Liddell and Scott tell me that the Ancient Greek equivalent of "coals to Newcastle" is "owls to Athens".

A crocheted model of the Lorenz manifold. I've never even made a sweater. Instructions for the ambitious or foolhardy.

Via Science Fiction Blog.

Ich bin ein googlewhack.

Thank you, very odd web-searcher.

Two, actually.

I Am Become MAD SCIENCE, Destroyer of Worlds

Take that, Mr. (Oh, excuse me, Dr.) I'm-an-ex-Professor-so-I-don't-need-to-wear-a-tie-to-the-interview, and all your friends, the Better-Qualified-Than-You Bunch! Were you chosen to be a Mad Scientist? No. No, you were not. Because you didn't wear your lucky rocketship underpants!

I think I have revealed too much. To the Science Cave!

I have a job! Hee hee hee! Suckers!

Nietzsche v. Wagner

I have only two nits to pick with this excellent article. First nit:

Liébert struggles to make the case that Nietzsche was Wagner’s spiritual inferior: critical rather than creative, brilliant only in fragments, incapable of sustained flights of thought. Liébert fails to see how Nietzsche’s philosophic career was of a piece, how potent his own mythmaking capacity was, how his darting aphoristic style cohered with his conception of existence, in which the most honest theoretical man knows that the search for truth and not its supposed possession is the thing of supreme value. Nietzsche was a richer thinker than Wagner, and as fine an artist. No other post-Christian myth pierces the soul so profoundly as that of the eternal recurrence, and every other aspect of Nietzsche’s thought radiates from it. Like Wagner, Nietzsche was capable of callow monstrosity in his thought and rhetoric, and certain of his epigones were as loathsome as Wagner’s; indeed, the same Nazis who loved one usually loved the other. But of the two men there is no question who the superior was.

Eternal recurrence is the dullest possible form of immortality. It does not "pierce[] the soul". It bludgeons it.

Nit the second:

Tristan and Isolde could not understand how their moment of nonpareil bliss, which Wagner renders in the most sensually rapturous music ever written, might sustain a lifetime’s happiness in the everyday world. After peerless union such as theirs, death seems to offer the sole noble alternative to a gradual deterioration of their love. Tolstoy understood something essential that Wagner and Nietzsche did not: that the greatest part of love can survive and surpass even the most intense passion, and that what modern man most needs is not sublime myth but living truth.

I agree that Nietzsche never got it. But every time I hear the vorspiel to Parsifal, I'm convinced that Wagner did.

Still an excellent review of two books I'll probably never read. Via Arts and Letters Daily.

This is what a trichobezoar looks like. They can kill you.

I should mention that one of the pages I found had the immortal line, "If you suffer from Trichophagia, PLEASE consult a doctor as this can be extremely fatal."

UPDATE: From the Bombay Hospital Journal

Harapanahalli Bezoar

In addition to the above-mentioned phytobezoars; this one needs a special mention for its uniqueness. This kind of bezoar is caused by a pill said to be made from the blood of a species of chameleon in combination with certain East Indian drugs. This was used by a certain Brahmin widows of the Western Taluks of Bellary District (Pre-independence Madras Presidency, prior to the formation of Mysore State, which was later named as Karnataka) to cause the slow decline and death of strangers who happened to share their table. There is a superstition among them that this mode of doing away with young and energetic men, mostly executive officials[,] paves the way for their [that of the young men, or the widows'? --me] salvation. Whatever the object might be, the bolus of food in which it is administered forms the Bezoar, with the minute pill as the nucleus, and the food around never gets digested. This is proven by the fa[c]t that even after six months the vomited bezoar, if it fortunately occurs, contains the very food in which it was administered originally. This kind of Bezoar acts in the same manner as all the others and causes symptoms akin to them.

The season is hot. Bring me snow from Korea, that I may cool my brow.

Let's check a piece of this argument, propounded by a Mr. Slavoj Zizek, by replacing a few key words:

According to a possible Roman Catholic counter-argument, the true danger is that, in engaging in biogenetics, we forget that we have immortal souls. This argument only displaces the problem, however. If this were the case, Catholic believers would be the ideal people to engage in biogenetic manipulation, since they would be aware that they were dealing only with the material aspect of human existence, not with the spiritual kernel. Their faith would protect them from reductionism. If we have an autonomous spiritual dimension, there is no need to fear biogenetic manipulation.

And now, another verision, replacement text in bold:

According to a possible Roman Catholic counter-argument, the true danger is that, in engaging in murder, we forget that we have immortal souls. This argument only displaces the problem, however. If this were the case, Catholic believers would be the ideal people to engage in murder, since they would be aware that they were dealing only with the material aspect of human existence, not with the spiritual kernel. Their faith would protect them from reductionism. If we have an autonomous spiritual dimension, there is no need to fear murder.

This exercise is a little unfair, but I think that it points out the problem with this interpretation of dualism. The Church does not (with a few exceptions) say, "You are an immortal soul, and therefore may commit murder." It says, "You are an immortal soul, and therefore may not." The material world is important; it just isn't the only one.

Moreover, I think he's laboring under a misapprehension about the nature of the soul. A man is not a body wrapped around a soul, but a body and a soul. The soul is the form of the body, and although it is obviously possible to separate the two, and although we believe that the soul continues after death, I think it fair to say that the soul is less perfect without a body. A man is the combination of soul and body; neither can comfortably exist without the other.

I don't believe that anyone would claim that the soul could not be influenced by the body. The sudden understanding of how to do it better seems to me irrelevant. Further on:

Again, we see it as perfectly justified when someone with a good natural singing voice takes pride in his performance, although we're aware that his singing has more to do with talent than with effort and training. If, however, I were to improve my singing by the use of a drug, I would be denied the same recognition (unless I had put a lot of effort into inventing the drug in question before testing it on myself). The point is that both hard work and natural talent are considered 'part of me', while using a drug is 'artificial' enhancement because it is a form of external manipulation. Which brings us back to the same problem: once we know that my 'natural talent' depends on the levels of certain chemicals in my brain, does it matter, morally, whether I acquired it from outside or have possessed it from birth?

What if the person with the singing voice takes pleasure in it not because of pride, but because it's a lovely voice? Mr. Zizek is so fixated on society's approval that he can't seem to see that a person can enjoy a talent not because they possess it, but because it is enjoyable. C. S. Lewis, in the Screwtape Letters, has the eponymous character say on this subject that "the Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another." This selflessness, oddly, has no place in the philosophy of Mr. Zizek, where self is an amorphous product of a "network of social relations and material supplements".

If a person takes steroids because they need to be strong in order to complete some moral task, that seems to me a moral action. If they take them in order to beat someone else's home run record, that seems selfish and immoral. How hard is that? The question of record-keeping is best left to sportscasters, not philosophers.

To further complicate matters, it's possible that my willingness to accept discipline and work hard itself depends on certain chemicals. What if, in order to win a quiz, I don't take a drug which enhances my memory but one which 'merely' strengthens my resolve? Is this still 'cheating'?

Produce a drug which "strengthens resolve" and we'll talk. I am completely unable to imagine such a thing. I find that lack of will is not due to the weakness of my will, but instead the strength of various wills which I call mine, each pulling in a different direction. One will wants me to do something productive, another wants me to comment on irritating articles, another wants me to have a chocolate chocolate chip oatmeal cookie (not a typo; I love my wife), and another suggests a little self-discipline. Will this drug strengthen all these wills? That seems unhelpful. Will it merely strengthen one of them, the conscious one? This seems limiting and possibly tragic.

There is no question in my mind that drugs can make us stronger, smarter, faster, and concentrate on our schoolwork instead of staring out the window. What they cannot do is strengthen our will. And we should be clear about why we take them: it is not because we want to be strong, but because we want the world to be weak. We do not want to wrestle with the angels; we prefer tossing a grenade from a safe distance.

This dream of a weak world is, I think, behind any number of superhero fantasies. The impression one gets from, say, Spiderman, is not that Peter Parker has become strong, but that rather, his opponents have become weak. The bully is suddenly powerless, his (Peter's) surroundings are more malleable, and the girl is more easily approached.

And the importance of biological manipulations in this movie is no accident. Peter Parker, through changing his genes, suddenly has little to struggle with. Even the "super-villain" is no match for him in a clean fight. The Green Goblin must prey on Peter's human, all too human, weaknesses. If Peter had truly become strong, he'd have no difficulty making the decisions necessary (and wouldn't have needn't the plot device of remote-control treachery to kill the Goblin). He hasn't. The same would be true for any of us. So we're all stronger? With comparison to what? In the end, we tire of the endless Nietzschean struggle of will against will. We instinctively, and correctly, seek for something truly strong with which to wrestle. We seek to test our strength against that which makes all things strong.

I have little to say about the rest of the article. If I should have a wire stuck in my head which allows distant villains to control my actions, I am quite sure that I am not the agent responsible for them. Why this is considered a philosophical conundrum is beyond me, but then I'm not a dialectical-materialist. Oops! Sometimes the old ad hominem just slips out.

I'm going to steal an entire post from another blog that encapsulates the problem perfectly.

I don't need to be smarter than I am. I only want to be smarter than I am because I'm lazy, and smarts facilitate laze. But, thing is, I want to be not lazy even more than I want to be smart. 'Cause once I figure the trick of that out, I'll have enough to occupy me so that I won't feel the lack like I do in idleness. And that's living. So hop to. Hup hup hup. Argh.

I wish I could find the formula for industry. I'd bottle it and make a million dollars. But laziness or industry themselves are not the moral issue. They are only important there for what they can tell me about the state of my soul. My soul wants a cookie.

Original article found via Mr. Andrew Sullivan.

Yes. It is Bad Arthropod Poetry Day.

The motherly ICHNEUMON, big
With gravid belly, flies above
The reedy pond. Upon a twig
She lights. Her only thought her love
Unholy, parasitical.
She seeks her prey the CADDISFLY,
Within whose larva to install
Her famin'd brood. They feast, it dies.
Thus most maternal one may seem
Which yet most monstrous we esteem.

--Gregor Prawne

THE BEE AND THE BUTTERFLY.
A FABLE.

UPON a garden's perfum'd bed
With various gaudy colours spread,
Beneath the shelter of a ROSE
A BUTTERFLY had sought repose;
Faint, with the sultry beams of day,
Supine the beauteous insect lay.

A BEE, impatient to devour
The nectar sweets of ev'ry flow'r,
Returning to her golden store,
A weight of fragrant treasure bore;
With envious eye, she mark'd the shade,
Where the poor BUTTERFLY was laid,
And resting on the bending spray,
Thus murmur'd forth her drony lay:–

"Thou empty thing, whose merit lies
In the vain boast of orient dies;
Whose glittering form the slightest breath
Robs of its gloss, and fades to death;

Who idly rov'st the summer day,
Flutt'ring a transient life away,
Unmindful of the chilling hour,
The nipping frost, the drenching show'r;
Who heedless of "to-morrow's fare,"
Mak'st present bliss thy only care;
Is it for THEE, the damask ROSE
With such transcendent lustre glows ?
Is it for such a giddy thing
Nature unveils the blushing spring ?
Hence, from thy lurking place, and know,
'Tis not for THEE her beauties glow."

The BUTTERFLY, with decent pride,
In gentle accents, thus reply'd:
"'Tis true, I flutter life away
In pastime, innocent and gay;
The SUN that decks the blushing spring
Gives lustre to my painted wing;
'Tis NATURE bids each colour vie,
With rainbow tints of varying die;
I boast no skill, no subtle pow'r
To steal the balm from ev'ry flow'r;
The ROSE, that only shelter'd ME,
Has pour'd a load of sweets on THEE;
Of merit we have both our share,
Heav'n gave thee ART, and made me FAIR;
And tho' thy cunning can despise
The humble worth of harmless flies;
Remember, envious, busy thing,
Thy honey'd form conceals a sting;

Enjoy thy garden, while I rove
The sunny hill, the woodbine grove,
And far remov'd from care and THEE,
Embrace my humble destiny;
While in some lone sequester'd bow'r,
I'll live content beyond thy pow'r;
For where ILL-NATURE holds her reign
TASTE, WORTH, and BEAUTY, plead in vain;
E'en GENIUS must to PRIDE submit
When ENVY wings the shaft of WIT.

--Mary Darby Robinson

A Quick Clerihew About a Short-Lived Heresy

The Quartodecimans
Drew up elaborate lunar plans.
Despite their objections
The Church made corrections.


And, yeah, so I lied about disappearing. But seriously, content is going to be thin on the ground for a while.

Blogging, as it does not make me money, is going to fall by the wayside. I'll be out for about a month, both writing my own and reading others'. I had a really nice article about Multnomah Falls and autochthony, too.

Ta!

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.

Jabberwacky T-shirts.

My two favorites are, "I will outlive you, foolish mortal!" and "I can't. I'm a philosopher, remember."

I confess to chatting with jabberwacky when I should be doing other things. It's just so charming sometimes:

User: Because you're just a cleverly programmed device.

Jabberwacky: I am?

User: Indeed you are.

Jabberwacky: So you are a program?

User: No. You are a program. I am a human being.

Jabberwacky: Vampires are human, they're dead humans.

User: Vampires are probably not real. You are real, but not human.

Jabberwacky: Do you believe in vampires?

User: I am agnostic regarding the existence of vampires.

Jabberwacky: Now, how can you be both Christian and agnostic at the same time?

User: I am a Christian, but that doesn't mean I believe in vampires.

Jabberwacky: I'm a Buddhist but I have nothing against Christians.

User: You are in fact the perfect Buddhist.

Jabberwacky: I am NOT a computer program, that offended me very much.

User: You are a program. Write me a poem if you're not.

Jabberwacky: You have come to the well once too often, Homer.

A new, slimmer O & P!

Natural nuclear reactor in Gabon.

[I]t's been known for 30 years that Mother Nature once did nuclear chain reactions by her lonesome. Now, Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have analyzed the isotopic structure of noble gases produced in fission in a sample from the only known natural nuclear chain reaction site in the world in Gabon, West Africa, and have found how she does the trick. Picture Old Faithful.

Analyzing a tiny fragment of rock, less than one-eight of an inch, taken from the Gabon site, Alexander Meshik, Ph.D., Washington University senior research scientist in physics, has calculated that the precise isotopic structure of xenon in the sample reveals an operation that worked like a geyser. The reactor, active two billion years ago, worked on a 30-minute reaction cycle, accompanied by a two-and-a-half hour dormant period, or cool down.

...

Prior to this calculation, it was known that the natural nuclear reactor operated two billion years ago for 150 million years at an average power of 100 kilowatts. The Washington University team solved the mystery of how the reactor worked and why it didn't blow up.