State Song of Maine

 I don't think I had ever heard it. I have an identical plaid shirt to that guy in the center.

 

Links From 2014

I will be in the State o' Maine,  Bah Hahbah and Acadier Tuesday to Thursday.   I wanted to leave you with a little something to tide you over.

I should probably put up a couple of songs, too. 

 

Just an offhand note on who gets to define Feminism.

Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Hitler? The theme song from "Dad's Army."

The real American folk instrument is not the guitar. 

Quiet Rant about supposed life behind the Iron Curtain 

Post 4500n- Roger Scruton on How to be a conservative. 

Hoarding

Because we are doing the last of emptying the house that my father's second wife lived in since 1946, the subject of keeping unnecessary thing that are a burden to your descendants came up this weekend, as it often does in these situations. Our daughter-in-law found a strategy that a reditor reported, approximately this.

Here was a trick my brother used.  He would find boxes of things that could be thrown away or donated. Then he would replace them with empty boxes. My father never knew things were missing, but it also did not leave empty spots on the shelves that would just have been replaced with...more stuff. My brother had slowly started to thin things out, so when my father died, we weren't having to start at square one on the cleaning out process. 

It was not only one person who created the many full closets on the second floor filled with children's toys and dress patterns, nor the garage with old furniture, gardening chemicals, and lamps. The surface layers and some of the deeper piles were clearly created by Ruth, who just died, but it was quickly obvious that my father who died in 2004 had not been responsible in getting rid of things in his last years either. As we got to very bottom, it became clear that Ruth's parents, who died in the 1970s and 80s, had also not done their duty of weeding through old calendars, sheet music, and cookbooks. It was in fact clear that when they had moved into the house in 1946 they must have brought considerable amounts of saved stuff from the previous house even then.  Sunday School books from 1915 (in Swedish), depression glass, 78 rpm records, and somehow, decorative glass from a Packard hearse.

I also just found a use for the oldest of your empty boxes. 

A Cappella

 

These weren't big in my day.  Maybe I would have liked being part of an A Cappella group. 

Screens and Screen Time

There is a lot of deploring of the amount of time the Youth of America is spending in front of screens, and how that has taken over older people's attention as well. Reading from a book is considered better, more ennobling, and certainly better for learning. Silence is considered superior to listening to a speaker, even if one is learning from a course on tape or a podcast. 

Are we sure? The research I have seen largely assumes what it sets out to prove. The worst aspects of the new are contrasted to the best aspects of the old. I spend a lot of time on screens, and I did while I was working as well.  Am I damaged?  Am I not what I should be? Have I let go of the rope and ceased to be a Real Intellectual? Whatever shall we do? The Apocalypse is upon us.  Again.

Simulation

When I was in college and reading Lord of the Rings, I thought invisibility would be the best superpower to have. I also thought that Time Stop would be useful in sports. I eventually settled on Time Travel, but I have been waiting for this and nothing has happened. 

I think getting into asimulation that picks up at a particular point of my life might be just as good.  I do worry about having to listen to and participating in the boring parts again, but if I make some changes, who knows what I might get out of. A couple of you won't make the friend list next time around, but I intend to be minimalist in my interventions.  Who knows what might be upended.

The objection would be that it would be less valuable because it "wasn't real," to which I say "Compared to what?" 

I Wonder Why

 

Italian boys from near Belmont Avenue in the Bronx.  Ahead of their time.

Duelling Motte-and Baileys

There is a FB argument between two Christians who I find rather tiring. One is saying "Tolerance is not a Christian virtue."  The other is insisting that it is, while acknowledging that the word itself does not appear in the Scriptures, and his wife jumps in to state even more emphatically that of course it is, quoting Bible verses in a proof-text fashion.

It looks like a clear problem of definition to me. By some definitions of tolerance, such as tolerating sin within the congregation, or tolerating the teaching or sin, the first man is of course correct. In terms of putting up with differences and difficulties from others, especially within the Church, the second man is correct. A mediated or refereed discussion between Christians who desired to live together in harmony could find points of agreement rather quickly, but neither seems interested.  One is a State Rep and the other is a college history professor, so they both feel they have territory to claim and protect for the sake of others who might be led astray. 

You see why I find this tiring. When disputatnts cannot acknowledge that they are at least in part arguing definitions and relent at least to the point that the other has a point according to his own definition, I find that one or both is trying to smuggle in other ideas with their definition. In current America, this is usually trying to add in some favorite political or cultural idea in disguise. At its worst it can insist that patriotism is the same as Christianity, or that socialism is the same as Christianity if one will only squint hard enough and count a second cousin as a sibling.

Duelling Motte-and-Bailey arguments, both attempting to claim territory they cannot fully defend on the basis of narrower claims that they can. 

 

Misinterpretations in the History of Heredity

 Two Misinterpreted Insights in the History of Heredity. Why did it take humans so long to discover what we now consider obvious, that things "run in families?" We knew there was similarity between parents and children, but somehow couldn't stretch that to families as a whole.  It seemed interesting enough, but when I ran across the sentence 

In 1644, the English philosopher, astrologer and pirate Sir Kenelm Digby published an exploration of the nature of matter, including problems associated with generation. (Italics mine)

I was all in.  OK, now you're talking! Philosopher, astrologer, and pirate. No one has had that on their resume for perhaps 300 years now, and it couldn't have been common in any era. Even two out of those three in a single individual would be rare after 1600. 

 

 

Monkeys Predict Elections

I missed this 18 months ago.  Monkeys accurately predict the outcomes of elections 54% of the time just by how long the look at the photos of both candidates. One of the commenters suggested that this implies humans could predict the outcome of monkey elections, which does seem equally likely.

PDQ Bach

We had a PDQ Bach concert when I was in college, but I skipped it.  I didn't know any better, and didn't tend to take advice then.

 

Founding Mother

David Foster talks about Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was a founding mother of libertarianism. 

 In modern Europe, some years of every young man’s life are consumed in training for war. But a far greater loss of productive energy is in the attempt to control productive energy. All their lives, all workers pour an enormous amount of energy into producing food, clothes, shelter, light, heat, transportation, all the necessities and comforts, and mountains of paper, pens, ink, stamps, filing cases, and acres of beautiful buildings, all to be used by men in Government who produce nothing whatever.

Great White Sharks

 Nellie Bowles reports that Bernie Sanders held a discussion with Chinese, Canadian, and US professors about the existential threat of AI. 

 → Well, I’m sure China is doing this altruistically: Bernie Sanders hosted an event on The Existential Threat of AI. It featured the dean of the Beijing Institute of Al Safety and Governance and a professor from Tsinghua University. Wow, all the Chinese professors think America should stop pursuing artificial intelligence research, maybe we should listen to our foreign friends! They also keep saying that we should disband our military. Seems thoughtful and reasonable. This just in: Great white sharks think seals should stop jumping out of the water and actually just stay in and float around a while.

China and Russia have also contributed heavily to American environmental causes over the years.  Which is odd, because they don't spend much on their own environmental causes. It's a puzzle. AI might in fact be an existential threat and we may need to have serious discussions with lots of people.  I'm just not sure we should start with the Chinese...

Do you think there are Chinese preppers? That might be an international conference worth having.

Medieval Manuscripts

 25 medieval manuscripts you can look at online right now.

The Beatus of Saint Sever  Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 8878 (France, ca. 1028-1072 AD)

 

"A good medieval illuminated Apocalypse should still be a bit disturbing to look through, even today. If you ask me, this Romanesque edition with its flat, expressive, colourful compositions fits the bill nicely."

Short Links

 Dogs Help, Cats Watch 

The Vampirist to Catholic pipeline  

 James reports on some AI behavior

Medieval-themed gifts  from the Weird Medieval Guys site

The Smelly Baby Problem

 The history of disposable diapers is more interesting than I thought. By Virginia Postrel at Works in Progress. 

Motivated by the less pleasant aspects of spending time with his new grandchild, the company’s director of exploratory development, Victor Mills, suggested disposable diapers. After analyzing existing products and conducting consumer research, P&G created a dedicated diaper research group.

The research this group conducted, like that of its successors and competitors, wasn’t glamorous. It didn’t advance basic science. It wasn’t even an obvious route to profit. (One percent of the market!) It was a high-stakes gamble that required solving difficult engineering problems. How that happened represents the kind of hidden progress that leads to everyday abundance.

Juggler

I was just thinking, "y'know, I've never posted a juggler before, and it's about time I got around to it." 

No I wasn't really.  I was looking for something else and saw this.

Recent Links

Institute for Christian Machine Learning.  I don't know what to make of this.

March Madness set to expand to 76 teams.  William and Mary men's team has never made the tournament.  In their best years they make it to the bubble.  This is our opportunity!

One of my book clubs is reading Uncle Fred In The Springtime  and I began it today. The opening sentence is "The door of the Drones Club swung open..." A sense of calm came over me.  I am in good hands.

In the context of control variables, Cremieux quickly dispatches the argument that glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) is dangerous. "What do the critics have? They have their confusion." Similarly, he shows how "attribution studies" that claim for example that 68,000 people a year die because they don't have health insurance are riddled with logical and statistical holes.

Gurwinder discusses how resentment and victimhood mentality leads to injustice, and Nikki Stolz relates this to  self-pity in literature.

I think I have caught up, and will resume my usual posting speed. 

Chihuahuas

 Chihuahuas don't really kill more people than pit bulls.  You will be amused why people thought so.

Auvelity

 If you are prescribed the new antidepressant Auvelity but it is unaffordable, with little research you can bring the cost down from $1000 to $5 by buying both parts of the mixture separately and following the formula.

Cole Allen

One daughter-in-law, a hearty Trump disliker, sent along a link that Cole Allen was not the sort of person the White House is saying he is.  I thought you might be interested in my reply to the dear woman from my immediate mental health perspective. 

That is fascinating. It does seem likely that painting him as anti-Christian is at minimum, highly superficial and recent, and more likely, imposing a predetermined view on him.

He has sounded somewhat psychotic to me, of a point of view that has grown gradually more paranoid. In a very usual fashion, he has drawn his paranoia from what is in the air at the time. Parts of his reasoning are indeed extremely solid, but finding the antichrist in anyone who is prominent in one’s own moment is always deeply suspicious, and attributing a special level of sinfulness to behavior that is always with us seems like a sort of "spiritual impression cherry picking."

It feels to me like an intensity of thinking about subjects that at one time was quite nuanced and able to look at contradictions and try to resolve them, but because of growing paranoia has settled on its answer and can no longer look at two sides of an issue . 

Because this is an enormous ambiguity about who he is, and what has motivated him, everyone will have plenty of evidence for their own side, and plenty of reasons why their opponents are just stupid and refusing to look at "the evidence."  I think we will see no shared resolution. 

She was around a lot of PhD candidates and PhD's at Rice in her 20's (she is early 40's now) and wondered if there is an increase in instability among such folks.  I had thoughts about that as well.

I have thought about this a lot in my career. My belief is that in a clear and protected environment like academia, you can go longer before your instability becomes a dealbreaker. It also happens in fields where you can work alone and submit your work with minimal interaction . So people “choose“ those fields because they get selected out in other fields earlier. They like those fields better for survival and social reasons.  If you learn how to avoid whatever the real forbidden behaviors are in a group, you can break lots of other rules for a long time and still get paid. Academia is just one of them.

The Fully Politicized Society

 Life in the Fully Politicized Society, on David Foster's substack.  He has written earlier versions of this at Chicago Boyz.  He links to some of that in this essay.

He darts back-and-forth between modern events - a speech by Michelle Obama, residence training at the University of Delaware - and events in Germany between the wars and in the Soviet Union.  It's not the same, as conservatives are wont to claim.  But it's the same thing. One of my great surprises when first working in mental health was that the bleeding heart liberals, who at the time I expected to be the good guys and care more about the downtrodden than those evil conservatives, were the ones who most wanted to make people do things that were Good For Them.  Oh sure, that's not what the law says, but it would be really good for Jerry to have a good long stay in the hospital so that he could "stabilisise," and then be required to go to day program five days a week when he gets out for the whole year.  Jerry was 24, and would point out that day program was groups of older women complaining about their first husbands, meditation groups, and healthy eating. 

 Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed….You have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eight years from now, you will have to be engaged. (bolding by Mr. Foster)