Tuesday: Hili dialogue

September 17, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Tuesday, September 17, 2024, and National Monte Cristo Day.  In this case Monte Cristo is a sandwich, described this way by Wikipedia:

A Monte Cristo sandwich is an egg-dipped or batter-dipped ham and cheese sandwich that is pan or deep fried. It is a variation of the French croque monsieur.

I’ve never had one. Here’s a photo. but it looks more like a donut than a sandwich! Still, I would of course try it. but look at this:

In sweeter variations, the Monte Cristo is often covered in powdered sugar and served with maple syrup or preserves.

Oy!

uıɐɾ ʞ ʇɐɯɐs, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, National Apple Dumpling Day, and National Voter Registration Day. (I vote by mail, automatically getting my ballots several weeks before the election, filling them out at home, and popping them into a nearby mailbox in the postage-paid envelope.)

There’s a Google Doodle today reminding people to register to vote. I don’t think that’s a problem among readers, but here it it (click to see where it goes). If you’re not registered, check your deadline here.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the Sept 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Kamala Harris did her first solo interview—with Action News anchor Brian Taff on Friday. It took place as she was campaigning in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.  It’s short—11 minutes long, and you can judge for yourself.  I see little few concrete proposals (beyond what she’s said before) beyond her claims that she wants to ban assault rifles and have background checks (which I approve).  Sadly, the reporter throws softballs, and there’s a lot of irrelevant autobiograpy and fuzzy sentiments.  She ends by saying that her fondest hope is to cook Sunday dinner for her family again, but if she gets to inhabit the White House that won’t be possible.

*The man accused of trying to assassinate Trump has been charged, but with gun-possession crimes. He apparently waited for hours for Trump to show up, presumably because he didn’t know whether or when Trump would play on that golf course, which is the Orange Man’s favorite course.

The man who investigators say appears to have waited near a golf course for about 12 hours in an apparent attempt to assassinate former President Donald J. Trump with a semiautomatic rifle faces two federal gun charges: possessing a firearm as a felon and possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number.

The defendant, Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, wore a blue inmate jumpsuit to his initial appearance in a federal courtroom in Florida on Monday, and later left the courthouse in a white van. His appearance came less than 24 hours after what the authorities said appeared to be the second attempted assassination of the former president in just over two months.

According to a criminal complaint, cellphone data indicated that Mr. Routh was in the woods in the vicinity of Mr. Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla., for roughly 12 hours before a Secret Service agent spotted what appeared to be the barrel of a rifle and opened fire. The complaint detailed the subsequent discovery of a loaded SKS-style rifle — a Soviet-era semiautomatic rifle developed in the 1940s — as well as food and a digital camera.

The charge of possessing a firearm as a felon is the more serious of the charges against Mr. Routh, carrying a prison sentence of up to 15 years. Possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number carries a sentence of up to five years.

. . . .The cellphone of the suspect charged on Monday in a possible assassination attempt against former President Donald J. Trump was near the golf course where the episode took place for nearly 12 hours, court records show.

The cellphone of Ryan W. Routh, the suspect, was “in the vicinity of the area along the tree line” of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., beginning at 1:59 a.m. on Sunday, according to a federal criminal complaint filed on Monday.

I would have thought that the crimes for which Routh is charged would carry more than 20 years in jail, but of course the investigation isn’t through, and I’m betting they’ll come up with more charges soon.  Right now, I’m unwilling to speculate on a motive, especially because the guy seems all over the map. The obliteration of a serial number seems damning (this is in fact was the lead headline of the WSJ on Monday), but the most intriguing part of this whole story to me is that they were able to track the suspect’s car using cameras along the road that could read his license plate number—a number photographed by an alert bystander as Routh fled the scene.

*As I predicted (you don’t have to be a genius to prognosticate such stuff), the Taliban is further cracking down on women in Afghanistan, passing a new set of misogynistic, theocratic, and oppressive laws.

As the Taliban begins enforcing new draconian laws, Afghan women say that whatever hopes they once harbored for an easing of the severe restrictions on them have largely vanished.

The new religious code issued late last month bans women from raising their voices, reciting the Quran in public and looking at men other than their husbands or relatives. It requires women to cover the lower half of their faces in addition to donning a head-covering they were already expected to wear, among other rules.

Women’s lives were heavily regulated by the Taliban-run government before the latest rules were promulgated, and some of the new laws codify restrictions that were already imposed on women in practice. But Afghan women, speaking in phone interviews over the past week, pointed to mounting signs of a crackdown in urban areas, where rules had been less rigorously enforced

The Taliban’s morality police, which is an extension of the regime’s most conservative elements, appears to have been handed an unprecedented amount of power in the capital, Kabul, and elsewhere, women said. While the morality police’s white robes were a rare sight in Kabul, they have become omnipresent since late August, several women said.

Officers are roaming bus stops and shopping centers searching for dress-code violations or any women who might laugh or raise their voices. On Fridays, the Muslim holy day, religious police officers disperse women in some parts of Kabul and accuse them of preventing male shop owners from making it to the mosque in time for prayers. Women are an increasingly rare sight on Afghan television broadcasts.

And women have largely stopped going to school: the Taliban promised women could still get education equal to that of men, but now they aren’t allowed to go to college or even get any education above the sixth grade.  I predicted that, too. If you know the Taliban, you know that they could never keep a promise about equality for the sexes.

*Jonathan Turley is peeved at the laxness (or rather, one-sidedness) of the moderators’ fact-checking in the Harris/Trump debate.  “With fact-checks like these, how does truth stand a chance?” He argues that the moderators fact-checked Trump far more often than Harris (and I can’t say he’s wrong). At any

ABC News has been widely criticized for the bias of the two moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir. Even liberal outlets acknowledged that the two journalists seemed inclined to “fact check” only Trump. In the meantime, they allowed clearly false statements from Harris to go unchallenged.

Three of the unchecked claims are being widely disseminated by supporters, including some in the media. Here are three legal “facts” that are being repeated despite being clearly untrue.

“Crime is down under the Biden-Harris administration.“

One of the most notable slap downs by ABC followed Trump commenting that crime rates have drastically risen during the Biden-Harris administration. Muir immediately balked and declared: “As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

Harris and her allies have been repeating the claim by ABC. But the actual statistics show that Trump was right. The Justice Department’s released survey found that, under the Biden administration, there has been a significant increase in crime. Violent crime was up 37 percent from 2020 to 2023, rape is up 42 percent, robbery is up 63 percent and stranger violence is up 61 percent. Other reports had shown startling increases such as a doubling of carjackings in D.C. in 2023.

“Harris has not supported transgender operations for undocumented migrants.”

Some of the greatest mocking in the media concerned Trump’s statement that Harris has supported transgender conversion treatment for undocumented persons. New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser immediately wrote “What the hell was he talking about? No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’s point.”

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer declared how “outlandish” it was for Trump to make such a claim.

But it’s true.

In 2019, Harris told the ACLU that she not only supported such operations but actively worked for at least one such procedure to take place. When it was reported by Andrew Kaczynski on CNN, host Erin Burnett was gobsmacked by the notion of taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained migrants. “She actually supported that?” Burnett exclaimed.

Even the New York Times later admitted that the “wildest sounding attack line” from Trump was “basically true.”

Harris does not support the right to abortion in the final three months of a pregnancy.  

Trump also hit Harris on her no-limits position on abortion rights, allowing women the right to abort a baby up to the moment of birth. Trump said Harris supports laws allowing abortions in “the seventh month, the eighth month, [and] the ninth month,” to which Harris retorted: “C’mon,” “no,” and “that’s not true.”

He adds one more unchecked claim that “ABC later corrected:ABC later challenged another claim by Harris on the deployment of U.S. troops.” Her claim was this: “(ABC later challenged another claim by Harris on the deployment of U.S. troops).”

But I don’t remember Harris supporting abortion in the final three months of a pregnancy; I can’t remember her saying that explicitly, though I may be wrong. All that Turley says to support this is that “many states, including Minnesota under Gov. Tim Walz (D), protect the right of a woman to abort a baby into the ninth month. While it is often said that this is left to the mother and her doctor, the law gives the decision to the mother.”  But that’s not Harris speaking!  At any rate, Turley also reiterates the dumb things that Trump said, most notably the Haitian pet-eating trope, which he should have stayed well away from, and his unfulfillable promise to make burning the American flag a crime.

But Turley’s point, with which you may or may not agree, is this:

The issue is not fact-checking, but the failure to do so equally and accurately. ABC actually disseminated false information under the mantle of fact-checking, and that’s a real problem.

Moderator Linsey Davis admitted later that ABC did not want a repeat of what had happened in the last debate, wherein Trump was given free rein and the moderators limited themselves to asking questions and enforcing time limits. CNN was praised in that debate across the political spectrum for being even-handed.

*Germany is reported to be holding back or delaying the sale of weapons to Israel. Although countries like Canada and the UK have either stopped or strongly curtailed the sale of arms to Israel, that hardly matters: it’s Germany and the U.S. who supply the bulk of weapons to Israel. The articles, from the Jerusalem Post, say this:

Germany’s federal government continues to ignore Israeli requests to purchase weapons, according to a Sunday report in the mass circulation daily Bild.

The paper wrote that “However, sales of heavy weapons systems to the Emirate of Qatar – one of the most important supporters of the terrorist group Hamas – were approved.”

and:

Although German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has reaffirmed his military support for Israel repeatedly, the German Federal Security Council, chaired by Scholz, has not approved arms exports to Israel for months, according to a Sunday Profil Magazine report.

According to the report, no approvals for arms exports to Israel have been granted since March. However, Scholz made public declarations of his solidarity with Israel and promised continued military aid at the end of July.

Furthermore, following the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, Scholz came to Israel and delivered a pledge of unconditional solidarity with Jerusalem. He, along with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, have repeatedly emphasized their belief in Israel’s right to self-defense, which included waging war in the Gaza Strip.

. . . Ultimately, the growing concerns [against Israel] are the reason why fewer approvals are being granted, even if no one wants to say it out loud,” summarized an employee of a representative on the Federal Security Council.

Approvals to export arms to Israel were initially granted at the start of the Israel-Hamas war , and they included an increase in export approvals that reportedly totaled a value of 326 million euros – ten times more than in the previous year, 2022, before the war.

“Often, there are no approvals at all – or they take forever to be processed,” the report noted. It added  that “export volumes have dropped significantly compared to last year – from 326 million euros to 14.5 million (as of August 21, 2024).”

Not a good look for Germany, especially given their history and subsequent attempts to make up for the Holocaust by things like making it a crime to deny it happened.  If the reason for this is really the “growing concerns against Israel” are the reason for this, then Germany should either articulate that, or, better yet, come up with the weapons to support the only democracy in the Middle East trying to defend itself—and in a way that has less “collateral damage”.

*Physicist Brian Greene has a science op-ed in the WaPo about string theory, a piece called “Decades later, string theory continues its march towards Einstein’s dream.” Einstein’s dream here means the elusive reconciliation of quantum mechanics with relativity theory, producing a theory of quantum gravity. And you may know that despite several decades of work on string theory now, it’s been criticized for not producing any testable predictions, which, to me at least, means that it can’t be a scientific theory. But Greene says we shouldn’t give up yet:

Scientists assess the validity of proposed theories by testing their predictions. The challenge for string theory is that it has yet to produce any definitive, testable predictions. This isn’t surprising. String theory diverges from conventional theories only under extreme conditions: where distances are unimaginably small and masses are extraordinarily large, such as in the core of a black hole or in the instant of the big bang. Unfortunately, exploring these realms is beyond our capabilities.

Critics argue that the situation is untenable, noting, “If you can’t test a theory, it’s not scientific.” Adherents counter, “String theory is a work in progress; it’s simply too early to pass judgment.” The critics retort, “Forty years is too early?” To which the adherents respond, “We’re developing what could be the most profound physical theory of all time — you can’t seriously cross your arms, tap your foot and suggest that time’s up.”

And so the debate continues, with stakes for science that couldn’t be higher. Two generations of some of the world’s most talented physicists — occupying coveted university research positions and supported by limited government funding — have spent their careers on a theory whose validity remains uncertain.

I know some of these physicists, and you can still get famous by working on a yet-untestable theory. (To some extent, that’s what Darwin was doing in The Origin.) But Greene isn’t ready to abandon the theory:

Here’s where human nature stakes its ground. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer because it comes down to individual scientific taste, one’s tolerance for risk and the extent to which one is willing to defer experimental evidence in favor of mathematical progress. To be sure, I would readily abandon string theory — and I’m confident my colleagues would as well — if experimental evidence undercut it or if a mathematical inconsistency were uncovered. I’m an advocate for truth, not string theory. But so far, no such experimental insight exists, and no such mathematical flaws have surfaced.

On the contrary, string theory continues to captivate seasoned researchers and aspiring students alike because of the remarkable progress that has been made in developing its mathematical framework. This progress has yielded provocative insights into long-standing mysteries and introduced radically new ways of describing physical reality.

People will keep working on it until it’s either falsified, gets empirical support, or physicists finally get so sick of pure mathematical manipulations that physics abandons string theory. . Where it sits now is above my pay grade, but a beautiful mathematical framework is not sufficient to keep a theory going: at some point it has to deal with empirical reality. As for the “provocative insights into long-standing mysteries”, well, Greene doesn’t describe them, and perhaps he should have, because they seem to imply string theory has led to a better understanding of nature, which can’t be true.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is cleaning up the area she hates trash on her beat:

Hili: Something is lying over there.
A: So what?
Hili: Pick it up because it’s litter.
In Polish:
Hili: Tam coś leży.
Ja: No to co?
Hili: Podnieś, bo śmieci.

And here’s a picture of Divy’s cat Jango taken by her nephew Gabriel:

*******************

From The Dodo

From Duck Lovers:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs (read below the outlined part, too):

Yesterday was the second anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, beaten to death by morality cops in Iran—for not wearing her hijab properly. Her death sparked a huge series of protests in Iran that are still going on.  I wish to Ceiling Cat that they’d work, but the penalty for protesting is getting shot, arrested, or blinded. The theocracy abides.

From Bryan, an amazing stunt:

From Barry. I’ve shown the first tweet before, but the second is new.  That is one deep cat sleep!

From my feed. This is sad but also very sweet:

I can’t access the New Yorker, which is unbearably woke and also says too little in too many words, but I found the longlist of the National Book Awards here, and obviously they include Rushdie’s new book about being attacked, Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder.  You can see the full list here—for free. It will be further pruned on October 1.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a lucky whale is about to ingest a fish ball:

Phoretic midges hitch a long ride!:

27 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Does anyone know of an archived copy of Brian Greene’s op-ed? I get wapo hardcopy daily but do not see it in Sunday, Monday, or this morning. According to paywalled headline, the dateline is 0600 yesterday. With my late 1960’s physics major, I know that I will not understand it, but would like to at least read the words.

    1. Thank you for the archived reference, Jerry. Now that I have read it…twice, I wonder who the audience is. I am surely not the sharpest pencil in the box, and my Scientific American level knowledge of contemporary theoretical physics has died with the decay of Scientific American itself over the past decade, but I think my educational background relative to other wapo readers is not particularly lacking. I have a BS and MS in physics from the late 60’s and early 70’s and have tried to read physics trade books as they have been published over the years. I think that what I got from the op ed was that we have a great deal of sunk cost in string theory research, now supporting a second generation of researchers; the math is elegant; we cannot actually test it because of the extrema it describes cannot be replicated in a lab; but we have no counter examples over forty years of awareness; so we should continue to support the research.

      What SHOULD the average wapo reader take away from this piece?

      Maybe this stuff cannot be written for us common folks?

      1. I wouldn’t bother with the Greene op-ed. Greene has been one of the biggest cheerleaders for string theory for decades, even as it is pretty obvious it is a failed program. The problem isn’t just that falsifying an approach where the fundamental length and energy scales (those between gravity and the domain of high energy particles) are so different that new experimentally verifiable prediction is just really difficult, it is that the way string theory is formulated there are like 10^500 different possible vacua, and there is no guidance from the framework itself how to select what the theory is (even using anthropic sorts of approaches). In some sense string theorists now admit they don’t know what string theory is. Their attempts at “predictions” or probes of deeper explanations of physical laws have become ever more tautological and silly (like placing bounds on the mass of an electron that are so loose to be meaningless). Guys like Greene have been invested in this enterprise for 30+ years so and they seemingly cannot give it up. A fair bit of interesting mathematics has come out of string theory, but essentially no new physics.

    2. The real reason that physicists are still pursuing string theory, despite it not (yet) giving testable predictions is this:

      No-one has a better idea — that is, a better way of moving beyond the standard model of particle physics and unifying different areas of physics with a theory of quantum gravity — and all attempts to find a better idea have so far fared much worse than string theory (and yes, plenty of people have tried and are trying).

      And the basic problem underlying that issue is the lack of guidance from nature. That is, there are no experimental results from particle colliders that are inconsistent with the current standard model, and hence give pointers to a better theory. In other words, the current models work sufficiently well that, ever since ~ 1980 or so, no novel findings in particle accelerators have come along that “break” the standard model. And without that guidance, it’s hard to make progress.

      1. To keep up with the string theory fiasco I recommend Peter Woit’s
        site: Not Even Wrong.
        And: great news from Afghanistan – with the blessing of Allah, the
        Taliban has now prohibited Polio vaccinations !

      2. A problem with string theory (and some other fields) is that there are popular accounts and technical literature and little if anything in-between. So recently I’ve been asking around whether I’ve missed something, and the answer is usually that I haven’t. However, just yesterday someone pointed me to a book about string theory at the level I’m looking for: doctorate in physics but in another field. It’s by Marcel Vonk, whose Wikipedia entry is about him as a professional poker player and mentions that he does string theory as well. The book is in Dutch, but I can read Dutch well enough.

  3. Well, Routh appears to be all over the Left. He was actively involved in trying to get Afghan fighters to Ukraine to fight against Russia. He wrote a book (available on Amazon) called Ukraine’s Unwinnable War. In it he apologizes to Iran for supporting Trump in 2016.

    “You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment and the dismantling of the [nuclear] deal. No one here in the US seems to have the balls to put natural selection to work or even unnatural selection,” he added.

    1. I just read in NPR that he also donated to Act Blue “nearly 20 times” (aside: very bad usage of the language).
      Many have been brainwashed to view Trump as a bad, evil person, Hitler in modern form. Given that is it really surprising that he would be targeted? I have Democrat friends and family who said after the first attempt, “It’s too bad that he missed”, and “everyone knows you aim for the chest and not the head”, while laughing about it. The same group has been laughing about this one too, saying, “maybe the third time will be the charm.” These are educated people who see Trump as so uniquely bad that it’s OK to laugh about murder and are cheerleading for actual political violence. Meanwhile, they see Republicans as a party of gun violence. I can’t understand it.

  6. Just finished Rushdie’s Knife last night, and it was pretty good. Loved his memoir, Joseph Anton, but find his novels have too much magical realism for my taste. I also just read, somewhere, that there’s a movie being made of Knife.

      2. 100% agree. Midnight’s Children is one of my all times favorites! I disliked the movie though, but that’s usually how I feel about movies based on books I’ve read.

  7. After hearing that the Vizsla is flooded in some parts of Poland, I wondered whether it has impacted Hili and her family since I think they live along the river. To PCC: do you know whether they are impacted?

    1. Most of the floods are in another part of Poland and the situation there is dire. We live very far from this area. Moreover, even though we live very close to the Wisła river, our house is high above the river and no flood can reach us. Thanks for thinking about us.

  8. The best Monte Cristo on planet Earth?

    Gracie’s Sea Hag in Depoe Bay, OR.

    You should have a cardiologist clear you beforehand.

  9. It seems to me that live fact checking in a debate can never be even-handed and unbiased. Even if the fact checkers themselves have no bias (a near impossibility), it’s pretty impossible to do a good and fair job on the fly, partly because so many of these claims are half-truths where a fact-check requires some nuance.

    1. In the run up to the debate, everyone expected the same, familiar, outrageous lies from Trump, and the news media have been roundly criticized for letting him get away with it. So I suspect that the debate moderators had prepared a handy flip chart and were ready to counter (a few of) them.

      1. Agreed. It’s not easy to fact check in real time, but if you know what lies are probably coming, you can be prepared to meet them. I think it is for that reason, and because Trump lied more frequently than Harris, that he got fact-checked more often. Her lies or misstatements were probably not foreseen, and thus not easily checked in real time.

        Also, if Harris agreed with the ruling of Roe v. Wade, which she did, she did support abortion in the 3rd trimester, albeit under special circumstances. Abortions that late in the game are rare, and for exceptional, heart-breaking reasons. One source (https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/press-release/what-the-data-show-abortions-later-in-pregnancy/) says that 1% of abortions occur at or after 21 weeks of gestation, which would include part of the 2nd trimester.

  10. Not a physicists’ backside.
    I’ve recently read “Before the Big Bang” Laura Mersini-Haughton. An Armenian living in the US. It includes a little of her life in the “Nth Korea of Europe” before the collapse of the USSR.
    In short a simple explanation as best I can, with her colleagues and using, math, string theory, quantum mechanics, predicted a huge void and it’s location in the sky. Supposedly an ancient relic of the decoupling from the wave function (entanglement) for matter to come into existence.
    Several space telescopes have confirmed its existence (the void) something she thought would never happen in her lifetime.
    Point being, string theory contributed to her research and the prediction of… a multiverse!
    “Hey! where you going?” 😁
    Dark matter also has never been seen, touched, smelt, or otherwise, but out there and very much part of the standard model for all the reasons you can read about.
    I am lucky I dont come pre loaded with string theory biases one way or t’other. 🤪
    If anyone has a thought or two & can be bothered I’d like to know more.

    1. She’s Albanian. I bought the book this summer and will read and review it.

      Albania was allied with China, not the USSR.

      Of course, voids have been known about for decades. I’ll have to read the book before I can comment further.

      Having said that, as I work in the field (just back from two cosmology conferences), suffice it to say that there is no consensus that her idea is correct. Most professional cosmologists have probably never heard of it.

      Also, in contrast to some other fields, for well over a century books have not been a means of communicating new ideas in physics. Books are extremely important for a variety of reasons, but new ideas are published in papers. Of course, one can also publish them in books, but that is usually the case when the author is the one who came up with the idea and wants to get it better known. Nothing wrong with that, but one needs to be aware of the criteria in the field for vetting a new idea.

  11. The idea of a battered ham and cheese sandwich dressed with maple syrup is strangely attractive. I think you are corrupting me!

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