Recent Links

 I have an overflow of articles again, which leads to grouping them like this. There will bve more of these for a while, because I have so many.

Women's sex drive is more socially constructed than men's, which is more biologically driven.  This in the context that both are both.  From the Existential Contrarian

Higher Graduation Rates Are Not a Good Thing from City Journal. It seems to just mean they're promoting weaker students anyway. I'm lookin' at you Tim Walz and Gretchen Whtmer

Predictors of Conspiratorial Thinking. 

Empty Buzzwords Lead to Poor Judgement.  Research confirms Dilbert

Do Young People Suck?  One would think this was a short rant by a grouchy old person because damn kids can't even shoe a horse these days, but it's Lyman Stone doing a deep dive, with graphs and statistics.

Southern Poverty Law Center

Grim points out that paying informants is not illegal, and may not even be objectionable.  I agree.  What is at issue is if they significantly funded the events, and if the violence would even have occurred without them.  I don't know, but I am certainly suspicious.

 

Update: Polimath reports what I should have looked for myself - that the indictment is not for paying sources but for wire fraud and making false statements. Which makes the cartoon less a propos, but I still like it.

Does Your Mother Know?

 An ABBA song I had never heard before.

 

Glom

I wondered for years where my mother had gotten that word. "You look like a glom," she would say, especially if I was unkempt, underdressed, and self-pitying.  I'm not criticising her, it probably helped. I was never able to get a handle on what it meant, but the sound of it alone seems to convey it, doesn't it?

For random reasons I decided to try again, with similar lack of success. But DuckDuckGo gave me a link to Althouse in 2010, where she quoted the word "glomming" for males looking on while one man spoke with a woman. One of the commenters had apparently said 

 "Glom" was used by my mother to describe a sullen, unsocialised male: "you look like a glom in that shirt." Everyone else used it to describe attaching oneself or sticking on to something - glomming on to. Given my heritage, I concluded that the meanings were related to the Swedish word for oatmeal. I have been unable to find any authority who thinks this even remotely possible. However, a similar word roughly equivalent to "gloomy" was reported to me by a Norwegian.

If I had to push my guess beyond provable limits, I would relate it to PIE *ghel, melancholy, rather than Proto-Germ. *klamm, stuck together (clamp, clam).

I was thrilled to see this. It validated so much of my childhood experience. Except when I clicked through I found it it was written by me, in 2010.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

 Colin Gorrie at the Dead Language Society does a nice introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Conspicuously French words tend to cluster in certain scenes within the poem. When Gawain is at the castle, being tested by the lady, their speech is dense with French. They talk of plesaunce ‘pleasure,’ prys ‘excellence,’ drury ‘love,’ and walour ‘valour.’

For example, in the following line, spoken by the lady, every content word is of French origin. English has supplied only the grammatical glue:

to þe plesaunce of your prys, hit were a pure ioye (1245–1247)

‘[I would gladly aspire] to the pleasure of your excellence; it would be a pure joy’.

When the Green Knight speaks, however, French is almost nowhere to be heard. And when, as we saw above, Gawain rides through the frozen landscape, the poet largely turns to native English vocabulary, albeit a Norse-inflected version: felle ‘mountain’ (from Old Norse fjall), dryʒe ‘strong; patient’ (from Old Norse drjúgr), dreped ‘killed’ (from Old Norse drepa ‘to kill’).

The poem sets court and culture against nature, and its representative, the Green Knight. The indoor world is adorned with French vocabulary; the outdoors is distinctly Germanic.

 His paid subscribers are doing four readings across six weeks of the entire work, with discussion, if you are interested.  

The Hali Gali

 

Every version of the Hully Gully seems to be a little different.  This is closer to what I remember from my first dance at Liberty Hall in South Chelmsford in 1965.  My father knew how to do this and I didn't.  Cooler than me.

Some Things That Work

 ...and some that don't in criminal justice. Book review at Washington Monthly of Jennifer Doleac's The Science of Second Chances. He differentiates between Activists and Factivists in what works after arrest inb the criminal justice system, and places Doleac squarely among the latter.

...collecting the DNA of people charged with felonies reduced their future rate of criminal conviction by 42 percent. This is one of many studies that allows Doleac to underscore a critical point: The most powerful deterrent is not the severity of the punishment but the certainty of being punished. Once criminals know that it will be hard to get away with crimes because their DNA is on file, many desist. And importantly, as Doleac notes, crime deterrence isn’t just good for future victims; it also increases the likelihood that the one-time criminal will do more productive things, such as obtaining a job or receiving an education.  

Fair monitoring of substance-use disorders has a good rate of return in lowering recidivism. The author suggests that doing this and little or even nothing else might be the best strategy for probation and parole.  For reasons that favored my agency but not the patient, I was part of resisting this at the psych hospital for many years.  Our position was that we were a mental health agency, not a substance treatment facility, and we would be overwhelmed with returning patients who did not have current psychiatric symptoms. We gradually shifted this because the long-term practicality proved itself out, but we were slow about it.

Something to surprise everyone in the topic. 

 

The War on Cancer

 Progress in thew War on Cancer By Steve Stewart Williams.  A good example of what to look for when someone is using statistics in a misleading way.

The Jalens

The best unofficial team in the NBA right now might be the Jalens. Named after Jalen Rose of the Michigan Fab Five (the First Jalen) and then 16 years in the NBA, the current crop was born in the years of his greatest popularity in the late 90s and early 2000s. This year's all-NBA team should have three: Jalen Brunson and Jaylen Brown, both 29, and Jalen Williams, 24. Jalen Duren and Jalen Johnson might qualify for awards this year as well, and there are about ten more after that.  OKC has two Jalen/Jaylin Williams.

Poor Orphan Boy

 Eve, on X: my dad's dad died recently and my mom just told me that now if they're (for example) deciding what kind of pizza to get he'll be like "well we have to get pepperoni..........because I'm an orphan.........."

It reminded me of this. 

 

How Funerals Keep Africa Poor

 David Oks writes from a statistical viewpoint on a lot of job automation and poor country topics. 

How Funerals Keep Africa Poor.  

And, finally, after all this, the big day comes. Your body is retrieved from the mortuary; hundreds of people show up, many of whom never knew you in life; and a great deal of money is spent feeding them, entertaining them, and sending you off in the style that an Akan elder deserves.

This all sounds, you’ll notice, very expensive. And it is.

A modest, mid-level funeral in Ghana costs about $5,000 U.S. dollars; a “befitting” one can easily cost $15,000 or $20,000. And all this in a country with a median income of about $1,500 per year.

Test Optional Admission Policies

 Test-Optional policies are a disadvantage to qualified applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. National Bureau of Economic Research

We find that test score optional policies harm the likelihood of elite college admission for high achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. We show that at one elite college campus, SAT (and ACT) scores predict first year college GPA equally well across income and other demographic groups; high school GPA and class rank offer little additional predictive power. Under test score optional policies, less advantaged applicants who are high achieving submit test scores at too low a rate, significantly reducing their admissions chances; such applicants increase their admissions probability by a factor of 3.6x (from 2.9 percent to 10.2 percent) when they report their scores. High achieving first-generation applicants raise admissions chances by 2.4x by reporting scores. Much more than commonly understood, elite institutions interpret test scores in the context of background, and availability of test scores on an application can promote rather than hinder social mobility. (Italics mine.)

Testing was my ticket into college. 

 

The Final Battle - Pahlevi Will Return

This is the current Revolution song in Iran.  Note that it refers to the Islamic Republic as a foreign occupier.