Simple Country Physicist

There are some bits and pieces of internet related stuff that I have been tree-ratting away for the last few days. First, I want to bestow on Dave Melthvin [Link] the Digital Order of Listerine for presenting me this morning with a whelming anecdotal reason why I am antithetical, as opposed to just apathetic, and queasy over Web 2.0 applications. His story of Gooey deprivation is enough to make the most Pollyanaish of liberal (modern) democrat social engineers into a true disciple of John Wayne’s celluloid drama persona. To say nothing of sending the least conservative of (modern) republican Cheneyist sine die to the local firearm emporium for an infusion of ammunition and perhaps even another home defense implement.

The point appertains, so well expressed by Mr. Methvin (his credentials are not given so I have to presume the term of address is accurate,) that the internet, the wonderful weirding web, is not only not stationary, it is not permanent! So the lesson that we seem unable to get the denizens of our coastal liberal urban concentrations to learn is that connection to the internet, or even its presence, is not a (maybe, for now) fact of nature like the mass of the proton or the value of the speed of light or the charge of the electron, but is an ephemeral construct of our species and civilization, both of whose survival is continually in suspense and jeopardy.

I could comment that those who live in the hinterland where internet access is not diffuse also have problems with this lesson, albeit not so intensely as in the tarpits of human stupidity that are the epitome of civilization. I myself had the great joy this morning of having to restart my UBUNTU box this morning and contend with its foibles of talking through my 802.11g wireless adapter to my home network, reminding me once more of the reasons I also really am antipathetic about the perversion that is USB. Yes, there are good reasons why I deeply enjoy living in the hinterland where we get reminded more often that this is indeed a physical universe where we have to think to contend and contend to survive. And why the mrrrrrrrrrm am I wasting my time on this stercus when I could be doing physics?

I also note that 0.2 of all laptops shipped in first quarter of the (calendar?) year were itty bitty lap tops. [Link] This raises the question of whether they should be considered separately taxonomically?  I could respond by asking what exactly the taxonomy is of laptops, but then I would have to also ask if the people who gather and report these numbers actually know what a taxonomy is? Given the level of maths illiteracy these days, as demonstrated by the fact that the business community considers people who can even parrot these statistics to be not only literate but highly numerate, I suspect this is a question best left unasked as we really do not want to confront the answer. Of course this is not near on the level of asking for details of our parents’ reproductive antics, but it is visceral to all too great a degree anyway.

Finally, in a spate of something that (sorta) comes close to physics, I see that researchers at Yahoo [1] have determined that there are two types of email users, [2] those who only use email while working and those who do email all the time they are awake. Hmmmm. I have all sorts of questions here. How do they separate out folks who have mobile email devices, like fruit, and those who have both home and office email accounts from those who have only office accounts?  I haven’t read the article yet so I shall refrain from any more overweening praise.

I shall comment however that I know two types of people: those who own computers and those who do not. The probability that the former do email is O(1). The probability that the latter do email is O(0).

[1]  Makes you wonder just what these folks are really working on, doesn’t it?
[2]  Yes, seriously. This does not seem to be one of those Ising state jokes.

internet taxonomy netbooks email web

Occasionally, especially rare these days as the traditional media is in recession, a chance group of articles meshes to provoke new direction of thought. The end of this week gave rise to such.

The starting piece on all this was a New Yawk Times piece [Link] on Freeman Dyson, which demonstrates, among other things, what education should be all about. All right, perhaps technical education – a sop to Capella – but isn’t that combination of creativity, independence, and integrity what education should be about but basically and definitely isn’t these days? I shan’t deny that in my estimation, valuing proper disrespect for false authority, that Dyson is a kultur hero or role model, not least because the modern establishment would quake in horror at that statement along many modes.

I also have to acknowledge being prodded by several excellent blots this week by Alexa Harrington [Link] who always has an uncanny grasp of separating pony from poo. In particular I found her blot on the issue of teacher recompense nudgeful and richtik. That was cemented by Melissa Lafsky’s article (if you get paid to be a journalist it isn’t a blog!) [Link] on our social degeneration and, in particular, our whacked educational system. I’m not at all sure I agree with her implied social engineering approach, an experiment that we have to repeat every decade or so to relearn its lemon-like nature – sweet smelling but the fruit is inedible. Nonetheless, the matter stands that the current shul system in this Yankee republic is broken and getting worse, as demonstrated by the recent triumph of the forces of darkness in Texas. [Link]

To contribute my unasked and probably unwanted 0.02$ Yankee currency, I want to look at what one has to learn when one seeks to learn physics, or any other nerdish discipline, and, I suspect, a lot of disciplines that aren’t technically nerdish, but being a nerd I am not very qualified to comment on such.[1] I have blogged on this taxonomy previously, [Link] and reproduce some of that here.

• Thoughts – the ideas associated with the discipline;
• Terms – the words used to express those ideas and their application;
• Tools – the means by which the discipline is practiced; and
• Techniques – how the other three T’s are combined to practice the discipline.

These are the ‘Four Ts’ and the point I want to make here is that to be able to teach these, you have to know something about them.

So if we look at this, and teachers who have sterling credentials of education – as educators – but pitiful education in the technical disciplines. Please note that I am not talking here about the people who teach children the basics of how to learn and the basics of human knowledge, the three Rs as it be except that such are outmoded today. That latter is another matter.

The fact remains that those who teach nerdish stuffs in high shuls and even in junior high shuls in our ‘certified educational system’ are woefully undereducated in those disciplines. I can recall as a Freshman and Sophomore taking maths and sciences classes of basic and introductory material alongside Juniors and Seniors majoring in the education version of maths and sciences. Yep, the sad fact then and apparently now, is that the folks who teach nerdish disciplines in high shul have about half (or less) or an undergraduate major in what they are teaching.

It may be argued that this is sufficient since what these ‘teachers’ were exposed to is less than what they are expected to teach in high shul. Balderdash! That would be accurate if those teaching understood what they were teaching.

If we go to the ‘Four Ts’ the only one of the four that half of an undergraduate major (or less) will provide those ‘teachers’ is (some of) terms. By limiting themselves to the introductory, often survey and service, courses [2] these education majors assure that all they will see is definitions and simplified problems. Neither of these contribute manifestly to the other three Ts.

In particular, the wanting of the certified education educated teacher is that they are unable, in these nerdish disciplines, to have obtained the first T. Simply put, they are incapable of thinking in that discipline and as such are incapable of teaching it. The best they can do is push out rote presentation of the terms and simplified tools and techniques that they learned, most at the level of high shul algebra.  And that is failure on the part of the teacher and on the part of for the students.

Err not, being a teacher is not easy, but our present system sets our society and its young members up for failure. The current system of highly educating future teachers in education matters and woefully inadequately in the discipline they will teach, at least in high shul, is inverted and suicidal. If we are to reform education and its apparat then part of that reform has to be to hold the teachers of nerdish disciplines primarily accountable for knowing and understanding and living, at least mentally, their disicpline. That means something of the order of a real actual major in that discipline and a second minor in education stuffs.

Or we can resign ourselves to being no better than a third world nation in another generation. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
[1] Yes, Quadgop, I realize that hasn’t prevented me, or 0.9944 of my species from commenting such innumerable times in past and hence, we expect similarly in future.

[2] A service course is one that is taught as both an introductory course for discipline majors and minors and as a curriculum requirement for roundness in other disciplines. As such it is weak in the former and strong in the latter.

I am rather gratified this morning to note that Ms. Alexa Harrington, who blog at “Educated Nation”, [Link] has returned from end-of-summer spiritual purification rituals. Evidence was presented of this by an email notifying me that she had posted a comment on one of by blots. [Link] In her inimitable manner, Ms. Harrington has struck deeply into the “I wonder” center of my brain with this comment. In particular, I reproduce here what to me are the salient parts:

Someone should do their thesis on the cycles and patterns of topics in the blogosphere.

Even Qadgop was moved by this to pause in his daily exercise of shredding sheet neutronium with his claws and tongue to trans halfway between continua in consideration.

The thought here is that one of the preliminaries to assessing “the cycles and patterns of the blogosphere” would be to develop a taxonomy of blogger and their blogs, which in turn generates the prerequisite of some assessment of whether these can be considered the one or the many since some blogs have multiple bloggers and some bloggers have multiple blogs. This vector schizophrenia aside, it has become rather apparent that some effort needs be bent to provide the blog universe (at least the part on Tellus) with some categorical taxonomy.

I should comment at this point that many of us are familiar with taxonomies. The one that comes most rapidly to mind is the one used in libraries to catalog books. The examples of this I am familiar with are the Library of Congress and the Dewey Decimal systems. In a sense these taxonomies are a map of all knowledgeable information, or at least that component that may be recorded and expressed in some variant of American English. (Both of which constraints are, of course, severely limiting.)

What we are not necessarily familiar with is the underlying theory and practice of taxonomies. I suspect most people think that some smart guy(s) sit(s) down who is broadly and deeply knowledgeable and composes a taxonomy in much the same way that we array cans of vegetables in our cupboard. This is only partly correct. There is actually a set of maths theory (and practice) for constructing and affirming taxonomies (taxonomies, like good vector spaces need righteous orthogonality.) An elementary (as in elements of, not the lowest taxonomy class of shul) presentation may be found in Dunn and Everitt’s An Introduction to Mathematical Taxonomy. One should also exercise care in applying these in situations involving practitioners of a taxonomy; I have been savaged more than once by excellent librarians driven to berserker frenzy over detailed kritik of their favorite system.

Despite this existence, we must also admit that rather few taxonomies are composed on maths grounds. Rather, they tend to grow in a Mopsyish fashion and only after they have evolved to a point where their operation is serious jepordized are they revamped using rigorous methodology. The best example of this process, to mu knowledge, is biological taxonomy which has suffered and is suffering severe trauma under the onslought of DNA measurement. Despite this stress, which leads one to enquire if it induces biologists to partake of junk food, the taxonomy of living “things” is made increasing credible and utile, at least to the view of an auslander.

To demonstrate why we have need of such in bloggery, let us consider the common, at least by myself, of the categorization of bloggers (and their blogs) based on whether there is recompense or not. In general, paid bloggers write their blogs on the part of or under the sponsership of some organization and hence have many characteristics of traditional journalists including excessive simplification. Unpaid bloggers, on the other hand, tend to be whiners in some dimension and say things as they think them. The taxonomic questions arise when we consider the cases of bloggers who have advertising on their blog sites. Are all of these paid? Or are the ones who only advertise enough to have a revenue neitral blog effectively unpaid, whiners as it were as opposed to simplistic blatherers? And are those who derive a positive cash flow paid?

I await some product of effort to develop this taxonomy. And given the time of quadriyear, it might be especially fitting if the developer were named Truman.

Well, the solar system survived another solar eclipse yesterday. I had to be satisfied with watching it via webcam, the privy purse was a bit too thin – and FD SCP a bit down on the idea – for a jaunt to Canada to burn out my retinas. I did get to emerge from the event to several end of the week gems of the feeds.

One, which goes back to Thorsday, is from the PEW folk. [Link] They have surveyed why folks eat junk food. It is not at all clear whether this was an open survey, where the survey population could just answer the question and the analysts distilled the responses into a taxonomy, or a closed survey where the survey population was presented with a taxonomy and had to pick a state. The responses pretty much distill down to “I’m bad and unrepentant” ranging from junk food is more convenient (0.73), preferred to eat (0.44), brainwashed by advertising (0.37), cheaper (0.24), and ignorance (0.14). I suppose we could tack on a big sign of “laziness” to the “incompetence”, “apathy of health”, and just plain “stupid”, although I am a bit taken with the ignorance claim.

I have always considered this oft decried claim that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” to be specious since ignorance is the most consistent and prevalent reason for human behavior. Studied apathy is second and merits no patience but actual ignorance, in situations where the ignorance is not a matter of laziness but of denial of access is a valid claim. Not everyone can read law books and comprehend them, much less have the leisure to do so. And since the founding fathers did not see fit to place a ceiling on how many laws could be in place or how much information was in those laws, ignorance has to be an excuse among rational humans. Which leads us to the question of whether the legal apparat is rational on any other basis than the subjugation of the members of the organization?

The same may be applied to health. Physicians are too busy or too arrogant to talk foods and health with their patients. Dietitians speak in generalities or specifics that preclude any learning for action. Libraries are going out of business and books on diet – as opposed to dieting – are passe. All one can learn about diet is a book on how to lose weight and/or inches – commonly ignoring the relationship of these – or advertising which is inherently suspect and slanted, propaganda by any other name. So ignorance of diet is one of the shames of our society.

I also observe the strange event of U Washington denying a patient entry to the roster of liver transplant candidates because he uses medical marijuana to alleviate the pain of his condition. [Link] This is not so much a rarity or even noteworthy except for its blatantness of organizational rigidity and self service. We have to wonder how the Yankee government’s communication commission’s condemnation of Comcast has has any effect, especially for the benefit of the citizenry? [Link] The matter now degenerates in justicer meanderings that only assure the continued antipathy of the two organizations and the continued predation of the citizenry.

Alternately NVIDIA has denied that it is abandoning its chipset business. [Link] Given the absolutely abysmal way that their graphics board perform, their total lack of cooperation in the open source environment, and their love affair with box manufacturers, this is almost as odious as Comcast’s depredations. We may only hope that this is one of those instances of organization prevarication as a prelude to collapse.

We are however heartened by news from fair Hahvahd [Link] that being married in middle age decreases the probability of incidence of dementia. We can only hope that the next round of the study will investigate why such is so prevalent in the populations of the two shuls on the Charles.

It is also with no small amount of pride that we note that a small Gawgah town has purchased an emporium of terpsichoreal ecdysistry in lieu of a water treatment plant. [Link] We do have to recall that the state has been rather hard hit by the draught here in the old Confederacy and has to find new ways to serve its electorate.

In a somehow related fashion, I note that the campus of the Black Warrior has instituted a class in “Second Life”. [Link] Apparently the campus’ nationally recognized reputation for dissipativeness and partying is now being expanded into the virtual arena. But I still fondly recall my quantum mechanics classes from Professor Miyagawa. But I am somewhat jealous, the only crip courses I got to take as an undergraduate were two maths courses for education college maths majors – one in numerical methods and the other in linear algebra.

In which regard we are intrigued to read of how U Texas has potentially found a way to trounce AIDS by finding an immutable region in the composition of HIV that is amenable to chemical destruction. [Link] Rather reminds me of shattering wine glasses by finding their resonant frequency, one of the few demonstrations of Dr. Walker in freshman survey of physics that actually worked the way theu were intended.

I find myself the proud (?) holder of a set of FireFox tabs, each an article or web site that I have not disposed of after a desultory weekend. In one sense, the matter elicits a consideration of a rather strange form of property made possible by the modern tabbed browser and in a weak derivative form by the tagging sites such as del.icio.us, which is the one I use to hang onto those web properties that I may want some day to revisit or just cite. The weak derivative nature arises from the ephemerality of the internet and the aspect that whether I shall be able to access these articles sometime in the future is an undefined stochastic, or perhaps, pseudostochastic, process.

In ways not always perceived this consideration of these being property in somewhat the same sense as a treasured flower pressed in a tome or a photograph treasured from years past offers new dimensions for their consideration. I start, not completely arbitrarily, with some research performed at U Florence [Link] that indicates an unpectedly small genetic difference between Cro-Magnons of 28 KYA and our species today. The immediate wonder that such a small difference is what we should expect over such a short time and that such a time is indeed short, is the realization of what this means for our nearest relatives the Neandertals. Such a minor difference is a hard, perhaps telling, blow for any ideas that modern man is a hybrid of early sapiens and then neandertalensis. The harshness of the blow is that we have to come one step closer to dealing with just what was our role in the discorporation of that species? So the momentary relief from the thrill of miscegenation is overwhelmed by considerations of just how neandertalensis met its end; whether we just starved them into extinction by out competing in the environment or that our prey may have included them as well as what we often consider to be lesser animals.

Then I observe work from U Chicago about how the internet is corrupting science. [Link] Perhaps a better question is what is the internet not corrupting? The thesis here is that because on-line searching is more definitive, researchers end up reading fewer papers. This causes me scant consideration. I recall my own research on how nerds – engineers and scientists – use libraries. It was this work that led to the conclusion that technical libraries should not have carpet in the stacks. But what it also told us is that one of the things journeymen and master nerds – the definitions and distinctions are essentially the obvious – do in libraries is browse in something akin to a drunkard’s walk around the locations in the stacks where their particular expertises’ information is located. In journal stacks this means the journals near those that these nerds read and publish in, and similarly for books. One of the things this demonstrates is the advantages of the Library of Congress cataloging taxonomy over the Dewey system. It also illustrates the problems one gets with the internet.

Next, from Michigan State U [Link] we find that obese workers are not lazier, more wackoid, or more disagreeable than nonobese workers. This is another one of those things that make us wonder if there is no communication between academics and real people. Although this may perhaps be a more ringing polemic about the incompetence of a large portion of managers. Competent managers I have had association with have had an outlook that the only restriction about obsese workers is that they cannot be put to work at tasks involving rapid movement. At one time there was a view that obesity was self-inflicted. There has been some recent genetic evidence to the contrary but even so, I should consider it alarming to find one worker, or even one manger, who did not suffer from some form of self-inflicted fault.

It also seems that General Motors has unveiled a windshield to assist people in staying on the road by incorporating edge trackers to staying away from the edge of the road, and infrared sensors for seeing through adverse weather. [Link] The noxious part of the article is that the windshield is aimed at seniors who may have sight impairment. I must immediately consult my ophthalmologist as I was unaware that spectral density of sensitivity degraded particularly with age. Everything I learned in shul was that the visual portion of the spectrum is called that for anthropocentric reasons. However given the behavior of General Motors’ management in recent years such nonsensical outlooks may be the rule. Perhaps the management researchers should research whether we should consider General Motors managers as suffering from some debilitation that precludes our posing trust in them?

And lastly, one of my colleagues, Magnetic Induction Force, pointed out an amusing failure on the American Physics Society’s web site. Seems that the APS is inaugurating a new integration and oversight journal intended to help the society’s members keep up with the diversity of physics information. [Link] This is a wonderfully admirable action, but it was rather compromised by the society making its RSS feed link only available to users of a rather short list of RSS accumulators. It may be that the society has an “official” accumulator but both my colleague and I are unaware of it so perhaps this is one of those inner circle things that are only known to certain members? Anyway, we may enjoy the futility of management that starts a new journal to help its members understand each other and their endeavors and then makes it inaccessible to all but a few. Seems rather Parkinsonian somehow.

Whatever else one may say about the overblown inadequacies of the wonks on the Charles, their daily technology articles have a higher incidence of attention than most. It is thus of some interest to myself that they have an article detailing how the new chief executive (?) of Rooshia has mandated that all government officials have to be computer literate. [Link] What makes this interesting (to me, whence the deviation from my practice of detesting the use of the word interesting) is not the demand – such is hardly surprising given either the nature of hierarchical, directive organizations such as governments or the nature of such in Rooshia – but the derivative considerations.

In particular, the secondary consideration is

what constitutes “computer literacy”?

Back when I pretended to be a CIO this was a matter that perpetually arose, as did the question of what one did about such in an environment dedicated to “dumbing down” users so that the work of the information support infrastructure was simplified to the level of veterinary medicine. (That is, the patient has limited capacity to communicate what is wrong thus eliminating both diversions – other than biting – and communication beyond that of bodily reactions.) In such an environment computer literacy had little meaning in fundamental computer terms and was only well founded in terms of what the organization wanted its members to do with computers – either positive in the sense of organizationally defined productive activities and negative in the sense of unproductive activities.

In such an environment one can immediately define a graded taxonomy based on what is to be accomplished in each of the mandated software clients. The immediate problem is how one accomplishes some level of competency within this emergent taxonomy. To translate that into simple terms, one can establish a hierarchy of literacy but it is not clear that any monies spent on achieving such have anything to do with organizational survival.

Absent such an atmosphere, since it is only extensible in the sense of our earlier blot on the increasing divergence of users into those who use computers as appliances and those who use them as tools and applicable only to the former, one comes down to having some fundamental difficulties in defining what measurable ( or at least, observable) characteristics constitute literacy. To see this consider that literacy in the Yankee republic typically means the ability to read and write American English. A sub taxonomy delineates such capability at the approximate grade levels of mandated public education but become ambiguously undefined at the so-called college level. The latter is largely due to the divergence of what is read at that level – reading classics of literature is very different from reading scientific or engineering refereed journal articles.

Hence we see that if we are only concerned with users who use computers as appliances, and particularly with the standardized clients of an office suite, an email/calendar clients, and a browser, then recognizing whether the box boots and can be used is a binary condition of low level literacy. How one uses the clients defines the higher levels of literacy.

But for those who use computers as tools literacy must be more basic as well as more advanced. It entails not only how the hardware operates and whether there are difficulties with the OS, but how one uses clients outside of the standardized. One rather suspect the latter aspects have to be eluded as in describing college level reading abilities.

Most importantly, none of these discuss the role of the large mammal in the enclosure, whether that mammal be an elephant, a camel, or a primate. In particular, what is the relationship between the ability to write computer code that executes and literacy? In my youth, this ability was the effective binary distinction of computer literacy. It distinguished senior professors and managers who were codeless from precocious undergraduates who coded in the same way that adults who could not set the clock on their VCRs were belittled by children who could. Caste does not always have to make sense but it does have a patent effect.

The problem with using coding capability as the knife switch of literacy is that it eliminates rather too many of the planet’s users. Of all those that own computers today, or have jobs that deposit a computer on their desks, something on the order of less than 0.02 of that number can write code. The number shrinks to about half if we disallow those who can only write macros in spreadsheets. Insightfully, these demographics are almost perfectly consistent with an effective aristocracy, that is, one not degenerated by Malthusian economics over a period of centuries.

The basic problem with such however, is that this also decomposes the existing caste lines. Of those who are members of the information support apparat, the ones who play the rolls of veterinaries rather than pets, less than half are coders. Thus to use coding as the knife switch is to rive the instrumentality of power. To fail to do so leaves the entirety of society open to inconsistencies, users who are supposed to be speechless fungi kept as decorative serfs but actually capable of negating the reality of governance at the instance of a whim. Such is not new, it permeates the conspiracy theories of secret masters of society. But in this case it consititues such an inconsistency as to leave only tacit agreements of non-acknowledgment.

One of the aspects of living in Greater Metropolitan Arab, which is a part of the republic’s hinterland and hence being an occupant thereof is that one is inherently a minority in the demographics of our modern nation. Of course, being a physicist in this country, or a scientist, or even a college graduate in fact makes one a minority.

I do not mention this because the present interminable race (misnamed unless one is racing turtles it would seem) for the office of chief executive seems to be increasingly about minorities. Indeed, the population has been slice and diced to such an extent that no majority exists so the real question that shall remain unanswered will be what minorities actually matter.

But I do have a suggestion on the matter of the race, if not that of minorities. The suggestion is that we need a constitutional amendment that all primaries must be conducted on the same day and that day must be sixty and ninety days of the general election. And in the interest of promoting some real competition, since the current situation is dominated by two antediluvian parties, would be that no candidate is allowed to spend any more money than the candidate – partisan or independent – who has the least money, and any candidate who spends more than this or goes into debt is summarily disqualified.

As you can gather from this, folks in the hinterland have a somewhat different view of things than the urbanite majority. Indeed, we tend to view many things differently. For example, the news that there is racism in Sowth Alibam [Link] is not surprising. Indeed, what the reportage let seep through is that racism in Alibam is not just a matter of caucasian attitude towards other folks. Its attitudes that span all the possible “racial” combinations included same on same. But what is exciting here is the question of when racism falls apart and just becomes just plain bias? I keep hoping that the Yankee government will get rid of the ridiculous taxonomy but evidently so long as we have demagogic ministers this will be impossible.

But we did get the opportunity for what may be a valuable lesson this week in the video and print coverage of the situation in Myanmar. [Link] The lesson is that we cannot permit ourselves to be governed by any sub-organization that has the benefit of the organization of greater importance than that of the citizens. The list of such is long: the military; the religious; partisan politicians; and probably bureaucrats. Somehow however, I doubt we will learn this lesson very well.

Dirt as a word holds rather a special pride of place in the Sowth. Despite its dictionary definition,

Dirt 1. Any foul of filthy substance, as excrement, mud, dust, etc.; whatever, adhering to anything, renders it foul or unclean; earth; as, a wagonload of dirt. [1913 Webster]

dirt may more simply be thought of down here in the old Confederacy as what most folks call soil, ground that plants are grown in, ground where agriculture is practiced.

Hence our use of the term “dirty” is also a bit different from the norm. Again, the dictionary tells us that

Dirty 1. Defiled with dirt; foul; nasty; filthy; not clean or pure; serving to defile; as, dirty hands; dirty water; a dirty white. –Spenser. [1913 Webster]

but we really mean by dirty that dirt has become part of their composition and hence they have aspects or characteristics of dirt. Quite obviously this may be meant either as positive or negative. In the latter it refers to a person who has the good aspects of soil and Southron existence, of providing for family and community, a term indicating one who is honorable and productive. The negative side implies one who has descended into dirt poverty, who is a burden on himself and others who will neither change nor die, one who is actually evil in their perversity and depravity.

If one listens to/reads carefully the verbal/printed works of Garrison Keeler, one hears/reads a couple of vignettes about the people of the town of Lake Woebegone and Lutefisk, the Norwegian preparation of junk fish using lye. The modern consumer proletariat of the Yankee republic, perhaps repulsed by Keeler’s “egg head” elitism, is more familiar with Lutefisk from the various food travel programs on television that seem devoted to ridiculing the other than ordinary and any foodstuff not vended by a national fast food chain restaurant. Few however can lay claim to having sampled, much less made a regular dietary item of, this gelatinous white stuff that has an aroma not normally associated with ingestion.

I got to sample it when I was a graduate student at the campus of the Boneyard, U Illinois. At that time the population was predominantly from places like Illinois, Indiana, Ohio with a scattering of folks from foreign places like Minnesota, Alibam, Maine, and Europe. One of the helpful activities of the administration was an official Foreign Students Association that provided help in dealing with Illinois academic and real society and culture and fostered a strong sense of us versus them among the furrin studints. I especially recall one lecture/demonstration on how to shop for groceries at a supermarket. I especially recall being asked by the lecturer, a female professor from the shul of home economics whether we had supermarkets in Alibam. She was somewhat outraged when I informed her that the first supermarket, a Piggly Wiggly, had opened in Gawgah. To give her credit, she did try to recovery by asking, in a broad plains accent, what a piggly wiggly was.

One of the other activities of the association was to have one of the students host a luncheon once a month when “native” foods would be served. When it was the turn of our representative from Minnesota, a stalwart son of Norway, at least genetically, we were served lutefisk among other delicacies. Happily I had acces to reagent grade ethanol in the laboratory and could gargle the aftertaste away. Still, not all that bad when compared to things like boiled catfish or shad-eel gumbo.

Now, however, I am pleased to read from Concord, New Hampshire of efforts to offer a new form of corpse preparation – Lutehuman. [Link] As one might expect from this the process involves dissolving the soft remains in Lye under conditions of high temperature and pressure, something like Kentucky Fried Chicken without the spices. As one who considers the current practices of internment – adamantine coffins and an aversion to decomposition – suicidal as a species, I am joyful to find an alternative to the almost equally environmentally damaging practice of cremation. And with this alternative one has the option, I expect, of having the bones ground down for use as fertliizer, or being strung as a keepsake. Somehow the idea of my daughter having my skeleton hanging from a hook in a corner, perhaps even planted with a climbing ivy to soften the aspect, has a certain macabre attraction that I will be unable to enjoy.

I am however able to enjoy an official pronouncement of the Norwalk, Connecticut government that “poop happens” [Link] in response to some female denizen of New Yawk who took exception to the presence of stercus canem on the city’s sidewalks. Apparently the woman’s toddler stepped in the “puppy poop” and thereby ruined the family’s outing. My initial question is whether this consititues some form of negligence on the woman’s part in the raising of her child. Perhaps the appropriate services should take her and the child into custody to determine if she is a fit mother and is not abusing the child. I know that in some circles in the Sowth raising a child in New Yawk City is considered child abuse. Of course, some of us also consider what goes on in the public shuls, especially with Every Child Left Behind, to be such.

The life lesson learned, of course, don;t take your children to Norwalk (or the aquarium?) if you can’t handle befouled shoes. Lock them up in a Skinner box until they are 18 and then throw them, box and all, into a river.

On a note of “the smell of Napalm in the morning”, I note that MalWart has pulled back from Chicago and is making do with opening new cancers stores in the suburbs. [Link] Seems that the city fathers, in particular Daley the Younger does not to want to risk the ire of the unions by permitting the implicitly and egregiously aunion MalWart into the Windy City. The immediate question one wishes to ask the Emperor Daley and his Senators is whether the unions are Red or Green? And is MalWart the opposite? Or is there some other dimensionality here?

Given MalWart’s capacity as the premiere of the (not so) hidden masters of the American Consumerate, one has to hypothesize that they are Red and the unions are (somehow?) Green? This seems especially confusing given MalWart’s recent shift to advertising how “green” some of its house products are. May we also hypothesize that sustainability is the last refuge of a repulsed, possibly decaying, corporate oligarchy? Something akin to patriotism for a scoundrel or religion for a politician? [Link]

On which we note that the former First Lady has now come into open season for criticism by her own party for having played the “race” card. [Link] My first thought here is accompanied by a shake of my head, a natural result of my combination of healthy cynicism and a realist recognition that we all came from Africa, at least insofar as current scientific evidence supports, and thus the whole “race” thing is an invention of basic human insecurities and the “us-them” phenomena. A contributor here is also that insofar as I can tell from reading anthropology texts the taxonomy of race as used in Amerika is as flawed as its predilection for Intelligent Design, which gives rise to a sneaking suspicion that the two are linked.

I should also not be construed as supporting either the former First Lady, or her husband, the behavior of both lending substance to the theory I have heard advanced that the conflict in Arkansas during the Second American Revolution was not a matter of the two sides fighting over which would have control of the state as fighting over which could be rid of the state. I dismiss this theory categorically inasmuch as I had a good friend as an undergraduate at the campus of the Black Warrior, one “Smiling John”, who was a native son of the state of Arkansas. Smiling John was no named because he was never observed in four years of undergraduate attendance of smiling when he was sober, and only occasionally when inebriated, which was a common condition on Friday and Saturday evenings. Since Smiling John was another chemistry major he had the usual access to supplies of reagent grade ethanol, which appropriately diluted with fruit juice or soda was admirably suited to a “serious drunk”. Such potage was dictated by the fact that what beer was available was imported from Mississippi and had an underlying aroma that in subsequent years I found could be compared to that of Lutefisk. Probably some judicious use of Lye in the brewing process that Milwaukee is either ignorant, or reticent, of.

Nor do I wish to support her opponent now apparently evolving into the (modern) democrat candidate for the office of chief executive. What I do note however is that he offers the usual, albeit in this case intensified, aspect of paradox of most politicians. The matter here is that the senator espouses an ambiguous and unspecified program of change whose few revealed aspects have indicated to be destructive and oppressive when the matter is one of the opposite. What the American electorate seems disconcerted with is itself change and thus what the senator seems to be offering is a change from that change. SO the paradox is that he is offering what is not desired but it is attractive to people who wish the particular change they are experiencing to go away and are perhaps thus desirous of conservation or even simplification? One is also taken with the aspects of the candidates ambiguity which rather reminds one of a stercus canem in that it has the visual appearance of being without color but if one measures its spectrum one finds it radically different from that of a black body in the physics sense. Thus we have a uncertain proposal of unknown content that on the surface appears to be unphysical. Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was right in saying that a technology sufficiently advanced was indistinguishable from magic?