to offer counter-examples.  "The military is awesome! . . . "We sent a man to the moon!" 

What liberals never appreciate is that in all of these counter-examples there's something else going on.  The institutional cultures that won World War II or put a man on the moon or that discover some new protein are not strictly speaking government cultures.  While none of them are immune from bureaucratic stupidity and inefficiency, ultimately higher motivations win out. 

How the Marines' esprit de corps differs from the post office's esprit de corps should be pretty obvious.  But even in the other examples, the cultural core of excellent government institutions is driven by something greater than a mere paycheck and significantly different from simple "public service."  The NASA that sent men to the moon was imbued with a culture not just of excellence and patriotism but the kind of awe and wonder that cannot be replicated by the Department of Health and Human Services.  Moreover, for scientists passionate about space and the race to get there, there was simply no place else to be.  That meant the very best people were attracted to NASA.  Even if, for some strange reason, you're passionate about writing billions of lines of code for a website and managing health-insurance data, there are still better things to do with your time than work on Obamacare. 

I want to be fair to government workers.  Many individuals who work for government are dedicated to doing excellent work for the public good.  But I'm talking about culture here.  President Obama talks as if, absent a war or other national crisis, the entire government can still be imbued with the spirit of sacrifice and excellence that won World War II or put a man on the moon.  And that's just crazy talk. 

Obama, the permanent campaigner, believes that governing should be more like campaigning.  Everyone unified towards a single -- Obamacentric -- purpose.  Everyone loyal to his needs.  Everyone in agreement with his agenda.  In 2008, when asked what management experience he had, he said that running his campaign proved he was ready for the presidency.  That should have been the moment when we all heard the record-scratch sound effect and said "What's that now!?"  Even if Obama deserved all of the credit for his campaign's successes, campaigning and governing are fundamentally different things.  Campaign culture allows for people to be fired.  It also rewards excellence, which is why some very young people rise very quickly in the campaign world, while it's far more rare in civil service.  Campaigns have a deadline-driven, crisis-junky energy and sense of team loyalty that is at least somewhat analogous to a war or some other crisis.  That's why the Obama campaign website was great.  It's also why the Obamacare website's error page has an error page.

Re-poop-ulation

It's funny how much easier it is to talk about this kind of thing as long as we call it "probiotics."

Not fit to print

The L.A. Times isn't in the least embarrassed to admit that it censors all letters to the editor that challenge climate-change orthodoxy.  You might wonder if that's not even more extraordinary in light of the recently updated IPCC climate-change report, which nearly comes right out and admits that the evidence for recent warming isn't there and that something is drastically wrong with the models.  Not so.  The only important part of the new IPCC report apparently is the conclusory statement that scientists are 95% certain that they're right about at least half of climate change.  So what should we think about the fact that the IPCC's third, fourth and fifth assessment reports, with their increasingly strident warnings, were published against a background of rising CO2 levels combined with a complete absence of detectable warming?  Shut up, the L.A. Times editorial staff explains. This isn't politics. This is science. Everything else is conspiracist ideation of the sort that you might expect from free-market enthusiasts.

Consensus is a great thing when you can screen out all the dissenting voices.  What do they know, anyway?  Are they on the approved government-funded commissions?  No?  Then they're politically suspect anarchists, and it's a shame that the First Amendment can't be revised to shut them up.  Speaking of consensus, if we get to use that as a substitute for logic and evidence, Anthony Watts helpfully compares his traffic against anti-denier sites like Real Climate and Skeptical Science.   Presto!   He wins, so he must be right.

What do these people want?

More fun as Ivy Leaguers try to come to grips with a Tea Party that won't go away.  We have the classic Yalie approach in the post below.  For another view of Tea Partiers, equally distorted by a prism of malice but not so ignorant, try Harvard professor Theda Skocpol's interview at Salon.  To an impressive degree, she's allowing data about Tea Partiers to moderate her knee-jerk assumptions.  For instance, while she spouts the usual line that a streak of racist xenophobia infects the movement, she also acknowledges that the more powerful meaning of symbols like the Confederate Flag is "regional resistance to federal power" and nullification.  She also doesn't buy the usual accusation that the movement is Astroturfed, though she's alarmed by the big-money organization that allows a group like Jim DeMint's Heritage Foundation to scare the pants off of squishy Republicans who are thinking of caving on a vote, because the legislators know what's coming at them in the next primary if they do.  (The TPs may not have the big numbers, but they're ferociously active in primaries.)  Skocpol would like to think that moderate Republicans are going to start pouring money and organization into counterattacks at the primary level, but she's not fooling herself enough to predict it yet.  She also warns that it's a mistake to predict a Democratic or moderate-Republican sweep in 2014, because mid-term behavior traditionally favors highly engaged activists.

There's an amusing section in which she struggles to understand what's got everyone's dress up over his head about a benevolent and moderate law like Obamacare.  On that subject, she hasn't quite brought herself to look honestly at what motivates her opponents.  To her credit, she's gone as far as to understand that the law is fundamentally redistributionist, and that some people don't much care for that aspect.  Otherwise she's drawing a blank.

Skocpol closes with a doleful (and slightly sour-grapes) view of the Left's ability to go toe-to-toe with extremist Republicans:

There’s also a whole series of reasons why older conservative voters, backed by ideologues, have this combination of apocalyptic moral certitude with organization that really gets results.  Especially in obstructing things in American politics. 

I don’t happen to think that the left and the center-left could imitate this.  For one thing, they don’t have the presence across as many states and districts.  But it’s also not clear it’s a model worth imitating.  I think the real problem that you’ve got right now on the left is how to defeat this stuff, how to contain it, how to beat it — given the permeability of American political institutions to this kind of thing.  And I don’t think it’s clear what’s going to happen.

Those people

Yale's Daniel Kahan doesn't know any Tea Partiers, but disapproves of them heartily, so he was shocked to discover that there is a slight statistical correlation between Tea Party beliefs and scientific comprehension.  Not that he lets this get in the way of his abiding faith in the inferiority of their beliefs:

Of course, I still subscribe to my various political and moral assessments--all very negative-- of what I understand the "Tea Party movement" to stand for.  I just no longer assume that the people who happen to hold those values are less likely than people who share my political outlooks to have acquired the sorts of knowledge and dispositions that a decent science comprehension scale measures. 

I'll now be much less surprised, too, if it turns out that someone I meet at, say, the Museum of Science in Boston, or the Chabot Space and Science Museum in Oakland, or the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is part of the 20% (geez-- I must know some of them) who would answer "yes" when asked if he or she identifies with the Tea Party.    If the person is there, then it will almost certainly be the case that that he or she [and] I will agree on how cool the stuff is at the museum, even if we don't agree about many other matters of consequence.

But, as Bookworm Room points out, it doesn't even occur to him that this means he might want to look more carefully at the basis for the political views of these people who, to his surprise, turn out not to be ignorant fools.   The comments on Kahan's blogpost are brutal; apparently he got linked by Politico, Watts Up with That, and Ace of Spades.  As one commenter said:

And they said George Bush [w]as incurious.   If my business was studying the intelligence of the population, I'd be embarrassed admitting I hadn't met such a large swath of the population.  Yet, this author takes joy in the fact.  Or else he's just laying the groundwork to defend his findings from his peers.  Either way, such a shame there's so little curiousity in academia these days.

Burros in wells

Wired explores child-directed education.  I never know what to think of these proposals, which sometimes sound like such obvious good sense and at other times degenerate into stupid chaos.  If the article is at all accurate, though, one dirt-poor school in Matamoros stumbled onto a winning formula.  The class did have the advantage of one clearly exceptional student:

To test her limits, [the teacher] challenged the class with a problem he was sure would stump her.  He told the story of Carl Friedrich Gauss, the famous German mathematician, who was born in 1777. 

When Gauss was a schoolboy, one of his teachers asked the class to add up every number between 1 and 100. It was supposed to take an hour, but Gauss had the answer almost instantly. 

“Does anyone know how he did this?” Juárez Correa asked. 

A few students started trying to add up the numbers and soon realized it would take a long time.  Paloma, working with her group, carefully wrote out a few sequences and looked at them for a moment.  Then she raised her hand. 

“The answer is 5,050,” she said. “There are 50 pairs of 101.”

Not only this budding little Gauss but the whole class responded well to the teacher's style of provoking their curiosity and then making them figure things out on their own.  After a year of his approach, standardized tests showed a decrease in failing math scores from 45% to 7%, and in failing language skills from 31% to 3.5%.  Excellent scores increased from 0% to 63%. Paloma's score was the highest in Mexico.  I liked this story, which the teacher told his class:

One day, a burro fell into a well, Juárez Correa began.  It wasn’t hurt, but it couldn’t get out.  The burro’s owner decided that the aged beast wasn’t worth saving, and since the well was dry, he would just bury both.  He began to shovel clods of earth into the well.  The burro cried out, but the man kept shoveling.  Eventually, the burro fell silent.  The man assumed the animal was dead, so he was amazed when, after a lot of shoveling, the burro leaped out of the well.  It had shaken off each clump of dirt and stepped up the steadily rising mound until it was able to jump out. 

Juárez Correa looked at his class.  “We are like that burro,” he said.  “Everything that is thrown at us is an opportunity to rise out of the well we are in.”

"What am I missing?"

It's a minor improvement, surely, that this poor child posting at the Daily Kos is confronting the painful task of reconciling data with mental models.  He's discovering to his horror that, although he was promised that Obamacare would reduce his health insurance costs, in fact his premiums are about to double.  How can this be, he wails?

He should start with the understanding that all that business about lowering premiums was complete balderdash intended to tamp down the fires of resistance long enough to get through a couple of election cycles.  It's impossible to believe anyone was serious about floating those claims.  Then our callow young poster should consider the real aim of collectivized medicine, considered in the most favorable light to its proponents, which is to even out the good and bad luck of a population with a mix of sicker, healthier, younger, and older members, some of whom are exposed to the expense of pregnancy (their own or a dependent's), or heart disease, or cancer, and some of whom are less so.  If such a motive is confronted honestly, it should be blindingly obvious that young, healthy people are going to take it in the shorts in terms of increased costs.  How else could it work?

But as usual, this young fellow was hoping that things could get cheaper for all those unlucky people without getting more expensive for people in his relatively fortunate position.  His consent was bought cheap, without his ever having to consider the cost.  Now he has to think about what it's worth to him to be compassionate.

Lately, I'm noticing something else odd.  A lot of the outrage over the newly-rolled-out premiums is over the horrifying discovery that the only way to keep premiums down is to have high deductibles and co-pays.  As my husband noted, all you have to do is add in health-savings accounts and you get a proposal that W might have floated.  Maybe my high-deductible, low-premium policy is going to survive this debacle after all.  What's more, maybe a lot more people are going to get used to the idea of buying insurance for cash, rather than having their employer purchase it for them with invisible money.  Maybe they're also going to get used to buying most of their medical care with cash (in all but the most medically disastrous years), so that they start noticing price signals again.  Heck, maybe we'll even start getting price signals again.

Wouldn't it be ironic if Obamacare didn't destroy the American health system, after all, but avoided doing so only by destroying what collectivists imagined were the functional bits?

Whirlygigs

In the comments section to an earlier post I gave my initial guess about how a helicopter must work. The part about each rotor blade acting like a fixed wing in terms of the general Bernoulli lift principle was right. The guess about the tail rotor counteracting the spin that the main rotor otherwise would put on the body was right.  There are other ways to skin that cat, such as mounting two counterrotating main rotors.  Sometimes those are fore-and-aft, or side-by-side, but they can also be mounted on the same axle, one over the other.  They can even be side by side and so close that they must be carefully timed to avoid collision between the intermeshed blades.  Yikes.

But my intuition about how the main rotor could be made to tilt the body (to go forward/backwards/right/left) was completely wrong.  It turns out each rotor blade can tilt on its long axis, in two ways.  They can be tilted all in lockstep, which affects their general lifting power.  But what's really nifty, and what I never would have guessed, is that the machine will automatically cause each rotor to tilt individually just as it reaches the point in its cycle that's in the direction the pilot wants to go, and then flip back when it passes that point.  Now that's a fast adjustment!   I had vaguely in mind that the whole rotor system, including its axis, must be tiltable, but then on reflection that couldn't have been right.  Tilt each rotor blade one at a time as it reaches a particular point in its superfast rotation!  Very clever.  No wonder helicopters need such obsessive levels of maintenance.

And now for Bernoulli, and my indistinct memory of reading a quibble about the explanation for lift that we carry around in our heads:  the wing is shaped with a big curve on top and a much flatter one below, so when air passes it must go faster on top in order to traverse the same distance, resulting in higher pressure below the wing and lower pressure above, ergo lift.  But, you ask, who says the the air on top has to get to the back of the wing at the same time as the air below? And in fact it doesn't:  it gets there a lot faster; the air on the bottom never catches up.  Hmm.

 

The Wiki lift article claims that the Bernoulli equation itself just describes what will happen if you assume a speed differential above and below the wing, which can be observed experimentally.  In order to explain and predict the observed speed differential, you need a more involved treatment of conservation of momentum, mass, and energy, and Navier-Stokes equations that can't readily be solved, and simplifying assumptions about viscosity that allow them to be approximated for some conditions.  I'll just have to take their word for it:  experimentation tells us that if you mold a proper wing shape and use the right angle of attack at a good speed, you'll get an airspeed differential and lift.  In my brain, that gets filed under "magic."

Vigilantes

The alleged facts of the case are unpleasantly familiar, though that in itself can lead to misjudgment. There will be no trial, though the accused allegedly admitted the rape. He is a popular football player, a relative of an influential politician. The family claims to have been driven out of town by the community because they wouldn't let it drop. The mother lost her job, and the charges were dropped in spite of the confessions and the conviction of the sheriff that the crime had occurred.

The American way is to move on. Let it go, as the sheriff says. There will be no trial, so there can be no overcoming of the presumption of innocence.

It's interesting that Anonymous is making these kinds of rape cases one of its forefront issues. In a way that's praiseworthy, but it's worth remembering that the KKK did just the same thing. Vigilante groups that hunt down and destroy alleged rapists often come to enjoy huge community support, as the Klan did during the height of its lynching program.

That's not to say that Anonymous are the same as the Klan. They certainly aren't. They aren't going to turn up at this kid's door and hang him. They aren't motivated by racism, but somewhat more purely by outrage over the repeated failure of the American system to address this kind of rape case.

It's an interesting problem. The system certainly has failed, repeatedly and consistently, in cases like this.

Sometimes I think vigilantes are really the answer to the failures of the system. Sometimes -- as in the case of the Klan -- they're a worse problem. Where are we here, I wonder?

Bored on a plane

I loved these.  My husband sent them to me, knowing they'd punch my buttons.