More Links to Keep You Busy While I'm Gone

 Universal Healthcare: The American Way  Embracing free market solutions.  It sounds great.  I don't see who could sell the package without ceasing to be elected, though

Changing Norms to Fit The Narrative  Tom Golden at Men Are Good, last of a four-part series on psychological research being bent to serve ideological needs.  I had not heard of this particular inventory, but man, does it ring true. 

Steve Stewart-Williams at NNN When Wokeness Kills. Links to the longer article by Megan McArdle

A Graveyard of Bad NYC Mayoral Narratives  Musa al-Gharbi demonstrates that the narratives of both parties and sub-parties do not explain what was in. fact a banal election. 

For those close enough to North Central MA, there is a Lenten study of The Return of the King at the CS Lewis Study Center in Feb-Mar on Wednesdays at 7. I may also go to the Thornton Wilder weekend conference in June.  It surprised me to see it, because even though Wilder often uses Christian themes (especially in "The Skin of Our Teeth,") he is not usually regarded as a Christian writer.  A bit heterodox at minimum.  Outside the tent is more likely.

AI and Theoretical Physics

Steve Hsu assures us that all but the last 20 minutes should be comprehensible to non-physicists.  I didn't get that far. Five years ago, and for the fifty years before that I would have been interested, but somehow I am less so.  Perhaps my thinking is less flexible, or I care less about the answers.

Hsu considers AI to be a "brilliant but unreliable genius colleague."

Theoretical Physics and AI 

2013 Links

 Taking Up Emotional Space We have more influence than we think, just in places we didn't expect.

How Big a Problem?  A shortcut problem-solving technique, and a discussion of what this would mean for acknowledging racial differences in IQ

Professional Jurors  Some difficulties that would show pretty quickly

Cow Accents   NPR repeated the urban legend that they got from the BBC. We got it right in the comments

Trivia Study Vs Memory  At what point does playing trivia become gaming the system.  I have a friend who still plays on Tuesday who tells me he has just picked up things like thew birthstone for each monthy.

The Twelve Days of Christmas

 

Links to Keep You Busy While I am Gone

We leave early on the 5th to meet sons John-Adrian and Jocie, Chris and Maria (Nome and Tromso respectively) and the three youngest granddaughters in Orlando.  I am not much interested in Mouseworld or Universal, but I am interested in them.

Suggested by Razib 

An Apology for Philology Philology used to be the core of Classics, which has now been taken over by people who write things like "Through a combination of Audre Lorde’s Black queer lens and Paul Preciado’s trans scholarship on the dildo, I further argue that by imagining Simulus as Black, queer, and/or trans, the power imbalance between Simulus and Scybale is greatly reduced." Solveig Gold and Joshua Katz push back.  The criticisms of philology seem to be "Neutrality is impossible, it's all whiteness, and we'd rather talk about ourselves being fashionable." 

Religion in America has stopped declining, but is not rebounding, according to Pew Research 

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Peggy Sastre at Quillette has a three part series Darwinian Hereises about the longstanding crusades to cancel Napolean Chagnon, E.O. Wilson, and Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer.  This includes death threat and kicking them out of academic societies as well as delisting their scholarship in hopes of making them invisible. 

 The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea Revisited. Edward Campbell at Unfashionable Truths replies to the comments on his socialism essay.  I linked to the last part of this previously.

As I explained in the original essay, the Nordics are not the examples many American socialists imagine. They aren’t evidence of socialism’s success; they’re evidence of capitalism’s success paired with unusually strong social cohesion.

Long before Scandinavia built modern welfare states, it spent centuries developing strong property rights, independent courts, high institutional trust, and vibrant trade networks. These countries built globally competitive private industries—shipping, timber, energy, engineering, technology—and produced companies like Maersk, IKEA, Volvo, Ericsson, and Novo Nordisk. They got rich first. Only after generations of market-driven prosperity did they construct generous social welfare systems. 

The Sweden Syndrome  What Swedes will deny is happening - except when it can't be ignored. 

The Trouble With "X"

 

True Crime

Lomez on X

Seems like most detective work is simply gathering enough evidence to prove that the guy who obviously did it is obviously guilty for a jury that watches/reads too many fictional murder mysteries and is therefore incredulous that the obvious guy is obviously guilty

Alan Cole on X 

Fictional murder mysteries are frequently pretty good with all sorts of layers to them.

By contrast, “true crime” is always like “the mystery of the girl who got murdered on a day where her ex-boyfriend can’t keep his whereabouts straight.”

Fahrenheit

As we are going to Orlando next week, I am thinking much about temperature.  It will be about a 50 degree difference for us. We are not going because we love Orlando, but because the two Arctic Circle sons and the women who love them will be there. Norway and Alaska don't get to see each other in the flesh that often. It's about six flights for each to get to the other, and neither of them has done it.  When they see each other at all, it is because they have each taken three flights to NH. One 3000 mile direct flight over the North Pole would do it for them, but that flight does not exist.*  For them, it will be a 60 degree and 80 degree difference, respectively. 

Fahrenheit is how people feel, Celsius is how water feels, Kelvin is how molecules feel. 

I am a big proponent of sticking with Fahrenheit, because 0-100 degrees is a nice even scale. 20 degrees is Cold, and 0 degrees is Too Damn Cold.  80 degrees is Hot and 100 degrees is Too Damn Hot. Celsius is not superior.  I don't care how my ambient temperature relates to the melting point of tin, thanks. 

*If they ever tried to charter that it would likely set off alarms in half the intelligence agencies in the world. Then it would puzzle them that it was just two Romanian-American brothers arguing with each other and eating fish. 

Random Memory

Probably from thinking about the Moneyball era. Pete Rose: "In my day we took performance-destroying drugs."

Modern Wizardry

In echo of Bethany's post about health care costs, we have Thankful by Mark Stoler over at Things Have Changed.  He is thankful for Big Medicine and Big Pharma

Moneyball

I read the book.  My son told me I would love the movie but I've never seen it. There're a lot of movies I've never seen which I am assured I would like, and that is probably true. I have something that I now distrust about the medium, which is unfair of me.  Because I am sucked in by its charms so easily, I am aware how powerfully it can mislead. But that is true of all art.  Art can condense an idea, even a subtle one, and teach it better than the strict truth. If you want to give a sense of the British Raj and espionage during the Great Game in India, you write Kim.  It's better than a dozen lectures on the subject in terms of staying power and teaching. 

Yet they are all liars, attempting to control how you see a particular perspective to the exclusion of others.

Actual baseball players criticised the movie when it came out because "not a single scene actually happened." For those of us who followed baseball statistics and rejoiced in the 80s as the statheads gradually established their bona fides, making better predictions than the supposed experts in a field where prediction is difficult. It was Yogi Berra, after all , who may have said "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future." Because baseball is a series of separate events, it lends itself to analysis and prediction better than other sports, but even that is fraught with peril. 

This scene captures the essence of the conflict beautifully, but it never happened. Bill James, most famous of the statisticians, willingly conceded that there were things scouts could discover and predict for you about a player that he could not: how hard he worked, whether he was coachable, whether he was going to throw it all away because of poor character.  None of that is in this scene. But because I support the idea, I think it's a great scene.

 

 

N'Ham'sha

There has been a run here on bumpahstickahs and such saying "NAHAMSHA." It's cute, but not quite right.  The first vowel is a schwa or even an inaudible vowel, and there has got to be a stop, a barely detectable P in it.  Accents are tricky, and eye-dialect even more so.

Happy Jack

 

Earendil

 Christ I, or The Advent Lyrics are part of the Exeter Book and date from the late 900s AD. Lyrics, in this case, is closer to the literal meaning of "accompanied by the lyre (harp)" of the ancient Greeks, though Anglo-Saxon poets may not have been directly knowledgeable about that. It is a set of 12 antiphons, and #7 contains a reference to "Earendel," the morning star, associated with a much older root referring to the light of dawn, such as in the word aurora. 

It not only suggests Tolkien's Earendil, he makes the connection explicit. 

When first studying A[nglo]-S[axon] professionally (1913) ... I was struck by the great beauty of this word (or name), entirely coherent with the normal style of A-S, but euphonic to a peculiar degree in that pleasing but not 'delectable' language ... it at least seems certain that it belonged to astronomical-myth, and was the name of a star or star-group. Before 1914, I wrote a 'poem' upon Earendel who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun. I adopted him into my mythology in which he became a prime figure as a mariner, and eventually as a herald star, and a sign of hope to men. Aiya Earendil Elenion Ancalima (II 329) 'hail Earendil brightest of Stars' is derived at long remove from Éala Éarendel engla beorhtast. (Personal letter from 1967)

Earendil was thus one of the first puzzle-pieces in Tolkien's Legendarium.  Additional note: Tolkien thought of himself as a philologist, and Lewis describes him as such, both the man himself and his representation as Elwin Ransom in the 1940s sci-fi series. We would call such a person an historical linguist today. Yet there is a distinction: the former studies word roots and tracings in order to understand texts; the latter hews more to an anthropological line and studies historical language relationships in order to understand humans.

You can learn more about the Advent Lyrics at the Anglo-Saxon England podcast. He is also doing a long series on King Canute, which I will summarise far in the future when he has finished.

 

Stocking Presents

For years I have put a 12 oz container of dry gas in everyone's stocking.  It's just a Dad sort of thing to remind people of. I used to do windshield wipers as well but that has become less necessary. This year Emily became the first granddaughter to get one.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

One will occasionally run across the challenge from liberals - my brother, for example - to conservatives opposing DEI to spell it out, saying "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  Ask them which one they are opposed to."  I have given medium-length, accurate but not rhetorically powerful answers to this, wishing that I had a better.  Today I heard a better:

Voltaire said the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. 

Julbord

The Julbord is a specialised version of a Smorgasbord. Years ago I toyed with the idea of doing an authentic Julbord, as I am partly of Swedish extraction. We had never had one at our house, nor even my grandmother's, yet I felt certain it would take to it naturally. Then I looked it up. I was already not doing well reading the description, but the photos of the rollmopse finished me off.  I'm sure they are quite the delicacy if you like the idea of pickled herring wrapped around an onion and gherkin. 

Herring in general is prominent, and as many as seven versions of it may make it to the table.  One would think that smorgas, meaning buttered bread, would not have won out in a battle* against seven herrings for naming rights, but there you are. There is also brawn, a head cheese made of cold jellied pigs head; multiple sausages including korv, especially fatty and stretched with potato and onion; Lutfisk, a dried whitefish cured with lye for days, then rehydrated for days in preparation for eating, at which point it is rather gelatinous - add white sauce or mustard; Eels are big in some regions, liver pate in others. Hardtack is ultratraditional, but crispbread is substituted now. The vegetables are brussel sprouts, pickled beets, and sour cabbage. Various dishes that moderns might take to better include smoked salmon, crusted ham, cheeses, and shrimp or mushroom omelets. Aqvavit and glogg are drunk, and the final course is a rice pudding with cinnamon. (There are other desserts. Plenty.)

Oh, and meatballs and other smavarmt, little warm dishes. And coffee, always coffee.  Swedish children even leave coffee out for St. Nicholas.

More modern versions are less fatty and less jellied. The newest versions stress seasonal and local foods. 

 

*There actually was a Battle of the Herrings, when the English were attempting to deliver herring to the siege of Orleans in preparation for Lent but were attacked by the Scots and French. This has nothing to do with smorgasbord, but was remembered for years as an important example of French cowardice costing their allies lots of casualties.