I'm just saying -- rethinking it

I loved the TV show Murphy Brown. It gave me lots of laughs. I found episodes on Internet Archive and one of them was a typical TV show let-down.

A high school graduate joins Murphy in her home and proceeds to be the teen from hell. She wants to be a journalist just like Murphy, but at the end, she says she doesn't want to go to college. Murphy has no experience with kids and freaks out.

The answer is to make the teen explain just how she plans to get to Murphy's level without college. "Jane" has no experience with professional writing. In her brief stay, she insists on doing anything she wants regardless of the effects on others. This includes smoking around a pregnant woman.

Murphy needed to explain to her that no news organization is going to pay an absolute newcomer for any job without evidence that they can do it. That's what college journalism is about: learning to write; learning to find and use sources; learning to present information effectively; learning which stories are important; learning to dig instead of give up. Her college class assignments and work on the college newspaper might get Jane an interview. Lacking them, she was dead in the water. 

Jane also needed to know that no story is news after its time. You have to beat the news cycle, not trail it. When your editor gives you a deadline, you have to meet it. No excuses. 

And you have to work in a people environment. If you walk into an interview with a non-smoker or somebody who gets sick from cigarette smoke, you can't light up. With coming bans on workplace smoking, Jane was about to hit a brick wall of employment.

The same thing faces high school kids now. AI is taking over scutwork. You have to come into an interview trained to do the job, and also explain why you can do a better job than AI. The most important thing is knowing how to back up your work with information, and AI is lousy at this, it will take any source that suits your keywords. That is why it lies to me on a regular basis and contradicts itself. If you don't understand how bad Wikipedia articles are and how this comes from the sources used in the articles, you will never be better than  AI.

Second, you have to deal with complexity. A recent article showed that using AI in customer service caused problems, it didn't fix them. It couldn't handle nuance or inflection, or customize answers, because it relied on information that didn't fit the situation. Using AI in online chat devolves into long transcripts because the AI can't actually understand the question, it can only deal with keywords.

It's the underlying problem of machine translation, which I think I've posted about before. Computer translation was promised in the 1980s and it has never happened because nobody has been able to program a computer to understand idioms. Idioms are phrases, the meanings of which go beyond the actual words. They are also used in a context, and computers cannot handle context. Actually, damned few humans can handle context, which results in those social media fuck-fests where people call each other names. At some point in the thread, somebody may say "read the thread".

Which doesn't solve anything either. Any time you walk into the middle of a conversation, you are dead in the water because you weren't there for the entire context. A counselor can tell you this; they come into the middle of a stressful situation and the only way to solve it is to make everybody go through the entire "conversation". Bear in mind that the parties have already gelled into their positions or they wouldn't need a counselor in the first place. Don't blame the counselor.

Because the counselor also has to deal with unreliable witnesses. Everybody tailors the story to favor themselves. It goes from being unable to understand language and so unable to understand what they said as part of the problem, to reshaping the narrative to suit themselves as time went on, to lying deliberately to make themselves look good. A counselor has to separate the noise from the signal.

AI can't do that and that's why it lies. Separating noise from signal is a matter of experience. High-schoolers tend not to have it; plenty of college graduates don't have it. I know of college professors who don't have it and pass urban legends because they can't tell they're false.

And most organizations that want to use AI are just as clueless. The companies that thought it would help them do customer service had no clue what went into customer service, and they have screwed up bigtime. A media outlet was bragging about going more to AI, which would result in publishing false information because of AI's inability to evaluate sources properly. A professor was bragging about using AI, which meant an idiot child was going to be running his college courses. It gets worse but I think you've seen enough.

We're in the hype quadrant of AI on Gartner Group's four-stage cycle. We're finding out who is absolutely clueless about how to do their jobs, as much as we're finding out that AI is an idiot child. 

I'm just saying....

Fact-Checking the Torah: the third clue

As part of the original thread, I wrote about the plagues of the Exodus which sound like the effects of a Plinian eruption, and tagged the date of the Exodus to 1628 BCE when Thera exploded in a cataclysm 20 times worse than the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius that is so famous.

More recently, I pointed to an occultation of the superior conjunction of Venus, something unheard of in a thousand years of Babylonian astronomical history. This pegged the Exodus as occurring in March 1628 BCE.

Nevertheless, people I got in touch with assured me that the Thera explosion occurred in June or July. But one of those people gave me the exact clue I'm writing about now.

In his book, Santorini: Volcano, Natural History, Mythology (https://archive.org/details/santorinivolcano0000frie/page/70/mode/2up), Walter Friedrich has a number of interesting photos, but none more interesting than the two on book page 69. The top one shows a pupa and the bottom an adult, of a parasite found on leaves buried in the stuff Thera put out when it blew up. 

So I looked up the life cycle of that parasite. Fethi et al. told me that the adults emerge in June or July and, if the weather be what it ought, there will be a second generation of adults who may survive the winter and lay eggs.

Fethi, Abbassi and Benzehra Abdelmajid and Achouche Abderrahim, “Study of the Bioecology of Aleurolobus olivinus Silvestri (1911) (Homoptera, Aleyrodidae) on olive Trees in Algeria,” November 2019 Bioscience Research 16(4):11

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338212224_Study_of_the_bioecology_of_aleurolobus_olivinus_silvestri_1911_homoptera_aleyrodidae_on_olive_trees_in_algeria

They lay eggs as soon in the spring as the olive trees show signs of activity. There are several pupa stages, so the pupa in the top photo could be part of the spring laying.

But obviously there are also pupae in late summer and early autumn. So the question is, whether the pupa in the photograph was left from the autumn generation, or is it evidence that Thera blew up in the spring?

The Fethi article doesn't give me much of a clue. It doesn't go into how fragile the pedicle is that attaches a pupa to a leaf. The adult that overwinters is alive and can hang onto that leaf for all it's worth so it has a chance to lay eggs in the spring. The pupa's pedicle is a perfectly passive attachment. Rain might dissolve it; wind might break it. 

Mr. Friedrich did not give me a link to the Fethi article. He didn't look into whether a pupa can overwinter, all he did was caption the photo to include the name of the parasite. 

This is one of the problems with academic work. It's myopic. Mr. Friedrich was satisfied to know that the parasite showed up when you used an electron microscope. He didn't think about what it meant that they found a pupa as well as an adult. It takes an inquiring mind to go that extra step. How many academics really have inquiring minds, and how many just do the research their department steers them to for whatever reason?

How many discoveries has humanity missed out on because people in universities don't really have inquiring minds? If you've read much of my blog, you know what I think. 

Knitting -- raglan sleeve armpits

If you've been reading this thread, you know that one of my mantras is "when you're done knitting you should be done." You should have a piece ready to wear unless you believe in washing and blocking first.

What I did on a recent jumper is inside out of what you do knitting bottom up with steeking at the armholes. You put the underarm stitches on a holder, then when it's time to work the sleeves, you pick up the underarm stitches, cut the steeking and use a crochet hook to pull yarn through the stitches next to the steeking, then work the sleeve.

For a top-down raglan, when you are ready to close the body, you cast on stitches for the underarms and put the sleeve stitches on holders. 

First, use the cable cast on for these stitches and make sure there are 10 for worsted, 12 for sport/DK and 14 for fingering.

When you finish the body, move the sleeve stitches from the holder to a circular needle.

Make a slip knot and put it on the working needle, then pull the last sleeve stitch over it. 

Use a crochet hook. Put it into the stitch under each cast-on stitch, pull the yarn to the outside and put it on the working needle. When you've picked up all the cast-ons, put the crochet hook between the last stitch and the first body stitch, put that on the working needle and then the first body stitch. Pass the last stitch over, put the body stitch back, and work the sleeve as usual.

Now you don't have to sew an underarm seam or close it with Kitchener stitch. All you may want to do is close up large or stretched stitches.

You only need this if your raglan increases haven't given you the right count of stitches in the body when you've done enough rows to reach the armpits. If you do have enough stitches, just cast on one, put the next sleeve or body stitch on the same needle, pass the cast-on over that, and keep knitting.

The PSSOs help close gaps.

When you do bottom up raglan, as far as I can tell, you will still have to close those armpits with Kitchener stitch. If you have an alternative, let us all know.

DIY -- the good cook and the landfill

My community is changing its trash procedures. Up to now, the city has been subsidizing everybody's landfill fees. It can't keep doing that and still do civic things. So everybody is going to be charged a share of the landfill fees and with proof that they've paid, they get the same service as before.

This means that people using meal kits and other landfill-heavy practices are going to feel the impact. The rest of us, not so much. 

If you're a good cook, you don't contribute to messes like this. You may even be able to take advantage of a composting program in your region, as well as getting good nutrition and cutting down on grocery expenses.

Some mornings I have ramen for breakfast, using a "no-time" broth recipe that I found on-line. You can mix the seasonings up in advance and store on a shelf; other ingredients have to be kept in your fridge. You can add in veggies, which lets you use up things in your fridge that are about to go over, improving your nutrition while keeping things out of the landfill. Next to each ingredient, I show other things you can make using it, so that buying half-pound packages is a good use of your money. 

This takes about 15 minutes to make even if you don't store the mixed seasonings, because you put on the water and noodles, turn on the heat, and while the water comes to boiling, add the seasonings.

1 tablespoon garlic powder (BBQ sauce, soups, stews, chili, spaghetti sauce, most cuisines.)

1 tablespoon onion powder (BBQ sauce, soups, stews, chili, spaghetti sauce, most cuisines.)

1 tablespoon dried parsley (stuffing, soups, stews, spaghetti sauce, Provencal seasoning for chicken rub, "like the colonel" seasoning for chicken, including nuggets.)

1 tablespoon dried green onions or chives optional (Provencal seasoning for chicken rub, Chinese recipes.)

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon ground ginger (use 1 1/2 teaspoons if you want it spicier) (Chinese recipes, ginger snaps and other baked goods.)

1 teaspoon chili powder or 3/4 tsp cumin, large pinch cayenne and small pinch oregano or cilantro (India style recipes use cumin, especially garam masala seasoning)

1 teaspoon paprika (goulash, of course, KFC seasoning for chicken)

1/4 teaspoon ground white pepper (use 1/2 tsp for spicier) (Chinese recipes of course)

1 tablespoon of mix (about a quarter of a batch) per 1 ½ cups water plus

1/4 teaspoon sesame oil or chili oil

1 teaspoon soy sauce

½ teaspoon miso paste (miso soup)

bundle of dry ramen noodles (3 bundles per pack)

Finely chopped vegetables like cabbage, broccoli, carrot, kernels of sweet corn, bell peppers, bok choy leaf and any other leafy green. Use freeze-dried vegetables if you can’t get fresh.

Bring it all to a boil, turn the heat down five minutes, turn it off and let the noodles finish cooking.

The little quarter pound box of low-sodium miso paste that I bought will probably make 50 servings of ramen broth. I have a gallon jug of soy sauce because I use it so much. Unless you like your mouth to burn, use just a couple drops of chili oil and you'll have plenty for other recipes. (I left salt out of the dry seasonings because I use full-sodium soy sauce.)

The dry ramen noodles are available on websites like Weee which also sells the other ingredients, including the veggies. The noodles ought to be a staple in your kitchen. You throw away a little ring of paper that comes around each bundle of noodles, and after three servings, you throw away the wrapper. Instead of throwing away that whole bowl and the wrappings around the two kernels of corn which are all you get for veggies, every time you make a serving.

Yes you need a saucepan for the cooking; you can use it to cook single servings of almost anything you like including chili, mac n cheese, soup or stew of any kind, oatmeal (use the old-fashioned five minute type and you can also make cookies), hard or soft boiled eggs, kichri or fried rice or even a one-person frittata or tortilla espanola -- and for heating water for tea, coffee, yerba mate, and milk for making hot chocolate. 

Yes you need a bowl to serve the ramen in, and you can use it for all the other things you can cook in that saucepan (except the drinks, of course), as well as for cold cereal or servings of snacks like granola, dry roast nuts, trail mix, chips, dip for snacks.... 

As for washing up, that takes all of five minutes, most of which is waiting for the water to get hot.

I have lots of other cooking tips on my DIY page. They can save you money, give you better nutrition, keep you from putting PFAS in the landfill or water supply. And oh, yeah, we're finding out that cooking from scratch burns calories as well as letting you control the sugar, sodium, fat, and cut out the garbage in packaged foods. Without the stress involved in being an Iron Chef.

Why Fallacies are False -- the Turnkey Fallacy

This started from a Bluesky post but it's been going on for millennia or longer. Anytime somebody proposes a turnkey solution, you know that they are speaking out of ignorance or out of selfishness.

The oldest example I know of from personal experience probably goes back millennia, maybe even as far back as human speech. Ever watch the movie "What Women Want"?

This is a thirteen-year-old male attitude. There is supposed to be one thing a guy can do to get any woman he wants. Ladies, when you hear a guy say "What the hell do women want?", whether he says it to you or not, run. He wants a button he can push. He doesn't want a real relationship -- he doesn't know what a relationship is.

Demagogues feed into this thirteen-year-old mentality by offering simple solutions to complicated problems. So do dictators. That's why their earliest support comes from the ignorant, the mentally immature and from educated people whose training has been pipelined to make them ignorant of much of reality. I've talked about pipelining in this thread before. I know college professors who fall for urban legends and produce work that incorporates fallacies or, at best, can't fit into the big picture of a subject, because the writers are ignorant of everything their pipelined research cuts them off from.

Academics who fall for the turnkey fallacy include people in STEM who think human cultures can be run on math or logic, people in the liberal arts, and people who think of themselves as liberals but still think there's only one solution to everything.

Which gets me to the Bluesky post. It promoted morals as a counterweight to politics. It had several problems.

It clearly appealed to a "come to Jesus" attitude. Well, as we all know, the religious right wants a "come to Jesus" movement, only not only do they really mean Jesus, they mean the evangelical concept associated in the last decade with child sexual abuse, spousal abuse, ignorance, violence, and incompetence.

Second, it relied on a composition by a Christian minister. One of the things Christianity does is fail to understand the scripture it ostensibly takes as its basis. In Jewish scripture, the section known as Neviim, Prophets, survived the Babylonian Captivity for two reasons. One is that the prophecies included either came true immediately, or they came true on the schedule incorporated in the prophecies. That's a feature of Jewish law. If your prophecy doesn't come true on one of those schedules, you're a false prophet. 

The other reason is that everything included in those books relates to Jewish law. Samson had to be a nazir for life because there was no central shrine for him to go to, to offer his sacrifices and have his hair shorn. He lived after the Philistines destroyed the Shiloh sanctuary. David ruled that the widow's other son did not have to die because the people trying to convict him of murders did not qualify as witnesses. They were on-lookers but they did not perform hatraah, community policing to try and prevent the killing.

So appealing to Prophets as morals somehow above and beyond Jewish law is a misunderstanding of both the meaning and history of the material. Musar, which Proverbs refers to (in Writings), is not ethics that supersedes the law. It is an inner drive that keeps one faithful to the law.

Third, my legal studies classes defined politics as the way you get things done in an environment of people with differing goals, aims, desires and so on. That means it's perfectly normal to have politics going on in a religious organization. But it's only going to result in a "come to Jesus" moment in the sense that the organization agrees on what to do and how. There won't be some sudden epiphany -- another religious concept.

Put it together, and the reverend who wrote the article possibly found that the politics in his religious organization doesn't track with what he sees as moral. So he's demonizing politics and then extrapolating outside his organization.

And that gets into something else I've found out through experience. Organizations are mass phenomena, not individual phenomena. They are not designed to suit the wishes of every member. The culture of which they form part is the same way. Its laws are the same way. They carry out the general mores of the culture, which may clash with some subculture (I've talked about that before too) or individual. 

We're living in a time when one of the subcultures is so ignorant of how everything works that it is trying to make the entire culture live by its wishes. In other words, as I've said more than once, the thirteen-year-olds are trying to run the school.

And the school is letting them do it. It took a while, but some of the older kids are speaking out about this. And it exposes that they haven't taken the hard classes that would let them speak effectively. What's more, some of them were so comfortable at school up to now, they never developed the outside experience that would have given them a clue earlier. So they break away because nobody at the school listens to them, and they get on the outside and are shocked to find that the outsiders they ignored while they were fat dumb and happy, knew all along that this was going on.

I stopped joining organizations when I was in my teens. Either I got tired of being expected to espouse ideas I didn't agree with, or I found that the organizations didn't live up to their billing, or the organization shifted in ways I didn't agree with. 

There is no one solution to these situations because there is no one situation, plus you are an individual not a peg to put in a hole. Plus situations change. You must be ready to break away and work on your own. You must be ready for your situation to change so that you have to change what you do and how, and you must be ready for the same thing to happen to your allies. You must realize that your set of allies will change for reasons of their own -- and sometimes you will have to ditch them for reasons of your own. 

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- postscript

I was just rereading something I wrote and realized there's one tip I didn't give you. I've used it, and it will help with your word count.

Avoid pluperfect tense. 

Oral narratives are straight-forward. They tell the tale from beginning to end. They do not have retrospectives. They have what I call sidebars, inset narratives. The Judah-Tamar story in Genesis is a sidebar in the Joseph saga; it gives us our second look at sexual behavior and sets us up for the hat trick in Egypt.

Immediately after it ends, there's a line telling us that Joseph has ended up in Egypt. In Biblical Hebrew, it uses a hufal perfect aspect, which indicates a completed action without a named agent. In Septuagint, it uses an "aorist" which, in my Greek thread, I call an imperfective, and again, it has no named agent. It is not a "pluperfect". The Vulgate uses ductus est which is a perfect passive; there is no separate pluperfect passive. So English translations that have a pluperfect in Genesis 39:1 don't have support for it in the usual source documents.

Biblical Hebrew narratives use perfective verbs to open and close episodes, as in Genesis 39:1 and the creation story, and to express one-time resultative actions. The idea of X happening before Y, once Y already starts happening, comes elsewhere in the context, not in the verb. Inside the story, BH uses what Dr. Cook calls a narrative past, which is really vav plus an imperfective verb. It ain't over until it's over, and the episode can end with a perfective verb or something like "and it is there to this very day", etc.

Fairy tales and other oral narratives treat the action, while it goes on, as not yet completed, the opposite of what a perfect verb means. All the more so, they are not going to use a pluperfect. Check out Grimm's tales (in German of course, see Internet Archive). 

Remember, you don't have to explain how things happen or how things happen to show up just in time for your action to take place. That may be one excuse for pluperfects in written literature, especially mysteries and thrillers, but you don't do that if you're writing it like a fairy tale. The other excuse for a pluperfect in a mystery is, of course, that once somebody commits the crime, you have to have retrospective discussions as you figure out who, why, and so on. 

In other fiction, that would be telling the story back to front. It's confusing.

Also, I suggest that you never have somebody use a pluperfect in speech. Just use a plain past tense. Not "I had already done that" but "I already did that." 

I rewrote a chapter in a fanfic novel a dozen times to get rid of the pluperfects in the first draft. The main character in that chapter was completely illiterate. The pluperfect is, if anything, a tense of written literature. If he couldn't write it, he couldn't use it. Rethink your uneducated or undereducated people and how they communicate. 

In another work I wrote "Nobody can possibly act out a pluperfect tense, acting is all about the present moment." After what I said about film as oral literature, it should be obvious to you that your Regency novel will not translate to film unless you rewrite it to get rid of pluperfect tenses.

While you think about this, brush up on your grammar so that you know the difference between the pluperfect ("I had gone to Birmingham that day") and the conditional ("Had I bought a ticket for Birmingham"). Remember, context is king.

Try not to use pluperfect tense. Edit to get rid of it, and watch your prose become less confusing and more immediate as your word count drops.

Knitting -- it doesn't get any older than this

So if you read my post on netting, you have an idea of how much I like finding ancient techniques. This post is about another one best known from Finnish work.

A pair of socks from Egypt worked in the Coptic culture of the 200s-500s CE uses a technique now called nålbinding which is related to both knitting and crochet. Because people used it that long ago, and because it is found all over northern Europe, you can suspect that it has a much longer history, possibly back as far as the breeding of wool sheep out of the original mouton hair sheep. So, by 3000 BCE. Museum pieces of nålbinding in Scandinavia date to the same time as development of the Selbu rose motif but obviously reflect a long history.

You use one needle with an eye, so if you have yarn or tapestry needles, those would work. 

You use long pieces of yarn, you don't work directly from the skein. 

You form a chain of loops by working the yarn into old loops and then into a loop around your thumb, which you push off your thumb while forming a new thumb loop.

This technique works best with wool yarn, unless you have a fairly sturdy yarn that will survive working with very long pieces to avoid having to add yarn. You have to add in new pieces of yarn when you get to the end of one. Adding yarn involves slight felting, which requires hackling. Only wool yarn hackles. 

Hackled yarn isn't strong enough for a loom. You want to take your spun yarn, wind it into your loom and cut off the extra. You don't waste those pieces, you work them up into small items with nalbinding. They couldn't afford to waste anything in those days.

This site gives the most detail, including videos for several families of stitches: Finnish; Oslo; York. York was captured by the Vikings and became the capital of the Danelaw so it makes sense that the Vikings imported their crafts. This site includes instructions on classic ways of doing multi-color work and the patterns used by people the writer interviewed.

https://www.en.neulakintaat.fi/

You can get special needles at a number of sites like Mielke Fiber Arts and Lacis. Do NOT buy Woolery's curved needles. I worked with them for a week and could not turn out a nice braid. The swelling around the eye is too large. They're nice to look at but it's like the "darning needles" that Woolly Thistle sells: that flange at the eye makes it impossible to use them for darning, duplicate stitch, tucking in loose thread or sewing seams. None of the nalbinding videos use needles this fat and most of them are straight; the curved ones do not have such an extreme curve.

Mielke's has three types of needles. The wooden ones should work well with heavy worsted and bulky yarns. The bone one works with worsted and should work with sport weight. The metal ones would be good for DK and fingering.

Most people make socks and mittens in nalbinding. If you use a three or four yard piece of cotton yarn, you can make a nice lanyard. There’s also a pattern for a shawl in two parts at this site. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVUEFGYEjTc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAoTjPjGruE

You can learn to carve your own needles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wQcdqiLjnU

When you are learning to work on the flat, use this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaKlTSKqcvk

When you work your first sample, I highly recommend that you use a different color of yarn for the second row so that you can see which loop you picked up to make your last stitch, and then you can be sure which loop to pick up for your next stitch. Also notice that when you are about to start a new row, you pick up two loops before taking your stitch, but as you work down the piece you only pick up one loop.

Hints.

To splice in new yarn, unravel the plies of your yarn for a couple of inches. Lay them together, get them wet and lay them across one palm. Then use the other palm to roll them together and get them to hackle. Work slowly for a while so you catch it if they try to unhackle, and dampen and roll again.

If your yarn refuses to hackle, go ahead and use a square knot. Wait until your working yarn is less than a foot long and then you will get past the knot pretty quickly and go back to using plain yarn. Use your needle and fingernails to loosen old stitches and get them over the knot. But first make sure your grandma from the Old Country isn't watching cause she will throw a hissy.

I tend to use my lowest three fingers to stabilize the working yarn.

The biggest problem is knowing which loop behind your thumb is the previous thumb loop. Pull gently on the top of the current thumb loop; the one behind your thumb that moves is the previous one and that's the one you want to pick up going front to back, then turning and working into the current thumb loop and under the working yarn.

Before making a new stitch, gently tighten the previous thumb loop to lie against the braid. This will make a neater result. Then tighten the current thumb loop slightly by pulling on the working yarn that goes to the needle, and then take your stitch.

When I stop working, I put my needle through the previous thumb loop in the direction it should go when I make my next stitch.

Work slowly and carefully until you get the hang of it. By the time I finished my first row for my learning project, I had considerably picked up speed and the second row went even faster despite having to double check and make sure I was consistent about which loop on the first row I picked up before taking the stitch.

If things go wrong, just work backwards to the last place that looks right and start from there. I had to do that twice yesterday.

If you've done nalbinding and this looks wrong, let me know what you think I messed up on. 

I'm just getting started with nålbinding and I think I will try to work some things in bulky yarn once I clear out old projects that I never got around to.