I don't know, but . . .

First Things has an article on zombies.

The MIT article Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine proposes using lab-grown brainless human bodies for spare parts and testing.

One point jumped out at me:

Recently we have even begun using for experiments the “animated cadavers” of people who have been declared legally dead, who have lost all brain function but whose other organs continue to function with mechanical assistance.

Does that make your hair stand on end too?

I've read LoTR several times, and watched the movies in theater and part of them at home again. It was fun. With a bit of trepidation I watched the first two Hobbit movies, and just the trailer for the last. It really doesn't work to try to mix the humor of the Hobbit with the darker and deeper themes of LoTR and pour CGI chase scenes on top. I felt no great loss at the omission of the last one.

Yesterday I recalled that the infamously bloated Star Wars Phantom Menace had at least two fan edits, one of which I spent the time to watch. (It had competent pacing, which the original didn't.) Hmm. Were there fan edits of the Hobbit?

Yes. Dozens. One highly regarded one is four hours long (like an extended edition LoTR reel), another apparently got it down to 2 hours.

Thus far curiosity. I didn't feel like watching any of them. I suspect I never will feel like it, though one day I might re-read the Hobbit.(*) (Just a heads-up--if you're reading a chapter a night to the kids, make sure you have plenty of hydration for the Mirkwood chapter.)

I wonder how many other movies have a sufficiently devoted fan base to do the work to fix them? Not many, I suppose--if the movie is sloppy enough to need substantial repair, it won't get fans on its own. There has to have been a precursor that was wildly popular--probably a book. And the fan base needs to skew geeky enough that some will have the technical chops to make it work. Harry Potter had a huge fan base, but the movies I saw didn't look sloppy or need fixing.

I've heard of some people who created their own animations from scratch for some books. Now that the tools are there and computer horsepower is relatively cheap, if technical skills collaborate with some good amateur artists and scriptwriters, we should see a lot more.

What would you be interested in seeing done?

(*) This year a number of things don't seem to have the attraction they used to, though it might be more accurate to say the past few years. There's plenty that's still satisfying; perhaps this is just a pruning to concentrate on those.

I almost missed this: the IgNobel prizes for 2025. Example: the Pediatrics prize The present study investigated the effects of garlic ingestion by the mother on the odor of her breast milk and the suckling behavior of her infant. Evaluation of the milk samples by a sensory panel revealed garlic ingestion significantly and consistently increased the perceived intensity of the milk odor; ... That the nursling detected these changes in mother's milk is suggested by the finding that infants were attached to the breast for longer periods of time and sucked more when the milk smelled like garlic.

BBC spotted the Engineering prize: a study on using UVC in shoe racks to elminate odor. (It works, provided you don't run the light too long, at which point the shoes start to smell like burnt rubber.)

The Peace prize went to a study showing that "drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language". "Participants who consumed alcohol had significantly better observer-ratings for their Dutch language, specifically better pronunciation, compared with those who did not consume alcohol."

The Dallas shooter wanted to terrorice ICE, and shot detainees by accident -- at least I suppose he shot them by accident; maybe he didn't care just so he hit somebody and caused terror.

I don't know who those detainees were. As of this writing their names haven't been released. As far as I know they'd done nothing deserving death, and were in the custody and under the protection of our peace officers. We failed in that protection, and they were shot in the place of our people.

Maybe it's that failure that leaves me with the sense that the dead and wounded need--not honor, but some kind of official respect. I confess that the sense is enchoate and I can't pin down a good reason or appropriate response.

It may be that the dead was a vile criminal--or someone picked up by mistake. I can't shake the notion that we owe something, somehow, in either case.

The other day in a conversation at Dr Boli about clever game shows, one commenter said of "8 out of 10 Cats" that it would "take people who are already known to be clever and humorous and put them into situations that encourage them to be humorous and clever."

Season 1/Ep 1 of "8 out of 10 Cats" was available, so I gave it a chance. The contestants were very fast with their quips, no question--faster than I generally am.

Unfortunately the fastest way to come up with quips is to use cheap shots; joking about sex, joking about the pope -- maybe some of the obscure references were too, but I've never been in close touch with UK pop culture.

Celebrity teams nominally competed to see who could best guess survey results, though the real contest was to see who could come up with the best quips. Which sounded better than it was. Maybe it got better in later seasons, but my curiosity doesn't reach that far.

The Bible warns of judgment, from Psalm 62 through Revelation: reward each man according to his work. Jesus clarified a bit with the parable of the talents--the servant that was punished was the one that didn't even try. He didn't do outright evil, but he didn't even try to do good.

So, what happens if we, trying to do good, make the wrong choices? Not evil, not lazy, but not ideal?

The parables suggest that part of the rewards differ but the praise (also a reward) is the same.

I'm not sure there's a need for a detailed direction (Move to Cincinnati, rent the apartment on Jericho Lane, take the job with Campbells, and put your chips on Betty instead of Veronica). I should do the best I can with the information I have. Maybe I get special guidance--usually not. If God blesses the results of my choice, could any different choice of mine have done better than God?

Of course God's blessings aren't always immediately recognized as such: "You're doing well, so I'm going to give you some assignments that other people would not be able to handle." You understand the blessing part later.

Acts 17:10-11: "The brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so."

In an internet of "news" pass-alongs, I hunger for more noble-minded souls.

"ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners"

The story struck me as a bit odd--where did the author find so many couples using such an oddball approach to fighting with each other? I guess you could do it with a request on some website, though you'd get a serious sampling bias that way, and it would take a fair bit of work to make sure you had more or less the real scoop. Or maybe the author asked a bunch of divorce lawyers for people who'd talk to him.

I can't imagine going to the computer to try to come up with something to say to my wife. Partly that's because I don't find the systems all that intelligent, and partly because it seems too indirect. If I'm angry or happy, I want to just say so myself, not ask a ghost writer. (Think of Cyrano as a cautionary tale.)

But I can believe some people do it. That you can get yourself in an echo chamber with AI that reinforces all your opinions--that sounds easy. In fact, it sounds faster than the traditional approach, which is to gripe to your friends and rely on them to take your side, until you've worked yourself up into fury.

But stories about walking around just reading the ChatGPT responses out loud to the spouse sound like absolutely no one I know.

I don't live in the phone, though.

"SEEKON – Two DayLight reporters narrowly escaped a masked dancer last Wednesday in the Seekon Pellokon Community Forest in Sinoe County."

The two were covering a story involving probable corruption surrounding a forestry contract, when a "country devil" showed up in town, looking for them. He was not reported as having any assistants with him, but the village people stood ready to assist him in whatever he wanted.

From "Prayer for our enemies"

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

They, rather than I, have confessed my sins before the world.

They have punished me, whenever I have hesitated to punish myself.

They have tormented me, whenever I have tried to flee torments.

They have scolded me, whenever I have flattered myself.

They have spat upon me, whenever I have filled myself with arrogance.

AVI linked to an essay Magical Systems Thinking about problems with complex systems, which in turn references the book Systemantics by John Gall.

"Systems in general work poorly or not at all."

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

"Great advances are not produced by systems designed to produce great advances."

"Efficiency Expert. Someone who thinks he knows what a system is or should be doing, and who therefore feels his is in a position to pass judgment on how well the system is doing it. At best a nuisance, at worst a menace."

I have claimed that in computer management, there is a "Conservation of Complexity": e.g. a tool that makes some things easier for 90% of your systems will demand horrible hacks to work with the rest. I've also spoken of myself as a political Godelian--any set of laws and regulations will have situations it does not justly address, and adding new rules creates a new set of failures in an infinite and increasingly unwieldy game of whac-a-mole. John Gall takes the analysis further, and amusingly.

We walked by a curious conversation at Horicon this morning. She was talking and he assenting: "He has his truth, and I have my truth, and we can have different truths. But somewhere there must be a truth that joins them."

I missed the rest, and it wasn't my circus, but I thought it telling that even though she believed in the relativity of truth, she hungered for a real truth, a true truth.

I was reading about Charlie Kirk over at Althouse (retired law professor specializing in "cruel neutrality"), and noticed that many of her commenters urged us all to "buy a gun."

Nothing wrong with that, but why? To defend yourself against the "Antifa" blackshirts? OK, fine, but who are they?

If I read the numbers right, there's more than enough firepower in honest hands to obliterate the Outfit, the Tren de Aragua, the Gangster Disciples, the Somali Outlaws, the Wah Ching, and all their related ilk (plausible candidates for "hostis humani generis" and outlawry)--in standup battles. But in practice, the gangs survive though secrecy and intimidation and connections with law enforcement.

Who's going to identify them for you? "I'm from Antifa and I'm here to kill you. Go get your gun." Sure. Or were you thinking of trying to track them to their lairs and attack them? You'll find them better defended than you hope. And where they are street enforcers for political groups, they will have some outside support as well. The bombers from the 70's were funded by rich lawyers (and occasional bank robbery). Remember the Klan.

And if you're worried about being surprised, some body armor might be handier than a rifle. (sniper?) And buddies with you could be even more useful--gangsters seem to prefer "defeat in detail."

I'm not talking about street crime here, or subway crime. That you can sometimes have an impact on, provided you're prepared and alert. I just don't see firearms as magical defenses against this kind of violence.

I remember sitting through one of those "spiritual gifts" lessons, filling out their questionaire, and thinking that some of what they were talking about (e.g. service) were universal requirements, not just for selected gifted ones.

Talents and gifts are context-dependent. Imagine if you will Albert Einstein and a little girl whose puppy is stuck just out of her reach in a storm drain. The talent she needs, and he has, is having an arm long enough to rescue her dog.

I have my own favorite talents, but often the situation calls for unspectacular ones.

by John Bellairs.

A few days ago someone on a writers' group posted that they re-read this every year. That kind of endorsement gets my attention, especially when the subject sounded like something that might give me an idea or two to goose a stalled fantasy story into motion again. Two wizards, Prospero and Roger Bacon, try to survive and defeat a malicious evil force.

It didn't get into the mechanics, and the two wizards weren't different enough to give my story (about conflicting sources of magic) any useful ideas, but the book was OK. It keeps one reading, and the descriptions and scenery are quite good. I wasn't too thrilled with the ending, but it made sense.

Writing has been like pulling teeth the past few months. Not sure why, but I suspect it's due to energy being diverted to trivia like healing.

The Shroud of Turin apparently has been controversial for quite a while. (My guess about how it might have formed was tested a few years after my post.)

A SciTechDaily post gleefully cites Nicole Oresme's claim that ‘I do not need to believe anyone who claims: “Someone performed such miracle for me,” because many clergy men thus deceive others, in order to elicit offerings for their churches. ‘This is clearly the case for a church in Champagne, where it was said that there was the shroud of the Lord Jesus Christ, and for the almost infinite number of those who have forged such things, and others.’

The article doesn't quote Oresme's reasons for holding the Shroud to be fake, just cites his conclusion. Maybe that's all we have, and if the item was fashioned about that era he might have had access to provenance information we don't.

I'm a bit dubious about attributing it to Jesus' burial, because it doesn't seem to match John's description. I could be wrong, of course.

Growing up we had two encyclopedia sets: one the Britannica (14'th), and the other the Book of Knowledge, which aimed at a younger readership with a wildly different approach. The Britannica had all entries alphabetical, as you'd expect.

The older (not the New, which turned strictly alphabetical too) tried to entice the reader to read on into different topics. If you wanted all the articles on some topic (or summaries of all of the stories by e.g. Shakespeare) you looked in the index and perhaps had to get several volumes off the shelf. It was designed for browsing.

There was a Canadian version also, with some of the articles and stories in French.

On facing pages (5246 and 5247) of the 1912 edition linked above you find "Simple Simon Met a Pieman" and a philosophical essay "Must all Things End?" and a few pages later "The Marvels of Electricity and Magnetism." The latter article knows nothing of the nucleus, attempts to prove the existence of the ether, and includes a howler "Why the Earth's pull is believed to be caused by electricity."

I don't recall anything quite that egregious from the edition we had, which I think was from the late 50's. For me, their organization plan worked. I browsed, jumping around to things that seemed interesting at whatever age I was at the time. When I was too old for the little kid's summaries of great stories, I was old enough to read about rockets and explosives. And eventually I started browsing in the Britannica too.

My parents also got the Great Books set and its associated teaching guide, but never got around to actually trying to teach out of them, though we kids read here and there in the Great Books. (horrible font, btw) I inherited both, and we never got around to using the teaching guide with our kids either.

I wonder what would have been different with Trump's announcement if that Tren de Aragua fast boat had been carrying some Iraniam passengers.

It seems as though a major principle of international law is encapulation: The relevant entities are sovereign states responsible for the activities of the subjects in their physical domain, and to some extent those which travel as well. Nothing else has the firepower of the state, both to repel outsiders and control their own.

That latter is not universally true now, if it ever was. Bandits too powerful for kings to deal with crop up all through history. Sometimes they wind up setting up states of their own, or even overthrowing the king.

So how ought a nation deal with a hostile non-governmental power? Declare them terrorists/outlaw/enemies and kill them wherever you find them, just as you would with a traditional enemy state? -- no matter what state they are nominally subject to?

That sort of piggy-backs on the framework we use, though in the absence of a transparent hierarchy it's hard to know who to trust if you want to work out a peace deal. Is Jose or Abdul the one you should deal with, if either? What do you do if Hess drops in and offers a deal?

And turnabout is fair play--suppose Canada decided that the Gangster Disciples were a terrorist group and enemy of all mankind, and started to do something about it. The Chicago establishment would have a cow at the attacks on their people, and the Washington crowd would be deeply insulted and angry at the insinuation that they were incapable of dealing with crime and that they didn't properly appreciate its hazard to others.

We had meat pretty regularly in Liberia, though the ship didn't always replenish the Lebanese Abi Jaoudi grocery store on time and the shelves could get a little bare. I liked the canned hams we had a couple times a year, though I never quite managed the key manipulation that would keep the strip from thinning to a snap or widening to engulf the key. Either way somebody had to fetch the pliers.

Abi Jaoudi carried mostly American/European foods, with some local fruits. It had a slightly musty smell, but we didn't mind—past the ground level tank with the large goldfish, past the automatic doors (amazing there!), inside, the small store (large by Liberian standards) was air conditioned! In the tropics! Mom had her list, and our requests for additions went unheeded. Although, if a birthday was coming up, and if the store had been supplied with options, we got to choose what flavor of cake.

You could find lunch meat, chicken, ground beef and other things that could be frozen or kept very cold for shipment. Denmark was closer than the US. Mom made great meatloaf.

Every now and then we had canned corned beef hash—not nearly often enough. I loved the stuff, greasy though it could be—perhaps the grease was part of the joy of it.

When I went to college I ate what the dorm served, or what grandmother made when I stayed with her on break, or what my parents had when I spent the last undergraduate year with them. Grandmother Lorene made cooking look easy. She'd go in the kitchen for a few minutes, then come back and watch TV for half an hour, then go in again, and again, and then supper would appear, sometimes chicken and potatoes and beans and fresh bread.

In grad school I was on my own, with no roommate to help with cooking or rent. I found how expensive some of my favorite foods could be—expensive enough to put a serious crimp in my book habit. Hash was too dear. As was Underwood Deviled Ham, which Grandpa Nugent had taught me about. He called it bacon, and ate it for breakfast on crackers.

But food expense was a solvable problem, so I got a cookbook and a crock pot and some garage sale pots and pan, and started trying some cheap dishes—especially ones that didn't require many or complicated ingredients.

I set black-eyed peas with some bacon in the crook pot to cook one morning, mouth watering in anticipation of the evening. However, a group of us wound up having to go to Fermilab for something that afternoon, and I didn't get back into the kitchen until after 10. Most of the water had boiled away, and the recipe was scorched. It took months to get the burnt taste out of the crock.

I tried one of the Betty Crocker pancake recipes—except the idea of getting buttermilk just for one recipe didn't sit well with me, so I substituted ordinary milk from the second recipe, confusing the two recipes in the process. The hybrid tasted quite good, and has become a family staple since then.

I learned the hard way that orange juice may be acid, but not so acid that a little mold can't build up in the pitcher's lid. I located the culprit when I recovered.

I learned that an off-brand of OJ concentrate reliably gave me indigestion, and read in the news a couple of years later that the manufacturer was indicted for adulteration—their OJ was mostly citric acid and sugar.

One day I decided to make my own corned beef hash, since the canned stuff was unaffordable. I figured that corned beef was beef, and ground beef was beef—and conveniently already chopped up for me too.

So I froze a pound of ground beef (cheapest grade). I would cut off a chunk and dice it up, then dice up a potato and small onion, and fry them all together. The ground beef even provided the fat to cook it all in.

I'd start this frying, dump a can of green beans into a pot to simmer, and sit down to watch the news, getting up to stir during the commercials. Grandma had made it seem easy. Then I'd drain off the fat and plop it all on a plate, with OJ on the side.

It never did taste nearly as good as corned beef hash, but it was my own, and inexpensive. Presumably it was nutritious too, though I only weighed 135 lbs when I married. (When I called Grandpa to tell him of the engagement, he demanded to speak with her. "Can you cook?" "Well, I just helped prepare a feast for 200." "Hmf. Well, you put 30 pounds on that knucklehead by Christmas or I'm sending you home to your mother!") I called my culinary experiment a success. The matrimonial decision worked far better.

In the meantime, while still unmarried, I kept reading about how good for you fish were supposed to be.

The prospect of having raw fish in the fridge, and being on a deadline to cook it, was daunting. I'd not grown up eating any fish other than fish sticks (and sometimes tuna salad), and only those when Dad was out of town—the New Orleans man hated fish. And the Liberian markets selling fish smelled pretty strong. Mom never shopped at them (she was a nurse, and taught hygiene and sanitation). So I had no favorite recipes to look back to. I'd had fish with potatoes once, so I knew they went together sometimes.

But canned anchovies would keep until I had the energy and enthusiasm at the end of the day to work with them. The usual fish recipes in the cookbook looked complicated, and none of them involved anchovies, but I figured that fish is fish. Well, I'm an experimentalist, right? And, OK, maybe a bit lazy.

Thus, one evening I diced up the potatoes and onions per usual and tossed them into a little oil, on the way to making my new patented anchovy hash.

The fish can had that little key opening tool, but I was much better at getting the strip unwound now. Dexterity had been a little slow in coming, but it got to me eventually.

The smell was quite a bit stronger than I expected. But I figured, soldier on, and try breaking the slippery things up into hash-sized chunks.

I'd not realized there'd be all these little bones. I quickly gave up on the ribs, but tried to pry out the spines.

Into the pan went the resulting shreds, beside the already-cooking potatoes and onions. Frying filled my apartment with anchovy smell, and then with too-hot anchovy smell. The fan over the stove exhausted into the apartment, so I opened the madras-cloth "curtains" and the windows, and set up the floor fan for a cross-breeze.

A little noise told me the neighbor's cats had decided to hang out under my back window.

After some contemplation I figured tea would be a better compliment than juice for this confection.

I cleared the books off the little table and sat down and looked at the hash.

I tried a bite.

I sipped a lot of tea, and ate about half the green beans.

I tried another bite. I had perpetrated this; I owed it to myself to make a go of it. And I hated throwing food away.

Plainly I was going to have to make more tea.

I ate the rest of the green beans, and looked at the hash again.

I scraped the plate into the trash and shoved a couple of paper towels on top to try to keep the odor down. An hour later I gave up and carted the trash out to the dumpster.

At least the cats liked the smell.

Some experiments fail.