We’re not sending our best

We’re not sending our best (to top tier universities) and it is because of legacy admissions policies and generational wealth. OK, fine, people with money can send their kids to any university they choose… nothing wrong with that, even though “generational wealth” is a biased privilege. But the people lucky enough to have had their ancestors go to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, get another super leg up (in addition to the money thing). Their marginally competent offspring get preferential admission. Legacy admissions might be one of our worst problems in America. When an incompetent wastrel scion of a businessman runs their father’s company into the ground, the company suffers, the employees go south, but ultimately, the wastrel suffers as well. That’s a level of feedback that is lauded by our free market, competition, and the red, white, and blue American capitalistic way. It is part of the self-regulating “floating all boats thing.” Really conservative goodness. But what happens when a lawyer, judge, banker, or member of Congress fails due to incompetence? They are all playing with somebody else’s money. They may suffer but their clients suffer more. What happens when most of the lawyers and judges are in their positions due to generational privilege? Legacy admissions at our finest institutions of learning are allowing nepotism to overload our most educated and prestigious class of people (and the important positions they hold) with the sons and daughters of the sons and daughters of the lucky ones who got through the door years ago. Now it's not other people's money; it's their freedoms and our democracy. Forget meritocracy; think royalty. We can just all eat cake... or something. The solution? Maybe the Supreme Court could declare legacy admissions to be unconstitutional, thereby eliminating this type of “affirmative action”. I believe that it was Carl Sagan who suggested that, if given a fair playing field, an average Filipino street urchin would probably triumph over most of our privileged American youth. We have our own “urchins” here already, why not give them an even chance?

Alito’s “rebuttal”

Please, please, please, will a professor of logic at any level of academia; please take out your red pencil and diligently parse Supreme Justus Alito’s “rhetorical rebuttal” to the statements (that were not yet even published) by ProPublica? Regardless of your opinion of what Justus Alito did, if his “rebuttal” (which he preemptively printed in the Wall Street Journal), is an indication of his understanding of logic and the Aristotelian elements of fallacious rhetoric; we are all in a great deal more trouble than we have even begun to understand. If he applies this level of critical thinking to his day-to-day SCOTUS duties, our problems are not political; they are cognitive. I believe he would fail Logic 101 at a community college.

Do Not think of a white horse, or a Bell Curve

 A bell curve is the standard distribution of a single variable over the range of its amplitude among the total population of the data set.  It's a "bell" because, when graphed, almost every individual variable has a very low number of examples at both extremes... for things we like, think "bad" and "good".  Very rare or very likely.  The middle part is where most of the data cluster.  The shape of the graph looks like a bell, sometimes tall and sometimes flat, occasionally lopsided.  Now think about what might be being measured.

How long do cats live, or how many kittens are in a litter.  You can measure (or at least try to measure) anything.  How fast do humans talk, or how tall are boys at age four, or how well they do on an IQ Test, or how often do they pick their noses.

Now, when you walk down the street and look at the people you live among, you might not want to consider some traits that, like virtually everything else, align on a bell curve.   For example, how likely people are to believe in the moon landing in 1969, or how racist that guy in a red hat is likely to be, or think that Hitler was right about lots of stuff, or... hear me out here,

how assiduously they wipe their anus after defecating.  

We really don't like to absorb what statistics tell us; maybe doing so is too painful.  We humans (340,000,000 of us in the USA) fall into a broad range of things that can be measured.  Things, like, what is the reading grade level and how many people might be illiterate.  Or how likely people are to know the name of the president of the United States right now, or how many people believe the crazy Q ANON stuff.

Just don't think about that lefthand side of the bell curve where the "very bad" people are.  And white horses, don't think about a white horse.

You're welcome, I think.

Free Speech

 

I just learned that there are women out there who will troll my wife because of things I write here.  

Hurray for (their) free speech.

You going to eat that?

 

A number of years ago I was listening to a program on the radio broadcast by our local NPR station from James Madison University.  The program consisted of a live interview of an academic conducting research into inter-species gene transfer from humans to swine.  Specifically, they were trying to perfect the transfer of a healthy human gene, for the production of insulin, into pigs for the purpose of inexpensive high volume insulin production and a significant reduction of cost. 

Years ago, I had worked for the USDA plant Research Facility in Beltsville, MD.  While there I worked on a great number of experiments into various treatments for fungal plant diseases of crop plants.  Most of the time the plants, treatments, and fungal infections were conducted in petri dishes and on seeds, but sometimes the experiments resulted in fully mature field grown crops that yielded harvestable quantities of “home grown veggies”.  When the tests were over, we often took the resultant food home and ate it. I got a lot of free string beans that way, and no one there turned their noses up at free the food.

This experience prompted me to call into the NPR program and ask: “How many human genes can you put into a pig before you don’t want to eat it?”   The radio went ominously silent for a long time, radio “dead air” of several long seconds.  Somewhat flustered, the folks on the program assured me that nobody would ever be eating the experimental pigs.  I, of course knew better.  Human nature being what it is, if the process they were proposing were ever to become commonplace; there would be some pigs eaten by humans.  What this means, I’m sure I don’t know.

Just recently, I listened to another NPR program where researchers were successfully translating “pig language”, the grunts and groans and squeals, into messages in human language.  The hope was that pig farmers would be able to better understand and respond to the pigs wants, complaints, and needs.  Presumably, the farmers might also be able to communicate back to the pigs with their wants, complaints, and needs.  The obvious question then becomes:

“How many people want to eat pigs that you can talk to?”

It’s convenience that wastes our efforts to achieve a sustainable planet.

 

I’ve written about the problems with solid waste in our society and I’ve recently seen discussions about our “waste” problems.  I said “solid waste” because we are also wasting our time and efforts if we don’t recognize something:  All the strategies to confront the problem are piecemeal reactions to the symptom (the waste) and not the overall cause:  Convenience itself.

We’ve all heard about indigenous people who can live in harmony with natural processes, but population density is the enemy of sustainability.  Because of it, it just isn’t convenient to deal with our waste stream in a sustainable manner.  

You can’t have composing in the city or even in the suburbs (if your neighbors are finicky).  Other products come in convenient packaging with multiple types of plastic, most of which gets contaminated with food waste.  Convenient “pop top” tin cans leave lots of food waste inside unless one inconveniently spends a lot of time getting the food out of them.  Meat products come with cosmetic diapers and multiple layers of plastic that a day after use, stink, forcing you to get rid of them fast.  They can’t be recycled and serve almost no purpose other than removing our consciousness from the fact that we’re dealing with the inside of a formerly living animal.  It all has to go to the landfill, and it has to go there quickly.

In rural areas we can grow our own food and compost all organic matter.  If the packaging of the things we still have to buy from the grocery were to be better, (do we really need six kinds of plastic containers?  I’ve seen individually wrapped apples!) our landfill needs would minimal, and the landfills would have a better quality of waste.

Online shopping is convenient.  The multiple boxing of the products is waste.  The two-and-a-half-ton truck that delivers a package of eyedrops or a pair of shoes wastes a lot of fuel for a few ounces, sometimes, most of the ounces are packaging. 

Marvin Harris in Cannibals and Kings, The origin of cultures, wrote that the invention of agriculture lead to most individuals actually needing more hours of work per day just to feed themselves.  The fact that it may have also led to civilization as we know it because it allowed for specialization is great; but it failed to lead to a component of our communities that specializes in waste reduction and disposal. 

It just wasn’t convenient.

Why is it so dark? when does the sun come back?

 Wait!   Dec. 5 is the earliest sunset; the shortest day and longest night is on December 21 (sometimes dec. 20 or 22) and the latest sunrise isn’t until Jan. 6?  How can that be?

My friend, Bill has suggested the twin holidays of “Quitzel” for December 5 and “Startzel” for January 6.  I call the time between these dates “the Pit”, it is our time with the most depressing days of darkness.  But the apparently random dates and disconnect from our clock time?  Have you ever seen the asymmetrical figure eight on a globe?  That’s the analemma.  You can make one by marking the tip of the shadow from a short pole at 12:00 noon every few days for a year (here’s a link to Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma).  So, the length of daylight changes throughout the year, and 12 noon isn’t even in the middle of that day!

Our orbit isn’t a perfect circle, and the sun isn’t in the middle of it.  The reason for the asymmetry in daylength around 12:00 noon and the date of the solstice is the asymmetry of earth’s orbit and the acceleration of our planet as it approaches its nearest to the sun at perihelion on Dec. 20, 21, 22 (date dependent on where we are among non-leap years and leap year).  Remember, our 12:00 noon is a construct defined by our steadily running clocks, and a year is 365.24 days long.  The length of daylight from the sun isn’t steady.  Our orbit adds (or subtracts? I think) one whole day/night cycle during our year.  How much lighttime each day is changed depending on where we are in our orbit.

The velocity of Earth is at its maximum at the point of perihelion, therefore the approximately (average) 12 hours of light in a day due to Earth's rotation gets changed by the greater fraction of that extra day and Earth's progress in its orbit during that 24-hour period of clock time (more gets done on the orbit per "clockday".  Of course, this is complicated by the fact that the actual "sun day" is also changed because the angle toward the sun is changing rapidly as 12:00 noon rolls around...  “Straight up at the sun at noon is changing, we’re moving perpendicular to that direction.  It is further complicated because it is the point in time in which Earth's acceleration (angular momentum) is greatest which brings relativistic time dilation into its maximum.  Even time itself isn't symmetrical throughout the year! 

The 23.5-degree tilt of Earth’s axis makes all the numbers different dependent on how far you are from the equator… but that’s another problem. 

 Do do do do do, up ahead! there's a signpost... you're in the Twilight Time Zone.