You'll get your apology when you stop worshipping the severed head of Baphomet.

All my knowledge of the Templars springs from a computer game, so there may be some historical inaccuracies. Although I still use Darklands as a hagiological resource.

Practicing fencing footwork is useful but deadly dull if it's all one does. I need to find some opponents.

Though on the lofty hills the hunter urge
His vainly barking dogs with empty din
And speed his iron shafts, I fear no risk
Of savage Mars, but trusting in my might,
I boldly set upon tall elephants
And fell them, wounded sore. Yet cruel Fate,
Alas, has tricked me slyly; I who slay
The mighty, by an unarmed girl am caught;
For a fair maiden, laying bare her breast,
May take me, doing as she will with me,
And to her high-built city lead me back.
My horn has given me my name in Greek;
Thus, too, the Latins call me in their tongue.

Aldhelm, Riddles, "The Unicorn"

If even these sea-monkeys die, they're not real, so I don't need to feel guilty about it.

That turtle-man is respectfully apologizing on behalf of the construction company.

Peculiar recently got to see the aurora borealis, and I was wondering if I'd have that same chance here in Oregon. I stumbled across Spaceweather.com, which is pretty much what it advertises. If you're wondering about the Northern Lights, or the Leonids, or, say, an extinction-mass asteroid, this is the place to go. Although frankly we're not watching nearly hard enough for that last.

An excellent study of a restricted version of the Three Body problem, by the lovely Ms. Emilie Evrard, whose work for the ESA has recently paid off.

"Europe Reaches the Moon" link via Eurekalert.

News from the North

Peculiar has written me, and given his permission to post some of his letter. The bad news is that, for the predictable future, he won't be blogging. He's far too busy.

There's much more good news. He's working as a roofer, which is mostly "trying not to fall off icy roofs or through rotten ones or both at once. It's nice though, doing honest work outside, with good views." He's also teaching a bit of Euclid at St. Innocent's.

He has also become an Orthodox catechumen, for which I honor him. The intensity of study and self-examination is not easy. He's seen the Northern Lights, and made a pilgrimmage to the grave of St. Herman of Alaska.

I'll post more when I learn more, and especially after the "bounds of propriety" he invoked in his letter are firmly established.

Cast among the waves, then thrown
On the beach to be met
By men like beasts. There may you
Chew slaves' dark bread
Full of foulness, and shudder,
Freezing, in foam and sea-tangle,
Piss, and puke like a dog,
Helpless, your teeth hammered, broken,
And lost. Let you laugh, then, like you did
Before, pledging our friendship.

--Archilochos

Or:

i hope you end up lost at sea.
and you wash up on a desert island.
and the only people there are hairy savages.
and they only give you moldy old bread to eat.
and you can't chew it because your teeth are all broken.
and you end up on all fours puking.
and you're covered in seaweed.
and it's freezing cold.

and i hope you look as happy
as you did when we swore
best friends forever.


I used this text. And didn't stick too closely, either.


As long as I'm at it:

Listen, lads, you'd better know
what the women get up to while we're gone
and what they'll say when we get back:
"My lover returns from his journey,
and his large ship batters the waves in his haste.
Why didn't he die at sea?
For I have found a youth
who has never worn ox-hide.
[...] at night.
[...]
Straightly [...]
My glances are wound around [...]
like silk threads."

--Xenander

The Cosmos 1 is due to launch on March 1, 2005. It's a solar sail powered spacecraft.

The Planetary Society, without government funds, but with support of Cosmos Studios and Society members, put together an international team of space professionals to attempt this first actual solar sail flight. The Space Research Institute (IKI) in Moscow oversaw the creation of the flight electronics and mission control software while NPO Lavochkin, one of Russia’s largest aerospace companies, built the spacecraft. American consultants have provided additional components, including an on-board camera built by Malin Space Science Systems.

Solar sailing is done not with wind, but with reflected light pressure - its push on giant sails can continuously change orbital energy and spacecraft velocity. Once injected into Earth’s orbit, the sail will be deployed by inflatable tubes, which pull out the sail material and make the structure rigid. The 600-square-meter sail of Cosmos 1 will have eight blades, configured like a giant windmill. The blades can be turned like helicopter blades to reflect sunlight in different directions, and the sail can “tack” as orbital velocity is increased. Each blade measures 15 meters in length and is made from 5-micron-thin aluminized, reinforced mylar – about 1/4 the thickness of a trash bag.

Once Cosmos 1 is deployed in orbit, the solar sail will be visible to the naked eye throughout much of the world, its silvery sails shining as a bright pinpoint of light traveling across the night sky.

Via Dappled Things.

Quite. Euclid 1:1 as I'd never hoped to see it. Or, rather, as I'd hoped never to see it.

A great deal of time these days in spent promoting or combatting Intelligent Design. The entire argument seems to me

a battleground quite peculiarly suited for those who desire to exercise themselves in mock combats, and in which no participant has ever yet succeeded in gaining even so much as an inch of territory, not at least in such manner as to secure him in its permanent possession.
--Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

The Argument from Design has never been good philosophy, and as such will never be good biology. Intelligent Design seeks to find a moment of special Creation, in which an intelligent power engineered life from non-living materials. How this creation is more probable than the gradual rise of self-replicating molecules from blind chance, and thence their complexification to higher forms of life, is quite beyond me; and how such probability may be demonstrated without begging the question seems to me impossible. But allow me to make one statement: whether Intelligent Design is a successful theory or not, it cannot provide the proof of God's existence that its promoters wish. Actually, allow me to make another: evolution's success as a theory doesn't provide proof that God does not exist, nor does it allow for a blithely materialistic philosophy. Anyone looking in this arena for such proofs is bound to be disappointed, which will stop very few people from doing so.

Philosophy was defined by Plato as the love of wisdom; the practice of philosophy was the acquisition of knowledge. Aristotle refined these definitions, splitting science into various branches (which branches are more clearly bounded today), and giving philosophy the task of expounding on first principles and causes. Whenever these definitions have been forgotten, bad thinking emerges. Philosophers who attempt to predict natural laws based on first principles (a charming example may be found in Kepler's attempt to force the planetary orbits into a relationship with the Platonic solids. He wished to have a punch-bowl made to demonstrate his theory. My flippancy is unfair to Kepler, who was a real empiricist and made incomparable advances in astronomy) are quite as absurd as scientists who attempt to draw metaphysical conclusions from the most recent theory about the origin of life.

Opponents of evolution tacitly accept much of materialist philosophy in debating the Argument from Design. It presumes, for example, that proof of God's existence must emerge from within the structure of biological science. Biological science is not opposed to the existence of God; it is indifferent. It is concerned solely with examining and explaining biological phenomena. If we accept that such an examination is the only means of gaining knowledge, or neglect to examine the causes which make such a study possible, naturally we will find that the existence of God is unnecessary.

Indeed, a successful proof of Intelligent Design would push the boundaries of the concept of a Creator (presuming always that it found such a Creator to be transcendent, rather than another limited agent, e.g. extra-terrestrial life with a love of farming) past those which philosophy has given us, and which are generally negative. If one accepts the philosophical arguments for the existence of God, God is unknowable (barring special revelation), and many of His attributes are simply negations: He is bodiless, He is not an accident, etc. While these negations can limit our mistakes, they do not allow us to make many positive statements about the attributes of God. They do not, for example, allow us to conclude that He is a Trinity.

Intelligent Design's success would establish God as an actor on a level with other actors in the physical universe. That is, this success would show that, rather than constantly existing as the fundamental Act-of-Being, God acts just as limited creatures do, in a way determined by various accidents. Such a discovery would not indicate miraculous doings, which are simply the expression of higher laws than are commonly understood. It would be an entering of God into creation as a limited being. Philosophically, this is nonsense; theologically, there has been precisely one such episode: the Incarnation.

St. Thomas Aquinas has something rather like the Argument from Design as his Proof from the Final Cause, but with such changes as demonstrate that he was all too aware of the difficulties of the common form of this argument.

It is impossible that contrary and disparate things should be in accord and reconciled within the same order, either always or very often, unless there exists a being governing them and causing them, collectively and individually, to tend towards one determined end. Now we observe that in the world things of different natures are reconciled within one and the same order, not merely from time to time and by chance, but always or practically always. There must then exist a being by whose providence the world is governed, and it is this being that we call God.
--Contra Gentiles

Note the important difference. God does not arrange the world as though He were playing Tetris. By governing it and causing it, He creates order. Evolution, to St. Thomas, would be a dramatic confirmation of his proof: disparate elements acting in accord. God, here, is not the object of an hypothesis; He is the reason that hypotheses may be made. The Argument from Design degrades the dignity of God by artificially limiting His methods of creation, and degrades the dignity of truly philosophical arguments when it is placed alongside them.

Shiny.

The Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) project is designed to close the gap between our current technical capability and our knowledge of the near-infrared sky. In addition to providing a context for the interpretation of results obtained at infrared and other wavelengths, 2MASS is providing direct answers to immediate questions on the large-scale structure of the Milky Way and the Local Universe. The optimal use of the next generation of infrared space missions, such as HST/NICMOS, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), and the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), as well as powerful ground-based facilities, such as Keck I, Keck II, and Gemini, require a new census with vastly improved sensitivity and astrometric accuracy than that previously available.

To achieve these goals, 2MASS has uniformly scanned the entire sky in three near-infrared bands to detect and characterize point sources brighter than about 1 mJy in each band, with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) greater than 10, using a pixel size of 2.0". This has achieved an 80,000-fold improvement in sensitivity relative to earlier surveys.

If you do check this out, which I recommend, keep in mind that the colors are for the convenience of a species that can't see much of the electro-magnetic spectrum.

Anhedonia.

Today I picked up a small book on the Language of Flowers. It was originally a present from "Father" to "Mother"--handwritten, rather poorly, and with marginal illustrations. It is remarkably charming, but contains a number of items I had not imagined would be part of a bouquet or corsage:

Potato: Benevolence
Rhubarb: Advice
Cabbage: Profit
Lettuce: Cold-hearted
Rocket: Rivalry
Mustard Seed: Indifference

It's the Language of Salad! I could compose a very nasty note from those ingredients.

Today's False Etymology: Mall

The word "mall" comes to us from 15th century England, after Sir Thomas Malory. When he was justly imprisoned for any number of offenses, he nevertheless continued his illicit dealings, selling stolen goods and financing various illegal activities from his cell:

He hath turned the Gaol into a very Den of Yeggs and Ill-Goers, and cares nothing to Cloake hys Iniquities. Hys Peculations and Usuriousnesse (most Contrarie to Scripture), are become as a Watch-Word even amongst ye Rogues whom he dealst wyth, and indeed each claims a Wyst that he were the Commander as it were of a MALLEORRES that is a Thieves'-Den. Which shew the unrepentante soull of thys THOMS MALLEORE styled Knyght-Presoner.

The word passed into general usage as a name for a pawn shop, and soon was shortened to "mal" or "mall". It acquired its current meaning in the 19th century during the American Civil War.

Previous false etymologies:
eighty-six

Remember, remember the Fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot!

Wicked cool! Platynereis dumerilii has two different types of eyes: one type found in insects, and another found almost exclusively in vertebrates.

Insect eyes are known to consist of an array of compound lenses, whereas vertebrate eyes contain a single lens. But they are also made of different types of cells: insects' eyes are built up with cells called rhabdomeric photoreceptors; vertebrates use ciliary photoreceptors.

...

So if this worm has both kinds of photoreceptor, does that mean that the two types of eyes, insect and vertebrate, both originated in an ancestor of this species? If the animal had two copies of the genes needed to make one kind of photoreceptor, speculates Wittbrodt, then the extra set would have been free to evolve into the other photoreceptor. Different animals would subsequently evolve to use the two options in different ways.

The issue of the evolution of so complex a structure as an eye was dealt with in a particularly charming manner in Richard Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable, chapter 5.

Thus refreshed and sobered, the jolly priest twirled his heavy partizan round his head with three fingers, as if he had been balancing a reed, exclaiming at the same time, 'Where be those false ravishers who carry off wenches against their will? May the foul fiend fly off with me, if I am not man enough for a dozen of them.'

--Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott

The link is to an online Elizabethan manual of defense, which are always well worth studying. Re-reading Ivanhoe gave me cause to wonder if a partizan might not have been anachronistic. It also made me realize that the "Wizengamot" before which Harry Potter is brought in The Order of the Phoenix is a corruption of "witenagemot", the meeting of the wise, which made me feel foolish for not realizing it earlier:

"My lineage, proud Norman," replied Athelstane, "is drawn from a source more pure and ancient than that of a beggarly Frenchman, whose living is won by selling the blood of the thieves whom he assembles under his paltry standard. Kings were my ancestors, strong in war and wise in council, who every day feasted in their hall more hundreds than thou canst number individual followers; whose names have been sung by minstrels, and their laws recorded by Wittenagemotes; whose bones were interred amid the prayers of saints, and over whose tombs minsters have been builded."

I can't wait for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince to be done. Although, frankly, Ms. Rowling's Minesweeper record is much faster than mine, and I got lots of practice when I was managing that restaurant. A facility for Minesweeper does not indicate time is being well spent.

If the owner of said restaurant is reading this, that was a joke.

Airline security just bugs me, and that's all there is to it.

So while the gate security confiscates any little metal device, including nail clippers (a family member joked “Now that would make an intimidating weapon; imagine a terrorist standing up with one in his hand and yelling ‘Stand back or I will clip you’”), the airlines then serve up alternative potential and much more dangerous weapons, including a serrated metal knife (although the blade was not large and it wasn’t very sharp) and fork. How crazy is that.

Security in the end will rest with the passengers: a determined group will certainly be able to put down someone armed only with a fork. It's the people who slip explosive through that worry me.

And more and more I have the feeling that security wants to discourage this impulse to guard ourselves. Afraid of someone's overreaction--and one can easily imagine a racially motivated assault on a plane, "justified" in the name of safety--they have done their best to prevent any reaction. They're trying to remove their natural allies: aware passengers.

So how can passengers help and how can we be prepared? Most are already contributing to security. They are more aware of other passengers and are on the outlook for weapons or anything suspicious. This might just help avert the next hijacker or terrorist incident.

Also, the willingness of passengers to fight back will certainly make terrorists think twice before acting again. This willingness to take action was demonstrated on 9/11 when passengers on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania fought back, though they died in their efforts. There have been more recent incidents as well, when passengers have jumped in to help restrain someone, the most notable case being that of the alleged shoe bomber.

You might be willing physically to assist the crew in cases of air rage, belligerency, or fisticuffs. But, be careful. You can still help, but I wouldn’t want to seriously injury some half drunk, emotional “Uncle Max” from Buffalo who is just venting to other passengers.

I don't agree with everything in the three articles on airplane self-defense, but much of it is good, solid advice. Me? I've got my crochet hook.

The System of the World, along with the previous two excellent books by Mr. Stephenson, ought to do a great deal to correct the injustice G. K. Chesterton perceived in how we think of Samuel Pepys:

Nine men out of ten in this country, above the most unlettered class,
could tell you with some confidence who Pepys was. He was a funny fellow who kept a Diary. He was a roguish fellow, and the fun of his Diary consists chiefly in his confessions of infidelity to a wife, or flirtations with a chambermaid. He wrote in quaint short sentences, often parodied in the newspapers; and he ended as many entries as possible with the phrase, "and so to bed". Now it is a very queer thing that this should be so universally known, and that nothing else about the same man should be known at all....Meanwhile, the rest of his life was a public life of practical usefulness and profound importance. He, with about one other man, made modern England a great naval power....His foes were the first men of the age, like Shaftesbury and Halifax; and they filled the streets with mobs of the Brisk Boys with the Green Ribbons, roaring for the blood of such servants of the Crown. And the roguish little fellow of the Diary stood up under that storm and steered like a ship the policy that has launched the ships of England. He fought for a fighting fleet, more or less of the modern model, exactly as Cobden fought for Free Trade or Gladstone for Home Rule.

--"And So To Bed", collected in The Spice of Life

UPDATE: The diary may be read here (which site Peculiar pointed out to me some time ago) in little snippets. The "cipher" Mr. Chesterton mentions was mostly just a system of shorthand, although Mr. Pepys also had a habit of throwing foreign languages into the mix when delicate subjects were... raised. I have been unable to find a decent online link to the shorthand system used, but I did, in my search, run across a neat notebook of Sir Isaac Newton. Which brings us back to the original topic of this post.

And now I will retreat from the harsh light of all news media into blissful ignorance of any electoral news, only to emerge when the dust has settled, and settled good. In the meantime, I will be watching naked mole rats.

They may hold the key to non-drowsy pain relief.

Normally, applying capsaicin to an animal's skin increases sensitivity to a heat stimulus. However, when Park applied capsaicin to a naked mole-rat's paw and then exposed the paw to the heat lamp, the animal did not respond at all.

Park's group then introduced Substance P to the naked mole-rats by applying a nonreproductive herpes simplex I virus to one paw. The virus enters nerve endings in the paw and migrates up the nerve fibers. The virus carries the DNA to produce Substance P, which can then be released into the spinal cord when nerve cells are stimulated with painful stimuli.

Park tells C&EN that it was a "really big shock" when his team applied the heat stimulus after introducing Substance P. "We were hoping to see something, maybe a slight increase in sensitivity, but we were really surprised when we found out that after introducing this one neurotransmitter, all of a sudden these animals behaved just like all the other animals that had been tested."

...

"These animals have evolved some way of modulating the levels of Substance P for whatever benefit to them. If we can learn from them how they did that biologically, it could help us develop new treatments," Park says.

I actually have a similar response to overcrowding, except that instead of losing nerve endings, I temporarily shut down my reasoning. Thus, I can survive untormented in even the most idiotic environment.

A brief introduction to Heterocephalus glaber.

(Yes, I realize that the pain-relief study is an old one. But I'd forgotten about it until now, when I was bouncing about the Internet looking for a good mole-rat primer. So I posted it under the guidance of the maxim "better late than never.)

Science comes through for the lonesome once again, at least if you're Japanese: the perfect pickup line.

We went out for Hallowe'en, to see I [Heart] Huckabees, which was almost as good a movie as it would have liked to have been. On the front porch we left a large dish of small candy bars, with a sign reading, "Please Take 2" (for obvious reasons). But when we returned, only about half the candy was gone. We leave in a seriously kid-populated area. Where's their budding capitalist spirit? Sad, is what it is. In my day we would have dumped that dish into our pillowcase and run like heck.