Trigger Warnings--A Compromise?

 Saw a tweet by FIRE arguing against a call at my alma mater for mandatory trigger warnings.  Here's a piece in the college newspaper arguing against it.

I can sympathize with someone whose emotions are so easily triggered as the result of some trauma in the past, but as an old fart, my knee-jerk reaction is: tough it out, snow flake.

I seems to me there's a reasonable compromise: FIRE agrees a professor is perfectly free to give trigger warnings.  I'd suggest requiring every professor to have a policy on trigger warnings that's announced in the first class of the semester. That way students have fair warning of what the rules are.  If the professor is my age, and with my views, they can drop out of the class (though after it becomes a requirement, it will be easy enough to include the professor's policy in the write-up of the course). If the professor is a "woke" member of a younger generation and wants to commit to giving trigger warnings, fine.

The Lesser Importance of Libraries?

 Much concern these days over which books are in school libraries and which are not. It's warranted: the presence of a book in a school library signals something. 

But these days hasn't it a diminished importance?  When I went to school the library was my source for magazines to read and books to take out. I didn't have other sources, unless my family could subscribe to a magazine or buy the book.  My appetite for reading material far exceeded the available money my family could spend. 

Today's youth have access to cellphones and printed material on the internet. I realize the material differs from the books whose presence in school libraries is currently questioned, but still.

Back in the day the two sources of perversive material were the library and the mass of rumor and fact passed down from older kids to younger kids. Today it's just a click  away.  

The bottomline seems to me that those trying to ban books are wasting their energy on the lesser threat, not the major one, while those fighting bans often exagerate the significance of the ban. 

Government Budgeting

 Was alerted to this substack post going back in history to efforts in federal budgeting and spending.

As I commented, I didn't follow some of the argument, but it triggered memories.  Back in the old days ASCS could use CCC funds as a piggy bank and its status to bypass some restrictions.  For example, if we had a rush print job for program signup involving the notices of bases and yields and the signup form, the print branch could justify bypassing the Government Printing Office's rules by claiming the material was to implement CCC programs, enabling them to go directly to a printer. 

Details of interest only to oddball types like moi.

The Port Royal Experiment and Phonics

 Stumbled across an odd fact today.  I've been reading Roger Lowenstein's "Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War."  It's interesting.  A main character for most of the book is Sec. of Treasury Chase, who ends up designing the "National Bank System" and also had charge mostly for the Sea Island plantations after the Union Army took the islands.  This led to what is called the Port Royal Experiment, giving the government the problem of how to handle the freed slaves and the occupied plantations.  It was a forerunner of Reconsttuction's issues.

One problem was teaching adult blacks to read. A teacher was John Zachos, a Greek whose father was killed in the Greek rebellion in 1824, and was brought to the US by an American who supported the rebellion.  He wrote a book, the first book the blacks had, entitled: " The Phonic Primer and Reader, A National Method of teaching Reading by the Sounds of the Letters without altering the Orthography. Designed Chiefly for the Use of Night-Schools Where Adults are Taught, and for the Myriads of Freed Men and Women, Whose First Rush from the Prison-House of Slavery is to the Gates of the Temple of Knowledge?"

The Great 20th Century

 It seems we often look at some statistics the wrong way.  For example, it's common among the optimists among us to brag about the improvement in living standards by citing the reduction in the percentage of people in poverty.  But I think it would be more impressive to look at it the other way.

So I  asked ChatGpt to compare the number of humans above the poverty line in 1900 with the number in 2020. I can't guarantee the accuracy of the numbers but what it gave me (using World Book numbers of "extreme poverty") was 150 million in 1900 and 7.1 billion in 2020.

That's a whole lot of people who might be happy.

ChatGpt's Errors

 My cousin and I were discussing the early textile mills in New England.  I thought I remembered Europeans visiting the mills, particularly Lowell, and writing about them.  So I asked ChatGpt.  I can't copy the response, which is curious since I've done it before, but it listed Harriet Martineau, Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur as a French writer, Isaac Weld, and William Strickland.

The Strickland reference is definitely wrong; he didn't write the book listed.  Both Weld and Strickland are cited as visiting New England in the 1790s, which seems too early for the mills.  Martineau seems dubious based on the description in Wikipedia, as does Crevecoeur. 

It looks to me that ChatGpt confused opinions on slavery which all four people expressed with visits to mills,

Why Working for FSA Is Worse These Days

 Sec. Vilsack testifying, link was posted to the Facebook FSA group. At the start he observes that it's no longer true that the county executive director of the FSA office is among the best paid in the county and that serving the public by working for the government has lost some cachet.

Iraq in Retrospective

 This is a comment I posted on Kevin Drum's post looking back at Iraq, which you should read:

"Wish I was blogging then so I'd have a good record of what I was thinking. As best I can remember I was dubious of Afghanistan, given the Soviets failure there, our failure in Vietnam, etc. But it went surprisingly well, and the aftermath seemed to be working well with Karzai getting support.

So with Iraq I was torn. The Post had a reporter who was filing good stories challenging the official line. I still had some skepticism about war. But on the other hand Bush did have Blair on board, and Blair seemed capable and had worked well with Clinton. So I think my attitude when the bombs began to fall was to the effect: I don't think I'd do this if I had the power, but I don't so I hope you're right and can do as well in Iraq as you seem to have done in Afghanistan.?

Why Grist Mills?

  Roots of Progress is an interesting effort I follow.  This particular post  roused my usual contrarian reaction, but also triggered a question, specifically this:

" you should take into account that some types of labor were automated very early on, via wind and water mills"

My question is why?  And who?

ChatGpt says, when asked how different civilizations ground their grain:

Ancient Egyptians: The ancient Egyptians used a hand-powered quern to grind their grains. The quern consisted of two flat stones, one placed on top of the other. The top stone was rotated back and forth to grind the grain into flour.

Ancient Greeks and Romans: The ancient Greeks and Romans used a rotary mill to grind their grains. The mill consisted of a circular stone wheel with a handle on one side. The grain was poured into a hole in the center of the wheel and was ground between the wheel and a stationary stone.

Native Americans: Native Americans used a mortar and pestle to grind their grains. The mortar was a bowl-shaped stone, and the pestle was a long, cylindrical stone used to crush the grain.

Chinese: The Chinese used a stone mill to grind their grains. The mill consisted of two horizontal stones with a vertical stone in the center. The grain was poured into a hole in the center stone and was ground between the stones.

Mesoamericans: The Mesoamericans used a metate to grind their grains. The metate was a flat stone slab, and the grain was ground using a handheld grinding stone called a mano.

Overall, each civilization developed methods that were suited to their particular needs and resources.

Based on skimpy research by google, it seems there's a transition from rubbing two stones together, to a rotary grinder hand powered and then to the water/wind driven grist mills. 

Did women initiate these inventions?

Me and Chocolate Milk

 This piece about the controversy over including chocolate milk in the school lunch program reminded me of something.

Growing up, dad would bring up some milk from the morning milking which went into the refrigerator.  As it was raw milk, the cream rose to the top.  Mom would skim the cream off for use in tea, coffee, cereal.  We'd drink the milk remaining, the skim milk. So I was accustomed to the taste and texture of skim milk.

When dad drove the truck to Greene, our market town for feed from the Grange-League-Federation (co-op) store and bigger grocery stores than our local one, we'd often go in the morning and get lunch at a diner.  My order was always the same, tuna fish sandwich and chocolate milk.  I disliked the taste and texture of the homogenized milk, so chocolate milk was the only thing I'd drive.

The Decline of Flexibility

 Paul Krugman has a piece on the declining flexibility, looking at the supply of artillery shells for Ukraine and shipping containers during the pandemic. Economic theory says that capital should move quickly to solve shortages,  but Krugman says it's not happening now.

I don't think he says explicitly but I think part of the problem is the increasing complexity of manufactured products. The modern PC is much more complicated than the hand crank adding machine I used in an early job.  A modern artillery shell is much more complicated than the comparable shell in the Civil War or even WWII. 

The more complex the product, the more steps in the manufacturing process, the more suppliers in the network, the more opportunity for Moore's law to work. 

Depositors Are Not Stockholders

 I think it's true in 2008 many stockholders were wiped out.  I know we owned GM stock and lost it. The same thing applied to some of the financial institutions--like Lehman.  I think some banks did not go bankrupt; they were for pennies on the dollar by another bank. That means where an investor might have had Bank X stock worth $50 in 2007, when it was bought out the investor may have gotten $2.

How Life Improves

 Kottke has this video showing a 2009 car colliding with a 1959 car.  

Chatgpt claims: According to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the United States has decreased from 5.39 in 1960 to 1.11 in 2019.

Cultural Appropriation

 It's bad if an acting role which is specific to an ethnicity, culture, or gender identity is filled by a straight white person?  But it's good if the musical 1776 or Hamilton is performed by a diverse group of actors?

In the ideal world we shouldn't bar anyone from auditioning for a performance of any role in a standard* play or film.  And we should allow a director to intentionally cast against type if she wants a nonstandard* play or film.

But our world isn't ideal, so how do we deal with that?  We know the available roles aren't representative of the world: too many sexy blondes under 30; too few women over 80, etc. We also know roles vary greatly in the degree to which they're specific to a particularl identity.  So I think the reality is we work towards the ideal, knowing we'll never get there.  You tilt the playing field a bit, or like a guerilla, advance here and withdraw there, testing the limits of what's possible, which means what people will support with money and time.  

* "standard" means a play or film whose casting would be described by a critic without attention to the identity characteristics of the actor.  So a director who wants to try a Shakespearean play with all male actors (as it would have been in his time) is doing a nonstandard version.

Standard Time on the Moon

 The NYTimes has an article on a proposal for establishing a time standard for the moon.  With the number of different nations doing activity there (South Korea?), presumably applying their local time to their work there seems to be a need.

It's further complicated because, as the article notes in passing, clocks run faster on the moon!

I had to ask Chatgpt for an explantion, which is:

"Clocks do not actually run faster on the Moon. However, they do appear to run faster when measured from Earth due to the effects of general relativity. 

According to general relativity, time appears to move slower in the presence of a strong gravitational field. The strength of Earth's gravitational field is greater than that of the Moon's, so time moves more slowly on Earth than on the Moon.

This means that if you were to compare the ticking of two identical clocks, one on Earth and one on the Moon, the clock on the Moon would actually tick slightly slower than the clock on Earth. However, because the Moon is much less massive than Earth, the difference in the strength of the gravitational field between the two is relatively small.

The net effect is that when we measure the ticking of a clock on the Moon from Earth, we observe that it ticks slightly faster than an identical clock on Earth due to the time dilation effects of general relativity. This effect is small, however, and only becomes noticeable with extremely precise measurements."

Myth America III

 Next two chapters in Myth America are on Native Americans, by Ari Kelman, and Emigration, by Erika Lee.

The first seems loosely focused around that idea that Native Americans aren't "vanishing", as Dee Brown and the recently retired ad would say.  The second is mostly about the nativism with which those who lived in the US greeted arriving immigrants, sometimes barring entry to groups or limiting numbers. 

I have a problem with this sentence: "The United States has been a particularly powerful actor shaping the movement of peoples by causing human displacement through war and foreign and economic policies.." The author does not support this assertion; indeed she doesn't discuss it at all that I see.  The problem is it's not true for most of our history, at least as far as war goes.  Immigrants have come from Germany, Italy, Philippines, Korea, Japan, China, and Vietnam--all countries where we've fought wars. But in all the cases the immigration was either the movement of the losers to their supporter (i.e, Vietnamese, Hmong, Chinese) or movement because the war and subsequent occupation troops established pathways for the movement. 

Coincidentally the NYTimes has an article today discussing another immigration myth, that immigrants come and stay.  In fact through much of our history many immigrants have left. That continues today.  The pattern described in the article seems to be: come to US and work for the money; return to the homeland for family and retirement. Prof. Lee does not mention this, though the fact of immigrants leaving undermine the myth that America is so  great no one would leave once here; 

Fading Families

 Don't remember what I've written here about genealogical research.  My sister did a lot during a year when she was no longer teaching school.  That was back in 1978, long before the internet and the extensive digitization of sources.

A digression: genealogical research appeals to the sort of mind who reads detective stories.  Back in the day there was great satisfaction in figuring out connections, assessing what the probabilities were when faced with incomplete evidence, etc. Unless you participated in a group devoted to genealogy, you didn't know whether you were the first to find your great great grandmother, or had some cousins preceded you.  All that is, I think, rapidly vanishing.  With ancestry.com and family search, once a connection is made it's visible to anyone in the world who wants to look. And with digitized sources, rapidly expanding to all the printed matter which still exists, and searching, no longer do you have to hit the libraries and local historical societies as did my sister; just click the mouse and pay the subscription fees.

Back tot he title.  One set of clues to ancestry was generational naming patterns. These days the Social Security administration releases statistics on naming patterns, tracing the popularity of names.  (I suspect there's been a recent drop in babies named Karen.) In the old days when family was more important, babies were often named according to a pattern.  For example, my great grandfather named his first son Andrew after his father, and his daughter Sarah after his mother.  In Scots Irish families the next set of children would likely be named after their mother's parents, and so on. The pattern was strong enough  you could use it to deduce genealogy, at least in the 19th century   (By the end of the century it was fading; while my father was named after his mother's father, and my uncle had his paternal grandmother's maiden name for his middle name, my uncle's first name and my aunt's name have no identifiable history in the family

We don't have such large families these days, and the pattern of naming has gone. Does that mean that family feeling is less, or just that a custom has faded away?  

Ask Not

Much discussion on social media about declining mental health, particularly among the young. I'd venture to suggest that the distance our society has traveled is measured by JFK"s words: "Ask not what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for the country"

Two points about the sentence:

1. the emphasis on "doing'
2. seeing the individual as being involved with/part of a greater entity--the country.

I don't have a quote to point to for today's society, but I think:

1. the emphasis has shifted more to "being" (authentic) 
2. the individual is now more separated from larger entities, whether country, occupation, or religion.

I'd guess the evolution is inevitable, caused by changes in the economy, in technology, in beliefs, but it will take society a good while to adjust to the changes.

Was Vertical Farming a Bubble?

 That seems to be the argument of this piece.

While I've been skeptical of it, I think it's premature.  Lots of innovations have had their ups and downs before becoming stabilized.  Humans react with enthusiasm to new ideas and overpromise.  I've seen that in the 1950's with atomic energy, off and on with computers, with the internet, self-driving cars.

I suspect when the technology winnows out the impractical and too costly ideas to arrive at an industry standard it will reduce the capital costs.  Experience will also teach the best locations for vertical farming operations--how cheap the land must be, how close to population centers.  Genetics may tweak the plants for best production under lights.  And the switch away from fossel fuels may reduce energy prices.

All that said, based on an impulse to be fair, I'm still feeling some Schadenfreude.

I Love Armies

 The first two paragraphs of a NYTimes article on getting Leopard tanks for Ukraine:

" Nearly a month after Berlin gave European allies permission to send German-made tanks to Ukraine, the flow of tanks so many leaders vowed would follow seems more like a trickle.

Some nations have discovered that the tanks in their armory don’t actually work or lack spare parts. Political leaders have encountered unanticipated resistance within their own coalitions, and even from their defense ministries. And some armies had to pull trainers out of retirement to teach Ukrainian soldiers how to use old-model tanks."

I particularly laughed at the second sentence: maintenance is always problematic, particularly in armies which haven't fought wars.