Ears to the Ground

 Tell me if you hear or read anyone who actively retracts a previous Trump/Russia position. 

First Salmon of the Season

 Pinay sa Alaska 

W H Auden

 

I increasingly find I cannot even tell the past, let alone the future. But I want to tell both and am trapped between them.

2012 Links

Global Warming Catastrophists. Is the National Wildlife Federation mainstream and respectable enough for you? Because this is from page 1 of their new report, "The Psychological Effects of Global Warming On The United States," and it is flipping insane.

Comparing Mountains Good comments about climbing

Geography Geek. Obama's poor grasp of geography and his general intelligence.  Lots of comments.

Daywalkers vs night shift

Village Closeness in the Balkans

Picnics

On a slide show presentation I saw today, I saw an old ad that showed people having a picnic.  It had a blanket spread on the ground and a picnic basket and bottles. I have never liked picnics, because one sits on an uncomfortable position on the ground made worse by trying to eat at the same time.  It is a little better on a beach, and we have gotten stuck at the occasional picnic, usually for church events.  I have never suggested we go on one.

Today it occurred to me that my picture of what a picnic is is at odds with the reality of picnics, including many picnics I have been to.  One could more comfortably sit up higher and put the food on some sort of platform.  Hence the phrase picnic table. That sounds like a lot more fun.  I told my wife about my decades of false impression and told her we should start looking for places to go and have a picnic.

One More Reason...

 ...to read Niall Ferguson, interviewed by Nathan Gardels of Noema: America is in a Late Republic Stage - Like Rome.  I admit that I am tired of the decades of discussion that America is Rome (which fell, doncha know, so smarten up) but he makes some excellent points here.

 Let’s just break it down briefly. Many people wrongly thought that it would be beneficial to Vladimir Putin if Donald Trump were re-elected. I don’t think this war is going to be ended on Putin’s terms, if it’s going to be ended. Secondly, maximum pressure is now back on Iran. That’s important. Thirdly, tariffs have been increased on China, so the pressure is on China. Little Rocket Man in North Korea is still waiting to get whatever is coming to him, but I don’t think it’s going to be a love letter from the Trump administration.

 I got this from a link from The Free Press.

Virgil Wander

Book club discussed Virgil Wander tonight. I found the discussing of it more enjoyable than the reading of it.  The plot starts slowly, and I could tell that something was important - such as the recurrence of the uncertain boundaries of land, water, and sky/fog intersecting with questions of people who were almost dead or thought to be dead coming back or recovering their lives - but I could not discern what any of it was about at first.  But even I, who hates it when authors toy with me that way with a striptease of a novel, appreciated the layering of it in the end.

If you give it a go, I think I can give you just a few things to think about while you read without giving any spoilers.

I wondered where on the spectrum from mere evocation to allegorical retelling were the names.  Was Virgil supposed to represent Wandering Aeneas in the first half of the Aeneid, have elements of him, or merely evoke something about the continual journeying of man?  Or was this Virgil the guide of Dante in the Inferno, and how strictly? I came up with an answer I liked by the end, but no one was excited by it. Still, there was general agreement that the names were important, especially of the male characters. 

What's with all the fish?

Is Adam Leer an evil character, one who is unlucky and easily blamed, or tragically trapped in having evil occur around him?

One of the discussants thought the book had a lot of understated humor, which I did not pick up but can see now that he mentioned it. 

Now That I've Held Him in My Arms

 

Subsistence Curriculum for This Week in Alaska

 

Looks like quite a week.  I hope Aurora can stop looking at her phone and talking with boys to learn this.

ChatGPT Effect on Student Cognition

I am usually suspicious of such claims.  Dime novels were supposed to ruin youths, as were radio, artificial light, television, rock music, computers, D&D, the internet...anything new was blamed for whatever was wrong with Kids These Days. But all of those things did change society, and change might be good or bad.  So with the natural Bayesian structure of our thinking (though we vary widely in how well we do that), this weights the balance pan slightly in the direction of Concern.

This preprint from MIT uncovers some possible problems for students using ChatGPT Your Brain On ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI assistant for Essay Writing Task 

Across the four-month trial, the ChatGPT group showed the weakest neural connectivity, roughly a 32 % lower cognitive load than peers who wrote unaided, and struggled to recall or summarise their own work. Their essays scored well on grammar and structure but were markedly uniform and short on original insight, according to human graders and automated analysis. When the same writers were later asked to compose without AI, performance lagged behind that of participants who had never used the chatbot. 

Proprioception

Science fiction used to have great fun hypothesizing further senses that an alien might have, beyond or instead of our traditional five. But even here on earth there are abilities we recognise as senses once they are presented to us as possibilities.  Animals that can detect magnetic fields or that use echolocation would qualify.  A sense of balance is based on internal awareness rather than external stimuli, as is spatial awareness.  Would we call hunger and thirst senses?  Sure, once we think of it.

It was years ago that someone described proprioception, our sense of body position, as The Sixth Sense, so that one has always stuck in my mind as the best example. It is both conscious and unconscious, as the five we are used to. If we stand in one place and close our eyes, we can tell without looking if our knees are bent or our arms raised. We can describe it instantly.  But it also goes on all day without our attending to it, so that we don't bump our head or hand against something as we walk. Even in the dark we can remember where objects are and have some idea whether we are in line to run into them.

I remember marveling at such a thing when first told about it. I remember closing my eyes in class in sixth grade and checking where all my pieces were. When I checked by sight, they were exactly where my internal sense told me they would be. Mrs. McKeon, long-suffering, asked me what I was doing, but in a less exasperated tone than my previous teachers. Perhaps she was proud of me, perhaps she had just given up.  Either way,  she told me to focus on my work.  I had learned under previous teachers not to counter that I had finished my work.

I have thought only occasionally - less than once year or even decade - about it since, but each time it pleases me. But I have noticed it lately, because it is less accurate than I remember.  My hand might be turned an inch more outward than I estimated, or be a bit higher or lower.  As I have always been clumsy, so maybe this is just noticing what has always been there.  The sense does deteriorate with age, and leads to worse balance and more falls. Yet if anything, I am falling less than I used to.  I don't know if anything is really up or not.

Nor do I much care.  One thing I learned from working in mental health is that if something is not a problem, it's not a problem.  If it gets worse, it might become a problem, and then I will worry about it.  As Tevye says "Good news will keep and bad news will refuse to go away." 

2012 Links

 Scrooge was a Liberal.

Mystery People Vs Research People Or is this a Male/Female difference?

The Little Black Egg 

Cost of Your Health Care. 

Anniversary - Bonhoeffer 

Reading Homer After October 7

I taught my students the 'Iliad.' Then they went to war. by Ido Hevroni, professor of Classics at Shalem College in Israel.

Amir approached me after the second class and said he was frustrated. He couldn’t get into the Illiad. We had a short conversation, and by the next meeting he came prepared like a skilled warrior, not a young man enjoying a cultural experience. He learned the text as an officer would learn a map before navigating his company to its destination. I expected to meet him again on October 9, 2023, at the opening of his sophomore year, but instead, I stood before his grave and eulogized him. Two days earlier, Amir had led a team of soldiers toward the Gaza border communities that were being attacked by terrorists. He was one of the Israelis killed on October 7.

Unfortunate Miss Bailey

This occurred to me because we are thinking of visiting Halifax. My mother and her then-boyfriend* were big Kingston Trio fans, so I grew up on this album and knew all the words to every song.  I had not realised that the song was that old, though.

 *Had she married him, as looked likely at the time, a lot of my childhood would have been Greek.  I sought him out years later and decided he was quite the jerk, and was glad my mother had not married him.

Examples of Fakes

 This guy is providing a public service.  But does it work?

 

Resting Hunt Face

 I am suspicious of the theories that explain modern human inefficiencies as evolutionary leftovers that no longer work.  It is not because I think they are mostly untrue - I think there are some very good ones out there.  But the explanation is so tidy and so congenial that I think it always brings a risk of being a Just-So story.

Having said that, I've got a fun one, by Jesse Bering Resting Hunt Face.  

Just look at the corporate world. Studies show that the selection of CEOs, along with those eye-watering salaries that companies are willing to offer them, vary as a function of the candidate’s facial appearance. It’s a powerful unconscious bias. It’s also just plain ineffective, as these automatic face judgments fail to predict actual profit-driven performance. That our species is so prone to making such costly errors, using faces to make rapid-fire but erroneous inferences about competence, is something of an evolutionary puzzle.

The idea is that we poorly evaluate modern leadership skills when we bring faces into the equation because we are very good at assessing hunting skills from faces, and consider that to be similar enough to sign on for that guy. 

We naturally think of ourselves, our families, and our friends when we hear such things. I do not hunt or even shoot myself, largely because I am so clumsy that it would be a waste of money and effort.  As I like to say, I would be more likely to take out the picture window or the refrigerator; if the neighborhood became so dangerous that I pretty much had to have a try at it, we're probably pretty much screwed already.  I don't know if coordination shows up in the face, but it is also true that I was always much better at being an advisor than a leader.  I never had any side hustles that brought home much money.

Four of my five sons have been shooters - one a hunter, two in the military, one at target ranges. Those are the four who also have side hustles besides their regular jobs. The hunter has the most side hustles, by far. He also has a slender 14 y/o daughter who can butcher a reindeer, though I can't say she looks much like a hunter.  Maybe that comes later.

So I have to think that "resting hunt face" could correlate with some job success, though maybe not CEO's or particular industries.

QOTD (x3)

"All models are wrong, but some are useful." George Box 1976.  He was an applied statistician.

"The truth is too complicated to be represented by anything but approximations." John non Neumann 1947.  He was a mathematician and physicist.

"A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." Alfred Korzybski 1933. He was a philosopher of language and reality. 

Seems like pretty close to the same idea from people at the top of different fields. 

 

Sleight of Hand

When you link to an illusionist's performance you start getting lots of magicians on YouTube. It's been fun.

 

Does China Have Enough Food To Go To War?

 This is nothing like my usual topics, and I only read the first few paragraphs and skimmed the rest.  But I know that some of you think about these things at a deeper dive, so I figured I would pass it along. Does China Have Enough Food To Go To War?

Despite this remarkable progress, Chinese authorities are increasingly challenged to feed their 1.4 billion people. Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, several outbreaks of African swine fever, floods sweeping southern regions, and severe droughts in the northern areas have revealed weaknesses in China’s food security.³ For instance, these events caused pork prices (the main source of protein for Chinese population) to spike and the imports of grains and oilseeds to soar to unprecedented levels. China is now the world’s largest buyer of key agricultural commodities, and it imports nearly 60 percent of global soybean export flows.⁴ These developments are in clear contrast with China’s decades-long efforts to develop and implement policies aimed at grain self-sufficiency.

Guys at Baseball Games.

 I went to a Woosox game last night, partly because of wanting to see Red Sox players who might come up, but mostly because I like seeing the crowd at a minor league game once a year.  I usually go to see the Fisher Cats here in Manchester, but I had never been to Polar Park before and was still bummed that my earlier attempt this year was called on account of wind and cold. But not until after I'd driven an hour to get there.  So of course I did the smart thing, choosing a game that was in danger of being called because of rain and driving over an hour to that.

I had never gone alone before, so enjoyed myself wandering, not having to worry that Someone Else was worried that I might have gotten lost. I reflected on the number of older men - men who were both portly and starboardly, if you get my drift - who came to baseball games alone.  They were a rather sorry, weird-looking guys, and I wondered what that was about. 

Then I remembered that I was an old guy at a minor league baseball game by myself and decided not to think about it anymore. 

On the Rail Trail

So I did.

Rioting

Over at City Journal, Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit by Charles Fain Lehman

The summer of 2025 has not yet officially begun, but it already looks like another long, hot one. Los Angeles has faced days of anti-ICE protests and rioting, which have spread to dozens of other cities, provoking clashes with local, state, and federal law enforcement. The burning cars and mask-clad demonstrators are disturbingly reminiscent of the riots for “racial justice” in the summer of 2020 and for “Palestine” in 2024. The cause changes; the personnel and methods remain the same.

He left out a lot of urban racial violence. the Kyle Rittenhouse acquital and Derek Chavin's conviction both brought riots. Atlanta 2023, Minneapolis ongoing. The usual method is for professional agitators to glom on to a peaceful protest, hoping to either bait the police into escalating or get the peaceful protestors to start getting physical, not necessarily by shooting or fighting, but by forcing their way into places or refusing to follow police orders. Rioting also provides an opportunity for looting, much as raping and pillaging were considered part of a soldier's entitlement for taking a city. 

The linked article talks about how this is longstanding, quoting from  Edward C Banfield's 1970 book The Unheavenly City.  

Put more succinctly: while Banfield’s contemporaries blamed riots on “root causes,” Banfield blamed riots on those who blamed them on root causes. People riot for all sorts of reasons, but the most tractable one is that they feel permission to riot—because their leaders give it to them.

Stamps and Coupons

Thinking about supermarkets and my grandmother led immediately to memories of S&H Green Stamps and Raleigh Coupons. She smoked two packs of Raleigh filters a day - and looking that up it was surprising how familiar all those brands still looked to me.  I could remember someone who smoked most of those brands, even though most people smoke Marlboros, Winstons, or Newports. Non-filters were considered old-fashioned and less safe.  The filters actually did nothing, but did at least keep flecks of tobacco from going in your mouth. My dad smoked two packs of Luckies a day, which dropped to one pack, mostly in secret, after his quadruple-bypass surgery.

I remember looking through the coupon catalogs, wondering why we never bought anything cool, just end tables and the like.

George Jones

What do you do when you don't like the song but everyone wants you to play it?

You don't go half-way.  You pull out all the stops.

 

Grand Union - Champagnes.

Supermarkets are one of those places that retain their old name long after they have been sold and resold and haven't been called that for years.  Its name is its name, to the people who knew it in childhood, and sometimes there were differences even then.  On of my sons tells me it is the same for stadiums and arenas, and I thought of a local one immediately.  Many people still call it The Verizon Wireless Arena even though it has been the SNHU Arena for a decade, and all the signs leading to it from the highway exits still call it the Manchester Civic Center, left over from 25 years ago. The official names of the parks in many cities are known only to the police and the mapmakers, but in Manchester I think there is only one known almost entirely by its unofficial name, "Pretty Park."

This came up because of Demoulas/Market Basket.  It has been a mess for years, with a family that tries to skirt laws but has also inspired employee loyalty.   There are about a hundred of them now.  It was originally Demoulas in Massachusetts, gradually spreading to other New England states, but there was a limit on how many of one store could sell beer and wine, so the family split off some and renamed them Market Basket.  It was largely a ruse. Still, there are stores that are still named Demoulas and others that have been Market Basket for years but are still called Demoulas by most of the locals. If you move into Concord, NH and call the downtown store Market Basket people will look at you in puzzlement.

A&P and pieces of A&P were bought, sold, combined, split, and recombined for 150 years. A few blocks down from where I lived as a boy it remained a supermarket after being sold off, and was just called "The Old A&P" for years after.  I don't remember its new name, and I doubt anyone else does either without looking it up.

But the interesting ones in Manchester, NH were the three Grand Union - Champagnes.  The first was built on the deeply French-Canadian West Side, the second was built in the South-Central part of the city, which was all ethic groups, and the third was built in the very fashionable not-very French-Canadian North End just before the lot of them (plus a few in other towns) were all sold to Grand Union.  Even though they were technically all named the same thing and their advertisements and fliers were identical, the one on the West Side was always just called Champagnes, the South-Central one was usually called Champagnes, and the snobby North Manchester one was always called the nice WASP-y Grand Union. My grandmother, a bit of a social climber who always resented that her husband had built their house just four blocks short of the North End, gladly switched from A&P to Grand Union in the 1950s.  She would never have gone to a Champagnes.

Full story of Romeo Champagne from the wonderful Cow Hampshire site. 

Mondo Duplantis Again

It's the beginning of a new outdoor season, and he is going to take it up a little bit at a time, to break the record over and over. He gets paid by the sponsors every time he breaks it, so why not? Sergey Bubka broke it a centimeter at a time once or twice a year for a decade. 

 

The only downside I can see if if he gets injured badly enough to shave off the very top of his career, he will always have to wonder how far he could have gone if, if, if... But that's what athletes live with anyway.  No that I think of it, that's what all of us live with anyway.

The conversion is 20' 7 1/4". For comparison, the record in 1950 was 15'7"; in 1975 it was 18'6"; in 2000 it was 20' 1 1/2".

Through Running

For those of you who enjoy learning and thinking about the costs and efficiencies of suburban rail and metros, there is this from Works In Progress.  The Magic of Through-Running.  

By the 1920s, the shortcomings of the system were becoming increasingly obvious. The population of Munich increased sevenfold between 1850 and 1930, with most of the growth in newly built suburbs. But the capacity of the suburban network could not be easily increased to meet rising demand. For the reasons explained above, the two central termini were the key constraints on capacity. There was also continued discontent at the fact that suburban services did not reach the city center, a fact that had been made more obvious by the development of trams that could do so.

On the other hand, there were fewer capacity constraints in the termini at the suburban end, because they usually only handled one type of service (i.e. just a single suburban service, not multiple suburban and intercity ones). This meant they could handle more trains per hour without major risk of generating chains of delays. If they did face capacity constraints, it was normally easier to solve them through expanding termini, since suburban termini are surrounded by less development, and land is cheaper. 

I didn't find the map density much fun, but I think it is necessary to absorbing the concepts. 

I am less willing to invest any pain in my learning as I get older.  I like to be spoon-fed delicious and high-energy concepts at this point.