Michael Flynn's Blog, page 55

The Future That Was

The Age of Romance

PALEOFUTURE clues us in to the way the future was. 

In the year 1933 physician Ira S. Wile predicted what marriage would be like in 2033.  In his day, Darwinism was all the rage, and all the Best Thinkers were looking forward to the day when marriage would be put on a rational and scientific basis.  In this future, there would be

"a bureau of records under government control that would begin monitoring people the day they were born. ...Everything about a person would be recorded; from someone's physical and mental defects at birth to the subjective progress and imperfections of that person throughout their life. Then, when someone wished to be married, they would be assessed by bureaucrats and found a suitable mate based upon case cards that have been cross-indexed against members of the opposite sex. These assessments would be made based on class and desirable physical and mental traits." 

Bonner: Each baby, when it's born, must donate some of his sex cells, sperm or eggs, and these are put in a deep freeze and just kept. The person leads his life, and dies. And after he's all dead and gone, so the heat of passion is taken out of the matter, a committee meets and studies his life.

Cronkite: So during his lifetime then, he hasn't had any children?

Bonner: He's been sterilized, and hasn't had any children in the normal way. After he's dead and gone, the committee meets and reviews his life and asks, 'Would we like to have some more people like him?' If the answer's no they take out his sex cells of the deep freeze and throw them away. But if the answer's yes then they use him to fertilize eggs similarly selected on the basis of review and validation of a person's contributions during his lifetime. He just doesn't get to brazenly go out and propagate his own genes without assuring himself and everyone else that they're the best possible genes.

I am reminded of something which IIRC P.A.M.Dirac once said of a physics paper.  "It isn't even wrong!"  Perhaps Bonner was unable to pick up chicks and comforted himself with a committee posthumously selecting his uebermenschliche superior genes.  Or maybe not.  Curiously, his obituary in the NYTimes made no mention of his views on this show; so maybe they were just for show.  

In 1930, a movie Just Imagine just imagined life in 1980, fifty years in the future.  Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic a scant three years before, but the movie imagined that huge "air-liners" would do so routinely.  However, in 1980 there would be "a marriage tribunal which confers a desired maiden on the most worthy of her suitors."  In the movie, the hero J-21 (John Garrick), an ocean air-liner pilot, loves LN-18 (Maureen O'Sullivan), but a newspaper publisher MT-3 [image error](Kenneth Thomson), wins the tribunal's approval. J-21 must prove to the tribunal that he is an uebermensch superior mate to LN-18.  Since crossing the Atlantic by air is no big deal, he shows himself a superior male by making the first trip to Mars.  (In this movie, apparently, Mars does not need women, but desperately needs clothing for them, setting up the trend for scantily-clad Space Princesses that has continued ever since.)
[image error]

There is also a man from 1930 - the vaudeville comedian El Brendel, who is the top billing.  There is an echo of this in Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon, in which a "sleeper" from the old days is awakened in the future of the novel to give the readers a contemporary POV for Life in the Future.


There are more videos from the movie here.  Here is where they meet the Martians.  Note the sophisticated humor and steamy sex.

m_francis @ 2011-04-07T16:58:00

A Passing Thought

I received the following email from LiveJournal.  Presumably, some of you did, too.

As most of you know, LiveJournal has been the victim of repeated, large-scale DDoS attacks over the last two weeks. These attacks are against multiple journals worldwide, several of which are political in nature.
This reminds me of those occasions at universities when the herd of independent minds has shouted down unfavored speakers, physically rushed the podium, or in some cases confiscated and burned campus newspapers printing unapproved thoughts. 

It seems to me that there is a certain cast of mind by which, when confronted with contrary opinions, some folks immediately resort to force to make the Other Shut Up!  

They don't always wear armbands, either. 

Statistopia

The Dreaded Red Squamish

The aforesaid disease, called DRS (sometimes DRSq), afflicts one in ten citizens.  It results in the decay of the reasoning process, causing sufferers to utter strings of complete gibberish.  But as you see when the number of incidents is looked at geographically, DRS is not equally distributed.  The geography is simulated by a 10x10 grid, each square of which is like a congressional district: roughly equal in population. 

As you can see, there are two townships in which DRQ is concentrated.  The township at (A2:B4), known as Appletown, has an occurrence rate which is five times the national average of c-bar=0.1!  The other cluster is just west of the Interstate (column I) at (H3:I5), which is called Barkleyville.  The occurrence rate here is even higher: nearly seven times the national average.  There are only three scattered incidents in the remainder of the region. 

# Incidents of Dreaded Red Squamish (DRS) ABCDEFGHIJ1000000000020
10000000031000000100410000001105000000010060000000000700000000008000000000090010000001100000010000
Something Must Be Done! 


Enough!  I say, Enough!  Here is proof positive that DRS causes sufferers to babble nonsense.  See the comm box here: 42 Disease Clusters In 13 U.S. States Identified.   Come to think of it, read the press release news article.  Better yet: read the tendentious propaganda scientific study.  Only a few people in the comm box appear to be immune to the brain-rot of DRSq. 

In fact, the major cause of clusters is simply to select clustery-looking areas.  The Scientific Study does not specify any criteria, only "An unusually large number of people sickened by a disease in a certain place and time is known as a ‘disease cluster’."  In order to identify numerous clusters, the disease of choice varied from place to place or time to time, and "unusually large" was left unusually vague. 

The cure for DRSq is at hand: statistical literacy.  No process is ever perfectly uniform over geography, nor perfectly steady over time.  Years ago, Rosiland Yalow had a wonderful paper about apparent clusters among low probability events.  They are of course virtually guaranteed.  She gave an example of IIRC childhood leukemia cases in a certain county.  The data was nicely random, then there were several consecutive years of double-digit incidents, then they disappeared.  Nothing unusual happened during those years or stopped happening immediately after.  Remember: a cause must explain not only what happens, but what does not happen.  If for example, a highway is the cause of DRQ in Barkleyville, then we must explain why the incident rate is not high anywhere else along the highway.  If the incidence rate in Appletown is due to the pharmaceutical plant, then we must explain why there were no elevated numbers in the past when the plant was already there and already making the same line of products; or why there is no similar rate at other sites where there are similar plants. 

In the present case, the mystery is solved.  The cause of the DRSq clusters is.... me. 

I used Minitab 16 to generate 100 random Poisson variables in a single column, then I destacked the column into ten columns of ten rows, and inspected for "clusters."  The mean of the Poisson distribution in all cases was c-bar = 0.1.  IOW, both clusters were optical illusions created by random number generation, even though one was five times and the other nearly seven times the over all average.  Relative risk ratios over a small base will almost always appear dramatically high simply because the denominator is dramatically low. 

100 Random Poisson Digits, c-bar = 0.1 ABCDEFGHIJ1000000000020
10000000031000000100410000001105000000010060000000000700000000008000000000090010000001100000010000
For sooth.

L'audace, toujours l'audace

Contra pusillanimitatem saeculorum

There is a scene in the movie Of God and Men, in which an official of the crypto-fascist Algerian government blames the then-current Islamist terrorism on, you guessed it, France.  None of this would be happening, he said, had it not been for colonialism.  I don't know if this is a true recounting of the meeting - for the movie is about actual events - or if the movie makers simply added a gratuitous "so there!" against wicked colonialism.  That is not our point today.  Nor are we determined to point out that Algeria prior to the French period was nothing to write home about either, it being a center for the Barbary pirates. 

No, it is the "anthropology" of the comment that drew our attention.  The official clearly saw the unrest as something that had been done to his countrymen, rather than something his countrymen were doing. 


"In the very age when men lived longest and were most secure in their lives," wrote Walker Percy, "poets and artists were saying that men were most afraid."  In the safest and healthiest milieu in history, people tremble over minuscule probabilities and unlikely concatenations.  Indeed, people are often afraid to hear someone speak in contradiction to their own cherished beliefs and will storm the podium or seek legal redress to muzzle them.

There is a certain sense in which courage is the prime virtue.  (And curiously, while I already had this essay half-composed off-line, and was about to mention it at dinner in a Chinese restaurant, I found exactly that wisdom in a freaking fortune cookie!) 

A human substance is a union of mind and body.  These are not two substances somehow coexisting in the same volume, but rather the form and matter of a single substance, a human being.  (This is no more mysterious than the union of sphere and rubber that make a basketball.  No one talks about "the sphere-basketball problem.")  To be strong, a human must exercise both body and mind.  Hence, the old expression, Mens sana in corpore sano, as the one thing Juvenal said men should pray for.  We will leave aside the exercises to perfect the body.  Judging from what we see, those have not been too heartily engaged in, and I am the worst offender.  We do talk about the sphere-Flynn problem.  But what of the mental strengths? 

Virtue comes from the Latin word for "strength," and there are strengths of mind as well as of body.  They are seven such virtues: three of the intellect, three of the will, and one which joins them, shown schematically here:


Now we could make an argument for which one comes first.  Since the intellect is prior to the will, it would seem that the intellectual virtues: (understanding of principles→knowledge of subject→wisdom as regards finality) ought to be first.  But there are other ways.  Temperance deals with unbridled desire and so it deals with the passion we know most forcefully.  And prudence comes first in order of causality. 

But all virtues are ways in which we take command of our own acts.  Liberty of mind, wrote Gilson, presupposes mastery over all the passions; and the passion that most disturbs the judgment of reason is fear.  Since courage is the virtue by which we confront the fearful and see the outcome as dependent on our actions, as Chastek puts it, it is through courage that we most come to command our acts; and so courage can be seen as the virtue par excellance and the "gateway virtue" to the others.  It fortifies the will to pursue the good which reason has proposed to it in spite of difficulties and dangers. 

The Romans had a saying: Virtuus in media stet: Strength stands in the middle.  A virtue is something then that stands between an excess and a deficit.  You've heard the expression "too much of a good thing."  A former pastor was fond of saying, "Light is the proper object of the eye; but too much light destroys our sight."  In the same manner, the virtue of courage should not be confused with the excess of bravado.  A man may be foolhardy without being courageous.  Similarly, courage should not be confused with Stoic indifference to the fearful, with the confidence born of long practice (as an old soldier in battle), or with throwing oneself into danger in a fit of anger or despair (a different sort of indifference than the Stoic's).  One may expose oneself to risk out of vainglory, for money, to avoid shame, or for the thrill.  All of these may result in actions that are materially indistinguishable from a courageous act, but they are not courage.  (They also show why materialism cannot explain such things.  The same atoms are in the same motions in each case.)  Courage is to expose oneself to danger (and not solely to physical danger) "in order to obey the dictates of reason."

Recall that Aristo-Thomism held to the primacy of reason, not the triumph of the will. 

The deficit of courage is of course terror.  On the battlefield, the foolhardy and the timid alike will die; and the same may be said metaphorically of non-battlefield courage.  Or else, all human act may be said to take place on a battlefield of sorts.  "He who would save his life, the same shall lose it" can be seen in this (as Chesterton remarked) for the timid man, afraid of risks, will die on the battlefield, while the one who risks his life may come out safe. 

"May."  To see oneself as the commander of one's actions is no guarantee of success.  But courage would be no virtue if success were guaranteed.  No one needs strength if there is no heavy lifting in prospect. 

Which takes us back to the Algerian official in the movie and to the artists noted by Péguy.  Both saw their acts as controlled by external circumstances: French colonialism or the approval of the intellectuals.  In addition, Lukacs noted, the bourgeois consumers of art were afraid to appear "not up to date," a fear peculiar to the Modern Ages.  (Modernis means "today.")  They became dependent on artisitc opinion rather than on their own taste.  ("Even bad taste," wrote Lukacs, "is better than no taste at all.")  And so people anxiously scan the best seller lists or the Top Ten so that they can read, see, or listen to that which everyone else is reading, seeing, or listening to. 

Children cannot be courageous, Chastek wrote, because they see everything fearful as something for their parents to take away.  (Now and then one encounters heroic children in the news, but newsworthy precisely because of their rarity.)  For those SFers interested in the future, the extended adolescence of today's boy-men, still reading comics, still playing games well into their twenties, bodes ill for the future of courage -- and hence of risk-taking and associated behaviors.  The children give us a clue to the vice to which courage is opposed. 

It is not terror.  It is no vice to be scared, afraid, terrified.  The courageous man is often afraid.  But it matters less that a man is afraid than how that man deals with his fears.  Even if the circumstances do overwhelm him, perhaps especially if those circumstances overwhelm him, he remains focused on what he can do to overcome them.  Courage is not about success; it is about how one faces the possibility of failure. 

The contrary to courage is sloth.  This is often called laziness, but it might more properly be termed comfort.  Virtue requires that sooner or later we relate to evil and the fear of failure as something that is up to us to conquer. One of the chief impediments to courage, and therefore to all virtue, is the desire for the comfort and ease we remember in childhood. The fundamental choice of our moral life is therefore between courage- the virtuous response to fear- and the comfort that consists in avoiding this sort of self determination in the face of fear.  -- James Chastek 
The case for sloth [he continues] is extremely persuasive and convincing. After all, why should we let people stand face to face with fearful things?  Isn’t the whole purpose of a society to remove fearful and difficult things as much as possible?  How can rulers just stand by and do nothing when their citizens are confronted with fearful and difficult circumstances? What if they fail! The voice of sloth argues, not without force, that courage  is nothing other than what a person is stuck having to do because of the laziness and inaction of our superiors- and even the inaction and indifference of God himself. If God isn’t going to come sweeping down and snatch us out of every fearful and terrible circumstance, then we will find a benevolent leader who will!

But that is the case with all vices.  They sound so seductively reasonable.  The search for Leaders did not turn out so well in the 1930s, but notice how we chronically refer to chief executives as our "leaders" today.  Perhaps the next Caesar will be the Messiah. 

The modern welfare state from a lack of courage.  A courageous man welcomes help when it is needed.  Courageous does not mean stupid.  But there is a difference between accepting assistance in one's struggle and not struggling at all, but waiting for someone else to do something.  It is possible to be uncharitable about this.  There will always be those who are genuinely dependent for one reason or another, and it is genuinely a good to help those in need.  I say again, it is not a matter of helping or accepting help, but of the frame of mind in which it is done.  Courage is not about the physical acts but about the moral strength of the actor. 

I remember driving through North Philadelphia on my way to tutor kids in reading when I was in college.  And in one of the windows in a draggled and run-down apartment building I saw a flowerpot and bright curtains.  Something about the sight resonated.  Here was someone still in command of his acts.  (Or hers.  Do we need to mention that men come in two flavors?)  It was, in its small way, an act of courage.  Or at least so it seemed to me.   

But in the Late Modern Ages, such courage is becoming more rare, and sloth more common.  Too many people want to be comfortable.  This includes comfortable in their thoughts.  Perhaps (and I say only perhaps) the decline in reading "difficult" books stems from the fact that such books often challenge one's intellectual comfort.  Much easier to hang on Facebook and collect like-minded virtual "friends."  Much easier to visit internet echo chambers, where the same cliches are repeated back and forth until they begin to sound like facts. 

Well, that is enough babbling for today.  It is possible to misunderstand.  Facebook is not evil per se, only per accidens.  (Though it may be inimical to thoughts of more than a hundred or so characters.)  There is nothing especially wicked about hammers, either.  You may use it to build a Habitat for Humanity or you may use it to bash someone's skull in. 

References

James Chastek, "The primacy of courage," (JustThomism)
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (Chesterton's Works on the Web)
Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (repr. U.Notre Dame, 1994)
John Lukacs, The Passing of the Modern Age, (Harper, 1970)
Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle, (Paragon, 1975)

Drollery

Quote of the Day

"The trouble with mornings is that they come when you're not awake." --Archie Goodwin, in "A Window for Death," by Rex Stout

On Potholes

How Long Does It Take

to fix a highway?

Depends on how big the earthquake is, right?
Right

Good Old Days

Once There Was a Time...

when folks worried not about being overweight.  Quite the opposite, it seems. 


Making you and your kids "as fat as pigs" would not be a major selling point today.  But a chubby baby was regarded as a sign of good health.  The advertisement shows that ad-men in the 1880s were ahead of the artists when it came to surrealism.   

Unlike many other turn-of-the-century patent medicines, this one was the true quill.  Bristol-Meyers continued to make it in 1957, after they had bought out Grove's.  It was a suspension of quinine in sugar syrup for the treatment of malarial chills.  In the 1880s, malaria was still a big problem in the South, not because malaria is a warm-weather disease, but because the South had a lot more mosquito breeding areas, esp. after the spring floods.  (I am told that the largest cause of death in building the Trans-Canadian Railway was also malaria.) 

But quinine was a very bitter taste, until Grove found a way to suspend it in crystalline form in a sugar or lemon flavored syrup.  It did not entirely mask the taste, but was good enough that it sold more bottles than Coca Cola. 

So "tasteless" chill tonic, which at first makes no sense and which in context of the pig-boy art suggests an analogous meaning of "tasteless" actually means exactly what it says: a tonic lacking the bitter taste of quinine for use against malarial chills. 

As mosquito control programs spread, and the TVA dams controlled the spring flooding, malaria and its chills became less a problem and sales dropped. 

For a passel more of "surrealist ads," go here. 

But some of the others don't strike me as very surreal. 
[image error]  [image error]
I don't think they'd let you do the baby-razor ad today, either.  No stropping, no honing!  Most people might not even know what that meant. 

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Polish Eifelheim

Odds and Ends

Another Milestone Passed!

An anonymous Twitter notes that "Obama has launched more cruise missiles than all other Nobel Peace Prize winners combined."
The last time the US engaged in a purely aerial war (against an opponent with virtually no aerial assets) was when we bombed the crap out of mighty Serbia, in the process hitting a civilian passenger train and the Chinese embassy.  Fortunately, our weapons are now smarter, which is a good thing, because our politicians are not.  We cannot hit any Chinese in Libya for the excellent reason that the Chinese evacuated 40,000 of their fellow subjects from the country with no fuss, no muss, no bragging afterward, and no press releases beforehand; a very smooth logistics operation which left only one question unanswered: What were 40,000 Chinese doing in Libya?  

The Beneficial Effects of Green Thinking

The Mail (UK) has an article about the price of windmills for power generation.  It seems that the wind turbines need magnets and these magnets require a rare-earth metal called neodymium.  Presumably, this differs from paleodymium.  So, where do you get neodymium?  From Inner Mongolia, China.  And what do the Chinese get out of it?  This: 


A six-mile wide lake of toxic waste. 

Meanwhile, Der Spiegel (The Mirror), a German newsmagazine, notes that many green initiatives wind up costing more than predicted -- surprise!  Cheop's Law in effect! -- have unplanned-for side-effects, and fail to deliver the promised benefits. 

If Only Civil Servants Could Marry

...we would not see stories like this one.  The New York Times, after a year-long probe, reports that residents of New York's group homes for the developmentally disabled -- some of society's most vulnerable citizens -- routinely fall victim to physical and sexual abuse.
Or that the union puts its members interests above its clients:Instead, suspensions, fines or lost vacation time are the norm -- and abusive employees are simply shifted to different group homes, where they routinely abuse other patients.
Undoubtedly, there will be a huge public outcry over this, with investigations, and requirements that the union (CSEA) immediately report "credible accusations" of abuse to the authorities. 

The solution is to permit women to become civil service employees and to allow civil servants to marry. 

Wait, Forget That Part About the Women

KVAL in Eugene OR reports thatAn Astoria woman has been sentenced to 30 days in jail for raping a 14-year-old boy at a party.

Prosecutors said Green held a party for her children and their friends last August, allowed several minors to drink alcohol and then had sex with one of the visiting 14-year-olds.
If only they would allow women to be women and allow them to marry! 

Are Poets the Only Empiricists?

James Chastek at Just Thomism has the following thought worthy of wider dissemination.  Failing that, I am reposting it here:
Empiricism is supposed to be the doctrine that all knowledge arises from (and for some is limited to) sense experience, but it’s striking how many people can be called empiricists who don’t admit anything like a normal sense experience. Normal sense experience encounters objects that are rough and scratchy, multicolored, bland or sugary with too much cumin, etc. There are colors that clash or go well together, smells that give rise to seemingly random intense memories, taste experiences that we will go miles out of our way to have, etc. But a good deal of empiricism (say, that of Locke or the doubters of “qualia”) doesn’t admit the reality of any of these experiences. All that’s there to sense is a coloring-book outline of the world, which we, the disembodied observer, view from an observation deck behind six inches of plate glass. Carry this sort of empiricism far enough, even the coloring-book shapes will fade into an equation. Such empiricism has the odd effect of insisting on the primacy of sense and yet cutting us off from anything sensuous. Perhaps only poets are real empiricists, or at least only those who don’t try to replace the sensual world with a substitute.
Mind As Brain
xkcd has a thought on this issue:
Razor Boy

Some of you who have read EIFELHEIM may recall that William of Ockham made a guest appearance in the latter part of the book.  The character Dietrich had studied at Paris under Jean Buridan, and Buridan was a student or follower of William, although not "full stop." 

Ed Feser has a long post about William of Ockham and his single-handed influence on modernity.  He did not originate the principle of parsimony that bears his name, which is often misstated.  Thomas Aquinas used it, as did Dun Scotus and others.  I have taken it to translate into modern terms as: "Don't have too many Xs in your equations, or you won't understand your own models."  IOW, it's an epistemological dictum rather than an ontological one.  It is not that the simpler answer is "more likely to be true," as modern philosophy-challenged scientists suppose.  William thought the real world could be as complicated as God willed; but our models have to be simplified or we won't understand them. 

Dr. Feser kicks things off with a Steely Dan tune, "Razor Boy."
Will you still have a song to sing
When the razor boy comes
And takes your fancy things away?
Christopher Hitchens claims that William undermined medieval scholastic thought using proto-scientific rationalism.  But because it is Hitchens, we know that it must be wrong.  In fact, William was a voluntarist who believed in the Triumph of the Will, specifically of God's Will.  This was contrary to Thomist thinking, which held that the intellect was prior to the will.  (Basically, you cannot desire something that you do not know.)  As always when you get things exactly bass-ackward, things do not cohere and all sorts of "paradoxes" and "problems" appear out of nowhere.  Causation blows up, and with it ethics and morality, and the limited state.  There is no demonstrable connection between cause and effect, so causation goes bye-bye; and it is only so far as scientists paid little attention in practice to Ockhamism/Humeanism that science prospered at all.  When al-Ghazali pulled the same stunt in the House of Submission, the scattered fires of natural science faded out.  The triumph of the will over the intellect meant that God becames the Tyrant in the Sky issuing arbitrary rules about what is good or bad.  Draw a straight line from there to absolute monarchs and libertarians.  (A libertarian is an absolute monarch with a very small kingdom.)  The denial of essences meant that you could never know if another creature was "really" human.  If there was no human "nature" or "essence," then there are only individual human beings; and those creatures with different skin colors or talking jibber-jabber might not be human at all. 

Is that too much to lay on the Razor Boy's shoulders?  Maybe not.  Dr. Feser writes:
As Michael Allen Gillespie argues in his recent book The Theological Origins of Modernity, the Renaissance humanists’ revolution in culture, Luther’s revolution in theology, Descartes’ revolution in philosophy, and Hobbes’s revolution in politics also have their roots in Ockhamism.  With the humanists this was manifested in their emphasis on man as an individual, willing being rather than as a rational animal.  In Luther’s case, the prospect of judgment by the terrifying God of nominalism and voluntarism – an omnipotent and capricious will, ungoverned by any rational principle – was cause for despair.  Since reason is incapable of fathoming this God and good works incapable of appeasing Him, faith alone could be Luther’s refuge.  With Descartes, the God of nominalism and voluntarism opened the door to a radical doubt in which even the propositions of mathematics – the truth of which was in Descartes’ view subject to God’s will no less than the contingent truths of experience – were in principle uncertain.  And we see the moral and political implications of nominalism in the amoral, self-interested individuals of Hobbes’s so-called “state of nature,” and in the fearsome absolutist monarch of his Leviathan, whose relationship to his subjects parallels that of the nominalist God to the universe.

On the Razor's Edge

The Wit and Wisdom of Ravn Olafsdottr

"When diligently sought, it is best to be someone else."

“All this miigimoos stop when enemy appear.  Well, perhaps not all miigimoos.” 

"We need bigger ship.  Accoommodate Doonovan’s egoo."

Mashdasan ran a hand across his cheek and chin.  “Don’t be too certain, Deadly One.  My loyalty is to the Confederation and to the Names.” 
“Good.  So be mine.  Hooray for Confederation.  Huzzah for Names.  We do secret handshake later.  Will you give me back my ship?” 

"Love doos not mean you nayver spank the little rascal."

"Always problem with undercover.  Better job you do, more your friends shoot at you."

"The Lion’s Mouth sends you out in pairs, don’t they?” 
Ravn nodded.  “Usually.  Second kills first if first falters.  Nice system.  Encourages heartfelt commitment to job.”