A Spirited Woman

I've slapped a boyfriend across the face, hard, and more than once, and shoved and struck too. Now, you might say these were extraordinary circumstances, or that because I'm a fairly small woman striking a much larger man it's not so bad, but the fact remains that if the tables were turned, such behavior would be considered appalling.

When I sounded out some friends, several of them admitted to lashing out physically at a boyfriend, and while no one was exactly pleased with themselves over it, it also didn't seem like the Big Deal it obviously would be were a boyfriend doing the same thing. I can't speak for others, but in some ways, I feel like violence was encouraged in me; people always found my temper, with its foot-stomping, drink-tossing, vase-smashing theatrics, to be hilarious, largely because I am so small and because it comes out so rarely. Like my grandmother, I was "a spitfire," my grandpa always said approvingly. As a result, I didn't work to curb it as I should have, probably feeling in some way that it even denoted "spunk" or something, and doubtless there was some half-baked, unacknowledged idea of "lady's prerogative" at work, a double-standard I'd consciously have mocked.

Your grandpa was right. Sometimes the only way to get a man to listen to you is to knock him upside the head. That's true for other men, too: once in a while, a man just needs a good knock on his door.

The double-standard is wise and proper, though, because if he knocks you back he could kill you.

Separate but what?

If anyone was hoping that the WaPo editorial page would get more respectable with the advent of Jeff Bezos, this article is bound to prove a disappointment.  Andre Perry argues that it is an important function of the public schools, at least on a par with the task of educating children, to provide jobs to disadvantaged teachers.  Thus, movements to limit teacher tenure are a stab in the heart of black professionals.

This argument has always seemed implicit in the attitudes of many progressives, but I believe this is the first time I've seen it made openly.

Canto

Via AEI:

Lending and spending with burning ire
The people cannot control the government
Ex-Im! Fall apart! The center must not hold;
Set anarchy loose upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide be loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence be drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of cronyist intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely de-authorization is at hand.
Kartoffelsalat! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of Irish sand;
A plate with potatoes, red onion and chive,
Bacon bits and warm vegetable broth,
Prepared in Germany, while all about it
Wind shadows of shameless export subsidies.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of scarcity
Will come to haunt my people in a faraway land,
As yam and tater, taxpayer-financed,
Slouch toward Munich, never to return.

A Reliable Alternative Energy Source

Trash.

“A good number to remember is that three tons of waste contains as much energy as one ton of fuel oil… so there is a lot of energy in waste,” Göran Skoglund, spokesperson for Öresundskraft, one of the country’s leading energy companies, explains in the short video below. That means that the two million tons of waste incinerated each year produces around 670,000 tons worth of fuel oil energy. Sweden even helps to clean up other countries in the EU by importing their trash and burning it.

Thanks again, Lord Keynes

Japan struggles with the stubborn refusal of its citizens to agree with the approved economic theories:

The world's third-largest economy contracted at an annualized rate of 7.1 percent in the April-June quarter, according to updated government figures Monday. The initial estimate released earlier this month said the economy contracted 6.8 percent. Business investment fell more than twice as much as first estimated.

The economy's contraction was expected after Japan increased its sales tax from 5 percent to 8 percent on April 1.

* * *

Surveys show the public opposes a further tax increase, though increases are needed to counter ballooning public debt, which now is more than twice the size of the economy.

The revised data Monday show business investment fell more than twice as much as estimated before, or 5.1 percent, while private residential spending sank 10.4 percent in annual terms.

"Theoretically, there should be no impact from the consumption tax increase on corporate spending or long-term corporate planning, but a large number of Japanese corporations seemed to see a large impact from the hike on final demand," said Junko Nishioka, an economist at RBS Japan Securities in Tokyo.

Can fish think?

Another post from the consistently interesting Phenomena site (the source of Not Exactly Rocket Science weekly updates), about fish send signals to eels about tunnels where prey may be hiding and can be flushed out, to the mutual advantage of the fish and the eels.  It's charmingly entitled "When Your Prey's in a Hole and You Don't Have a Pole, Use a Moray."

The judicious mind

Phenomenon blogger Virginia Hughes, facing jury duty, has done some research into the role of stress in making us excessively judgmental.  She concludes that a prospective juror would do well to embrace relaxation techniques, which seems sensible.  It also occurs to me, however, that if we want people to judge us with calmness and temperance, we would do well not to put them under stress.  Many of civilization's proudest achievements are the ways we signal to strangers that we are not necessarily an immediate threat.

Grid parity

That's the PC term for comparing the cost of conventional electrical power and PV (that's the PC term for what we troglodytes call solar power).  A new study cited at Greenbuilders claims that a handful of states, including Texas, my Texas, already have reached grid parity, with more on the way.  The calculation includes heavy federal subsidies set to expire in 2016.

Casa Texan99 is interested in solar, notwithstanding our climate skeptic character flaws, because we enjoy independence and because there are more reasons to favor renewable energy sources than mixed-up anxieties about carbon poisoning.  That is, I don't consider CO₂ a toxin, but that doesn't mean mining and burning fossil fuels produce no unpleasant effects of any kind.  On the whole, I believe they produce benefits far outweighing the costs, but I'd move to solar power for my home in a heartbeat if I thought it made economic sense.

As my husband points out, though, this study, like most, glosses over durability and the time it takes to recoup upfront capital costs.   From what he hears the solar panels are getting cheaper, but they aren't lasting the advertised 20 years, either.  In some states, the upfront capital investment is addressed by leasing arrangements, but a few states, like Florida and South Carolina, have outlawed these.  In South Carolina, for instance, public utilities so far have succeeded in arguing that a company that installs solar panels on a homeowner's roof and then charges them for the power produced is a utility that must jump through all the usual monopolistic hoops.

This Grist article points out that our society can be unpredictable about which emerging industries get the red carpet treatment, in ways that don't necessarily line up with our usual assumptions about libertarian trends:

It’s been interesting to watch this play out in light of the Wild West atmosphere that so often surrounds technological breakthroughs.  I’ve been reading American Odyssey, Robert Conot’s history of Detroit, and I’m continually surprised at how easy cars had it in the first few decades of their creation.  They killed people left and right, but it was was years before “drivers’ licenses,” “insurance,” or “parking tickets” came on the scene.  Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft were able to muscle into long-established monopolies and get comfortable before facing any major pushback, and the first major online retailer, Amazon, was able to go nearly two decades without charging the sales taxes that brick and mortar stores had to.

It’s not that this kind of preferential treatment for new technology is fair.  And to be sure, solar has gotten some breaks over the years as well, particularly at the federal level.  Solar may have widespread appeal to everyone from hippies to libertarians.  Yet it’s still having to fight to claw its way into a surprising number of markets, while other industries get to zoom ahead.

I wouldn't want to minimize the headaches the "distributed power" causes for electric utility companies. I've been involved in a dozen or more power utility bankruptcies, and the administrative nightmares caused by allowing people to force utilities to run their meters backwards when their co-gen power was being produced were always a big part of the intractable disputes.  But it does seem as though we make it unnecessarily difficult for people to generate some of their own power.  I was pleased to see that South Carolina appears to have taken some steps recently to reduce the barriers to solar leasing.

Ghostbusters

It's the 30th anniversary right now. For a week or so, you can see it in theaters.

I took the family today. I hadn't seen it in ages. It's a surprisingly good movie. Almost everything that happens on screen is beautifully wrapped up in building out the plot and its universe. Well worth a few minutes, if you happen to have some time in the next little while.

Choice

Some promising news:

"This year, 2014, we saw the largest single-year growth in enrollment in programs in the history of school choice," he says. The fastest-growing state is Indiana, which is expected to award 30,000 scholarships this year, up from 590 in 2010. "And the momentum's not going to stop."

"Freedom!"

I had nearly forgotten that the Scots are about to vote on independence.  I know nothing about the problems they face today, of course; my head is entirely full of claptrap from Braveheart and songs of the Jacobite rebellion and movie versions of Mary, Queen of Scots (the Glenda Jackson/Vanessa Redgrave production is terrific, by the way).  I had a vague notion that romantic old ideals of freedom and independence were bursting forth, so it was disappointing to read this analysis from Andrew Stuttaford at HotAir:

The problem with an independent Scotland is not that the economics are dodgy (although they are), but it is that that is in the grip of an authoritarian leftist political class, a grasping, thuggish vulture class that should be wished on no people. There is also the little matter of the EU. If an independent Scotland wished to join the EU (the membership it “enjoys” through membership of the UK would probably not survive) its (enthusiastically europhile) leaders would have to commit to joining the single currency as soon as Scotland satisfied the necessary tests. They deny that, but the EU’s rules are clear. The euro would ruin what’s left of the Scottish economy and make a mockery of “independence.”

The polls are actually looking as though the vote might go for independence.

"My son, the . . . ."

I've been listening to a series of lectures about the history of 20th-century science, which has now reached the career of Niels Bohr.  The lecturer claimed that Bohr was the only person ever to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Olympic Gold Medal.  Alas, the wonderful factoid is not quite true.  His brother Harald was on a team that took a silver medal in soccer, and apparently Niels sometimes played with the same team, but not in the Olympics.  Still, it suggests an impressive well-roundedness.  If nothing else, you have to imagine that Mrs. Bohr had plenty of tidbits to drop into conversations with her friends about what her sons were up to these days.

It turns out that Nobel laureates who won other prestigious prizes generally have received Nobel Peace Prizes or literary prizes rather than straight science prizes.  George Bernard Shaw, for instance, had to find room on his mantel for a Nobel Prize in literature as well as an Oscar (1938, Pygmalion, best adapted screenplay). Philip Noel-Baker, a British diplomat, won both the 1959 Nobel Peace Prize and a 1920 Olympic silver medal in track. Charles Gates Dawes, who was vice-president to Calvin Coolidge, won a 1925 Nobel Peace Prize after writing a tune in 1912 that ultimately was recorded as a number-one pop hit in the U.S., "It’s All In The Game.” George Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics after winning $1 million on TV's "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader," but that's not cross-training, strictly speaking.

The dawn of English

For those of you with an interest in linguistics, here are some very enjoyable podcasts on the development of English.  Someone in a ChicagoBoyz comments thread, I think, referred me to Episodes 28-30 for the incidental political history that was included in them, concerning the time we usually associate with King Arthur.

I've been watching the Starz series "Outlander," a time-travel yarn about an woman who leaves post-WWII England, via a McGuffin that doesn't matter, and lands in Scotland just before the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.  As I get older I find it more and more difficult to follow movie dialogue, especially BBC productions with regional accents, but for some reason I never have trouble with thick old-fashioned Scots accents, maybe because I've listened to so many old ballads.  I could listen to that accent all day.  (The show throws in a lot of Gaelic, too, of which I don't speak a word beyond "slainte," but it sounds incredibly romantic.)  Anyway, the point is that the Frisian described in Episode 28 of the linguistic podcasts sounds an awful lot like a mashup between Cockney- and Scots-flavored English.

Song of Brynhild

So, among Viking-oriented friends this week (of whom I have a surprising number), the big news was a study that showed that half of the Viking invaders of England were female. This contradicts long held beliefs among scholars of the graves of early Viking invaders, because the grave goods are only very rarely female brooches and dresses, and almost always are swords or other weapons. Scholars assumed that this meant that the person in the grave was a man.

On studying the bones themselves, however, it turns out that lots of those buried with weapons turn out to have been women.

I see that our old friend Lars Walker is not impressed with the study. He cites a rebuttal, and comments:

But, this paper essentially uses the presence of six female migrants and seven male as evidence that women and children most likely accompanied the Norse armies with the intent of settling the land once it was conquered, rather than migrating in a second wave once the fighting was over. It is, sadly, not at all about female Viking warriors, and not some Earth-shattering evidence that Norse armies were evenly split among women and men.

They'll still have to prove to me that there were any female Viking warriors at all, but the point is made.

The importance of the finding goes beyond that there were women among the earliest settlers, though. It is that women were not restricted to the roles that our scholars assumed they were restricted to filling.

We have plenty of reason to doubt that women fought in the field as part of Viking armies, both in terms of the written evidence from the early sagas, absence of mention of it from the surviving Anglo-Saxon records, and of course the physical facts of Viking-age combat. On the other hand, there is ample evidence in the sources of women who were trusted with the defense of homes, and homes being established in an invaded land will of course need especial defense. For that matter, the prominent role of women in the population of Northern Europe, and their affection for weapons even as wedding gifts, was remarked as far back as Tacitus' Germania.

What I think is important to take away from this study is that what scholars were certain about for generations about the rigidity of female gender roles simply wasn't so. Many women built their lives around an image of themselves with a sword, not a brooch, and their contemporaries accepted this so much that they honored them in death with the marks of the life they had chosen. We are the ones who assumed they wouldn't, or couldn't, do that. Best not to repeat the mistake, which was more a relic of 19th-century attitudes than a careful reading of the writings of our ancestors.

War Dogs

Seriously?  We don't make it a point to bring home military dogs when they're retired from active duty?

Culture and freedom

David Foster's site, ChicagoBoyz, linked me to a site called askblog, including this quotation:

[T]he cultural margin is more important than the institutional margin. … [T]here are no societies in which anarchy will work well but government would work poorly, or vice-versa.  Instead, on the one hand there are well-developed cultures, which could have good government or good anarchy, while on the other hand there are poorly-developed cultures, which could have only bad government or bad anarchy.

Another interesting post at the same site described a conservative tendency to arrange issues along a civilization/barbarism axis, while progressives tend to think in terms of an oppressor/oppressed axis.

I Imagine This Works Well

"Soldierfit," a workout plan based not on boot camp -- that's been done, and never very successfully -- but on the military life post boot camp. Assigning you an "NCO" to check on you every 30 days and chew you out for bad habits is probably somewhat effective, if you stay with the program.

Of course, it's a gimmick. You could always walk away, unlike the real military. Nevertheless, the structure probably would help a lot of people. One of the things I try to do for a few of my closest friends, not here on the internet but the ones I have in the physical world, is to keep in touch with them about their priorities and check on their progress regularly. Obviously I wouldn't impose myself if they did not wish it, but several of them have said that they like knowing they will have to account for their progress on a regular basis. It sometimes gives them that push to go to the gym, to write an extra chapter on their novel or dissertation, or whatever else they may be working on that is important to them.

That said, talking about what you're trying to do feels like accomplishing something -- and it's not, it's just talking. You have to hit that balance where what we are going to talk about is your accomplishment, so there'd better be one!

Baby steps in medicine

Twenty-five years ago there was great hope that advances in the understanding of the genetic underpinnings of cystic fibrosis heralded a cure in the near future.  That early hope was dashed, but medical researchers keep making small, concrete advances, many of which can hugely open up the life of teenagers and young adults suffering from this disease.  It may not be too long before we can refer to middle-aged people suffering from it.  It was not so many years ago that only a lucky child could survive it to the age of six.

Boys really are different.

Science says so.

The week in pictures

From Powerline: