Castleconnell

Broad, but not deep, along his rock-chafed bed,
In many a sparkling eddy winds the flood.
Clasped by a margin of green underwood:
A castled crag, with ivy garlanded,
Sheer, o'er the torrent frowns: above the mead
De Burgho's towers, crumbling o'er many a rood,
Stand gauntly out in airy solitude
Backed by yon furrowed mountain's tinted head.
Sounds of far people, mingling with the fall
Of waters, and the busy hum of bees,
And larks in air, and throstles in the trees,
Thrill the moist air with murmurs musical.
While cottage smoke goes drifting on the breeze,
And sunny clouds are floating over all.

--Aubrey de Vere (1786-1846)

More Crime Lab Shenanigans

From the NY Times:

The New York State Police’s supervision of a major crime laboratory was so poor that it overlooked evidence of pervasively shoddy forensics work, allowing an analyst to go undetected for 15 years as he falsified test results and compromised nearly one-third of his cases, an investigation by the state’s inspector general has found.

The analyst’s training was so substandard that at one point last year, investigators discovered he could not properly operate a microscope essential to performing his job, the report released on Thursday said.

And when the State Police became aware of the analyst’s misconduct, an internal review by superiors in the Albany lab deliberately omitted information implicating other analysts and suggesting systemic problems with the way evidence was handled, the report said. Instead, the review focused blame mostly on the analyst, Garry Veeder, who committed suicide in May 2008 during the internal inquiry.

This sort of thing goes on all the time and will continue until we get serious about testing these labs. The only reform that could stop this kind of abuse is rigorous, regular testing by an outside body. All the talk about the "highest standards" is meaningless without blind tests.

How Science Really Happnes

Great article by Jonah Lehrer of Wired on the role of failure in scientific progress. Much of it is based on the work of Kevin Dunbar, who spent years in the 1990s hanging around biochemistry labs observing scientists at work. Dunbar's first finding was that many, many experiments produce unexpected results. Overall the number of "anomalous" results was more than 50 percent. (So much for "normal" science.) Once these anomalies appeared, the scientists tried to figure out what they meant. They usually started by assuming there was a problem with the experimental apparatus, so they would check that and run the experiment again. Often the anomaly disappeared, but often it did not. Then they passed onto the most crucial step, which was discussing the strange result with their colleagues:

While the scientific process is typically seen as a lonely pursuit — researchers solve problems by themselves — Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn’t the presentation — it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude.

This is certainly what works for me. When I encounter something unusual, I call somebody to talk about it. Since it is an inevitable part of cultural resource management that I often work in areas on which I am not an expert, sometimes a real expert can tell me right off what is going on. Sometimes I discover that I have landed in the midst of an old problem or even an ongoing controversy. But more often I have simply strayed into one of archaeology's vast gray areas, and conversation is always the best way to shed light.

A Walk in the Snow

Georgetown and Rock Creek Park today.

Embryonic Solar Systems

These Hubble photos of the Orion nebula show young stars surrounded by the disks of matter that astronomers think eventually coalesce into systems of planets. Click for a larger image.

Pantheism

Nice essay today by Ross Douthat on pantheism, apropos of its salience in the movies:

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

The "we" here is a bit tendentious, but certainly many people have these strong longings for something beyond the world we can see and touch: for ultimate answers, for an escape from death, for moral laws backed by divine anger. For nonbelievers, the existence of the "god-shaped hole" in the souls of many humans is one of the greatest puzzles. It seems a cruel trick for the universe to equip us with longings for what does not exist.

I would observe, though, that if life among hunter-gatherers is often short, it is not necessarily more brutish or nasty than any other sort of human life. Nor does belief in God do anything to lengthen it; the medieval world was every bit as nasty and brutish as the Mesolithic, and life might even have been shorter. And that is how I also feel about our spiritual situation. For me, religion doesn't really explain anything about the place we find ourselves in. It simply changes the questions. The fact of my existence on this world at this time, born with certain strong inclinations, surrounded by the others beings I have fallen in with, remains an absolute mystery to me no matter how I think about it. The "answers" offered by the religions I know seem to me either evasive or unhelpful. I don't expect any "answers" from science, either, not about the really hard questions.

What I feel is that I can only respond as the person I am to the world I see around me. I was born with curiosity and wonder, in a time when human knowledge is vast and ever-expanding, in a place where I am free to follow my mind wherever it will go. I also have a love of life as I see it. I love to dig my fingers into rich dirt, to watch the trees bud every spring, to see babies born, to watch children grow, to know people in all their madness and complexity. So I marvel at the universe and live the life I have, among the people I love. For me, that is faith.

Republican Intransigence Backfires

Jonathan Chait explains the failure of Republican tactics in the health care debate:

At the outset of this debate, moderate Democrats were desperate for a bipartisan bill. They were willing to do almost anything to get it, including negotiate fruitlessly for months on end. We can't know for sure, but Democrats appeared willing to make enormous substantive concessions to win the assent of even a few Republicans. A few GOP defectors could have lured a chunk of Democrats to sign something far more limited than what President Obama is going to sign. And remember, it would have taken only one Democrat to agree to partial reform in order to kill comprehensive reform. I can easily imagine a scenario where Ben Nelson refused to vote for anything larger than, say, a $400 billion bill that Chuck Grassley and a couple other Republicans were offering.

But Republicans wouldn't make that deal. . . . The Republicans eschewed a halfway compromise and put all their chips on an all or nothing campaign to defeat health care and Obama's presidency. It was an audacious gamble. They lost. In the end, they'll walk away with nothing. The Republicans may gain some more seats in 2010 by their total obstruction, but the substantive policy defeat they've been dealt will last for decades.

Getting Serious

My sons Thomas and Ben get ready to try out their new dart guns Sunday.

The Year in Corrections

Regret the Error wraps up the best media corrections and retractions of the year.

My favorites:

British Medical Journal:

During the editing of this Review of the Week by Richard Smith (BMJ 2008;337:a2719,doi:10.1136/bmj.a2719), the author’s term “pisshouse” was changed to “pub” in the sentence: “Then, in true British and male style, Hammond met Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, in the pub and did a deal.” However, a pisshouse is apparently a gentleman’s toilet, and (in the author’s social circle at least) the phrase “pisshouse deal” is well known. (It alludes to the tendency of men to make deals while standing side by side and urinating.) In the more genteel confines of the BMJ Editorial Office, however, this term was unknown and a mistake was made in translating it into more standard English. We apologise for any misunderstanding this may have caused.

Los Angeles Times:

Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday’s Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery story in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday.

Denying Evolution and Climate Change

I suppose I ought to have thought before of one reason so many American conservatives deny that our carbon dioxide emissions could change the climate: because this is science, and since science supports evolution, they reject the whole enterprise. This comes to my attention from Orac at Respectful Insolence, protesting an essay by "Intelligent Design" proponent Senator Rick Santorum, who wrote:

Given this uncertainty, I think most Americans find the experts' cocksureness unsettling. Despite the bravado and billions of dollars in media hype supporting the climate alarmists, only 37 percent of respondents agreed that man is causing global warming in a recent Rasmussen poll. Why? Well, maybe because Americans don't like being told what to believe. Maybe because we have learned to be skeptical of "scientific" claims, particularly those at war with our common sense - like the Darwinists' telling us for decades that we are just a slightly higher form of life than a bacterium that is here purely by chance. . . .

To my mind this is the real danger of the debate over evolution. It really doesn't matter very much if most Americans accept evolution or not. But because our understanding of evolution is in make ways the pinacle of our scientific achievement, anyone who looks at the matter seriously can only reject it by rejecting science as a way of learning about the world. Anti-scientific populism has all sorts of unfortunate real-world effects, from anti-vaccine hysteria to the crazed opposition to any restraints on carbon emissions. People who reject the scientific project are capable of believing just about anything, and when they vote their prejudices they can do real damage to the world. One reason to sweep the whole evolution vs. creation debate under the rug is that once people understand how good the science of evolution is they will have to make a choice between science and fundamentalism, and many of them will decide that science is bogus.

Happy Sunreturn

The shortest day of the year finds us digging out of the foot and more of snow that fell over the weekend, with the schools and even the Federal government closed. It is a good time for quiet reflection, and for thinking about the time to come.

Best wishes to all, and may the growing light of the year bless you with joy.

Autism up Again

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, 1 in 110 American 8-year-olds has been diagnosed as autistic. (One in 70 boys and 1 in 315 girls.) This is up from another count made just a few years before that had the rate at 1 in 150.

Most of the increase is probably due to the expanding range of "autism spectrum disorder" and increasing awareness of autism. But at least some statisticians in the CDC seem to be worried that the prevalence of the disease may be increasing, too, and that would indeed be disturbing.

Early Humans ate Grain

Most archaeologists have assumed that people first lived on a grain-based diet in the neolithic, after we discovered farming, or perhaps for a few thousand years before that in a sort of transitional period, 12,000 to 10,000 years ago. I remember one eminent fellow telling me that before farming our diet was "Atkins." Now there is good evidence of a human group in East Africa that ate a lot of sorghum and tubers 100,000 years ago. The evidence, from a cave near Lake Niassa, includes grinding stones from which ancient starch grains have been recovered. This evidence does not tell us how much of these people's diet was grains and tubers, but it must have been significant, at least during one part of the year.

Blizzard of 09 (II)

The snow has been blowing around, so it's hard to know the exact total, but there is at least 12 inches of snow in our yard, and it's still falling. These pictures were taken around 2 PM.

60!

All 60 senate democrats have signed onto the health care bill, meaning that it will pass before Christmas. And then comes reconciliation with the House bill....

To quote Max Weber:

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.

Halloween, 1796

From a survey of the Scottish church compiled in 1796:

A sort of secret society of Guisers made itself notorious in several of the neighboring villages, mean dressed as women, women dressed as men, dancing together in a very unseemly way.

We suspect that these clubs of single people and their costumed holiday frolics are very ancient, but there isn't much evidence before the 1700s. "Guisers" is of course related to "disguise."

Oh My Darling, My Cattle. . .

After describing the great importance of cattle in the culture of Iron Age Britain, Alistair Moffat writes,

A faint, surprising Hebridean echo of the exaggerated value of cattle can still be heard in the Gaelic language. On the Isle of Lewis and elsewhere in the west the most effusive term of endearment available is m'eudail. Literally it means "my cattle."

Arab "Moderates" Hate the US, Too

From Greg Scoblete at Real Clear World:

But the second dynamic is even less favorable to the U.S. and that's the extent to which the moderates don't much like the U.S. either. A recent poll from the University of Maryland illustrates the point: while there is a disgust of al Qaeda's methods (and thus, of radicalism) there's a basic agreement on al Qaeda's political objectives of forcing a change in U.S. foreign policy:

A study of public opinion in predominantly Muslim countries reveals that very large majorities continue to renounce the use of attacks on civilians as a means of pursuing political goals. At the same time large majorities agree with al Qaeda's goal of pushing the United States to remove its military forces from all Muslim countries and substantial numbers, in some cases majorities, approve of attacks on US troops in Muslim countries.

Your run of the mill moderate may be disgusted by al Qaeda attacks against America and may find the idea of slaughtering infidels abhorrent, but he may also think that we're getting what's coming to us and so isn't very motivated to get himself killed purging the radicals from his midst.

It seems to me that Americans who advocate fighting wars in the Middle East, including the President, miss the importance of this. Hardly anybody in the Middle East believes that we have their best interests at heart. The more Muslims we kill, regardless of who they are, the more people there hate us and want us to leave. We cannot fight our way out of this situation. The only way we can end the hatred against us is to stop killing Muslims and pull almost all of our forces out.

The Blizzard of 09

The view at 8 AM with four inches on the ground and more falling fast. I am supposed to be on my way to Richmond today for Christmas at my father's house, but at the moment that seems unlikely.

Light Graffiti

A collection.

Lakes on Titan

This Cassini photograph shows sunlight glinting off a large methane lake on Saturn's moon Titan. Titan has clouds, rain, lakes, and rivers, but of liquid methane, not water.

Nostalgia about Childhood

From a review on Spiked of a BBC program about the history of children's play:

If you depended for all your information on tabloid newspapers and late-night Sky 3 programmes, you could be forgiven for thinking that territorial teenage gangs are a recent phenomenon, but Hop, Skip and Jump demonstrated otherwise. Another Glaswegian, Tommy Smith, remembers the city’s clearly delineated gangland borders in the late 1950s and early 1960s, talking of the relief at returning home after venturing into a fierce rival gang’s territory. Colin MacFarlane saw a man get his throat cut, after which the killer approached him and threatened: ‘If you tell anyone about this, there’ll be trouble.’ A few days later, the mark drawn around the body by the police had been covered by that icon of childhood innocence: a chalked hopscotch court.

These accounts suggest we should regard childhoods of yesterday with ambivalence – and sometimes even appreciate the often paradoxical nature of society’s nostalgia. A frequent lament by those who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s is that back then there were so many wonderful bombsites and ruined houses to explore, which is tantamount to thanking the Luftwaffe – who possibly killed these children’s parents – for a happy childhood.

Another puzzling phenomenon is that today’s nostalgia was foreseen at an early age, as many folklorists in the 1960s began tape-recording traditional playground songs, fearing they would be killed off by 45s and cheap transistor radios disseminating commercial pop music, much as recorded pop music was indeed helping to kill off much English regional folk music. Yet, as Hop, Skip and Jump illustrated, these traditional songs have survived into the twenty-first century. Many songs sung in playgrounds today would be recognised by our children’s great-grandparents. And, to add yet another twist to this tale of misleading nostalgia, because these songs have been transmitted laterally to second- and third-generation immigrants, such songs would be utterly unfamiliar to the grandparents of these children.

Preserve Auschwitz?

Here's a historic preservation dilemma for you: should we renovate Auschwitz? The question has been debated for years, as the camps slowly deteriorate. On the one hand, there is something obscene about spending millions of dollars to lovingly restore a death camp. On the other, there is a strong imperative to preserve the sites to preserve the memory of those who died there.

This morning's news story was about the theft of the famous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign that hangs over the gate, which it strikes me is one of the strangest thefts in history. But from the story I learned that the debate over restoration has finally been settled, and the EU is putting up $90 million for a thorough restoration of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

I have my doubts about the wisdom of this. Every restoration brings with it questions of authenticity. Nothing can be made precisely as it was, and the whole enterprise is always fraught with questions of "Disneyfication" and the like. Every restoration is guided by a vision of the experience that the restorers want the visitor to have. As long as the camps just were as they were, nobody could really be accused of exploiting their memory. But once restoration begins, this question becomes inescapable. The camps will not just be leftovers from the Holocaust, but a museum shaped around somebody's idea of what death camps were like.

I myself would have left them alone to slowly rot away to nothing. That would have been a different kind of memorial, a memorial to change and impermanence. The Nazis are gone, and perhaps we should let the camps fade away to nothing, too.

Well, What's Your Interpretation?

Jesus scans the faithful with a radio frequency sin detector.

(The Blessing Christ by Fernando Gallego, ca. 1500)

Just Because

Better in France

Libertarian Matt Welch on how much better the health care system is in France.

The only people who think the American system is best are the ones who've never lived anywhere else. It's a case of ignorance, plain and simple.

Water World

One of the most earthlike planets yet discovered is known by the euphonious title GJ 1214b. This planet, only 40 light years away, is about 2.7 times larger than the earth and 6.5 times more massive. The latest observations suggest that its bulk is 3/4 liquid water, surrounding an iron-nickel core.

Imagine the life that might roam that enormous warm ocean, thousands of times bigger than all the seas on earth!

Resentiment

Interesting post from Julian Sanchez on the resentment and anger so many conservatives feel toward "elites," whoever they are. As he notes, when the Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of congress they still spent the 2004 convention fulminating against "elites." Instead of reveling in their own success, they obsess over "the idea that somewhere, someone who went to Harvard might be snickering at them."

Things one didn't know

Every once in a while I learn about a bit of local culture that survives amidst the overarching sameness of America. From today's NY Times, a piece on a peculiarity of Pittsburgh weddings, the cookie table:

For as long as anyone here can remember, wedding receptions in Pittsburgh have featured cookie tables, laden with dozens of homemade old-fashioned offerings like lady locks, pizzelles and buckeyes. For weeks ahead — sometimes months — mothers and aunts and grandmas and in-laws hunker down in the kitchen baking and freezing. Then, on the big day, hungry guests ravage the buffet, piling plates high and packing more in takeout containers so they can have them for breakfast the next day. . . . But even amid the increasing professionalization of the wedding, with florists mimicking slick arrangements ripped from Martha Stewart's magazines and wedding planners scheduling each event down to the minute, the descendants of those Pittsburgh settlers continue to haul their homemade cookies into the fanciest hotels and wedding venues around the city. For many families today, it would be bordering on sacrilege to do without the table.

A tradition worth preserving, I would say.

Protesting the Climate Summit

In Copenhagen, a slew of "world leaders" are trying to meet to do something about our ongoing experiment with the atmosphere, and thousands of protesters are trying to stop them.

Why?

I mean, really. The same people used to protest the World Bank, which for all its faults was set up to help poor countries and sometimes really did try. Now they are protesting an effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. I assume they think this is a good idea. So why try to block the meeting?

Some people just make no sense.