Spring Comes to the Woods

Green in the trees.

Green along the mill race trail.

Wildflowers. Today.

Carlo Labruzzi

Carlo Labruzzi (1748-1817) was a Roman draughtsman and painter best known for his scenes of ancient Roman ruins, including a series of 226 scenes along the Appian Way. Above, view of Rome from the Palatine Hill. You can access a whole book of his work here.

Wobbling Muons and the Future of Physics

A team of physicists at Fermilab, led by Chris Polly, has announced that their big muon experiment has produced results outside the Standard Model, which is getting a lot of attention. Dennis Overbye explains why:

Muons are an unlikely particle to hold center stage in physics. Sometimes called “fat electrons,” they resemble the familiar elementary particles that power our batteries, lights and computers and whiz around the nuclei of atoms; they have a negative electrical charge, and they have a property called spin, which makes them behave like tiny magnets.

But they are 207 times as massive as their better-known cousins. They are also unstable, decaying radioactively into electrons and super-lightweight particles called neutrinos in 2.2 millionths of a second.

What part muons play in the overall pattern of the cosmos is still a puzzle. “Who ordered that?” physicist I.I. Rabi said when they were first discovered in 1936. Nowadays muons are produced copiously at places like the Large Hadron Collider when more ordinary particles are crashed together at high energies.

Muons owe their current fame to a quirk of quantum mechanics. Among other things, quantum theory holds that empty space is not really empty but is in fact boiling with “virtual” particles that flit in and out of existence. . . . This entourage influences the behavior of existing particles, including a property of the muon called its magnetic moment, represented in equations by a factor called g. According to a formula derived in 1928 by Paul Dirac, the g factor of a lone muon should be 2.

But muons aren’t alone, so the formula must be corrected for the quantum buzz arising from all the other potential particles in the universe. That leads the factor g for the muon to be more than 2, hence the name of the experiment: Muon g-2.

The extent to which g-2 deviates from theoretical predictions is one indication of how much is still unknown about the universe — how many monsters, as Dr. Polly put it, are lurking in the dark for physicists to discover.

In 1998 a team at Brookhaven on Long Island did a preliminary experiment to measure g, and their result was quite different from what the Standard Model predicted. But at the time there was actually some disagreement as to what the predicted value was, and the Brookhaven experiment was discontinued in 2001 when the funding ran out.

Since then the Standard Model's prediction has been refined, and the giant muon-generating machine from Brookhaven has been dismantled and moved to Illinois and installed at Fermilab. Many physicists have been waiting expectantly for the results because, honestly, there aren't many other interesting results coming in from subatomic physics labs.

The new, preliminary data, based on only 6% of the planned run, deviate from the Standard Model in the same way that the 1998 data did. Some physicists are excited, others not so much; the result is a long way from certain, and it remains possible that another look at the details of the Standard Model might make it go away, or lead to only a very small tweak in the equations.

What strikes me about this story is how frustrated subatomic physicists are with the state of their field, which has been stuck at the Standard Model for 45 years, and how hungry they are for any new data from the subatomic world. Most physicists, including all the ones I know, are certain that the Standard Model is incomplete. It can't be reconciled with General Relativity, it can't account for Dark Matter or Dark Energy, and it seems annoyingly arbitrary in many ways. Why would a muon be 207 times heavier than an electron? The pursuit of String Theory was an attempt to get past this barrier, but whether the theory is correct or not it has proved unable to answer those questions, so most physicists are turning away from it.

There is a longing for more data collected at every higher energies, at ever greater expense, to somehow penetrate the veil that separates us from a deeper and more elegant understanding of the universe:

Most physicists believe that a rich trove of new physics waits to be found, if only they could see deeper and further. The additional data from the Fermilab experiment could provide a major boost to scientists eager to build the next generation of expensive particle accelerators.

Against this a skeptic might point out that the same goal, the Final Theory, has been used to justify every expensive physics project in the past, and still the goal moves away as fast as we can approach it. The Large Hadron Collider did nail down the existence of the Higgs Boson, but it was also supposed to answer a long list of theoretical questions that remain hanging. It has failed to find the particles predicted by many Supersymmetry theories, but rather than retreat, the theorists have only tweaked their equations to predict that supersymmetrical particles have energies higher than the LHC can reach.

Until we have enough physics to posit a very clear and attainable goal, like the Higgs, I doubt anyone will be building another $100 billion collider; if it were up to me I would put the money into fusion research instead.

Fairbairn's Book of Crests

Pages and pages of dragons, bulls, and anything else you might think would give your coat of arms the right tone. Late 19th century,

"When Racial Bias Overlaps with Mental Illness"

Have you spent any time puzzling over who, exactly, commits hate crimes against Asians? I have. I mean, in the US we have strong historical reasons for hate between blacks and whites, and between whites and Native Americans, and the mass arrival of Hispanics has turned some communities upside down. So I can at least imagine a sane person lashing out over those conflicts. But who hates Asians?

Let the Times explain:

Tommy Lau, a Chinese-American bus driver in New York City, was walking last month during his lunch break in Brooklyn when he noticed a man harassing an older Asian couple.

Mr. Lau, 63, stepped in front of the man to ask what he was doing. The man, Donovan Lawson, spat at Mr. Lau and punched him in the face, calling him an anti-Chinese slur, prosecutors said. Mr. Lawson, who is Black, was arrested and charged with a hate crime.

It was the 33rd arrest for Mr. Lawson, 26, who is homeless and mentally ill, the authorities said. Four times, officers had been called to assist him because he appeared to be in the grip of a mental breakdown, and he was being monitored for treatment in a mental health program run by the Police Department.

He is not unique. Many of the people charged recently with anti-Asian attacks in New York City have also had a history of mental health episodes, multiple arrests and homelessness, complicating the city’s search for an effective response. . . .

For instance, Mr. Lawson was one of at least seven people arrested after attacks on Asian city residents in the last two weeks of March, ending with a horrifying attack on a Filipino woman, who was kicked repeatedly in broad daylight in Manhattan by a man the police say was homeless and on parole after serving a prison sentence for killing his mother.

Of the seven people arrested, five had prior encounters with the police during which they were considered “emotionally disturbed,” police parlance for someone thought to be in need of psychiatric help. Investigators believed the remaining two also had signs of mental illness.

Just as with mass shootings, anti-Asian violence happens at the intersection of politics with mental illness. There may be a virus of anti-Asian memes in the air, for which Trump is partly to blame, but sane people fight it off. Only the very confused and angry are susceptible.

I think mental illness is our biggest problem, and here is just another case of the chaos our inability to care for the mentally ill brings.

From the Kibbutz to Libertarianism

Via Marginal Revolutions, Meir Kohn explains how he ended up as a libertarian:

In my youth, I was a socialist. . . . Growing up in England as a foreign‐​born Jew, I did not feel I belonged. So, as a teenager, I decided to emigrate to Israel. To further my plan, I joined a Zionist youth movement. The movement I joined was not only Zionist: it was also socialist. So, to fit in, I became a socialist.

What do I mean by a socialist? I mean someone who believes that the principal source of human unhappiness is the struggle for money — “capitalism” — and that the solution is to organize society on a different principle — “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” 

I think that might be the best definition of contemporary socialism I know: the belief that capitalism forces us to struggle for money which makes us unhappy. It is as an explanation for our unhappiness that capitalism looms in the minds of young leftists, and the desire for socialism is entirely the desire to be happy.

The Israeli kibbutz in the 1960s was such a society. The youth movement I joined in England sent groups of young people to Israel to settle on a kibbutz. When I was 18, I joined such a group going to settle on Kibbutz Amiad.

A kibbutz is a commune of a few hundred adults, plus kids, engaged primarily in agriculture but also in light industry and tourism. Members work wherever they are assigned, although preferences are taken into account. Instead of receiving pay, members receive benefits in kind: they live in assigned housing, they eat in a communal dining hall, and their children are raised communally in children’s houses, and can visit with their parents for a few hours each day. Most property is communal except for personal items such as clothing and furniture, for which members receive a small budget. Because cigarettes were free, I soon began to smoke!

Kibbutz is bottom‐​up socialism on the scale of a small community. It thereby avoids the worst problems of state socialism: a planned economy and totalitarianism. The kibbutz, as a unit, is part of a market economy, and membership is voluntary: you can leave at any time. This is “socialism with a human face” — as good as it gets.

Being a member of a kibbutz taught me two important facts about socialism. The first is that material equality does not bring happiness. The differences in our material circumstances were indeed minimal. Apartments, for example, if not identical, were very similar. Nonetheless, a member assigned to an apartment that was a little smaller or a little older than someone else’s would be highly resentful. Partly, this was because a person’s ability to discern differences grows as the differences become smaller. But largely it was because what we received was assigned rather than earned. It turns out that how you get stuff matters no less than what you get.

The second thing I learned from my experience of socialism was that incentives matter. On a kibbutz, there is no material incentive for effort and not much incentive of any kind. There are two kinds of people who have no problem with this: deadbeats and saints. When a group joined a kibbutz, the deadbeats and saints tended to stay while the others eventually left. I left.

In retrospect, I should have known right away, from my first day, that something was wrong with utopia. On my arrival, I was struck by the fact that the pantry of the communal kitchen was locked.

I have friends who spent time on hippie communes in the US, and they ended up believing what Kohn does, that most people in communes are shirkers and they only survive until the few hard workers get fed up and leave.

I do not think it is the system that makes us unhappy. I do believe that some systems promote happiness better than others, which is why I participate in politics and advocate for the system that I think works best, social democracy. But politics is not, I think, our fundamental problem. Our problem is that we are animals with imperfect brains evolved to help us survive in circumstances that no longer apply very well; except, that is, for the circumstance that we are social animals whose happiness depends mostly on our relationships with other people, who are as unreliable and imperfect as we are.

Shah Jahan

The greatest of the Mughals, or at least the most stylish. Above, as painted by Chitarman, a Hindu artist at his court, c. 1627; below, by Rembrandt, who must have seen a print based on one of Shah Jahan's many portraits. The cultural blending is wonderful; Chitarman's portrait uses Hindu colors and a style of drawing imported from Persia, while giving the emperor a Christian halo and several onlooking putti as well. And Rembrandt is again showing how Europeans of his time were reaching out for inspiration all across the world.

And below, other pages from the Shah Jahan Album, a sort of glorious scrapbook made for the emperor, now in the Met. All of this is inspired by Jason Farago's wonderful picture essay about the Shah Jahan portrait in the New York Times.

Shahr-I Sokhta

Shahr-I Sokhta is a Bronze Age archaeological site in eastern Iran; its name means "the burnt city." It was announced to the archaeological world in 1904 by Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born, British archaeologist/spy who roamed Central Asia digging into mounds and dabbling in the "Great Game" of imperial influence peddling.

The site dates back at least to 3200 BC and perhaps to 3500. It seems to have been abandoned about 1900 BC, around the same time that the Indus Valley civilization also disappeared. After abandonment the site was crusted over with salty soil that has preserved many things intact, including objects made of leather and cloth.

The location was probably never a great one for agriculture, although there was more water there before 2000 BC than any time since. Most authorities think the city grew as a trading emporium. The outstanding thing about its culture is the number of borrowings from the surrounding cultures of Mesopotamia, Elam, the Indus Valley, and Jiroft in southern Iran. Consider this game board, essentially identical to the one found in the royal tombs at Ur. (Hundreds of gaming pieces have been found in graves at Shahr-I Sokhta, so they were big on board games.) Stamp seals identical to examples from the Indus Valley have also been found. Playing the game of trying to find the city in Mesopotamian records, some excavators think it may be Aratta, a place named in the Gilgamesh epic that the Sumerians placed "where the sun rises" and said was full of lapis lazuli and gold.

The excavators say that at its height around 2400 BC the city covered an area of 100 hectares (250 acres), a suspiciously round number if I ever saw one. But anyway it was pretty big.

The foundations are made of mud brick. The structures have a sameness about them, and no great palace or temple complex has been found. The Italians who have been doing a lot of work there lately think the city was divided into several largely independent neighborhoods, each perhaps inhabited by a tribe or clan. (This model has also been applied to the Indus Valley cities, especially Harappa.)

Since 1972 much of the archaeology has been focused on the huge graveyard, thought to contain 25,000 to 40,000 burials. This photograph of the graveyard comes from UNESCO, but neither they nor any of the other internet sites that reproduce it say what those little house things are. I want them to be ancient grave markers but I have a feeling they are modern.

The later inhabits of the Burnt City were big on grave goods, including goods probably associated with the profession of the deceased. We have a potter buried with jars full of glazes and a stone carver buried with tools and pieces of chlorite. But, again, no kings or queens. Also not a lot of differentiation between male and female internments; everyone wore the same sort of jewelry, lots of beaded bracelets and lapis pendants. Women also have just as many seals as men, which suggests they controlled their own property. Weapons are rare.

A cup from a burial. These Italians think that the divisions of wealth in the city got greater over time, leading in their Phase III (2400-2100 BC) to the emergence of an elite class that they call (really) "the group of Phase III." The gaming board was from one of these graves, and the pit also contained a basket full of dice and counters. Maybe I should have my dice bag buried with me.

Among the discoveries from the graveyard is the oldest known artificial eyeball, made of bitumen, thought to have been worn during her lifetime by a woman buried around 2800 BC.

To me the fascinating thing about this discovery and others from Iran is that they show how appealing "civilization" was to many people in different environments. Ideas and ways of living spread out from the early centers in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley to people who copied or adapted them. It amuses me that board games spread so widely, perhaps as far as China. Also the habit of marking possessions or documents with a seal, which spread much farther and faster than writing. But also, as we saw when looking at Central America, there were things that just arose all over the planet at a certain stage of development, like cities and aristocratic elites. We humans have, as an old sage once said, "many songs but few tunes."

Eleanor Catton, "The Luminaries"

The Luminaries (2012) is a big, complicated story full of interesting characters that is mainly about the pleasure of telling big, complicated stories full of interesting characters. Eleanor Catton must be a fan of nineteenth-century fiction, because this book is resembles nothing written in the 21st century as much as it does Dickens and Thackeray. Her descriptions of people, in particular, are perfectly Victorian.

I picked this up because it managed to both win the Booker Prize – the longest book ever to do so – and be made into a mini-series. Plus it's set in New Zealand during the gold rush of the 1860s, something I know absolutely nothing about. (I did learn a little history.) I listened to the audiobook, read by Mark Meadows, which I enjoyed very much, and I wonder if the characters would have been as distinct in my mind without Meadows' voices, since there are so many.

There is some showy structural stuff, like, each chapter begins with an astrological note that I suppose might be important if you took the time to work them out. I gather the characters are supposed to be connected in some way to the planets and the signs of the zodiac. In the final section, each chapter is shorter than the one before, while each chapter title is longer than the one before, until in the final chapter they are the same length.  But I paid no attention to any of it and don't feel like I missed anything.

If you have the time, like say, you have a very long drive ahead of you, I recommend The Luminaries very highly. It has been a very pleasant companion for me.

Links 2 April 2021

Fragment of Roman Fresco with Peacock

US National Academy of Sciences releases report on geo-engineering to fight climate change. News story, report.

Photographs by Sally Davies of New Yorkers in their apartments, totally over the top.

The wealthy warriors interred in two Iron Age boat burials at Valsgärde in central Sweden were laid to rest on beds of down. Examination of the preserved feathers shows they came from many species: geese, ducks, grouse, crows, sparrows, waders and eagle owls. Feathers were a valuable resource in the north (and still are), and just these two beds represent hundreds of hours of work.

The Silicon Tribesman visits St. Patrick’s Anglo-Saxon Chapel, Heysham, Lancashire, with stone-cut graves dating to the 7th century.

There is substantial evidence that  Stanislaw Chrzanowski was a Nazi war criminal, but he was never prosecuted. Was it because he spied for Britain after the war?

The online Museum of American War Letters. I think this is a brilliant idea, I mean, how else to share powerful war letters?

Remembering G. Gordon Liddy, organizer of the Watergate burglary, who believed that patriotism meant complete loyalty to his president and obedience to all his commands. He said once that the motto of everyone in the government should be fiat voluntas tua, "thy will be done." (New York Times)

Having fun with the US Strategic Command's errant twitter post.

A dying mother's letter to her two young daughters.

Short Buzz Aldrin letter about his moon walk: "we will walk on Mars in the spirit and wonder that sets our species apart."

The battle over the paleogenetics of Native North Americans. Many American Indians think they should control how their story is told, and view scientific study of their past as another colonial assault. To many archaeologists, this demonizes the pursuit of truth.

In the interest of fairness I offer a link to this Washington Post essay in defense of brutalist architecture. Which utterly fails, of course, since brutalism is completely indefensible. It is nothing but Stalinism in concrete: anti-human, anti-happiness, anti-sanity. It should be eradicated from the earth.

In the pandemic, community college enrollment in the US has fallen 9.5%; for minority students, the drop is more like 19%. Millions of young people have pretty much lost a year. (New York Times)

According to this study, prosecuting people for misdemeanors makes it more likely they will commit crimes in the future. I think the deterrent value of prosecution and punishment has to be balanced against the evidence that involvement with the criminal justice system ruins many peoples' lives and makes them more dangerous to the rest of us.

The American Psychiatric Association has a policy against diagnosing public figures without examining them, called the "Goldwater rule" because it was enacted after several psychiatrists publicly opined on Barry Goldwater's alleged mental health problems. But how far does the rule extend? Can a psychiatrist be disciplined for a short tweet suggesting the president's lawyer is crazy? (New York Times)

Blackwater Photography

Many ocean fish spend their larval stages floating with the plankton in the open sea. And many of these organisms carry out a daily migration, sinking into the depths during the day and rising toward the surface at night to feed. Taking pictures of them is an "emerging hobby" called blackwater photography. Above, larval lionfish, about an inch (2.5 cm) long, by Steven Kovacs.

Bony-eared assfish. (So far as I can tell, not an April Fool's joke)

Larval cusk-eel

And a larval ribbon fish. More at the New York Times.

How American Couples Meet

Straight couples, anyway. I cut up the original figure (from here) so it would display better at this scale. I like the curve for meeting at work, which peaked in the 1990s and has since declined by half.  The relationship between dating your office mates and sexual harassment, and the pushback against harassment, is worth pondering. But the bigger picture is that meeting online has replaced meeting through friends and family. I thought meeting in bars was over, but I guess not.

This came up in the context of the Match Group announcing they were going to offer background checks of prospective dates. Which only makes sense in the online dating world, where you have to go out and meet strangers, but still feels very sad and unromantic to me.