Kingdoms of Glory

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Dear Sister G--------,

Have I mentioned to you lately how much I like your weekly status updates? Even setting aside how much I like you personally--even on top of that, you always have interesting stories that make me think. I was thinking this morning about your latest missive in which you describe a member's attempt to characterize the kingdoms of glory for her son. "Snakes! Fire! Worms!" It made me ponder how I would try to teach this principle to someone--just as I suppose it made you ponder the same.

Suppose I'm dealing with someone who spends time outdoors occasionally. I think I would explain it something like this:

First imagine that you are outside in the mountains. It is cold, and wet, and muddy, and miserable. You can try to seek shelter under a tree but it is still wet and miserable, and you can dig a hole in the ground, but with only your bare hands as tools you cannot make yourself very comfortable. I will compare this to outer darkness.

Now imagine that someone takes you to a concrete bunker. Inside this bunker there is no rain and no wind. There is a shower facility with hot water that lets you get the mud off, and there is temperature control and a sleeping bag and a few cans of baked beans for you to eat. Maybe there is even an automatic dishwasher. Compared to where you were before, this is great! I will compare this to the telestial kingdom, which is the lowest of the kingdoms of glory.

Now imagine that someone takes you from that bunker to a large mansion. You have nice furniture, a swimming pool, a fancing dining room where your friends can come and visit you. You have a pantry stocked with good things to eat, and a kitchen with all the latest electric appliances for your convenience. Upstairs you have fancy bedrooms with soft feather beds for you and your guests. There are recreation rooms filled with gadgets and gizmos and entertainment centers and every kind of play-box and x-box and other electronic device. Compared to where you were, this is fantastic! I will compare this to the terrestrial kingdom, which is a higher kingdom of glory than the telestial.

Now imagine that someone takes you from that mansion to a high-tech mansion factory. In this place you have comforts not only for yourself and your friends comparable to the mansion, but you have the capability to actually construct mansions for your friends and your children. There are drafting machines and automated diggers, and 3D printers, and solar-powered tractors, and robots that can make anything you can imagine. Compared to where you were, this is magical! I will compare this to the celestial kingdom, where God dwells.

Now I want you to realize something about all of these places in my story. They each have requirements, and so it is with the kingdoms of glory. 

To move from a muddy hole in the woods to the clean bunker, you must be willing to accept help from someone else. You cannot be too proud. Likewise the scripture says (D&C 88:32-33) that those who refuse to accept Christ's gifts must remain in outer darkness and not in a kingdom of glory, because they will not receive that which has been given to them. 

In order to move from the bunker to the mansion, you must be prepared to take care of nice things--you must know how to take care of swimming pools, and vacuum floors, and make beds. Otherwise your mansion will not remain a mansion for long. Likewise the scriptures say (D&C 76:98, 103) that those who break the commandments, who lie and steal and commit adultery, cannot come into the terrestrial kingdom but remain in the telestial kingdom.

To move from the mansion to the mansion factory, you must be prepared to utilize the tools in the factory. You must be someone who has a desire to build and discover and create things to serve others--otherwise the tools will go unused and you might as well just have stayed in the mansion! I cannot fully describe the celestial kingdom because I cannot see it now, but I do know this: the scriptures say (D&C 76:55-59, 70) that they will dwell with God and receive all things, and become "gods, even the sons [and daughters] of God," and that only those who are valiant in the testimony of Jesus can dwell there. And I know that the work and the glory of God is "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man," so I know that those who are in the celestial kingdom must also be those who are dedicated to that work.

And I think that's pretty much how I would describe the kingdoms of glory.

And now for a quick snippet, here is something that a friend of mine wrote on Facebook about her boys. [Names changed]

This morning while checking pockets in jeans, so I could throw them in the wash, I smiled when I realized that I could tell who's jeans were who's just by the contents of their pockets. Andy's pocket are always full of candy wrappers, Kyle's have knives, or some sharp object in them, Brian's have lego men. A pocket size glimpse into their personalities.

Max adds: Something left in a pocket is so ordinary and everyday that you probably never even think about it. It's just a consequence of the life you live every day. When the Savior comes, what will he find in my pockets?

Love always,

Maximilian

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Disbelief and mental models

[excerpted from a letter to Sister G.]

Okay, last thing I wanted to tell you about: I want to share with you a thought about investigators' concerns and the conversion process, but first I have to read to you from a CIA publication called /The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis./ The CIA is pretty good at collecting lots of information but relatively bad at making good predictions, and the book is aimed at helping CIA analysts improve their analysis by, among other things, understanding the human mind and how memory works and the difference between how people think they think and how they actually often think.

Experienced analysts have an imperfect understanding of what information they actually use in making judgments. They are unaware of the extent to which their judgments are determined by a few dominant factors, rather than by the systematic integration of all available information. Analysts actually use much less of the available information than they think they do.

The expert perceives his or her own judgmental process, including the number of different kinds of information taken into account, as being considerably more complex than is in fact the case. Experts overestimate the importance of factors that have only a minor impact on their judgment and underestimate the extent to which their decisions are based on a few major variables. In short, people's mental models are simpler than they think, and the analyst is typically unaware not only of which variables should have the greatest influence, but also which variables actually are having the greatest influence. 

All this has been demonstrated by experiments in which analysts were asked to make quantitative estimates concerning a relatively large number of cases in their area of expertise, with each case defined by a number of quantifiable factors. In one experiment, for example, stock market analysts were asked to predict long-term price appreciation for 50 securities, with each security being described in such terms as price/earnings ratio, corporate earnings growth trend, and dividend yield. After completing this task, the analysts were asked to explain how they reached their conclusions, including how much weight they attached to each of the variables. They were instructed to be sufficiently explicit that another person going through the same information could apply the same judgmental rules and arrive at the same conclusions. 

In order to compare this verbal rationalization with the judgmental policy reflected in the stock market analysts' actual decisions, multiple regression analysis or other similar statistical procedures can be used to develop a mathematical model of how each analyst actually weighed and combined information on the relevant variables. There have been at least eight studies of this type in diverse fields, including one involving prediction of future socioeconomic growth of underdeveloped nations. The mathematical model based on the analyst's actual decisions is invariably a more accurate description of that analyst's decision making than the analyst's own verbal description of how the judgments were made. 

Although the existence of this phenomenon has been amply demonstrated, its causes are not well understood. The literature on these experiments contains only the following speculative explanation: Possibly our feeling that we can take into account a host of different factors comes about because, although we remember that at some time or other we have attended to each of the different factors, we fail to notice that it is seldom more than one or two that we consider at any one time.

So what's the relevance of this to missionary work? I think, Sister G--------, that people's mental models for believing or disbelieving the gospel are also often simpler than they think. I'm not saying that there aren't people who have genuine issues with doctrine or history or whatever, but I think there are also people who think they have issues when those issues would actually pretty much resolve themselves (or at least recede) if they had a spiritual witness of the truth and a desire to change their lives. If a stock analyst can fool himself about the real reasons why he thinks a stock is going to go up or down, how much easier is it for us to see false complexity in matters of faith!?!

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Confirmation bias

Abstract from paper: 'Using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen increases by 50% the probability a woman will be advanced out of certain preliminary rounds. The screen also enhances, by severalfold, the likelihood a female contestant will be the winner in the final round. Using data on orchestra personnel, the switch to blind' auditions can explain between 30% and 55% of the increase in the proportion female among new hires and between 25% and 46% of the increase in the percentage female in the orchestras since 1970.'

My impression of the results: it seems that female musicians were and are genuinely less likely to be top performers (otherwise blind auditions would result in proportionate representation), but also that the magnitude of the difference was exaggerated in the minds of those evaluating--as if confirmation bias were playing a role in the evaluation of individual candidates. It wouldn't surprise me if a similar confirmation bias effect were in play in the software industry.

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Mormon culture and RMs

In response to this article:

I don't know if I would tell someone to take "RM" off their checklist. After all, you only get one shot at marriage (in the general case), and I fully support your right to not marry anyone you don't want to marry for any reason at all, if you are willing to pay the price. But I would encourage boys and girls to be kind to those whom they do not intend to marry, and I would also encourage them to think hard about exactly which qualities they are willing to pay for in the currency of mate-selection, which is loneliness, self-doubt, and delayed fulfillment. Judge as you are willing to be judged.

-Max

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Communist Cuba

Interesting article: http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_havana.html

"Tourists tip waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides, and chambermaids in hard currency, and to stave off a revolt from these people, the government lets them keep the additional money, so they're "rich" compared with everyone else. In fact, they're an elite class enjoying privileges—enough income to afford a cell phone, go out to restaurants and bars, log on to the Internet once in a while—that ordinary Cubans can't even dream of. I asked a few people how much chambermaids earn in tips, partly so that I would know how much to leave on my dresser and also to get an idea of just how crazy Cuban economics are. Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they'll bring in $600 a month—30 times what everyone else gets. "All animals are equal," George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism, "but some animals are more equal than others." Only in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class and even the poor outside Cuba."

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Subtlety and the Indirect Approach

Cool story.

By the early 1980s, Van Halen had become one of the biggest rock bands in history. Their touring contract carried a 53-page rider that laid out technical and security specs as well as food and beverage requirements. The "Munchies" section demanded potato chips, nuts, pretzels and "M&M's (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)."

When the M&M clause found its way into the press, it seemed like a typical case of rock-star excess, of the band "being abusive of others simply because we could," Mr. Roth said. But, he explained, "the reality is quite different."

Van Halen's live show boasted a colossal stage, booming audio and spectacular lighting. All this required a great deal of structural support, electrical power and the like. Thus the 53-page rider, which gave point-by-point instructions to ensure that no one got killed by a collapsing stage or a short-circuiting light tower. But how could Van Halen be sure that the local promoter in each city had read the whole thing and done everything properly?

Cue the brown M&M's. As Roth tells it, he would immediately go backstage to check out the bowl of M&M's. If he saw brown ones, he knew the promoter hadn't read the rider carefully—and that "we had to do a serious line check" to make sure that the more important details hadn't been botched either.

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Subtlety and the Indirect Approach

Cool story.

By the early 1980s, Van Halen had become one of the biggest rock bands in history. Their touring contract carried a 53-page rider that laid out technical and security specs as well as food and beverage requirements. The "Munchies" section demanded potato chips, nuts, pretzels and "M&M's (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)."

When the M&M clause found its way into the press, it seemed like a typical case of rock-star excess, of the band "being abusive of others simply because we could," Mr. Roth said. But, he explained, "the reality is quite different."

Van Halen's live show boasted a colossal stage, booming audio and spectacular lighting. All this required a great deal of structural support, electrical power and the like. Thus the 53-page rider, which gave point-by-point instructions to ensure that no one got killed by a collapsing stage or a short-circuiting light tower. But how could Van Halen be sure that the local promoter in each city had read the whole thing and done everything properly?

Cue the brown M&M's. As Roth tells it, he would immediately go backstage to check out the bowl of M&M's. If he saw brown ones, he knew the promoter hadn't read the rider carefully—and that "we had to do a serious line check" to make sure that the more important details hadn't been botched either.

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

/Capital Accumulation In the Twenty-First Century/

So there's a book by an economist named Thomas Picketty which is very big right now, on capital and RoI trends over time. Now, I have not yet read this book so I'm going off of snippets and reviews (positive and negative), but since I've been reading Richard Heuer's /The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis/ (originally written for the CIA) one thing that is big on my mind now is that lots of data doesn't have to lead to good analysis. Heuer reports the interesting result that doctors who emphasize accumulating data over hypothesis testing tend to be worse at diagnosis; and experiments on experts in various domains (from horserace handicapping to social science) reveals that giving an expert more data does not improve the accuracy of his results, but does increase his CONFIDENCE in his own accuracy by a lot. That is, if you make a best-guess based on initial data, you're very aware that it's only a guess and your estimate of your own accuracy is pretty good; if someone gives you a whole bunch of information backing up the initial data, your accuracy doesn't improve but your impression of your own accuracy does--the extra data just makes you overconfident. It turns out that a multiple-hypotheses approach, concentrating on indicators that can differentiate between hypotheses (basically Bayesianism), is one of the best available approaches for avoiding overconfident estimates.

So, again emphasizing that I have only read reviews: Picketty's book, like Herrnstein and Murray's /The Bell Curve/ from two decades ago, appears to be heavily data-driven. Therefore, when and if I read Picketty's book I will be keeping a sharp and skeptical eye out for the following question: what hypotheses are you using your data to evaluate, and which pieces of evidence support some or all of those hypotheses?

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Private charity

The analysis in this article is flawed on multiple levels:

1.) Quote: 'Compared with government relief, private charity is supposed to be more responsive to individual need and less bureaucratic; more of a helping hand and less of an initiative-suppressing "hammock," the term Ryan uses to deride the effects of government programs.' 

Having acknowledge this point (and the related point that private charity builds cross-class social capital and alleviates social inequality), the article proceeds to ignore it, measuring private charity vs. government programs purely in terms of money spent. The goal isn't to spend the most money possible, it's to get the largest effect possible with the money you can afford to spend.

2.) Quote: 'As charitable giving is structured in the United States today, it too often plays out not as the rich helping out the poor, but as the rich increasing the gap between themselves and the poor. A 2007 study by Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy found that only 30% of individual giving in the benchmark year of 2005 was aimed at the needs of the poor — including contributions for basic needs, donations to healthcare institutions, for scholarships and allocations from religious groups. (The study was commissioned by Google.) The smallest allocation of philanthropic giving to basic needs of the poor was made by the wealthiest donors, those with income of $1 million of more, who directed 3.8% of their giving directly to the poor. For the $100,000-$200,000 income group, that allocation was 12.4%.' 

If you're trying to explore a counterfactual universe wherein private charity, not government aid, is responsible for the poor, why would you choose 2005 as your benchmark, a time when government aid is already supporting the poor? The only conclusion the 2005 data supports is that the wealthiest givers feel that the marginal value of giving to the poor is low--whether that's because they see the poor as overserved or because they don't care about the poor under any circumstances is impossible to tell. The article is perfectly willing to use Great Depression-era data when it supports the author's beliefs--why not examine the proportion of individual giving to the poor back in the Great Depression when the poor were certainly underserved and starving to death?

Probably because measuring individual charity is hard. See point #3.

3.) Quote: 'The largest single recipient of philanthropy is religion — 32% of the total, according to Giving USA. But only a small portion of that goes to outreach to the needy; more than three-quarters of donations to religious organizations is spent on "congregational operations," including facilities upkeep, the Indiana University study found.'

This confuses "private charity" with "charitable organizations"--probably because tax-deductible donations to charitable organizations are easily and conveniently measured when you want to write an article. But it's utterly missing the point. While I am more than willing to grant that "congregational operations" are not germane to relief for the poor and should be excluded from the discussion in the same way that support for the arts is--despite that, I also observe that many things that we do within the Church to help each other WOULD NOT SHOW UP in this money-oriented discussion. When Bishop Gordon introduces an out-of-work neighbor to his old colleagues at Microsoft, when he and Dave Koon fix up an old truck to loan to someone so he can restart his business, when you let a friend in need come over and ransack your cupboards for groceries that he needs, when you mentor a young person or an older gentleman who needs to update his skills so he can get a better job--all of that is private charity, and yet it will never show up on the analysis of tax-deductible contributions to charitable organizations because it doesn't fit the standard money-oriented mold. And yet it can change lives.

Conclusion: does this mean that private charity CAN replace government aid? Not necessarily, and IMHO probably not completely, given how socially-disconnected our society is. Eliminating federal aid would probably result in those who have no friends or family starving, or turning to crime--a bad result. But a society which relies on government programs instead of the civic virtue of real people will spend more and more money to achieve less and less. It is inferior in all ways to a society built on individuals who live the gospel of Jesus Christ in their dealings with each other--even if those dealings don't show up in neat statistical analyses of IRS deductions.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Fictional vignette

I arrived. She was there on the cliff. I'm not sure whether she was doing pushups or painting, but she was doing something while relaxing and keeping an eye on the horizon.

She cocked an eyebrow at me. I... dropped down next to her and started doing pushups, which she accepted silently. Eventually I spoke.

"Mount Rushmore?"

"Good guess," she said. "No."

I frowned, then shrugged. She'd tell me when it was done, or she wouldn't need to. "It has," I said, "been months since I vacuumed." 

She grinned lazily at me. 

"Yes, that goes without saying," I added. "I will try."

"What else is on your mind?" she said.

"I'm trying to convert oData queries into FetchXml expressions for CRM. There's a built-in LINQ provider, but it doesn't really fit complex oData scenarios. For example, it doesn't play nicely with $expand, $orderby, $top, or some kinds of $select. Rather than massaging my queries until it does fit that built-in LINQ provider, I think it's going to be simpler to fall back to generating FetchXML queries. Supposedly they are a little slower than LINQ-generated QueryExpressions, although even that is a little controversial, but at this point I'm more concerned with feature completeness... and FetchXml can supply outer joins, which I absolutely need in order to make oData expands work correctly."

"Hmmm," she said. "Parsing the results might be a bit of a job. It's not coming back in a flat table, is it?"

I paused. "I'm not sure." A few minutes later I said, "Actually, it is. I don't have to parse the XML, but conceptually it is coming back in one big SQL table, which I would be responsible for grouping back into the appropriate objects during an $expand scenario using the server metadata."

"Hmmm. Sounds non-trivial."

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Code Re-use

Code re-use is a good thing, but sometimes it really is quicker to throw away OPA (Other People's Abstractions) and write directly against the lower-level code. Especially if OPA have a lot of features that you aren't going to use and your scenario is simple.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

TDD

Q: Why is TDD a good idea when bug fixing?
A: Because sometimes the amount of work required to make a "red test" is so much that if you fix the bug first, you will never get around to writing the test infrastructure. (Plus, after you fix the bug, you don't have a good test case for writing that infrastructure.)

Case in point: I have an oData service which fails on certain queries, because the underlying CRM provider which services the queries can't handle certain LINQ expressions. There are likely to be other queries which fail in the future, and I need automated tests to prevent fixed queries from regressing as I tweak my oData service... but the bug repro I have is too heavyweight for a unit test. So instead of fixing the bug I just spent (three? five?) hours digging through dependencies with ILSpy and writing enough test infrastructure that I now have a failing "red test" to document the bug condition... only uses it uses mocks and reproes the bug without any network communication at all.

It's amazing how good I feel about the progress I've made even though the bug itself is still RIGHT THERE.

(Also, git's branch-per-feature paradigm is great for keeping my cognitive load modest while doing TDD.)

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Bayesian inference

[from another conference--a friend asked for a quick explanation of what Bayesian inference is]

The basic idea behind Bayesian reasoning is quite simple, it's simply quantifying with a formula what you do anyway instinctively. Here goes, without the math:

When you estimate probabilities, it's fair to say that you're guessing at the ratio of possible universes. Saying "Three out of four, Richard Nixon is a crook" means that of all the possible universes you can see from where you are today, Richard Nixon is a crook in three of them. "Fifty-fifty it comes up heads" means you think the possible universes are evenly balanced. That's the Bayesian view of probability, that it's a subjective estimate instead of something real.

Bayesian inference is about how your view of a given probability changes over time as you see new things. When you see something new, you delete all the universes in which that thing would not have happened, and then look at the ratio of remaining possibilities for the new probability. Example: say Nixon says "I am not a crook." If I estimate that Nixon would always say that in universes where he is a crook, and he wouldn't bother to say it in half the universes where he isn't a crook, then as soon as he says it, half of the universes where he was innocent vanish. Instead of 3/4 chance he's guilty, it's now a 6/7 chance. (Remember, the chance of being innocent drops from 1/4 to 1/8, and it's the ratio of 1/8 to 3/4 that matters because any universe not in that ratio has already been disproven.)

This doesn't just work for yes/no questions, it could be that I'm trying to decide between "Richard Nixon is a crook" vs. "Richard Nixon is incompetent." Either way I'm simply eliminating possible universes with each piece of evidence.

So far so good, but the great weakness of Bayesian inference is this: I'm simply narrowing down my hypotheses each time based on evidence. What if the truth isn't in any of my hypotheses? What if the real explanation is that "Richard Nixon is an alien"? Since Bayesian inference is all about ELIMINATING possibilities, I will never, ever tumble to the truth. Even if I see him beam himself up into his spaceship, Bayesianism has no way for me to deal with that. And yet in the real world, I would indeed change my mind if I saw his spaceship--I'd generate a new hypothesis on the fly. So my mind isn't Bayesian, it isn't deductive. What is my mind doing?

Bayesian inference is demonstrably the most reasonable way of deciding between two possibilities, but somewhere inside my head I must have a container that says "infinite number of other possibilities."

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Moroni

"Yea, verily, verily I say unto you, if all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men. Behold, he was a man like unto Ammon, the son of Mosiah, yea, and even the other sons of Mosiah, yea, and also Alma and his sons, for they were all men of God."

This is an interesting statement, considering Alma and Ammon's backstory as men over whom, at one point, the devil had quite a lot of power. So it's not something intrinsic to Moroni/Ammon/Alma, but rather a statement about the state which they had achieved by their faith in and obedience to Christ. And therefore you may wish to ponder whether you are, at this time, someone who would cause "the very powers of hell [to be] shaken forever." And if not, how can you become such?

That's what I get out of it, anyway.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Personal ad

An awful ad at [http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=218&ad=27835668&cat&lpid&search=single] inspires me to write my own version.

WANTED

I never thought in a hundred years I'd do something like this but this idea has been floating around in my head for some time now! Time to let it out! :-)

ETERNAL GRATITUDE and/or MY FIRSTBORN CHILD to the person who introduces me to a kindred spirit.

Do you know of a socially-awkward single female with an old-but-cheerful soul who loves all kinds of skill and knowledge and isn't particularly anxious to get married that you would like to line up with a 33-year-old single guy who probably won't ever initiate anything romantic with her but would deeply appreciate having somebody to talk with?

I'm not really comfortable writing about my good qualities, but a few words about my bad qualities: I can be kind of insensitive, either because I genuinely don't notice the signs of distress or because I'm pigheadedly pursuing something I think is more important. I'm less interested in winning arguments than in determining out what is really true (couldn't be a lawyer), and I'm also less interested in appearances (and therefore social status) than being undisturbed in my own agenda. I can be ambitious and motivated at times but I am also subject to ennui and sloth when I get discouraged. Although I do accept criticism without complaint, especially from close friends, I probably have too much faith in my own judgment and I frequently jump to initial conclusions before the data are all in. I am about 200% more emotional than I wish I were. I'm also prone to making rash vows for sentimental reasons which then have to be kept forever, which is why I can now never eat kangaroo or squish a spider ever again, and probably can never marry. (This inflexibility drives people crazy, including my grandfather. Be warned.)

What I look for in a kindred spirit: I'd kind of like someone to balance me out, someone who is more analytical and less hasty, but who still shares my core values. If you know a girl who doesn't wear earrings or makeup, who has never had a boyfriend or kissed a boy nor particularly wants to do so, who occasionally reads books on chemistry or astrophysics for entertainment (even if she doesn't finish them), who doesn't really "get" people, who ignores social conventions when it suits her ("girls can't be blacksmiths!"), who reacts to setbacks with a wry smile and a philosophical shrug, who understands why vows MUST be kept once made, who makes you want to be better and kinder and more tolerant and more intelligent and more pure-hearted like she is--if you know such a girl, I would like to meet her.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Gun suicides

Interesting result. From http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/firearms-and-suicides-in-us-states.html:

If suicides and gun ownership were being driven by a third factor we would expect gun ownership to be correlated with all suicides not just gun-suicide. What we find, however, is that an increase in gun ownership decrease non-gun suicide. From an economics perspective this makes perfect sense. As gun ownership increases, the cost of gun-suicide falls because guns are easier to access and as the cost of gun-suicide falls there is substitution away from non-gun suicide.

Put differently, when gun ownership decreases other methods of suicide increase. Substitution among methods is not perfect, however, so when gun ownership decreases we see a big decrease in gun-suicide and a substantial but less than fully compensating increase in non-gun suicide so a net decrease in the number of suicides.

- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/firearms-and-suicides-in-us-states.html#sthash.eq0Uf9z1.dpuf

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

On relativity

I'm not sure what to think of this datum. The result seems consistent with special relativity so I presume it's consistent with general relativity too, but then again I don't really understand the math for a rotating reference frame.

Note: On October, 1971, J. C. Hafele of Washington in St. Louis and Richard Keating of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, borrowed two cesium clocks from the Naval Observatory and bought each a first class found trip seat on commercial flights, one headed east, the other west.  The clocks were strapped into the seats and never moved again until they returned, nor were they observed in transit.  "The experiment may be the cheapest ever conducted" to test relativity, Scientific American explained. When the clocks were returned to Washington, the west bound clock had speeded up by 273 nanoseconds compared to an identical clock that remained at the Observatory, and the east bound clock had lost 59 nanoseconds. The previous position of Einstein was that "Moving clocks run slow", but there had been no prediction of a time difference depending on the direction of travel. The explanation by the relativity theorists involved a new frame of reference and a long defense as to what that reference frame was needed. Beckmann's theory predicted the time differences due to the travel of the clocks through Earth's gravitational field.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Irony

This exchange with Richard Dawkins strikes me as incredibly ironic. (http://www.newstatesman.com/science/2013/10/richard-dawkins-interview-pope-francis-poetry-and-why-jews-win-so-many-nobel-prizes)

IC: One problem with these Darwinian explanations, however convincing they are, is that they aren't really falsifiable.

RD: That is a very common criticism, and it's probably a valid one. That doesn't mean they're wrong, of course. I think from my point of view—I won't say it doesn't matter whether they're right or wrong, it's just sufficient in some cases, for me, to be able to say, Well, at least it's not totally implausible from a Darwinian point of view.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Jewish ancestry

[Cc K and B]

I haven't digested the scientific evidence in this post yet, but I want to hold on to it for future reference. The implication which leaped out to me is the same one Cochran mentions later on down: if the DNA evidence is accurate and most mitochondrial DNA is of local extraction, then most Jews are not Jewish through the female line of descent. Furthermore, this makes me wonder about studies which have purported to compare Jewish DNA with American Indian DNA in order to disprove the Lamanite hypothesis. If the Jews can't even keep track of their own lines of descent since classical times, what makes anyone think they are a reliable source of comparison DNA for disproving theories about a population which diverged 600 years before that? We don't even KNOW what Lamanite DNA "should" be like.

http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/jewish-moms/

-Max

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Charity

This story made me laugh. I should cultivate just such a cheerful reaction to lies, instead of offended rage.

In June, I attended a dinner for Bill Clinton, which was educational. Clinton spoke passionately about his foundation, about African wildlife, inequality, childhood obesity, and much else with enormous factual command, emotion, and rhetorical power. But he and I also spoke privately. I asked him about the financial crisis. He paused and then became even more soulful, thoughtful, passionate, and articulate. And then he proceeded to tell me the most amazing lies I've heard in quite a while.

For example, Mr. Clinton sorrowfully lamented his inability to stop the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned all regulation of private (OTC) derivatives trading, and thereby greatly worsened the crisis. Mr. Clinton said that he and Larry Summers had argued with Alan Greenspan, but couldn't budge him, and then Congress passed the law by a veto-proof supermajority, tying his hands. Well, actually, the reason that the law passed by that overwhelming margin was because of the Clinton Administration's strong advocacy, including Congressional testimony by Larry Summers and harsh public and private attacks on advocates of regulation by Summers and Robert Rubin.

Wow, I thought, this guy is a really good actor.

From: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-ferguson/hillary-clinton-documentary_b_4014792.html?utm_hp_ref=media

-- 

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Charlie Munger on technological improvement

I had to dig up this story, sending it to you for future reference. Context was a Facebook conversation on the effect of technological advancement on labor.

Me: "Sometimes the benefit of a new technology doesn't flow to the workers or even the business owners, but only to the inventors of the new machinery (and perhaps to the consumers of the product). Charlie Munger tells an interesting story along those same lines."

[Charlie Munger, from http://ycombinator.com/munger.html]

The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. And most people do not get this straight in their heads. But a fellow like Buffett does.

For example, when we were in the textile business, which is a terrible commodity business, we were making low-end textiles—which are a real commodity product. And one day, the people came to Warren and said, "They've invented a new loom that we think will do twice as much work as our old ones."

And Warren said, "Gee, I hope this doesn't work because if it does, I'm going to close the mill." And he meant it.

What was he thinking? He was thinking, "It's a lousy business. We're earning substandard returns and keeping it open just to be nice to the elderly workers. But we're not going to put huge amounts of new capital into a lousy business."

And he knew that the huge productivity increases that would come from a better machine introduced into the production of a commodity product would all go to the benefit of the buyers of the textiles. Nothing was going to stick to our ribs as owners.

That's such an obvious concept—that there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that's still going to be lousy. The money still won't come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Asking In Prayer About the Book of Mormon

[from a conversation with B.J.]

When I was in the MTC, they kind of made a big deal about praying about the Book of Mormon to know if it's true.

I'd never done it before, and honestly I was kind of embarrassed to do so, but at the same time I knew that at some point someone (an investigator) was going to ask me if I had and it would be simpler to be able to just say, "Yes," instead of explaining why it was unnecessary.

So I did.

And the way the conversation went, metaphorically, was kind of like this:

[Heavenly Father is reading the newspaper]

Max: Um, Father? Is the Book of Mormon true?

[Heavenly Father raises his eyebrows as if to say, "I know that you know that I know that you know..."]

Max: Yeah, that's what I thought.

[end scenario]

It was kind of embarrassing, and sort of a formality, but we both knew why I did it, and it did make things simpler in the long run.

So that's my story.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Killing

Then I cautiously raised the upper half of my body into the tunnel until I was lying flat on my stomach. When I felt comfortable, I placed my Smith Wesson .38-caliber snub-nose (sent to me by my father for tunnel work) beside the flashlight and switched on the light, illuminating the tunnel.

There, not more than 15 feet away, sat a Viet Cong eating a handful of rice from a pouch on his lap. We looked at each other for what seemed to be an eternity, but in fact was probably only a few seconds.

Maybe it was the surprise of actually finding someone else there, or maybe it was just the absolute innocence of the situation, but neither one of us reacted.

After a moment, he put his pouch of rice on the floor of the tunnel beside him, turned his back to me and slowly started crawling away. I, in turn, switched off my flashlight, before slipping back into the lower tunnel and making my way back to the entrance. About 20 minutes later, we received word that another squad had killed a VC emerging from a tunnel 500 meters away.

I never doubted who that VC was. To this day, I firmly believe that grunt and I could have ended the war sooner over a beer in Saigon than Henry Kissinger ever could by attending the peace talks.

-Michael Kathman, "Triangle Tunnel Rat"
as quoted in On Killing, by Lt. Colonel David Grossman

I find this story troubling. I think of myself as someone who is prepared to do what is necessary, but I suspect that I wouldn't have been prepared to kill the guy under the circumstances either, even though it is the clearly rational, tactically correct thing to do. (Who cares if he is pointing a gun at you at that exact instant vs. eating rice?)

Historical evidence is that most human beings are not killers by nature, and resist the act of killing even enemy soldiers in combat. I thought I wasn't like that but now I'm not so sure.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Science challenge

Challenge: in thirty words or less, compare and contrast greenhouses and the Greenhouse Effect (specifically, as it pertains to carbon dioxide).

Here's my attempt: greenhouses trap radiative heat by preventing convection. Carbon dioxide traps heat by preventing re-radiation.

Challenge: explain in thirty words or less why climatologists think carbon dioxide emissions are disastrous.

Here's my attempt: write equations predicting climate change using basic physics. Predictions don't match reality, so increase carbon dioxide coefficient until equation matches. No such thing as an unknown variable. What's falsification anyway?

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief: original tune

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/17054730

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Testing, testing

Multiple choice test, created for (http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/multchc.htm):

Cochlear refers to:
A: The ear
B: The eye
C: The mind
D: Theatre

Epidermis is located:
A: Within the thorax
B: Below the dermis
C: On the periphery of the integument
D: None of the above

Which of the following sorts is the best way to sort 300 million Americans by SSN?
A: Quicksort
B: Insertion sort
C: Bubble sort
D: Radix sort

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Torture: Kratman was right, if horrific

Kudos to Tom Kratman for being right about the (horrific) effectiveness of torture, and to the CIA for being smarter than people give them credit for. Torture done properly is effective; otherwise there wouldn't be a moral dilemma. (This is true whether or not waterboarding constitutes torture--any negative conditioning that can be performed with waterboarding would work as well or better with more horrific punishments.)

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2013/01/the_case_for_torture_ex_cia_officials_explain_enhanced_interrogations.html

'Hayden acknowledged that prisoners might say anything to stop their suffering. (Like the other panelists, he insisted EITs weren't torture.) That's why "we never asked anybody anything we didn't know the answer to, while they were undergoing the enhanced interrogation techniques. The techniques were not designed to elicit truth in the moment." Instead, EITs were used in a controlled setting, in which interrogators knew the answers and could be sure they were inflicting misery only when the prisoner said something false. The point was to create an illusion of godlike omniscience and omnipotence so that the prisoner would infer, falsely, that his captors always knew when he was lying or withholding information.'

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

"Where babies come from"

Whenever I eventually have to give my kids the "where babies come from" talk, I plan on giving them the full scientific treatment. The discussion will include words such as "chromosome," "ovipositor," "meiosis", "fission," and "spermacyte." There will be a brief discussion on alternatives to mammalian fertilization techniques, including ovuliparity (external fertilization, as in fish), oviparity (internal fertilization but egg-laying, as in birds), and viviparity (internal fertilization, as in mammals).

Then I will simply say, off-handedly, "humans are a hemotrophic viviparous species like most other mammals," and refer them to textbooks for further details.

My kids will know so much about sex that they'll view it as boring stuff for old people only.

'My dad said a penis is kind of like a mammalian ovipositor for males, except instead of a rotting tree, the host is a female of the same species, and fecundation occurs after implantation instead of before. Yech. Oh yeah, and there's some kind of pleasure stimulus involved.'

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Doubt is essential to faith?

Lesley Hazleton has a talk in which she thoughtfully asserts the importance of doubt.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lesley_hazleton_the_doubt_essential_to_faith.html

I see her point, but I think she misstates things when she says that the absence of doubt leaves behind nothing but fanaticism. I think a willingness to entertain doubt to far more important than doubt.

It doesn't particularly matter at any given moment whether I doubt a proposition, say, the reality of my own mind as an actual mind (as distinct from "the brain": a stimulus-response system constructed from neurons and governed entirely by physical laws) as long as I am willing to entertain doubt if and when it becomes appropriate. (Say, someone manages to build a device which can control my mind.)

I understand the Pythagorean theorem well enough that I have zero doubt of its truth (in the Euclidean domain). Hazleton's formulation would make that lack of doubt a statement of arrogance, fanaticism, and self-righteous zeal, but in fact it's nothing of the kind. It is simply knowledge. I am willing to allow challenges to that knowledge, but I know full well that those challenges will be met. I have comprehended it and it is true.

Faith is what you do while you are waiting for either falsification or comprehension.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Excessive Force

Snippets from a fascinating article on modern law enforcement.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/%E2%80%9Cwhy_did_you_shoot_me_i_was_reading_a_book_the_new_warrior_cop_is_out_of_control/

Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn't a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. "To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends," a friend of Culosi's told me shortly after his death. "None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation." Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that's when they brought in the SWAT team.

On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn't slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi's heart.

Sal Culosi's last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: "Dude, what are you doing?"

[snip]

Indeed, that's exactly what happened to seventy-two-year-old Aaron Awtry in 2010. Awtry was hosting a poker tournament in his Greenville, South Carolina, home when police began breaking down the door with a battering ram. Awtry had begun carrying a gun after being robbed. Thinking he was about to be robbed again, he fired through the door, wounding Deputy Matthew May in both arms. The other officers opened fire into the building. Miraculously, only Awtry was hit. As he fell back into a hallway, other players reporting him asking, "Why didn't you tell me it was the cops?" The raid team claimed they knocked and announced several times before putting ram to door, but other players said they heard no knock or announcement. When Awtry recovered, he was charged with attempted murder. As part of an agreement, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. Police had broken up Awtry's games in the past. But on those occasions, they had knocked and waited, he had let them in peacefully, and he'd been given a $100 fine.

[snip]

In 2010 a massive Maricopa County SWAT team, including a tank and several armored vehicles, raided the home of Jesus Llovera. The tank in fact drove straight into Llovera's living room. Driving the tank? Action movie star Steven Seagal, whom Sheriff Joe Arpaio had recently deputized. Seagal had also been putting on the camouflage to help Arpaio with his controversial immigration raids. All of this, by the way, was getting caught on film. Seagal's adventures in Maricopa County would make up the next season of the A&E TV series Steven Seagal, Lawman.
Llovera's suspected crime? Cockfighting. Critics said that Arpaio and Seagal brought an army to arrest a man suspected of fighting chickens to play for the cameras. Seagal's explanation for the show of force: "Animal cruelty is one of my pet peeves." All of Llovera's chickens were euthanized. During the raid, the police also killed his dog.

[snip]

But Stamper says that like many aspects of modern policing, dog shootings may have had a legitimate origin, but the practice has since become a symptom of the mind-set behind a militarized police culture. "Among other things, it really shows a lack of imagination. These guys think that the only solution to a dog that's yapping or charging is shooting and killing it. That's all they know. It goes with this notion that police officers have to control every situation, to control all the variables. That's an awesome responsibility, and if you take it on, you're caving to delusion. You no longer exercise discrimination or discretion. You have to control, and the way you control is with authority, power, and force. With a dog, the easiest way to take control is to simply kill it. I mean, especially if there are no consequences for doing so."

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Religious analogy

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/07/02/stranger-in-a-mormon-land

My visit to the Mormon ward was far removed from all of those experiences.

The closest analogy might be something along these lines: Imagine that you are an observant Jew attending a Christian church for the first time. There are many things that you will recognize, including concepts and even scriptures, but they will be recast in a way that is weird, in fact, utterly foreign to you.

Sure, members of this relatively new faith will use the same Hebrew Bible, but they will call it something different, the "Old Testament," which hints at a divide. They also use other authoritative books, and their method of interpretation has little to nothing to do with your own tradition. They have transformed the Passover meal into something barely recognizable to you. They profess faith in a messiah, but their idea of him is different from your own hopeful notion of the savior of the Jewish people and the world. They affirm the truth of your religion to a point, but insist on a newer, fuller revelation from God that has superseded yours, and invite you to join them in this final dispensation.

My visit to the Mormon ward was a bit like that...

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Bunny inspectors redux

[Cc B. and K.]

D.,

This may amuse you if you're in the right humor. USDA regulations now say magicians' rabbits need full-scale disaster plan. Death by paperwork.

-M.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/1/agriculture-department-tells-magician-write-disast/

"My USDA rabbit license requirement has taken another ridiculous twist," he continued. "I just received an 8 page letter from the USDA, telling me that by July 29 I need to have in place a written disaster plan, detailing all the steps I would take to help get my rabbit through a disaster, such as a tornado, fire, flood, etc. They not only want to know how I will protect my rabbit during a disaster, but also what I will do after the disaster, to make sure my rabbit gets cared for properly. I am not kidding–before the end of July I need to have this written rabbit disaster plan in place, or I am breaking the law."

Mr. Hahne also detailed the guidelines the USDA reportedly gave him:

• The new regulation became effective Jan. 30, 2012.

• The written plan must be completed by July 29, 2013.

• Mr. Hahne and his wife, Brenda, must be trained to implement the plan as written.

• The written plan must be available for review by USDA inspectors by Sept. 28, 2013.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Intelligence and agency

[Note: I could be wrong about everything. I frequently am. I do however find my own insights convincing or I wouldn't bother to share them. ]

Dear Sister G.,

"Intelligence." "Agent." These words are used in the scriptures. I think they are well-chosen. Obviously the gospel concept predates the word choice--the gospel was true before English was invented--but I think Joseph Smith did an even better job than he probably knew, translating them into English.

The scriptures say that men are "agents unto themselves," and the JST of Moses 7:13 says, "in the garden of Eden, man had agency." The word "agent" comes from Latin "agere" (ago/agere/egi/actus). Textbooks often give the meaning as "to do, to act, to make, etc." but what it really is is a generic verb which gets its specific meaning from the associated noun, just like the English word "do." (Consider the difference between "I did my taxes", "I did the dishes", "I did my duty", and "I did him in".) Basically it means "to whatchamacallit." In English, "agent" can refer to something which catalyzes or acts (as in chemistry, or expressions like "agent of change"), or to someone who acts ON ANOTHER'S BEHALF. When the scriptures say then that men are "agents unto themselves," I feel like the Lord intends for us to see 1.) we have the power to act, to do, to make, etc., 2.) when we do so, we represent ourselves--but we also have the choice to become HIS agents, to act at his direction and on his behalf. It's a good, subtle choice of word and I love it.

The scriptures also talk about "intelligence," especially in D&C 93 (which refers to "intelligence" as a singular undifferentiated "mass noun" like "information", without discrete subsets) and in Abraham 3 (which refers to "intelligences" as a synonym for premortal spirits). The word "intelligence" comes from Latin "intellegere" (intellego/intellegere/intellegi/intellectus), which textbooks say means "to understand." It comes from "legere" (lego/legere/legi/lectus) which means "to read". "Inter" (between) + "legere" (to read) = "to read between [the lines]", "to understand". But here's the neat thing: I learned a few years back that the original meaning of "legere" was actually "to choose." Because reading consisted of picking the right meaning out of a set of letters, "legere" also came to mean "to read" as well as "to choose". So "intellegere" not only means "to read between", it must also mean "to choose between". That makes "intelligence" an extremely appropriate word for the scriptural concept of that which not only sees and understands, but also chooses a course of action.

We are intelligence, endowed with agency.

Love,

Max

P.S. Moses 7:13 originally said, "the Lord said unto Enoch, behold, these thy brethren, they are the workmanship of mine own hands, & I gave unto them their knowledge in the day that I created them & in the Garden of Eden gave I unto man his agency;". During revisions by the Prophet, the word "knowledge" was crossed out and replaced by "intelligence", the phrase "in the day that I created them" was crossed out, "gave I unto" was crossed out, and "his" was partially crossed out and rewritten as "has". "I gave unto them their knowledge & in the Garden of Eden man had agency;"

I mention this both because it's interesting doctrinally and because it says something interesting about the process by which revelation comes: line upon line, precept upon precept.

-- 

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Textbook awesome

Dear B.,

Today I read a truly awesome sentence in a genetics textbook.

I don't know how much you remember about cellular meiosis, but to refresh your memory: in cellular mitosis, a cell splits into two cells, each with its same chromosome count. In meiosis, a cell splits into four cells, each of which has the normal chromosome count, so that it can be combined with another cell during fertilization to produce a new organism. The reason this works is that before mitosis or meiosis, each chromosome builds up an extra chromotid--a copy of itself, still attached to the original chromosome through a centromere--which splits during meiosis to produce two chromosomes.

The splitting takes place in two phases. In the first part, the two versions of each chromosome (e.g. the X chromosome you got from your mom and the one you got from your dad) pair up into what are called "bivalents": like two little X's attached to each other. Then one chromotid of each swaps parts of itself with a chromotid from the other, so you wind up with four chromatids (one identical to the mother's, one identical to the father's, and two that are part of each). Then the cell splits, and one chromosome goes to each new cell. In the second phase, the chromosome itself splits the chromatids apart, and the cell splits again, with each cell getting one chromatid. (This second part is just like mitosis, only the cell already only has half the right number of chromosomes.)

Okay, so the awesome sentence went something like this: "During zygotene [a subphase of meiosis], each chromosome somehow seeks out its homologous pairing in order to recombine." Key word there: "somehow." The textbook went on to acknowledge that the mechanism is not well-understood. It's kind of mind-boggling when you think about it: if a chromosome is just a string of genes, how does your chromosome #11 from your mom know that it's chromosome #11 and is supposed to pair up with your other chromosome #11 from your dad? Rather, the chromosome itself MUST have some extra information that says, "Hey, I'm a #11" The reason I think this is awesome is that here is a fascinating scientific question that most textbooks would probably just gloss over because the answer isn't known, but THIS textbook specifically calls out the fact that the answer isn't known--and questions are the essence of science. Knowing how to ask questions, and what to do to find real answers, and tell them from false answers.

I wish this kind of thing were more common. I wish the average 10th-grade high school student finished the school year knowing more than just a bunch of facts and accepted theories about biology--I want them to know what we don't know as well. Do we know where new phenotypes originate? (If a giraffe evolves a longer neck, where did the gene for longer necks come from in the first place?) That evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium that you just taught us--do we know if it's true based on paleontological evidence, or is it just a theory still looking for evidence? Do we really understand how neurons pass information to each other? How do homologous chromosomes find each other? (Maybe there are answers to some of these questions. It's hard for me to tell the difference between 'the details are so complicated that I just won't mention them here' and 'nobody knows how it works but I don't want to admit that in a textbook.' It seems like you need a lot of expertise in a subject to be able to confidently assess which questions are unsolved--you can't easily learn this on your own even with the Internet, which is another reason it should be in textbooks.)

"Somehow." This is my new favorite science word.

Love,

Max

-- 

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Hydrogen generation

Replacement for platinum in electrophoresis?

http://science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2013-news/Schaak6-2013

--

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

'If you do not accuse each other, God will not accuse you. If you have no accuser you will enter heaven, and if you will follow the revelations and instructions which God gives you through me, I will take you into heaven as my back load. If you will not accuse me, I will not accuse you.'

Conquest of Elysium Damage Calculator

Conquest of Elysium Damage Calculator

Base Damage:

Bonus

Enemy armor total:

Answer

*** Formula:
Open-ended average of 1-N = N/(N-1)+N/2
[derived by summing infinite series of open-ended rolls plus the average damage of the final non-open-ended roll].
Including armor A where A < N, this produces a weighted average damage = ((1+(N/2)+(N-A-1))*(1/N) + (N-A)*(N-A-1)/(2*N)

Global warming: poll

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/02/13/peer-reviewed-survey-finds-majority-of-scientists-skeptical-of-global-warming-crisis/

According to the newly published survey of geoscientists and engineers, merely 36 percent of respondents fit the "Comply with Kyoto" model. The scientists in this group "express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause."

The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.

The survey finds that 24 percent of the scientist respondents fit the "Nature Is Overwhelming" model. "In their diagnostic framing, they believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth." Moreover, "they strongly disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal lives."

Another group of scientists fit the "Fatalists" model. These scientists, comprising 17 percent of the respondents, "diagnose climate change as both human- and naturally caused. 'Fatalists' consider climate change to be a smaller public risk with little impact on their personal life. They are skeptical that the scientific debate is settled regarding the IPCC modeling." These scientists are likely to ask, "How can anyone take action if research is biased?"

The next largest group of scientists, comprising 10 percent of respondents, fit the "Economic Responsibility" model. These scientists "diagnose climate change as being natural or human caused. More than any other group, they underscore that the 'real' cause of climate change is unknown as nature is forever changing and uncontrollable. Similar to the 'nature is overwhelming' adherents, they disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal life. They are also less likely to believe that the scientific debate is settled and that the IPCC modeling is accurate. In their prognostic framing, they point to the harm the Kyoto Protocol and all regulation will do to the economy."

The final group of scientists, comprising 5 percent of the respondents, fit the "Regulation Activists" model. These scientists "diagnose climate change as being both human- and naturally caused, posing a moderate public risk, with only slight impact on their personal life." Moreover, "They are also skeptical with regard to the scientific debate being settled and are the most indecisive whether IPCC modeling is accurate."

--

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

'If you do not accuse each other, God will not accuse you. If you have no accuser you will enter heaven, and if you will follow the revelations and instructions which God gives you through me, I will take you into heaven as my back load. If you will not accuse me, I will not accuse you.'