In the still of the night

I just read a popular book on chemical elements, The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean. It was very entertaining, and seemed quite credible and clear, even if slightly fuzzy on the quantum mechanics. There was one claim that I took exception to, though:

The length of a day is slowly increasing because of the sloshing of ocean tides, which drag and slow earth’s rotation. To correct for this, metrologists slip in a “leap second” about every third year, usually when no one’s paying attention, at midnight on December 31.

Is there any time in the year when people are paying more attention to the time exact to a second than precisely at midnight on December 31? Does he think people would notice an extra second if it were interpolated at noon on July 7? I always assumed they did it at the one time of year when people would notice an extra second precisely because they want to be noticed. “Never fear, humble citizens. While you sleep, we are looking after your time.”

Come home to Israel…

Binyamin Netanyahu is back to grandstanding as king of the Jews — just days after announcing that he would be speaking to the US Congress as “a representative of the entire Jewish people” — telling European Jews that they will always be victimised by non-Jews as long as they stay in Europe, so they should move to Israel, where they can be victimised by fellow Jews instead. But at least in Israel Jews can pray in peace without armed police protecting them; because in Israel the armed police will break up their prayer sessions and arrest them (if they’re women and not Orthodox).

The Tin Woodman as Anti-Antinomian

Antinomianism — the belief that the intrinsic holiness of believers liberates them from petty concerns with moral, much less humane, behaviour — often seems depressingly prevalent. At least as prevalent as the mirror-image disposition that many believers attribute to atheists, that if there is no God to set rules, all things are permitted.

I was just reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for the first time, and I was struck by the morality of the Tin Woodman, who hopes that the Wizard will bestow upon him a heart. Of course, the running joke is that the everyone is going to the Wizard to get something that they already have. The Scarecrow wants brains, even though he repeatedly proves himself the cleverest of the company; the Cowardly Lion wants courage despite the fact that he repeatedly performs heroic and self-sacrificing deads. The Tin Woodman, although he is made of metal and lacks a heart, is the most tenderhearted of all. At one point he rusts himself through crying over a beetle that he steps on accidentally.

“This will serve me a lesson,” said he, “to look where I step. For if I should kill another bug or beetle I should surely cry again, and crying rusts my jaws so that I cannot speak.”

Thereafter he walked very carefully, with his eyes on the road, and when he saw a tiny ant toiling by he would step over it, so as not to harm it. The Tin Woodman knew very well he had no heart, and therefore he took great care never to be cruel or unkind to anything.

“You people with hearts,” he said, “have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful. When Oz gives me a heart of course I needn’t mind so much.”

Replace “heart” by “grace”, and you see that far too many of the devout believe they have been to Oz.

Are you “cultural”?

A while back I remarked on a tic shared by politicians and political journalists, of designating certain people and their voting choices as “demographic”. Now the RCMP have disrupted a planned mass shooting at a Halifax mall.

wouldn’t characterize it as a terrorist event. I would classify it as a group of individuals that had some beliefs and were willing to carry out violent acts against citizens,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commanding Officer Brian Brennan said.

Now, you may be wondering, how do “violent acts against citizens” carried out by “individuals that had some beliefs” — I’m guessing he means to imply that the acts were supposed to be promoting those beliefs somehow — differ from what you or I would call “terrorism”?

He would not specify what those beliefs were, saying simply that “they were not culturally based.”

Got that? “Terrorists” carry out their violent acts in furtherance of beliefs that are “culturally based”. Wanton violence to promote non-culturally-based beliefs are lamentable, but not terrorism.

I wonder if he has any particular cultures in mind?

Snitches get stitches, French financial edition

Several newspapers, including Le Monde, have been collaborating to publish information about tax avoidance and money-laundering at HSBC, gleaned from files leaked from the bank’s Swiss dependency several years ago. Now Pierre Bergé, president of Le Monde’s supervisory board and one of the paper’s owners, has

attacked the paper on RTL radio, accusing it of “informing” on the business people, politicians, criminals and celebrities named in the HSBC files.

“Is it the role of a newspaper to throw the names of people out there? … I don’t want to compare it to times past but all the same, informing is informing.”

First they came for the hedge-fund managers…

Building confidence in public health

The NHS informs concerned parents about vaccines:

The 4-in-1 pre-school booster is very safe. Before it was granted a licence, the safety, quality and effectiveness of the pre-school vaccine, like all vaccines, was thoroughly tested. It does not contain thiosermal (mercury).

A lot of parents are (probably unnecessarily) worried about thiomersal in vaccines. The reassurance from NHS would probably be more persuasive if they knew how to spell it. (Thiomersal is, confusingly, called “thimerosal” in the US, but not “thiosermal”.)

“The important thing is to get the money in”

That’s what Lin Homer, head of HM Revenues and Customs (the UK tax authority) said in 2012 about agreements not to prosecute wealthy Britons who had been concealing their money in Swiss bank accounts, and so also protect them from having their identities publicly revealed, in exchange for them kindly consenting to pay the taxes that they were legally obliged to pay. We wouldn’t want to embarrass anyone! And then I recall this woman (a mother with two children) who was sentenced to prison for five months for receiving an item of clothing from a friend who had stolen it.* As Bob Dylan sang, “Steal a little and they throw you in jail/Steal a lot and they make you king.”

Shocked by the criminal activity at HSBC in Geneva, which was revealed to the French tax authorities by an enterprising tech support guy, the Swiss police have been unusually active in seeking to ensure that such lawlessness is stopped — by seeking to extradite and prosecute the guy who revealed the information. Informed of HSBC’s crimes in 2010, the UK government sought ingeniously to decapitate the bank, by appointing its CEO Stephen Green to the House of Lords and making him Minister of State for Trade.

In order to further ensure that appropriate standards of legal and ethical behaviour were put into effect at HSBC, the head of tax at HMRC, Dave Hartnett, started working for HSBC as a consultant two years later.

* This sentence was later overturned on appeal. But she certainly wasn’t allowed anonymity, and no one said “The important thing is to get the trousers back”.

What does an anti-vaccine activist want?

With the swelling of interest in the anti-vaccine movement, inspired by the recent California measles outbreak, I’ve seen a number of opinions published similar to this one from Ian Steadman in the New Statesman

Then there’s also this to think about: if somebody’s distrust of scientific and/or political authority is so great, for whatever reason – maybe they’ve been scared by sensationalist stories in the media, or maybe they sincerely believe the government has no moral right to dictate health choices to citizens – that they’re willing to significantly increase their child’s risk of catching a (possibly fatal) illness, then calling them names and telling them scientists and politicians disagree with them is probably futile. Arguing that “the science is settled” with someone whose stance is predicated on the belief that the standards of proof used by scientists are flawed is definitely futile.

The article is excellent, but I don’t entirely agree with this sentiment. Living in Berkeley and Oxford, I have encountered some vaccine refuseniks, and it’s not clear to me that they have anything as definable as a belief about “the standards of proof used by scientists”. Rather, I think that they have a desperate need to feel special, protected not by mass vaccination — and definitely not by anything as infra dig as “herd immunity” — but by their special virtue, which may be Christian purity or organic health-food purity. Continue reading “What does an anti-vaccine activist want?”

Kids’ Kindness Krusade

So, there’s this president in America, and his job description definitely does not include “Defender of the Faith” or anything like that, and he’s getting bashed for having suggested that the Crusades — hundreds of years of Europeans hoisting aloft the banner of Christ and marching off to slaughter infidels and expropriate their lands, in case you’ve forgotten — might have raised some misapprehensions that Christianity is not 100% a religion of peace. He also made the (clearly revisionist) assertion, with no footnotes to back it up, that churches in the American South weren’t doing everything they possibly could to end slavery and later discrimination against Black Americans. Political and historical opponents aren’t taking these slurs lying down!
Maybe it’s because my ancestors were the first victims of lazy crusaders who thought they might as well start by killing the infidels closer to home (Rhineland Jews), but I’ve always found the Anglo-American use of “crusade” to mean an ardent struggle for a good cause — possibly hopeless, but usually a good thing (for example, the “crusade against rape culture” or against the REF), or even against equine colic). (I don’t know how it is used elsewhere. I can’t think that I’ve observed the corresponding German word used in a generic sense.
This dissonance particularly stood out for me when I saw, in an elementary school in Cambridge MA where I was doing some volunteer teaching, a poster announcing the “Kids’ Kindness Crusade”. Even without knowing the story of the Children’s Crusade (which may or may not have been a real historical event) it seems bizarre to me that people would think a “kids’ crusade” sounds like a positive thing. It seems as weird to me as promoting a “Parents’ Patience Pogrom”, or “Genocide against Germs”. Or, for that matter, “war on illiteracy and unnumeracy“.

14th Century NIMBYism

In Juliet Barker’s book on the Great Revolt of 1381 I was struck by this comment on the spread of local grammar schools in England in the second half of the 14th century:

Where there was no dedicated room or building available, classes were held in the local church. In 1373 the Bishop of Norwich prohibited this practice in the schools of King’s Lynn, on the grounds that the cries of beaten children interrupted services and distracted worshippers.

Nowadays the bishop and the local residents would have cited the shortage of parking… Continue reading “14th Century NIMBYism”