Three-Digit Plate

 My (Great-)Aunt Sal had a three-digit plate because she had registered her first car in the 1930's. 673. She had a Creme-and-Cocoa Chevy and then VW Bugs when I knew her, finishing with a Superbeetle. I should have paid attention and tried to snap for it when she died in 1983.

 

Trisagion

I will be singing with the choir for advent again, so it is back to warmups to get my range and what's left of my technique back. I find this wonderful, moving up a half step with each repetition until I can't hit the highest note, then dropping down an octave and climbing again. It is a worship song rather than an exercise. I have to pay attention to mouth shape, remembering the "r's" and "e's" especially. There is breath and throat control for the slurred notes, to keep them smooth and not choppy. The intervals are varied.

It's a beautiful piece, based on a standard Orthodox liturgical hymn. There are older more authentic version that are also good to learn.

 

55th Reunion

Best reunion I have been to, and it did not begin auspiciously. There were many fewer than at the 50th - no surprise - and just a lot of brief conversation and moving on. Pleasant but shallow, I suppose. But over the first two hours all forty of us had a chance to touch base with just about all of the others, everyone having a longer conversation with a few. In the last hour it narrowed to about 20, all around one table with some side conversations and switching places when people went to get another drink or had a longer goodbye.  But no one was far from the center, and more of the conversation was addressed to the whole group, a few lines here and there. People waited for each other, listened to each other, told stories. It ended softly, slowly. 

Mongoose Vs Cobra

The Slo-Mo is fun

 

Salt and Pepper

I am no longer shocked that prepared supermarket foods have too much pepper and salt, nor that cheaper restaurants lean on those ingredients.  They are cheap, flavorful, and cover a multitude of sins.  I'd rather have a try at those supposed culinary sins they are covering myself, but it must be working or it wouldn't keep happening - and maybe getting worse.

We went to an expensive restaurant on Friday, and my tenderloin and potato based dish had way too much pepper. This seems to be happening everywhere these days. Do the majority of people like that much? Does it spur people to buy more drinks, as the salt does? Has everyone forgotten how to cook food? 

In contrast, we went to a coastal seafood place tonight and I had fried scallops, discerning no pepper. There was likely some salt in the batter, but it didn't taste salty. It was just simple and very good. It is the sort of place with an overhead chalkboard menu where you order at the counter and pick it up when they call your number. It was busy on a Monday night in October.

Sponge-Headed Scienceman has had it with garlic being added to everything, and I am beginning to come around to that idea, after years of saying Gimme More. But first, back off on the salt and pepper.  I have started to mention it, especially at fancier places which might have more reason to fear negative word-of-mouth. There are salt and pepper on the table for a reason, I thought. 

The Land of Milk and Cookies

I had a pastor who years ago used that phrase in a sermon, along the lines of "and then we will all go to live in the land of milk and cookies."  I thought it was charming, capturing the spirit of joy, calm, and abundance that the biblical phrase milk and honey intended, but in a modern context.  I mentioned it to a co-worker who was one of Those Christians who launched into a correction that this was not actually something that should have been in a sermon, because the honey part of the phrase represents something-or-other about Messianic prophecy which shouldn't be left out because then you are missing the whole point...

Well, no. Keep it simple.  Honey refers to foraging.  Milk refers to agriculture, possibly settled but more commonly nomadic. The Israelites moved between these economies, and at varying times God was quite clear where they should be.  No, Cain, do not bring me an offering of broccoli. Yes, Nehemiah, it is time to rebuild a city. The Land of Milk and Honey covers the territory.  Everything is here.  The foraging is good, the cows are contented, be at peace.

Noticing

Steve Sailer's book Noticing is built around his decades-long observation that there are things you are not supposed to notice, and simply noticing them out loud gets you in trouble.  There is a reason no one was noticing and it wasn't an accident.

So I have long noticed but only occasionally mentioned how often people - meaning especially my age, especially women, and ones I know/knew - show how kind and good they are by how often they mention that they hate Trump. The oftenness provides ample evidence that they don't actually criticise both sides, and leads to wondering why they have to say essentially the same thing so often.

The other side spreads it around to a somewhat larger circle of "stupid things liberals do," with a variety of targets.  

Yogi Berra supposedly said "You can see a lot just by looking." 

Links from 2015

From October and November.  It now looks as if all 11,702 posts of mine have been visited 150-200 times this October, including some to dead links. 

 Boomer Youth Culture a simple theory on how it developed that I still like.

Community Versus Communism  I was refining the idea at this point.  As I read, I sometimes thought "That's how I still say that now," while at other times I thought "I hit upon a better way to say that." Good comment from T99.

Bamfield's John Vanden Music from The Bills with great harmonies. Bamfield is a tiny community on Vancouver Island, facing the Pacific.

Star Wars Villains  The Assistant Village Idiot explains to you why it's morally inconsistent and confusing.

Two extended posts about College Protests that are still green

One Thought  Starting with an analogy I still like.

Life Is Hard  Good responses, closing with a highly complimentary spam comment I left up.

Porcupine

A woman was running back up the road from her truck, looking concerned at the small animal that was wandering and looking disoriented in the road. It was a young porcupine.

A warm-hearted woman. What could possibly go wrong. 

Traffic

My overall traffic has suddenly gone up 100x, with this last week up 3x, all of my posts from May 2025 visited two hundred times each two days ago, and a similar weirdness for Oct 4-9 targeting other months in the last ten years.

They come from phones in South America and Southern Asia, but except for one American Osteopathy site, the majority come from the vast category of "other."  

Whatever it is, something automated is looking for something here, and I doubt that's good. 

Controlling The Weather

Conclusive Evidence Found of Jew Controlling the Weather - Babylon Bee

Winchester Cathedral

 

New Education Model! Using AI!

 So you know it must work, right? Except Boy, Was I Wrong About Alpha School by Wess Trabelsi at AI ∩ K12.  This is someone who wants the tech revolution in education to work.  He is sympathetic.  

But he has also seen other promising results blow up before, and calls 'em as he sees 'em.

I have long since learned not to be surprised when new educational marvels look like they work, because the news that there is selection bias and results that don't scale is just around the corner. Deception.  Some of it may be salvageable, but it doesn't look likely.

Debates

Scott Alexander at ACX has a new post, challenging Steven Pinker to a debate about AI. Alexander thinks the AI dangers are real - and I don't mean the water and the electricity - while Pinker thinks they are oversold. Alexander points out that Pinker has consistently underestimated how intelligent AI is going to be, so he should just admit he is wrong, wrong, wrong about all of it. There is something about the tone which makes me uncomfortable.  His reasoning is all in a row, though it is his usual obsessive self. (Note, Alexander always faults himself for the length of such posts, as if that were the extent of the problem. To me that is a clue of how he is missing the point.)

Alexander was arguing with Tyler Cowen last year about USAID in much the same tone. I am at a bit of a loss, approving of his general approach in both discussions, yet finding the final product somewhat beside the point. It is fair to hold someone accountable about what they previously wrote, but this somehow has an air of the childish "But you said...but you said...but you SAID..." I quoted GK Chesterton about arguing with a madman, as Alexander has that autistic style I am so familiar with. 

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity*, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. 

But my strongest impression was how much I glimpsed my own reflection in his posts. A few specific topics I have covered in detail (ahem) and at length (ahem) sprang immediately to mind. 

* I remembered this as "charity," which is interesting.  I may like that better, and if I ever get to speak with Gilbert I will mention it. 

Undermentioned

There are people making points I would myself, but doing it better than I would have. Yet I do notice few people want to touch on the possibility that this is what happens when minority and immigrant cultures are trying to compete socially in elite white situations. Perhaps those who already feel entitled are more likely to enter those cultures, less afraid of it.  One of the accused has returned to Dubai, for example. 

"Hidden" Messages

My mother remarried in August 1966, just before I entered 8th grade. We went to the beach with his family sometime that summer, with the girl who was going to become my step-sister, who was getting ready to leave for Colby Junior College.  This song came on my transistor radio and their voices dropped.  "You know what this is really about, right?" said Beth.  My mother murmured, "it sounds like they are talking about having too much to drink last night without saying it." My sister nodded wisely.  They were clearly hoping that I didn't catch this terrible reference. 

That was my first clue that my new sister was some kind of a dingbat.  It was clearly a drug reference, not alcohol.  You could tell that from the garage-band El Cheapo psychedelic sound if nothing else. (Rock autoharp was a little surprising.) Heck, I even made sure my nine-year old brother didn't miss stuff like that.  You wouldn't want to be humiliated in fifth grade of a suburban school for missing a drug reference.  You might never recover your status. It was one more moment of thinking I was just going to be alone in the world until I had a family of my own. Eighteen months later I played "What Condition My Condition Was In" in my own garage band,* and none of the mothers overhearing us had the least bit of objection. Went right over their heads.

Of course, I married a girl who also didn't get the reference, or more exactly, never considered that there might be a naughty reference of any kind. She memorised lyrics without listening to them.  Her sorority sisters explained a few things to her so I didn't have to. But that's another story.

 *We weren't even a garage band.  None of our parents would let us use their garage. We thought we had a garage at Jimmy Labonte's house once, but when we got there his father was doing Pinewood Derby stuff with his younger brothers.

Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs

 The review convinced me that Lee, the topic, is fascinating, but the book isn't. Lee Kuan Yew's Memoirs at Astral Codex Ten, part of ACX's yearly series. Lee was the determined genius who rescued Singapore, taking it from Third-World hellhole to economic powerhouse.

There’s an irony in that while Japan lost World War 2 pretty badly on the field, their actual stated goals in the war were to free Asia from western colonialism, and those goals they achieved amazingly well. They may have lost by direct force, but Lee and others like him didn’t forget how weak and disorganized and cowardly the British ruled in defeat. Western empires ruled Asia more through their aura of invincibility than through their technological advantage, and once that was lost their days were numbered and they knew it. The fall of Singapore was the single greatest military defeat the British ever had in terms of soldiers lost; it was also the battle that struck the deathblow to their Empire. 

But also

Something like half the book is Lee listing every world leader he ever talked to as PM. This is another part that mostly gets kind of dull (especially if you don’t follow the details, although this case is much easier to track than the internal politics chapters since you’ll probably recognize the characters’ names, or at least their countries). They’re all described as “tough” and “vigorous”, occasionally as “warm”, and usually with some other positive descriptors. This is probably a mix of sincere respect and diplomatic language for most of them.

Except Jimmy Carter. Lee spends an entire chapter making fun of Jimmy Carter for being shallow, undermined, weak-willed and inauthentic. And then takes an aside in the next chapter, when he’s complimenting Reagan, to mention how smart it was of the American people to replace Jimmy Carter with this guy. If you ever want to see someone who’s not a giant swimming rabbit attacking Jimmy Carter, this is the book for you 

Nolan Sisters

British.  Never heard of them before. This was their first TV appearance, but they were big in Europe in the 70s.  A friend described them as "terminally cute," which is true. As they got older, they got just a little more frisky, more like Marie Osmond than ABBA or Olivia Newton-John, but in that range.

The algorithm just sends you things, and there are lots of YouTube videos about their later tragic lives (three died of cancer; their agents ripped them off) and how beloved they were in Europe, especially England and Ireland. Perhaps it is the green dresses, but that's a very Irish-looking group of sisters.

Public Perception

Bethany again looks for the research, finds there is very little research, and so does some research.

Do People Ever Change Their Minds About Controversial Cases? 

This is why polling can be valuable: people’s perception of what others think does not necessarily match what others actually do think, and it definitely doesn’t always catch when people change what they think. 

Data Republican is a national treasure, and it looks like she does this full time.  Bethany, OTOH, has a day job, a husband and child, and lots of medical appointments or she would be DataCatholic/~Feminist/~Libertarian*, which doesn't really roll off the tongue and sell subscriptions. 

We think we know what the general public thinks, but it is often only what "my people" think, or "those stupid other mass culture people" think, or what I overheard today, saw a poll on today, or was assured by reliable opinionards is true. There is almost nothing that we have more than a slender portion of the data, but even with that low bar, gauging public opinion might be near the bottom of the list. This leads to the puzzle of whose opinion we do actually know pretty well. Perhaps I should write about that general question.

Public perception does change, but is tough to suss out, because there are so many temporary and interactive factors that influence point-in-time opinion guesses discernment. 

*I don't know who has what symbols and semiotics in place, but "~" means approximately. 

Kids These Days

 Kids These Days Part II by Paul Bloom.  Part I is linked there. He goes directly after the smartphones-are-the-problem issue, but expands to trying to explain anything about development.

 Turkheimer’s skepticism is about explaining individual differences, but population trends also emerge from many interacting causes. When trying to understand an increase in depression among a certain population at a certain time, we should take seriously a similar skepticism about theories that say it’s caused by this—and even about more subtle theories that say it’s caused by this and that and this other thing. When it comes to the claim that smartphones are to blame, this skepticism should be reinforced by the failure to find robust evidence in its favor.

Kids these days can't even shoe a damn horse.