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Sometimes it matters

Till We Have Faces - Ancient, Medieval, Modern, Postmodern?

Update:  Back from the conference.  There wasn't much that intersected with this question, and I think I will write about what was stressed first.  I am still sorting it out. 

 

I have a post started on the above topic. Yet I figured I had better go to the conference this weekend first, so I don't have to retract everything next week.

I am otherwise devoid of inspiration at present.  Preoccupied with house guests and medical concerns, my own and others'.

Programmed Meat Machines

Steve Hsu has fun with - but answers quite seriously - whether we are just meat machines programmed by evolution to believe we have free will or similarly, to be religious. The first part of the interview is about education, especially in a Chinese-American context, the rigor of physics and mathematics versus other disciplines, and the censorship of many voices, not just conservative ones, by wokesters in the academy.

There is a transcript to the interview for those who prefer that.

Missed Covid Lifesaver

 Via Insty.

Plasma Therapy Could Have Saved Thousands. from Johns Hopkins. At the highest level, admittedly something that could have happened only in hindsight, over a million could have been saved.

Convalescent plasma is a therapy derived from the blood of individuals who have recovered from an infectious disease, rich in antibodies against the pathogen responsible for their illness. This plasma is transfused into patients still fighting the infection, with the goal of leveraging the immune response of the recovered person to help accelerate their recovery.

Well, now we know.  If you get a serious virus, they may be after you to donate. I hope mine would be acceptable after the babesiosis I had in 2023.

The Secret to Long Life

It seems every time I listen to The Studies Show that I want to post something on it, without giving away too much information and infringing on their product. This week they talk about Blue Zones, where entire areas have an unusual percentage of people living to be 100. The short version is that they don't exist, none of them, and in fact some have lower life expectancies. So the directions to eat walnuts, eat more fish (or less fish), drink only water, drink mostly wine, eat frequently with your extended family, or find meditative alone time are mostly just made up ideas that people like and think will work, and get a contract with Netflix to make a documentary about it.

They speak very highly of a paper by Saul Newman which discovers patterns highly suggestive of clerical error and pension fraud. "The state-specific introduction of birth certificates is associated with a 69-82% fall in the number of supercentenarian (110+) records."

His recommendation for long life? Don't have a birth certificate, don't have a death certificate, and you can be any age you like.

New Epitaph

"Speaking of digressions..."

The Knowledge

Reposted from 2016.  All the disaster in WNC made me think of it, though that isn't quite the same situation. 

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I forgot to mention how much I liked Lewis Dartnell's The Knowledge: How To Rebuild Our World From Scratch. It's an instruction manual of how to leap over centuries of dark ages in the event of some apocalyptic collapse of civilization.  It bypasses the usual survivalist and sci-fi dystopias of riots in the street and starvation in the first few months, picking up in some more stable period of small societies of less than 10,000 trying to get on with building a civilisation.

For example, simply knowing germ theory, how to make a good anesthetic from nitrous oxide and ether, and allowing dissection of corpses for training, you can get up to the equivalent of 1900 in medicine very quickly.  Dartnell adds in how to quickly get to x-rays and weak antibiotics and voila! We're pretty much at 1950 already.

Other things will be harder.  Stored petroleum has a shelf life, and we've already accessed the easy oil out of the ground.  We'll be able to scavenge metals from abandoned cities, but mining the easy stuff has already been done. We'll have to go to charcoal or ethanol-based fuels, so Dartnell gives directions how that works.  There are chapters on how to make glass, four-field rotation farming (that helps us skip centuries of trial-and-error), paper and ink, wind and water energy, clothing, and chemistry.  Lots of fun, though toward the end I skipped the second halves of some chapters, as the details weren't so interesting as the overall concepts.  The details would be plenty interesting to people who actually needed them, I imagine.

It's pure sport for someone like me.  I'm not likely to survive any apocalypse long, so it's all just the intriguing imagination game.  Still, I'd like my descendants and younger friends to be among those who survive and prosper if worst comes to worst, so I'm showing it around and started circulating a copy in the family.

Old Folkie

Also from 2009. I look the same but fifteen years older now. Good comments. 

"Notre Dame, My Mother"

From 2009.  Even more pertinent today. Copithorne in the comments.

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Lacy Dodd has a thoughtful article over at First Things about Notre Dame's intention to bestow an honorary degree on President Obama. Ms. Dodd has some right to be heard. She was unmarried and got pregnant while a senior at Notre Dame ten years ago. She gave birth to and kept the child. There were disappointments:

My boyfriend was a different story. He was also a Notre Dame senior. When I told him that he was to be a father, he tried to pressure me into having an abortion. Like so many women in similar circumstances, I found out the kind of man the father of my child was at precisely the moment I needed him most. “All that talk about abortion is just dining-room talk,” he said. “When it’s really you in the situation, it’s different. I will drive you to Chicago and pay for a good doctor.”

I tried telling him this was not an option. He said he was pro-choice. I responded by informing him that my choice was life. And I learned, as so many pregnant women have before and since, that life is the one choice that pro-choicers won’t support.

That accusation is a bit broad, of course. There are prochoice people who rejoice in a woman's decision to carry to term. Yet where I work, I am struck by the number of women who shake their heads disapprovingly at decisions to carry to term if there is any reason not to. If your boyfriend isn't going to be supportive, if you have a crummy job, if you have a really good job, if you are less than 20, if you are over 40, if you aren't in perfect health - any one of these is considered not only a sufficient, but a necessary reason to abort. There are often narrowed eyes and real spite if there is any indication that some religious person "got to them," and "guilted them into going through with it." This absent any evidence that the religious person in question did so - it is assumed.

Ms. Dodd concludes:

I’d like to ask this of Fr. John Jenkins, the Notre Dame president: Who draws support from your decision to honor President Obama—the young, pregnant Notre Dame woman sitting in that graduating class who wants desperately to keep her baby, or the Notre Dame man who believes that the Catholic teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion is just dining-room talk?

RIP Luis Tiant

 Luis Tiant, Red Sox Hall of Famer, dies at 83. If you are an old baseball fan, you will be seeing lots of stories on him this week. My favorite was the thickness of his accent getting him past the censors on TV before they had time to react. "I hay boolcheet for stuff today, but use aw mye dick* to geh by." While sitting in the locker room naked except for a cigar. The part referred to was reportedly impressive.

*Equivalent Cuban Spanish slang, I am told.

The Last Word on Moral Philosophy

The Last Word on Moral Philosophy, over at Grim's begins with Marcus Aurelius's quote "Waste no more time debating what is a good man. Be one."

In his situation, one at least has the comfort of knowing I am exactly where God wants me to be, and doing at least approximately what I should be doing.  Whether I do it well or ill, with good grace or bad, is still unknown.  But I at least have that.

Community and Government Cooperation Misinformation

 From Thomas Doubting, over at Grim's, comes this link about who is doing what in Western NC.

Austin Texas Representative Gerald Daugherty

"The last Republican in Austin" retired in 2020 and did not seek reelection.  Remember his wonderful ad from 2016?  A lot of people on this blog can relate to this guy.

Hive Mind and Neanderthals

We have discussed here before how IQ (which Steve Hsu wisely calls a colloquial term) is a good group tendency measure, but no better than a moderate predictor of individual success. If you compare a hundred people with IQ 100 and a hundred people with IQ 110, the latter group will have less crime, more years of education, higher incomes, more stable relationships and better overall health.  But in both groups of 100 there will be a lot of variation.  The book for this is Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own, by Garett Jones. He embraces the seeming contradiction rather than avoiding it. He stresses the greater patience and cooperativeness of those with higher IQ, even though those are more modest, have a greater cultural impact than the usual cognitive measures we associated with g-factor intelligence.  Even though his ideas for raising national IQ do not look that promising to me, I'm likingthe book for other reasons.

Into this mix comes some interesting support. Over the last few decades we have revamped our thinking about Neanderthals, that they were more intelligent than we had credited, created art and used tools more variously, and contributed some to our ancestry. I said here last year that perhaps we supplanted them because we were just meaner.

Neanderthals had larger brains, so were unlikely to be less intelligent.  Their tool-making is more individualistic, suggesting that each tool-maker was more creative.  What would cause that?  Necessity. If you lived in larger groups, which in turns had contact with other larger groups, sharing genetic material (usually by exchanging daughters), then everyone didn't have to reinvent the wheel* themselves.  The group knowledge is a repository of memory.  Neanderthals were more likely to have autism-associated genes than our African ancestors. They lived in smaller, more densely related bands.

(Diagram from Razib Khan's substack)

In fact, Neanderthals are often not much related to other bands a hundred miles away, even over centuries.

So they may have each been smarter, more creative, but were less social, and less likely to have lots of shared memory, shared culture.  Homo sapiens were smarter as a whole, and thus exploited environments more fully.

And if it came to a fight, one side had a lot more people than the other.

I have been a loud voice favoring the view that genetic changes have created the cultural ones.  I am apparently wrong about that. David Reich's group has shown that genetic changes seem to lag behind the cultural ones. Not so very long, but noticeably. Once a practice has begun, such as relying more on milk products, genes for lactase persistence begin to be selected for. When you think of the math alone, this makes sense, and we will use lactose as our example. Waiting around for a single chance mutation, and then hoping that this one individual with that advantage reproduces is a bit chancy.  But if the cultural habit of using milk products for food, even if poorly digested and causing intestinal problems, becomes widespread in an area, then any number of small advantages will be called out. A mutation has a better chance.  I had never thought of it that way. The genes for lactase persistence actually show up a few thousand years later than the dairy use. But once they existed, they rapidly made their holders healthier and longer-lived.

*Almost literally

Missing Family Members on TV

When I first wrote this in 2009 it was less known, but now is recognised as a standard TV trope. I included a video this time, which I should have last time.

In the comments is the phrase "...kids, like jackals, sense weakness..." An excellent observation.

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The stereotype is that 1950's television showed stereotypical two-parent, two-child families where nothing went wrong, and this was unhealthy for the attitudes of children growing up watching this. Leave It To Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet are cited as examples.

But more frequently, television killed off a parent somewhere and started the story later, with the bereft or even orphaned child adjusting to a new family situation. Rather creepily, Mommies got eliminated much more often than Daddies, though both parents getting the hook before the series started was also common.

Uncles taking care of nieces was big: Bachelor Father, Sky King, Family Affair. Dads left with the kids also seemed to be a big draw: My Three Sons, The Rifleman, Andy Griffith, Bonanza.

Circus Boy, My Little Margie, Danny Thomas, Gidget, Hank - there's dead parents everywhere. Or live parents nowhere might be a better way to put it. It's easy to see the sympathy draw, and perhaps the losing of a mother rates higher on the instant sympathy scale. Men taking care of kids also offered more opportunity for comedy. Still, it's weird how many moms they picked off here - maybe TV producers didn't like their wives or mothers or something. I can't think of any early single moms except for December Bride. Tough women left with the ranch out West came up though. It seems to be the reverse of the Dad-as-nurturer show - Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley winning against all odds.

Super-intact families were used more for comic effect in unusual situations: The Munsters, The Addams Family, The Flintstones, The Jetsons. Still are: The Simpsons, Family Guy. The Real McCoys and The Beverly Hillbillies both had multigenerational weirdness going, with missing relatives seemingly no problem. Maybe that was an Appalachian stereotype thing.

 

 

Universe

 Never look a gift universe in the mouth. GKChesterton, personal correspondence