He can read

Ben read to me last night. I asked what he wanted to read and he passed over the stack of library books to pull out one of his old favorites, Bones, Bones, Dinosaur Bones by Byron Barton. Except for the names of dinosaurs, he read every word, stumbling once over "have" and once over "and," a word against which he seems to have a personal block. He has a lot of the book memorized, which I suppose is how he was able to read "These are the bones of Tyrannosaurus Rex." But he was getting all the variations in sentence structure -- "we have" vs. "these are" -- so he wasn't working just from memory. It was very exciting, especially because it was his idea and he was excited about it. He wanted to show me that he can read.

Spring

Today was the first real day of spring in Catonsville. It was warm for two days a while back, but the ground was too wet to do anything but walk in the sunshine, and no flowers were blooming. Today it was warm, the daffodils and early cherries are starting to bloom, and the soil was dry enough to get my hands dirty. I spent two hours weeding one of my beds and digging lime and peat moss into the open spaces between the perennials, where I will plant marigolds and cosmos -- this is an open bed, without nets, so only things that deer won't eat can survive there. It was a blissful time, even though the maple trees are also blooming, and the evil miasma of pollen has entered my system with all its baneful consequences.

My little children were outside playing all afternoon.


I took this picture as a record of what the garden looks like at the start of spring. I will be taking these from time to time throughout the year, posting a record of how things look on the south side of my house. Note the gate, which I repaired yesterday after Robert broke it. He tried to jump the fence and didn't quite make it. He was fine but the gate was lying crumpled on the ground, torn from its hinges. "My bad," he said cheerfully, and then waltzed off to play video games.

What makes sense?

I'm reading Tropic of Night, an entertaining supernatural thriller by Michael Gruber. The story concerns African sorcery, as performed by an imaginary tribe called the Olo. An Olo sorcerer who carries out a particularly grizzly series of human sacrifices called okunikua acquires extraordinary power:

No Olo has done okunikua since some time before the turn of the last century. . . . The Olo witch who did it, whose name the Olo never mention, was annoyed by French civilization and wished to make it go away, which in time, of course, it did. The Olo patriarchs considered that the two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the consequent reduction of the great colonial powers to little postcard nations were a direct result of this guy's okunikua. They approved of the result but, as moral people, thought the means excessive. Western historiography does not agree, since it is much more logical to assume that millions of fairly rational, marvelously educated, prosperous people went crazy and ripped the heart out of their own civilization.

The Backpack Adventure

In which our young heroes learn a lesson about thinking ahead.

Last night my 16-year-old son Robert and his friends went to the "battle of the bands" at their high school. At about 9:30 they called me to pick them up. I arrived, but they didn't run over to the car. I shouted. They made obscure hand gestures. I shouted again. Robert came over to the car. "We can't go yet," he said. "We're trying to get Alec's backpack off the roof." Then he ran off again, leaving me blocking traffic in the pick-up lane. I parked my car and made my way over to the school, where I could see that there was indeed a student backpack on the school roof. It was only about 15 feet off the ground, but I could see that the arrangement of the roof would make it very difficult to climb. As I watched, several volunteers tried the ascent and failed.

I said, "How did Alec's backpack get on the roof?"

Robert said, "Um, I threw it there."

"Why did you do that?"

"I'm 16! I don't need a reason!"

Ok.

Robert said that they had spoken to a teacher and he was certain that a janitor would be arriving any moment with a ladder to get the wayward pack down. I pointed out that it was 10 PM on a Friday night, and there was absolutely no chance that a school janitor with a ladder was going to appear. They still wanted to wait. I said, we'll get it down tomorrow. They were still hemming and hawing, so I walked to my car and started it. They ran over, and I drove everyone home.

This afternoon Robert, Alec and I went back to the school to retrieve the backpack. They were very nervous about carrying a ladder onto school grounds, which reminded me of the great advantages of being a grown-up. I know enough of the world to know that no one would really be mad, and that the kind of policemen and school officials who would use the affair as an excuse to yell at teenagers wouldn't yell at me.

So here I am, on the ladder, rake in hand, retrieving the backpack and handing it down to Robert:

So the backpack is safe and dry, and I don't think any of them will be throwing valuable things onto the school roof again any time soon.

In Northern Ireland, something rather Amazing

Last week, IRA dissidents killed two British soldiers and a Catholic Ulster policeman. Their goal, which they announced in claiming credit for the killings, was to restart the violence. So far it has not worked. Yesterday at the funeral for the slain policemen, Constable Stephen Carroll, Catholic and Protestant leaders came together to denounce the killings and call for peace. John Burns in the NY Times:

But as formerly sworn enemies filed into a provincial church on Friday to mourn as one, the funeral of the slain policeman provided the latest and most powerful demonstration of the ways in which the province’s people and its leaders have united against a return to the violence that racked Northern Ireland for 30 years. Rallies that drew thousands to silent vigils this week in Belfast and other major towns across the north, and dozens of interviews across the province, suggested that the old antagonists — Roman Catholics and Protestants, nationalists seeking a united Ireland and Unionists committed to keeping Ulster a part of Britain — remain determined to settle their future in peace.

And:

One of the week’s most arresting moments came when Martin McGuiness, a former I.R.A. commander who now serves as the province’s deputy first minister, visited Kate Carroll, the policeman’s widow, and called the constable’s killer’s “traitors” who should be turned in to the police, a demand that many in Northern Ireland said no senior member of the republican movement had ever made before.

The change is heartening, and it gives one hope about our species.

I think what Burns leaves out of his account is the way the conflict has been reshaped by social and economic changes in Ireland. Thirty years ago Protestants saw Ireland as a backwater inhabited by ignorant peasants, and they wanted to remain part of modern, wealthy, cosmopolitan Britain. Catholics very much resented this attitude. The north at that time was much richer than the rest of the island, better educated, more urban, more industrial. But as Ireland has developed, achieving very rapid economic growth, the influence of the Catholic church has lessened, and it has come to seem to the British as a much less absurd place. On the other hand the north has de-industrialized like the rest of Britain, and the development of new economic activities has been greatly hindered by the ongoing violence. So the two parts of the island have become much more alike, economically and socially, and that has greatly aided the peace process.

While I'm on the subject, the rapid development of Ireland has been made possible by the European Union. Ireland has become the perfect place for American firms to set up a foothold within the EU, with lower wages than England or Germany and close ties to the US. So in this case the dream of the EU's founders, that economic unity would eventually end war on the Continent, is working very well.

Department of Overheard Conversations

On the street in Georgetown today, a young woman speaking into her cell phone:

Your left what?
Oh god, that's awful.
Can they -- can they do anything?

Western Maryland

I spent the day in Western Maryland, working along the C&O Canal. It was a cool day, 45 or so, overcast and breezy. The landscape had the bleak feel of forests with no leaves, but was still lovely. To get there I had to pass through Cumberland, an old factory town that is about half boarded up. Then I spent the morning in an industrial park a few miles south of town, enjoying the smells of the sewage treatment plant, the roar of the cement factory, and the charming atmosphere of the federal prison with its mile of razor wire. But there was still that wonderful view out over the floodplain of the Potomac to the mountains beyond, lots of beaver dams and lodges, and the other charms of early spring in the woods: woodpeckers, geese, ducks, and a woodcock that flew up right in front of me. In the afternoon I went to prettier places and found two new archaeological sites. All in all, it was a grand day.

Seeing Patterns

From an article by Michael Brooks in New Scientist:

Even so, religion is an inescapable artefact of the wiring in our brain, says Bloom. "All humans possess the brain circuitry and that never goes away." Petrovich adds that even adults who describe themselves as atheists and agnostics are prone to supernatural thinking. Bering has seen this too. When one of his students carried out interviews with atheists, it became clear that they often tacitly attribute purpose to significant or traumatic moments in their lives, as if some agency were intervening to make it happen. "They don't completely exorcise the ghost of god - they just muzzle it," Bering says.

The fact that trauma is so often responsible for these slips gives a clue as to why adults find it so difficult to jettison their innate belief in gods, Atran says. The problem is something he calls "the tragedy of cognition". Humans can anticipate future events, remember the past and conceive of how things could go wrong - including their own death, which is hard to deal with. "You've got to figure out a solution, otherwise you're overwhelmed," Atran says. When natural brain processes give us a get-out-of-jail card, we take it.

That view is backed up by an experiment published late last year. Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas in Austin and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, asked people what patterns they could see in arrangements of dots or stock market information. Before asking, Whitson and Galinsky made half their participants feel a lack of control, either by giving them feedback unrelated to their performance or by having them recall experiences where they had lost control of a situation.

The results were striking. The subjects who sensed a loss of control were much more likely to see patterns where there were none. "We were surprised that the phenomenon is as widespread as it is," Whitson says. What's going on, she suggests, is that when we feel a lack of control we fall back on superstitious ways of thinking. That would explain why religions enjoy a revival during hard times.

If it is true, and I think it is, that belief in God and an afterlife is largely a way of coping with circumstances that we can't otherwise tolerate, this establishes the agenda of secular humanism: to build a world in which nobody needs such crutches, because everyone's life is acceptable as it is. I know we will probably never get there, but to me this is a goal worth striving for.

Kepler

Tomorrow night NASA is scheduled to launch the Kepler satellite, which is designed to search for extrasolar planets roughly the same size and distance from their suns as earth. Finding planets has gotten routine -- as of today the official count is 342 planets orbiting 289 stars. But all of these are either very large or very close to their suns. No earthlike planet has yet been found.

So here's to Kepler and the brains behind it, hoping they find many worlds for us to dream about. It's going to take some time, though. To confirm a planet's orbit takes three or four transits, and a planet in an earthlike orbit has a period of about a year.

The picture shows the part of the sky Kepler will be searching.

Jewish Necromancy

In the Biblical Archaeology Review, a little piece on a fascinating artifact from the 3rd to 7th century AD: a human skull on which magical incantations had been scratched in Aramaic. At least four other such skulls of the same period are known, as well as hundreds of similar spells scratched on pottery. Many of the spells invoke demons, including Lilith, who at that period was known mainly as a demoness who attacked birthing mothers and newborn babies.

snow

Snow is one of the best reasons to have children. Without them it it sometimes just cold and wet, but their joy at the wonder of it is infectious.

It isn't that unusual for us to have snow in March here in Maryland, but usually when this happens it is barely below freezing and well above by the next day, so our March snow is mostly slush. Not this time. It started snowing in earnest late last night, but that must have subsided soon because I was disappointed to wake up at 5 AM and find only two inches or so on the ground. But school was canceled, so I kept to my snowstorm plan and stayed home. Around 7 AM it started snowing hard again and it kept up until 9, and by then we had four or five inches in our yard and the streets were so slippery people had trouble driving up the very modest hill out my dining room window. It was about 25 degrees at that point, and the snow was coming down dry and fluffy. After the snow let up I hunted up the boots and snowsuits that hadn't been used all year and took the little kids outside. Ben was fixated on making a snowman. I tried to tell him that this wasn't the right kind of snow, but he insisted on finding out for himself. After that failure, he and Zhen Zhen made snow angels while I shoveled the walk.


I was fixated on sledding, which I hadn't done in two years. After lunch I tried to get Ben and Zhen Zhen suited up again. Ben decided to get nervous and have a fit. Despite my best efforts I couldn't persuade him to come, so I left him home and took Zhen Zhen. We had great fun, although she liked being pulled on the sled more than going downhill. By the time we got home Ben was over his snit and ready to go, so I put Zhen Zhen down for her nap and set out again. I took Ben to the big hill at the high school, and he loved it.

Now I feel like I have done the snow day thing right, and I can relax.

From "Diving into the Wreck"

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or week

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
and I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
Obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Adrienne Rich

The Civil Rights Trail in the Obama Era

Scott Vogel in the Washington Post:

You need to get to the rain forests before they're all gone, and the polar ice caps may have melted by the time you try to see them, but it's Alabama that demands your immediate attention. And by Alabama I mean that place where elegant black ladies of a certain age stand sentinel over the trails through civil rights country.

Really. They're lit from within, these women; they glow as only people can who never thought they'd live to see the day but then live to see the day. And as they gaze out on the landscape of a country facing agonizing choices and certain pain, they haven't a doubt in the world that we'll get through this. After all, we've gotten through far worse.

Vogel enters the Birmingham Civil Rights Institutes, which overlooks Kelly Ingram Park, and finds Yvonne Williams:

Before coming to the institute, Williams spent all of 31 years teaching fourth grade in Birmingham public schools. And still she retired too soon.

"We used to have that poster with all the presidents, you know?" Williams says. "And I distinctly remember this little boy coming up to me one day and saying, 'Mrs. Williams, where is the black one?' I thought, Lord, give the words to say it." She stops for a moment, collects herself.

"I just said to him, 'Maybe in your lifetime.' "

birthday

Today I am 47, and I have a feeling that this is going to be a very good year.

Secular Moralism

I found this essay by Andrew Koppelman interesting. He is reviewing a book by a Catholic philosopher who thinks that, deep down, it is not possible to care about human rights without believing in god. Koppelman's answer is that whatever the results of philosophy, it simply is possible to be an agnostic worker for human rights. Perhaps agnostics have no defensible basis for their belief that people should be free and fed, but then nobody has a defensible reason for belief in god, either. To Koppelman (and to me) all moral systems have components of invention and faith. Religion solves no moral problems, it just changes the problem from "why do you care about other people?" to "why do you believe in god and how do you know what he wants?"

Koppelman:

Wherever you situate yourself in this landscape, your view of the moral universe won’t—and can’t be—a neat, closed system with all the loose ends tidied up. Recognizing this can inoculate us against two related errors: One is to think that we have all the answers. The other, perhaps even more malign, is to be too confident of what the other fellow’s beliefs entail: that his or her “belief in God produces fanaticism” or “atheism leads to immorality.” . . . We’re all stumbling around in the dark, grabbing as much of the elephant as we can. It is unseemly to mock one another’s shortsightedness. Taylor’s book does a wonderful job of elucidating the predicament that is, at the deepest level, what unites us.

children's crusade

For about ten years now I have been reading books about animals to small children: tigers, leopards, monkeys, sharks, snakes, komodo dragons. Almost every one of these books has a final chapter bemoaning the threat humans pose the animals we have been reading about.

This drives me crazy. What is gained by making five-year-olds feel bad about tiger poaching? Why would I want to send my children to bed in a state of anxiety about orangutan extinction? It seems to me that what we want is to give children positive feelings about wild animals, so that when they learn, at a more appropriate age, about deforestation, they will care about the fate of wild things.

Last night I read Ben a book about coyotes. You might think that since coyotes have enormously expanded their range and numbers over the past 400 years, this book might end on a more positive note. But no: "although coyotes are doing well now, we don't know what the future holds for them in a world with ever more people...." Maybe I should try a book about rats.

This bad feeling for its own sake is the dark side of environmentalism. The message these books are sending is that all joy ought to be tinged with worry -- whenever we take delight in the power of tigers and the cunning of coyotes, we ought also to fret about the fate of the planet. But this is crazy. I see no evidence that making people feel bad is a good way to motivate changes in behavior. On the contrary, everything I know tells me that people will contribute to causes that make them feel good, and that unending negativity only turns people away. So whenever there is a chance to tout conservation measures that work, or to point out the many creatures that are still thriving in the world, we ought to be doing that instead of broadcasting gloom. Especially in books for five-year-olds.

Draw Your Own Clown Face

Ben (6) doodled this in his kid's menu Monday evening.

What is it?

Can you read this clue and figure out what happened here? The answer is in the comments.

A Family Saga in Bumper Stickers

Today I found myself driving behind an old Volvo bearing the following collection of bumper stickers:

Peace, Hon
War is Not the Answer
Do We Fear our Enemies More than We Love Our Children?
Obama/Biden 08
Killing One Man is Murder, Killing 1000 is Foreign Policy
My Son is a U.S. Marine

Paul Kozal

A wonderful photographer with many dreamy tree scenes like this one, which looks to me like an invitation to an adventure.

Back to Sleep

I find that one of life's great small joys is waking up in the dark with a grim feeling that it is time to get up even though I don't want to, checking the clock, seeing that I still have hours before the alarm will go off, and then drifting happily back to sleep.

Adrift

Thanks to Lisa Krauss, this is the Andrew Wyeth painting I was trying to find.

You have to wonder

In the "Strange T-Shirts" category, I spotted this on a man running in Washington:

Marketing is a Gerund

the archaeologist in his youth

I just stumbled across this picture of me in 1985, standing in the well of a small plantation dating to about 1650.

Bunker art

Some of Paul Virilio's photographs of WW II bunkers along the French coast have been posted at The Morning News. I find them quite striking in a grim way, because they seem to refer both to recent, terrible events and to archaeological photos of ancient castles and temples.

forensic science is bogus

The National Academy of Sciences is finally set to release its report on forensic science, and it says what anyone who has ever thought seriously about the subject already suspected:

Forensic evidence that has helped convict thousands of defendants for nearly a century is often the product of shoddy scientific practices that should be upgraded and standardized, according to accounts of a draft report by the nation’s pre-eminent scientific research group.

The report by the National Academy of Sciences is to be released this month. People who have seen it say it is a sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on, including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting. The report says such analyses are often handled by poorly trained technicians who then exaggerate the accuracy of their methods in court. It concludes that Congress should create a federal agency to guarantee the independence of the field, which has been dominated by law enforcement agencies, say forensic professionals, scholars and scientists who have seen review copies of the study.

We send people to prison for life in this country using "scientific" evidence that couldn't get published in the lowest tier of scientific journals. The people who control the forensic labs, starting with the FBI, have always refused to allow outside testing of their labs, which as far as I am concerned renders all of their results useless. As things stand now we simply have no way of knowing how accurate these labs are. Academic investigators who have done small studies have found frightening error rates of greater than 20% for finger-print analysis, to take just one example. The first thing we should do is require all forensic labs to submit to annual checks of their accuracy by an outside regulatory body. The accuracy of their results-- say, that they matched 96 out of 100 DNA samples accurately-- should then be published and made available to judges and juries.

We don't test crime labs because it would be expensive and because it might make it harder to get convictions. But getting convictions isn't the point of the justice system, getting the truth is. And while getting at the truth is hard is most areas of life, it is fairly straightforward in science. It would not be hard to answer questions like "how accurate is the FBI fingerprinting lab?" if we simply did the necessary tests. That we don't is a travesty.

a memory

When I was about 12, I guess, I noticed that every time I saw a "No Dumping" sign there was trash strewn all around it. I wondered, do people with trash to dump wander around looking for a "No Dumping" sign? When they find one do they think, "Aha, this is the spot?" I pondered this on occasion for two or three years before one day it finally hit me: nobody would bother to put up a "No Dumping" sign except in a place where people had been dumping trash.

Bureaucrats

I had an experience on the train today that I have had three or four times. I sat with two bureaucrats who used to work in the same office but are now in different buildings although still in the same agency. They spent the whole 40-minute train ride catching up. They talked mostly about work, for forty minutes, and when we reached our station I still had no idea what either one does or what agency they work for. They talked about "changes" happening with the new political appointees, but I got no idea what those changes were. They talked about retirements and other departures. One said, "I heard you fired someone; was that difficult?" and the other explained for a few minutes how difficult it was. (Lawyers were involved.) They discussed how the old Inspector General, a political appointee, had now come back as the Deputy IG, a civil service post. They talked about the budget process; one heads a group that used to have two people work on the budget part time now but said it now takes four people full time. And so on and so on, forty minutes of shop talk. And in all of it I picked up only a single clue to where they work, that their agency has a hot line that gets thousands of calls.

The wheels of bureaucracy grind on, pretty much irrespective of what part of the government you're talking about.

jellyfish that age backwards

Nature is really weird.

About as wide as a human pinky nail when fully grown, the immortal jellyfish (scientific name: Turritopsis dohrnii) was discovered in the Mediterranean Sea in 1883. But its unique ability was not discovered until the 1990s.

Turritopsis typically reproduces the old-fashioned way, by the meeting of free-floating sperm and eggs. And most of the time they die the old-fashioned way too.

But when starvation, physical damage, or other crises arise, "instead of sure death, [Turritopsis] transforms all of its existing cells into a younger state," said study author Maria Pia Miglietta, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University.

The jellyfish turns itself into a bloblike cyst, which then develops into a polyp colony, essentially the first stage in jellyfish life.

The jellyfish's cells are often completely transformed in the process. Muscle cells can become nerve cells or even sperm or eggs.

Through asexual reproduction, the resulting polyp colony can spawn hundreds of genetically identical jellyfish—near perfect copies of the original adult.

Civil War pedantry

From Wilfred McClay, an interesting article on Abraham Lincoln and on how different history seems to those living through it than it does looking backward. As McClay says, Lincoln is now regarded as a great man, but at the time he was hugely controversial and widely hated.

We need to remember that this is often how history happens. Background music does not swell at the crucial moment, and trumpets do not sound, when the events of history are actually taking place. The orator or the soldier has to wonder whether he is acting in vain, whether the criticisms of others are in fact warranted, whether time will judge him harshly. . . .

So far, so good. But then we wander into nonsense:

We also need to remember how likely it seemed to Lincoln and others that he would lose the 1864 election, and thereby experience ignominious defeat and see the disintegration of the Union cause as he had fought for it. Had it not been for the miracle of Sherman’s and Grant’s decisive victories in the field, such a defeat at the polls would have been likely, as the American people had grown weary of this frustrating struggle.

Where to start? Grant's and Sherman's victories in 1864 were not a "miracle." Both men's armies outnumbered the Confederates opposing them by 2 to 1, and they were superbly equipped with everything from rifles and cannons to teams of railway men who could repair track faster than Confederate raiders could tear it up. Neither Grant nor Sherman was a military genius. They were both competent, disciplined commanders hand-picked by Lincoln because they had the particular skill needed at the time, that is, they knew how to advance aggressively and to make superior numbers decide the outcome of a battle. They had those superior numbers partly because of Lincoln's skill in mobilizing public opinion and Congressional support behind the war. Lincoln took a personal role, not just in choosing generals, but in making sure that the railroads ran, that promising new technologies like repeating rifles and ironclad ships were pushed forward, and that black troops were used in the battle line.

Yes, history is contingent. But it is rarely decided by "miracles," and great leaders like Lincoln actually have some impact on how it turns out.