Looking up

Twenty-six areas of global progress.

Another Lesson in Spirituality

I think this one is very helpful even for those of us who aren't planning to date, but merely have to talk to these people once in a while.

Hampsterdance

Once upon a time...



So that reminds me of this tremendously unfair and inappropriate video.



With apologies to DL Sly at least, as I don't doubt that woman can drive anything with wheels.

Inconceivable!

In other words, the swing votes here, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, may have voted for a liberal social policy because of a conservative method of statutory interpretation. Yes, the end result is to expand the social safety net for women. But the reason that result was reached was because of a close, conservative reading of the statute in question.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

We recently had an invigorating discussion about facts, so I thought I'd actually look the word up. I know, linguists tell us that dictionaries don't define words, they document usage. I'll make no appeals to authority here! Nonetheless, it's an interesting selection from the OED. Who knew that facts can be acts, disputed, and guilt? Or that Sgt. Friday never said,"Just the facts, Ma'am"?

fact, n., int., and adv.

Etymology:  < classical Latin factum deed, action, event, occurrence, achievement, misdeed, real happening, result of doing, something done, in post-classical Latin also thing that has really occurred or is actually the case, thing known to be true (11th cent.; from 13th cent. in British sources), case, legal dispute (from 13th cent. in British sources), use as noun of neuter past participle of facere to make, do < an extended form of the Indo-European base of do v.

 I. Senses relating primarily to action.

1. An action, a deed, a course of conduct; (formerly also occas.) †an effect, a result. Also as a mass noun: action, deeds, as opposed to words. Now somewhat rare.

Interesting that the word also carries the meaning of actions, deeds, events. Real things, indeed.

II. Senses relating primarily to truth.

6. Law
 a. The sum of circumstances and incidents of a case, looked at apart from their legal bearing.
 b. In pl. with the same sense. Also: items of information used or usable as evidence.

7. That which is known (or firmly believed) to be real or true; what has actually happened or is the case; truth attested by direct observation or authentic testimony; reality.

Firmly believed?

8a. A thing that has really occurred or is actually the case; a thing certainly known to be a real occurrence or to represent the truth. Hence: a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony, as opposed to an inference, a conjecture, or a fiction; a datum of experience, as distinguished from the conclusions that may be based on it.

b. With the and following clause or preposition.
 (a) The actual occurrence of an event; the real existence of a situation or state of affairs.
E.g.: 1986   Amer. Scholar 65 572/1   The fact of their nationality colors the way men and women think, particularly about politics and society.
(b) The circumstance that something is the case.

 c. Uses emphasizing the truth of an assertion, esp. in fixed phrases.
 (a) The (honest) truth. Freq. in the fact is with that-clause, esp. asserting something surprising, unwelcome, or controversial, or making an admission; also colloq. (orig. U.S.) without the.
 (b) A true statement. Freq. in (and) that's a fact.

d. A person, an institution, etc., undoubtedly in existence; a person or thing experienced or seen.

9 is interesting because it goes against what I think a fact is. I'll leave all the example sentences.

9. A piece of information allegedly or conceivably true; something presented as a fact (in sense A. 8a) but which is disputed or unproven; (more strongly) an unproved assertion, an allegation.

1566   W. Painter Palace of Pleasure I. lii. f. 304,   I humblie beseche you to tell me the truth of this facte.

1632   J. Hayward tr. G. F. Biondi Eromena 21   They resolved that the Admirall should goe disguised..to assure himselfe of the fact [It. fatto].

1699   tr. C. de Saint-Evremond Arguments M. Herard 113   The Fact is false, there has been no dissipation of the Cardinal's Goods by Monsieur Mazarin.

a1729   S. Clarke Serm. (1730) V. i. 8   It would have been absurd to allege, in preaching to Unbelievers, a Fact which itself presupposed the Truth of Christ's Mission.

1797   Morning Chron. 27 Aug. 2/4   If another soldier should call you a jail-bird, and the truth of the fact be notorious.

1824   Westm. Rev. 2 209   This is..a false fact, supported by a supposed motive.

1872   W. H. Lamon Life Abraham Lincoln xi. 236   Douglas denied the fact; and Lincoln attempted to prove his statement by reading a certain passage from Holland's ‘Life of Van Buren’.

1941   A. M. Lindbergh Diary 13 Oct. in War within & Without (1980) 233   It bases its accusations on false statements and inaccurate facts.

1968   Hartford (Connecticut) Courant 29 Aug. 16/4   One cannot help but question the credibility of the writer's facts.

2002   Vanity Fair June 160/3   Waksal hotly disputed some of the facts in that story.

10. Guilt, especially actual guilt as opposed to suspicion. Obs.

Phrases

P9. orig. U.S. "just the facts ma'am" and variants: used with reference to the eliciting or presentation of an unembellished or straightforward account of factual information. Also attrib.: strictly factual; unembellished, dry.With allusion to the investigative technique of police detective Sergeant Joe Friday in the U.S. radio and television series Dragnet (first broadcast in 1949), although the exact phrase ‘Just the facts ma'am’ did not occur in either the television or radio series.

Compounds

C1 a.   fact-fetishism n.

1957   D. MacDonald Triumph of Fact iii, in Anchor Rev. No. 2. 122   Fact-fetishism is to some extent a class phenomenon.
1964   K. Winetrout in I. L. Horowitz New Sociol. 149   We wind up with fact-fetishism, with a ‘social science of the narrow focus, the trivial detail, the abstracted almighty unimportant fact’.
2010   P. Garrett Victorian Empiricism 201   An all too familiar definition of empiricism as fact-fetishism.

C2.  fact-proof adj. impervious to facts, willing to disregard facts.

1828   Foreign Q. Rev. Feb. 28   Nothing softer than the Reviewer's fact-proof cranium could resist it.
1909   G. B. Shaw John Bull's Other Island p. ix,   He is never quite the hysterical, nonsense-crammed, fact-proof, truth-terrified, unballasted sport of all the bogy panics..that now calls itself ‘God's Englishman’.
2010   Sydney Morning Herald (Nexis) 2 Nov. 11   So anger is a standard tool, used by both sides of politics. Is there anything new about it? One striking feature of rage 2010 seems to be that it is increasingly fact-proof.

Source: "fact, n., int., and adv.". OED Online. March 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/67478?result=1&rskey=b6Jdx4& (accessed March 24, 2015).

A Plea For Reform

...to any Constitutional attorney: I can’t pay you (see above), but I have a tax return that will make your eyes bleed. Get me in front of a jury or, better yet, the Supreme Court, and let us ask 12 or nine reasonable people if the burden of completing this particular tax return – a requirement I must meet to retain my liberty and my property – is reasonable or not. And if just one of the jury or bench believes that a reasonably educated person could accurately complete my tax return in a reasonable period, I’ll be happily defeated – as long as he shows me how.

Otherwise, use me as a legal guinea pig to pull down this entire rotten structure that turns good people into unwilling law breakers or liars of both... Our tax code is so complex that people our government deems too poor to buy their own health insurance must fork over nearly a tenth of their income just to comply with it.

History and narrative

David Foster has up an interesting post about fiction and non-fiction. In recent years I've been reading more history than was my early habit, when I tended more to fiction. I find that I have a hard time remembering the history and keeping it straight unless I can tie it into fictional worlds. Modern fiction set in historical periods can be a problem, since most authors jam everything so full of anachronisms, but this problem can be ameliorated slightly by reading fiction written during the time in question. The trick is not to take the fiction as an accurate statement of history, but as a suggestion of what facts an author of that period took for granted, and what things hadn't even occurred to him yet.

Malaria and flowers

How malaria makes its hosts more inviting to mosquitoes when it's time to jump ship:

Plasmodium's ancestors lost the ability to photosynthesize a long time ago. But they still hold onto some of the ancestral enzymes from the bacteria that their forebears swallowed 1.3 billion years ago. As a result, Plasmodium is weirdly similar to flowers and trees. Some scientists have even taken advantage of this evolutionary kinship by looking at weed-killers as potential drugs for malaria.

This ancient heritage also explains why Plasmodium can smell like lemons. Odom and her colleagues found that the parasite make pinene and limonene using enzymes that are related to the ones that plants use to make these chemicals.

There are reasons to think that the parasite are using these chemicals to lure mosquitoes. While we're painfully aware of the appetite mosquitoes have for blood, the fact is that mosquitoes also feed on flower nectar. They depend on the nectar for sugar they need to fuel their flights. Many insects are keenly sensitive to certain colors and odors that flowers produce, which guide them reliably to their next meal of nectar. Odom and her colleagues found that the antenna of malaria-carrying species of mosquitoes are exquisitely sensitive to pinene and limonene. If you want to attract mosquitoes, it makes sense to make those chemicals.

Yes, Let's Do That

"Let's hop into a time machine and go back to the England of yore!"

A small selection of readings in the original accent from a few important periods of English literary history. Well, and actually a bit earlier: all the way to Arthurian Britain, as well as we can guess at it.

But take heart: if you couldn't ask for the beer in Old Brythonic, ask for it in something like Latin. Pretty much any Romance language you know will have preserved a word for beer that Arthur's kindred would have learned to understand.

Surprise!

Obamacare is proving to be a drag on small business growth. Close to two thirds predict compliance costs of the ACA will "increase costs a lot" this year.

That's Some Tight Security

From American Public Broadcasting:

Nearly nine years after Brett first saw combat here, this Detroit native returned to Iraq to defend the Christian faith he holds so dear.... Brett asked us to not to us his last name for security reasons. In 2006 he served in the U.S. army’s 14th mountain division for 15 months in Iraq. Brett was wounded by a roadside bomb and is a veteran on disability.

Good luck looking up his service records from the 14th Mountain Division, ISIS.

V S Naipaul on Daesh

Naipaul once wrote a book called A Turn in the South, which treated the racial problems of thirty years ago with a compassionate eye for all sides. His outright condemnation of the so-called Islamic State is the more powerful given his demonstrated ability to imagine different perspectives sympathetically. Sometimes, it's just because you can accurately imagine someone's inner life that you find them disgusting.

Update on Women in the Combat Arms

As the military drives on with President Obama's orders to integrate women into every military job, the Washington Times reports that evidence suggesting this may be unwise is being suppressed.

In particular they mention a British study that just came out late last year, which you can read here. In terms of combat effectivness -- which one would think ought to be the only consideration -- the British identified 21 factors they thought could plausibly be said to contribute to combat effectiveness. Women studied had negative results in 11 of these 21 areas.

"In three of the 11 negative factors, mitigation would be a significant challenge," the report says. "These are survivability, morbidity and deployability, much of which are predicated by physiology."

Those are some pretty important areas. Will they survive in combat? Will they suffer injuries that will hamper their teams? Can they be deployed at all?

The problems turn out to be related. Women suffer combat stress injuries much quicker than men, which reduces their ability to maneuver -- and also makes them less dangerous to their enemies, not just less likely to survive.

These studies suggest that the relative strength of women, compared to men, when carrying the combat load are likely to result in the early onset of fatigue. This is likely to result in a distinct cohort with lower survivability in combat. Similar research points to a reduced lethality rate; in that combat marksmanship degrades as a result of fatigue when the combat load increases in proportion to body weight and strength. The risks regarding survivability are therefore relative; these are about biology rather than character.

UPDATE: I think this concerns me for two basic reasons.

1. We're doing all these assessments on what amount to closed courses. The whole reason to establish a closed course is to limit the risks: you can drive at speeds that would be ridiculously unsafe in traffic, or practice combat-driving maneuvers in a relatively safe environment before you have to go out and do them for real. The problem is that the armed forces will have to go out and do this for real at some point. If we discover in a three-month survey on a closed course that we're encountering morbidity and survivability problems that also impact the ability to effectively kill the enemy, we need to understand that the effect of this on a unit deployed at war for a year or more is going to be magnified substantially. For want of a nail, the shoe... the horse... the troop... the regiment... the battle.. the war.

2. That Congress and the military are glad-handing their way through this suggests that we're not listening to negative findings if they conflict with the great goal of 'gender equality.' Will negative findings from the battlefield be enough to correct us here? Or will we refuse to see it even then? 'Their command should have trained them harder'; 'their leadership didn't provide adequate support'; 'the environment is toxic for women'; 'who dares question that she got pregnant at deployment time?'

The danger is accepting a permanently higher number of American dead and injured to further our chase for this will-o'-wisp.

Practicing without a license

I'm in favor of it, obviously.  The Washington Post reports in alarm over the high cost of legal services, even approving in its own backhanded way of high hourly rates charged by lawyers in light of the poor things' unfair student debt (that being, obviously, the only excuse for a market rate in a just society).  Here and there, however, people are trying out the legal equivalent of a nurse practitioner.

For years I ran my firm's pro bono legal clinic for homeless kids, 99% of whom had the same recurring problems, typically involving outstanding warrants for unpaid tickets.  My neighbors come to me with the middle-class equivalent, which is wills and divorces, with the occasional business contract.  Only in the case of the business contracts am I likely to add much value to what is available online to anybody with a modicum of instruction and experience.  Cheap over-the-counter legal assistance for routine problems would cut way down on the cost of a lot of ordinary problems.  If at the same time it makes some dull and lazy lawyers feel the cold breath of competition on their necks, well, maybe they'll get better at returning their phone calls timely.

Do I worry that people will get into trouble when a cut-rate semi-professional doesn't diagnose the zebra conditions?  Not very much.  The realistic alternative for most people is no legal advice at all.  There are many, many controversies that can't be solved by a lawyer for less than the amount in dispute.  Like a nurse practitioner, a legal practitioner who finds himself in over his head can refer people to an expert for anything really hairy.  That's what I do when people approach me for consumer jobs outside my expertise:  I try to do the bone-headed part up front--all the time-consuming process of extracting the facts and documents from the client, and roughing out an approach--then refer them to an expert with a situation that should now be cheaper to handle.  Long experience tells me that the expensive part of a lot of legal work stems from using the lawyer as a secretary.  Nearly all the cost of administering an estate, for instance, is monkey work consisting of endless repetitive letters to holders of various sorts of accounts and titles, finding out what documents they need filled out and sent in before they'll transfer title to heirs.  Anyone with a bit of training can do that for himself and save a ton of money.  Cassandra, with her paralegal experience and natural advantages, could do all of it standing on her head.

We sometimes couch licensing restrictions as a public protection, but there's usually a big old hunk of anti-competitive merchant protectionism built right in there.

Melville on battle

From Sheridan at Cedar Creek, by Herman Melville:

Shoe the steed with silver
  That bore him to the fray,
When he heard the guns at dawning
  Miles away;
When he heard them calling, calling--
  Mount! nor stay.

Maybe Because She's Done So Much To Earn It?

Poll: Democrats think the media is harder on Clinton than other politicians.

Never Take A "Data-Driven" Road Trip

My late father-in-law was an aerospace engineer, and his adult children still gripe about the trauma of family road trips he planned. We must hit the next sight-to-be-seen! No time for dinner! No, we can't just stop here and enjoy ourselves!

NPR found someone even less likely to plan a good time.

Randy Olson, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University and a self-proclaimed "data tinkerer," believes he's devised a route that could allow a family to hit a landmark in each of the Lower 48 states, from Grand Canyon in Arizona to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to the Statue of Liberty in New York, in just nine days of driving.

"About 9.33 days, if you drove non-stop," Olson clarifies.

That means no time sleeping or using the restroom — and no bad traffic.

Allow me to suggest: no.

Sexual Identity

A brave soldier comes out.

(It's a parody of the genre, so expect the usual language.)

UPDATE: RangerUP finds a date for our soldier.

Barriers to entry

Adam Smith warned us that merchants are forever looking for ways to protect themselves from competition.  Thirty-five states have a "certificate of need" process that drives up medical costs.

The Bible and science

From "The Lost World of Adam and Eve":

Isn't the claim that readers cannot properly understand Genesis without knowing Hebrew and the ancient Near Eastern culture just a form of scholarly elitism?

It’s no more scholarly elitism than recognizing someone has to translate the Bible into English. Bringing the ancient text to us is not just a matter of word rendering; it’s a matter of understanding the culture in which it was written. We have to translate not only language but also culture. We all are dependent on the expertise of others. I’m never inclined to think that the exercise of one’s spiritual gifts or talents is elitism. I’m a hand, not an eye. And someone else is an eye and not a hand. That’s how the body of Christ works.