Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 18

Game of Drones

I owe that title to a headline in our local version of the Erickson Tribune. Sometimes you see a headline that produces literal envy. I wish I’d thought of that! That article tells the story of drones, as it were, replacing the milkman and the UPS/FedEx delivery truck. My subject is the word’s etymology. We’re having another word-centered morning. The word that set us off on that, however, goes back into the past—and the origin of drone sort of capped our morning’s “round” (in the musical sense). Percept began, precept followed, and we ended on drone.
Percept surfaced late last night as Brigitte read an article titled Philosophy of Nature published by International Catholic University ( link )—an odd word when stared at. We know it all too well in its verbal form, perception, but its noun form, meaning “a (thing) taken (in),” but with emphasis on that unsounded thing, is almost never used except in such philosophical context as in the referenced paper above. Per in this concept means “thoroughly” the ceptcomes from the Latin capere, “to take, to grasp.” 
In precept the pre comes from prae, meaning “before”; the ceptis once more “grasp.” Thus “that which comes before,” presumably, we’re properly capable of grasping something. The word means a maxim, rule, an order, or instruction. Percept is solidly objective; precept is a quite immaterial “rule” or “guidance.” The preceptor, therefore, is a teacher or a guide.
Now for that famous drone. I have what follows from English Language & Usage ( here ). Evidently the drone has quite a history already; it’s actually older than I am. It originated in 1935 when the British Royal Navy demonstrated a remote-controlled aircraft in target practice. That plane was called DH 82B Queen Bee. A U.S. admiral attending that demonstration, one William H. Standley, returned home and there asked Commander Delmer Fahrney to develop something analogous for the U.S. Navy. It was Fahrney who originated the word by naming such flyers drones “in homage to the Queen Bee.”
By the time of World War II, two kinds of drones had been fashioned and were being tested: target drones to be destroyed and assault drones to do the attacking. In the dim future lay the drone that accidentally landed on the White House lawn and in the immediate future will deliver the papers—once targeting has been tuned up a little more.
Incidentally, George R.R. Martin, the man whose novels gave birth to Game of Thrones, was a man I’d known slightly in my science fiction days. Once, while assembling an anthology of stories, he included one of my novellas in his collection. I still glow faintly from that close contact with future celebrity.

That’s the Wrong God, Abu Bakr

The current “take” on ISIS (the would-be Caliphate), is that ISIS has been seriously degraded, but that much work remains to be done. Most of that “work” is simply to enable the world to focus appropriate power to deal with this instance of public madness. Yes. That a reportedly tiny armed force, 30,000 people, could have caused so much havoc is indeed rather surprising. It illustrates the very degraded state of the military in the states of Iraq and Syria—but it is even more remarkable that a mere 43-year old Syrian, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, thought that he actually could form a caliphate and that such a venture could possibly succeed. So what’s the explanation of this phenomenon?
I think it rests on a belief—namely that God is actively engaged in this world and on behalf of various chosen people. And because God is God, those who hold this belief can sincerely attempt the quite impossible. They have nothing else to support their aims. To some significant degree, the belief also rests on quite deep ignorance, either actual or stubborn. At this stage in history, modernism is still very powerful and quite able, in due time, after it has managed to overcome its multiple distractions, to focus just a small amount of its available power on these fanatics. And then they will turn into history—and be rapidly forgotten.
It is reassuring to have recorded in the Christian tradition—which, alas, also features in its past a belief in a God who intervened and “chose” a people—some quite clear indicators that such a view is faulty. “My kingdom is not of this world,” said Christ in John 18:36.  Then there is “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” Matthew 22:21.
First comes the worship of the tribe, then the worship of God. Endless problems have arisen from failure to grasp the distinction between these two kinds of worship.

Pick Your Operation

Does something like a TV remote fall into the “simple” category—or is it merely yet another instance of massive complexity miniaturized? More like the latter. Ours has to talk to our AT&T cable box yet in such a way that it also talks to our Sony TV. Three remotes live in reasonable harmony together in our living room. The Sony’s own, used sometimes to switch between Cable and DVD, AT&T’s to open up our Eye-on-the-World, and one for our Blu-Ray DVD which also doubles as a channel so that we can watch streamed movies. Sometimes, however, confusions arise. When that happens late at night, help must come from yet another look-alike, our Uniden telephone. It looks like a remote but uses AT&T’s telephone line to connect me with Tech Support in some such place as Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, where I can discover why it is that my AT&T-remote no longer works. Now the time-difference between here and Mumbai is such that at 1 am it is 11:30 am there. The distance is some 7,920 miles. Yet I have to cross that distance “virtually” to learn that to restore my baffled sanity, I need to press the ATT button on my remote (like two inches away) so that I can restore that remote’s functionality again. That simple? That simple. Suddenly everything is Okay again.
I hope I never become a nonagenarian. Then I might have problems with my live-in robotic surgeon the size of a small vacuum cleaner but with multiple extensible thin arms. The call to Mumbai ensues. “I have a terrible pain in my side, down toward the groin. I fired up the Robo-Doc and he wants me to pick from a menu. So far so good. But now that he’s diagnosed appendicitis, he insists that I press Ctrl-Alt-F9 on his keyboard to give him the Okay to operate. But when I do that, Robo-Doc says: ‘Lobotomy procedure authorized. Please lie down on the couch.’ I’m calling you from the closet. Robo-Doc is waiting out there. What’s wrong? Didn’t the F9 work? And how do I abort the whole thing?”

Notes on Excitement

Convergent experiences had me pondering “excitement” this morning. The pondering began the moment I cried an inward “Whoa, there! Let’s calm down.” The excitement actually began around 1:03 am last night when one of our e-mail accounts began to misbehave again. That account goes all the way back to the stone age of the Internet. Hence it rests now on some history in which Yahoo, Southwestern Bell Corporation, then SBC Global, then AT&T, the parent of all, and Uverse, which is some kind of ill-behaved youngest son of AT&T, all bore, and, indeed, still bear a responsibility. Last night nothing worked—and my longish “chat” with AT&T brought no helpful resolution. This morning (surprise but yet, also, no surprise), the unstoppable force had somehow managed to move the immovable object; the defective e-mail account now acted as if nothing had happened (except our sleeping late). But, hey, just give it time. No shortage of excitement around here.
Mornings are also “paper” times—another occasion for excitement. Will the paper have been thrown? In these exciting times our papers, which include the Detroit News, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times—are delivered by three different route operators; no single carrier ever just brings one. The reason for that is that the giants of the media make use of the lowest-cost ways of getting their paper to our door, using different carriers on different days. Generally it all works well, but now and then, say once a month, the Thursday paper gets delivered on Friday or no paper comes at all. Therefore the trip out to the drive, partially blocked from view by the car, is a case of excitement rising. Will there be a paper? If not, agitation. But if the paper is there, the agitation’s just postponed. Because reading the paper brings new negative emotions caused by content that never pleases; my critical faculties turn that displeasure into a feeling of my own superiority (If I ran that paper, that crap wouldn’t be there!). But feelings of superiority on the cheap are, well, not exactly helpful in polishing my own humanity…
The biological function of excitement is to induce some things to attract, some things to repel us. Very effective. The institutionalization of this excitement is also a method of drawing customers to anything and everything. The best kind of excitement is one which threatens—but not us personally. Doom and gloom—but no need to start grabbing the family papers. We can just watch people staring at burned down homes where their papers have all just vanished. A feeling of superiority arises? Perhaps not—or we don’t allow it. Most of us think—there but for the grace of God go I.
In nature, to be sure, excitements of the sort that literally clog the media (everythingis breaking news) are relatively infrequent. But in communities addicted to the media, excitement is constant. That, in turn, produces a strange sort of continuous state that distorts reality. So, indeed. Whoa there! Let’s calm down. Boredom, it turns out, is a highly desirable state. It releases the attention which, if effort is made to direct it, may come to be focused on that which really matters. Like making the bed. Or mopping all that salt off the tiles by the entrance…

Code Napoléon Recalled

A year away from another general election, the focus is back on money again. And once again ventures are being launched to reform the funding of the electoral process. This, of course, is a bottom-up venture in a day-and-age when the acceptance of our fundamental laws lies back some 238 years (the Constitution having been ratified in 1788). Since then law in the United States, case law governed by precedent, has grown enormously and represents a vast morass piled high enough to make a Himalaya. At a minimum, some constitutional amendment will be required to bring about the change reformers hope to achieve. Such an amendment requires two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress and must be ratified by three-fourth of all states. Even if such a change passes, the accumulated precedents of nearly two-and-a-half centuries will be applied to its interpretation in practice—which is a way of saying that fundamental effective change from the bottom up is virtually doomed at the start.
Just a short time after the Constitution was ratified in the United States, the Napoleanic Code was established in 1804—but its earliest draft dates to 1793. This summarily wiped away the vast accumulation of many different versions of French Mediaeval law: a radically fresh start. The name that come to be attached to it tells us that it was top-down. That code itself was modeled on Justinian’s reform of Roman law, completed in 533—which tells us the size of that mountain of morass Napoleon had to cause to disappear…
The Code was—like its time—rational to a fault. It was, by design, intended to avoid the features of case law; thus it prohibits judges introducing a general rule, thus enlargement of the laws, because this constituted, in the eyes of framers, legislation by judges (Article 5). This also meant that precedent (stare decisis*) is not a binding feature of French law. But…
But, of course, no law, no matter how new and clean, can actually anticipate all of the cases that will be brought before judges. Every code is missy, as we would say nowadays, and therefore judges would be faced by cases in which the proper fit of the existing code would not cover the gaps. To prevent judges from avoiding such problems by not dealing with them. They had to use some part of the Code to apply it to the problem in the gaps. They were required, therefore, to engage in interpretation  (Article 4; for text of Articles see this link ). In effect, therefore, the French Code, although intended to prevent legislating judges, also compelled them to interpret the law one way or the other so that the net effect is that French jurisprudence de facto works the same way as common law—although its judges are denied the favorite game played on Law & Order, our TV series, which often features a major hunt for precedents.
Which is a way of saying that reform, however good—and it is best if it is a brand new start—will gradually turn into another yet another new morass. Morass will pile on top of morass until it begins to seem like a mountain. The very shortest version of the French Code today has 3,000 pages; there is also an “expert” and a “mega” version (the last available on a searchable CD ROM).
Now tunneling beneath that mountain with a (probably small) popular movement of reform—and introducing say a few pages more stuff at the very bottom, i.e., as part of the Constitution—say regulating how money may be spent on elections—will barely be noticeable by the money itself which, like water, can penetrate any kind of mountain of morass at any point and cumulate wherever it wishes.
But for a smallreform, likely to last, say, two hundred years, one does need a Napoleon.————————* Stare decisis et non quieta movere. To stand by decisions and not to disturb the undisturbed. Thus to use case law established by previous cases and to respect their conclusions as law.

The Month Has Fled

The month has fled, where has it gone?Memory draws lines each nightAnd starts a new one every dawn.Potter-like it fashions Time Its turning wheel the sun’s new lightEach day a line, each month a rhyme,In language that is not quite clearUntil at death we leave this sphere.

Where the Plastic Money Went

Our Bank, PNC, provides an annual summation of charges made to our principal credit card. We only use one. We charge most everything to it that we buy outside—never mind small and very incidental purchases like the occasional ice cream in summer and the like.
Here is where at least some of our money, the plastic kind, went this year:
Category % Media 27.3 Groceries 25.1 Merch./Retail 20.4 Moving Expense 15.5 Insurance 4.3 Restaurants 3.7 Gas 3.0 Health 0.7
Total expenditures include two other major categories. One of these are direct payments by our bank to designated accounts:
·         Utilities·         Extra health and pharmaceutical insurance.
The other is checks that we write. We write fewer and fewer, but some of these are often significant in size:
·         Charities·         Repairs·         Special jobs like lawn repair, guttering, etc.
The percentage breakdown is for on-going expenses. We note with some raised eyebrows that we pay more for media—including telephone, newspapers, magazines, cable television, Netflix, and Internet—than we pay for food! Always suspected something like that.
A note or two. A special expense in 2014 was the actual physical move we made in July. With that absent, the Media percentile would be higher. Health is low—but only because we don’t use a credit card to pay for it--and Medicare does most of it. Gas is low as well, but that’s because we buy most of our gas at Costco, and Costco expenditures are listed under groceries.
Yes. Those media. This posting today inspired by news to the effect that a portion of Arizona lost all Internet service because somebody found and severed a major carrier line buried deep in mountainous territory. All sorts of devices went down, not least ATM machines where we draw out cash when we need it.

Fading Names and Sluggish Memories

We were discussing, Brigitte and I, how dreams communicate ideas using symbols—indeed that even when we are in a full state of wakefulness, beneath the surface, dream images may well be present. I offered as an example once reading a book about the collapse of the Soviet Union just before bedtime but sitting up in an armchair in my bedroom. It was getting late. I closed my eyes for just a moment—and there I saw this gigantic image of a huge bear.
So next I tried to remember whose book I had been reading, and I said “Khrushchev.” But it couldn’t have been Khrushchev. He came later—and he certainly didn’t write a book translated into English to reach a world audience. So I said: “You know, the man with that mark on his forehead.” We both knew who we were talking about, but his name just would. not. surface.
Eventually Brigitte retrieved the famous name by recalling a saying by President Reagan: “Tear down this wall…Mr. Gorbachev.” What President Reagan actually said was “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”—but B’s memory conveniently inverted that order.
Visible on the bed this morning was a prominent picture of another famous foreign politician on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. “You know,” I said, “I can hardly wait for the day when, in some context about Israel, we’ll sit here and try to remember the name of Netanyahu.”
Yes. God speed that day. But will we live long enough? That is the question.

Where East Meets West—Twice

A project Brigitte is toiling on—on which more when the research is done—caused me to make a graphic of the world. Sometimes a picture teaches more than those famous thousand words. So let me start here with that picture.

It’s hard to believe that one can actually compress the map of the world into a single image—which is done here. In fact I’m showing a slight bit more of our globe just so that the Prime Meridian, thus 0° Longitude, is shown twice with a slight overlap. The center of this image is the Antimeridian, thus 180° Longitude. The line marked by that red A runs through Greenwich, England and meets the tip of the line in the middle at the North Pole. Thus the left side shows the eastern and the right the western Hemisphere.
We’re not accustomed to this view. Deep habit has us imagine West to the left and East to the right, but when we travel on the globe, in whatever direction we are going—so long as we are crossing longitudes—eventually West becomes East and vice versa. In Greenwich there are houses where it is quite possible to stand in some kitchen chopping onions and one foot is in the Occident, the other in the Orient. We’re accustomed to think of Europe as part of the Western World, but only a little slice of it—most of England, a chunk of France, and a goodly part of Spain—are geographically West. London, with Longitude of -0.1278, is as much in the West as San Francisco at Longitude -122.4194.
Now this being a flattened version of the globe, the bottom portion is a single landmass—and would show a solid white mass all across the image if Google had let me go further south. That is because Antarctica is a landmass that squarely covers the pole.
Note that at some points the Longitude 180 marked in black covers over (because coinciding with it) a dashed line in light red. That dashed line is a date line. It jigs and jags to ensure that tiny islands or that bit of Russia are in the same time zone. Luckily for us, who must by all means keep Putin in his place, the dateline (even if only a broken line) keeps Putin firmly in the East. Go West, young man. But not too far—or you’ll end up in the Orient.

The Length of Lent: 36? 40? 46?

The subject arises because tomorrow is the first Sunday of Lent, but Lent begins on Ash Wednesday—which always falls on a day 46 days before Easter Sunday. In Catholic tradition, the period is known as Quadragesima, literally the “fortieth,” in common usage “the forty days”. But when this tradition first took root—late in the sixth century when St. Gregory the Great was pope (590-604), he thought of Lent as a form of spiritual “tithing”; therefore fasting and repentance (the central focus of this period), was a period of 36 days, which, rounded, makes a tenth of the year. So how does all of this sort out?
Let’s take it one step at a time and answer first what might have come first: 40 or 36? Forty seems to have come first. As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it ( link ), “In determining this period of forty days the example of Moses, Elias, and Christ must have exercised a predominant influence.” All three underwent a 40-day fast. The 36 days came about because fasting on Sundays (and every Sunday is a celebration of Christ’s resurrection) is inappropriate. Six weeks produce 42 days. Deducting the Sundays produces that 36-day period.
Let us next see how the duration of the length of Lent became 46 days. This comes about because of that “predominant influence” the Catholic Encyclopedia talks about. Yes. The fast ought to be 40 days, not an abbreviated 36. Some period after Gregory, a couple of centuries later as best as I can determine, four more days of fasting (workdays) were added—thus the four days beginning with Ash Wednesday and ending on the Saturday before the First Sunday of Lent. Simple, really. Lent is 46 days. Six Sundays fall into that period. Take those away and you end up with a nice clean 40 days of fasting.
A final note. Easter is a holiday that combines the solar year, the lunar cycle, and the days of the week. Easter is always celebrated on the first Sunday after a full moon that appears after the vernal equinox. In North America the vernal equinox will be March 20 until and including 2102. The earliest possible Easter therefore will be March 22—assuming that the full moon falls on March 21 and March 22 is a Sunday. The latest possible date for Easter is April 19th, thus assuming that a new lunar cycle begins on the day of the vernal equinox.
We think our lives are complicated. Traditional ways are as complex as any other. Oh, I ought to add: Maundy Thursday this year will fall on April 2, exactly three days ahead of Easter Sunday. So what does “maundy” mean again? For an answer look for at this blog post here.