I don't know, but . . .

By Kurp and Samuel Johnson

I was reading Ezekiel 43 this morning ("defile ... by the corpses of their kings") and what leapt to mind was Westminster Abbey. That's probably not a fair comparison, but...

you don't want to know the answers to. "Liberia's Education Ministry has blocked controversial plans to introduce mandatory drug testing in all of the country's schools."

Liberia has a major problem with drug abuse among youth: UNFPA guessing 1 in 5 (maybe only 1 in 18, but that's still a lot). So, what do you do? Test, maybe?

Setting aside accuracy issues, and ignoring the cost of a testing program, what do they plan to do with the information? What can they do, if they identify someone as a drug abuser? Is what they're doing now working at all?

Someone described an expert as a person who can explain how bad your situation is, but not tell you how to get out of it.

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.

We humans are more like waves than statues. They estimate that nearly 100% of our atoms are replaced within 5 years.

Suppose an adult is about 60 liters of atoms, and each liter is about 10ドル^{26}$ atoms/liter (for water, which is most of us).

The biosphere is pretty big. Since most of it is ocean, if I assume that the ocean gets churned and mixed on the scale of centuries, I can take that as a conservative estimate of the biosphere: about 1ドル.4 \times 10^{21}$ liters.

So, taking a single human from about 2000 years ago, and you today, then ${60 \times 60} \over {1.4 \times 10^{21}}$ liters ${\times 10^{26}}$ atoms/liter says that the overlap of atoms between a human then and now is 25 million.

In other words, there are north of 20 million atoms in your body now that were once in Jesus Christ. And likewise for your neighbor. First class.

St. Maximus wrote "Christ is baptized, not to be made holy by the water, but to make the water holy."

One Japanese town created cards with the names, faces, and statistics of men in the town: firemen, community volunteers, and so on.

“We wanted to strengthen the connection between the children and the older generations in the community. There are so many amazing people here. I thought it was such a shame that no one knew about them,” she said in an interview with Fuji News Network (FNN). “Since the card game went viral, so many kids are starting to look up to these men as heroic figures.”

We like to tour castles, and try to imagine what life in them was like. We don't tour the peasant huts; there aren't any left. They'd have been pretty cramped too. Of course, castles might have gotten pretty cramped for space; you don't waste time and stone building fortifications to enclose parks (unless you're building Constantinople). Although maybe you only get crowded when everybody is taking shelter..

Imagine tourists a thousand years from now wandering about what used to be the USA. What would be left that they could tour?

Skyscrapers don't last. Everyday homes would survive as foundations. Metal, pipes, bricks--all gets scavenged and reused. Some of the public buildings, if not stripped for construction material, might have parts of walls and pillars left. And dams. Even if a dam is broken, that's a lot of concrete, and would stay impressive for a long time.

Runways would look pretty ratty, with lots of crumbled stuff and plants growing through it, but should still be mostly visible. Likewise the highways--though I assume a lot of that would be redone and the concrete repurposed. Bridge remnants, where there wasn't a replacement.

Near towns, I'd guess that concrete would get scavenged for coarse building fill, maybe to build town walls.

Some of the stories of our era would survive. Would Cape Canaveral be famous for the legends about space travel or the battle fought there in 2876?

One of the New Years challenges I got was to watch a couple of foreign language movies without subtitles and see if I could figure out what was going on. I picked The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and Yamato. True, the former did have slides, which are sort of like subtitles, but I don't read German. I got the gist.

Yamato was a bit harder--I mistook the sweatheart for a sister. The movie follows the lives of several crewmen, proud of their ship, subject to hideous discipline, and getting pounded by American planes.

Perhaps the speech and text told more of the story. IIRC, Yamato didn't run up against much in the way of American aircraft until Sibuyan Sea and Samar (and then Ten-Go, of course). The depiction of Samar (if such it was) leaves out the task force's retreat. Possibly they didn't want to dwell on that part.

Ten-Go was a kamikaze mission for the ship, and here my lack of Japanese hurt: they showed no kamikaze planes--did the characters discuss it? If not, that's a weird omission.

From the purely Japanese PoV, the Americans come across as impersonal and deadly--impersonal until they kill his sweetheart's mother and eventually his sweetheart at Hiroshima. A bit santized...

I suppose I could rewatch with subtitles on, but I won't spend the time. The visual story is one I wanted.

There's a framing story, and I eventually figured out the motives on that one too. Interesting challenge--not one I'd want to try with something like My Dinner With Andre, though.

In Zelazny's Lord of Light, Yama says "None sing hymns to breath... But oh to be without it!" I remember having had pneumonia a time or two.

Sometimes looking at a boring ECG can be a delight.

I really want this to be true: it has been interpreted as suggesting that ice cream is good for type 2 diabetes and some heart issues (or at least for not getting them).

I've read before that dark chocolate is good for blood pressure. Never mind the nuance right now: since it has milk, milk chocolate should be even better, right?

I'm just waiting to hear that sourdough baguettes are good for weight loss.

Unfortunately, where they're true (and other studies disagree), it's only with caveats and that critical word "moderation." Are you telling me 1/2 kilo isn't a single serving bread size?

Coneflower seed heads feed some birds during the winter, so we cut and stacked them. Cut stalks of various of the annuals in the garden are used as bee nests over the winter too, so they're lying loose also. We have some firewood stacked by the house, and several bushes of one type or another, on a pretty small lot. Though we no longer have any trees, neighbors do.

If we lived in the Altadena area, our house would have gone up in no time.

True, tornadoes are a more frequent threat around here...

The weather will reach a seemingly tropical 44F today, and be mostly sunny. The workmen are wearing heavy jackets and gloves. The old roof is coming off, including some decrepit 4x8's, and new one is going on. 17-January. Tomorrow night it's supposed to hit -3F.

It's a ranch-style duplex, so they needn't climb high. I wonder if there's a discount for the off season.

UPDATE: They only did part of the roof, so I guess they were working on storm damage.

from the past day's reading:

"Genius ought'n to be eccentric!" he cried in some excitement. "Genius ought to be centric. It ought to be in the core of the cosmos, not on the revolving edges."

or this, about Augustine, and millions of the rest of us

an idleness which was fatal to his virtue

The city calendar hanging beside me has almost every day flagged as some "Day": Bison Day, World Freedom Day, Fast Food Day, Craft Jerky Day, Cake Day, and World Hello Day. "Cookie Cutter Day" has another, unmentioned, name this year: the start of Advent.

At least they got Christmas Eve et al on there.

"What I Learned in 40 Years of Doing Intelligence Analysis for US Foreign Policymakers" by Martin Petersen: From September 2010.

During one of the most challenging times in my analytical career, I worked for the finest analyst I ever knew. In the middle of the Tiananmen Crisis in 1989—when everyone’s hair was on fire—I found him late one afternoon going through a stack of musty old reports. I asked him what he was doing. He said, “I am looking for things that did not make sense then, but do now.” He found some, and it profoundly affected our line of analysis.

The article ends with this:

The colleague who teaches the Kent School’s Art of Review Seminar with me tells a story about Abraham Lincoln, who in one of the darkest hours of the Civil War attended a Sunday service in that little church that still stands across from the White House. On his way back, he was asked by a fellow parishioner what he thought of the young reverend. Lincoln replied that he had a strong voice and clear message, but that he failed to do one thing; he failed to ask us to do something great.

It's a pity the agency deteriorated so badly. We could use some intelligence.

Somehow, at the end of the day, I can't find any of the time all those timesaving shortcuts accumulated, much less find any accrued interest from it in the time bank.

Midway through Mortal Goods, Ephraim Radner briefly recounts his time as a young Anglican priest in Burundi during the early 1980s, shortly after the Tutsi genocide of Hutus had subsided. Filled with zeal to fix things, he was appalled that the Africans just got on with life, farming, trading, marrying and being given in marriage. Radner wrote an essay for the Christian Century condemning the African “will to silence” and challenging Church leaders who “support or acquiesce to the myth of peaceful order that is used as a cover for injustice and spiritual illness.” He was deported for his troubles.

"For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays." The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis

I wonder what he'd have thought of blogging. He wrote a pretty fair number of essays himself, many still eagerly read.

If you didn't have electricity, or natural gas/oil, or gasoline, how many servants would you need to maintain your current lifestyle? (Setting aside things like e.g. air travel) There are lots of things that we don't have to do ourselves because our magic servants do it for us.

At first it looks manageable--you don't need a full-time wood chopper in summer--but washing and cleaning time adds up, and since you're providing lodging for them you need more servant time to take care of the others. Maybe you and your neighbors could board horses in a single neighborhood facility and split the costs, but your current lifestyle presumes the convenience of instant use of a vehicle.

I'm guessing at least 3.

I've heard the wheelbarrow story for ages. You know the one: a tightrope is stretched across Niagara Falls, and a daredevil walks over and back with a pole. Then he does it without a pole. Then he does it pushing a wheelbarrow. Then he does it balancing the wheelbarrow on his head. Then he does it pushing the wheelbarrow full of a couple hundred pounds of bricks. The crowd cheers each time. He asks the crowd, "Do you believe I could push a man across the falls in this wheelbarrow?" "Yes," is the answer. He addresses the nearest man who said yes: "Get in the wheelbarrow."

The lesson drawn is about faith, and the difference between thinking something and being willing to follow through.

OK, ok, but look at it a different way. What's the benefit? The daredevil gets acclaim when he pushed the bricks across the falls--"What a wonderful man to be able to do that!"--but nobody cares about the bricks. If you get in, the daredevil gets the glory, and you get the "He's a very trusting soul" reaction. And the downside is that every now and then you get a wind gust, and a very intimate view of the falls.