Moving through time

Hello, world. I’m in the Pacific Northwest, feeling pacific, enjoying the mild weather, and reconnecting with family. I’m not doing much, which is rather soothing, and just watching the days go by, as one does in paradise.
So yesterday my sisters sprung a surprise on me — a gigantic box containing the battered remains of the old balsa wood model airplanes I used to build in middle and high school. This really was a huge surprise, like the dead rising from the grave to walk and remind me of my past sins. I had told them to get rid of them years ago, and honestly thought they’d been trashed, but no, my sister Tomi had wrapped them in bubble wrap and stashed them in her house. She had not needed to do that.
In my teens, I’d had a solitary hobby. I’d build these Guillow balsa and tissue paper model planes. I’d get one, take it up to my grandmother’s attic where she had some space, and spend a few months carefully assembling it. I didn’t fly them, and I didn’t put them on display at modeling shows. I’d finish them, put them in a jumble with the others, and move on to the next.
It was the process. I’d cut out the ribs and forms from balsa sheets and glue them together on sticks and struts over templates. I liked the engineering of the airplane skeletons, and enjoyed the finicky work of, for instance, carving and sanding the wing leading edge to get a perfect curve. Sometimes I’d go outside the instructions and shave the ribs down so I could overlay them with a sheath of 1/32nd inch balsa, just because it was more form fitting and stronger.
I spent hours with an X-Acto knife and the finest grade of sandpaper, making sure there were no bumps or deformations. They were beautiful bones.
Then I’d clothe them in tissue paper, lightly moistened to shrink as it dried. Layers and layers of dope would be applied, until the surface was smooth and shiny like metal. But it wasn’t. It was perfect when you could tap the taut surface and it sounded like a snare drum.
Then painting. Hours of painting, many coats. I’d research the planes and pick one exemplar I’d mimic.
Once it was done, it was done. I’d throw it in the pile in the attic; at that point, I only scrutinized it for its flaws (there were always lots) and plan to do better with the next one. But I never planned to fly them or show them. The joy was in the building, in the process of becoming, and I didn’t need them beyond that.
It was a zen thing, I guess. Every teenager should have a zen thing.
Time passed. I moved away. I went to college. I got married. I had kids. Sometimes, when I visited my grandmother, the kids would go up to the attic to look at the airplane graveyard their weird dad had built. More years passed. My grandmother died. Her house was being sold. What did I want done with my model collection, I was asked, over the phone, far away. I don’t care, I said, stomp on ‘em, set ‘em on fire, I finished them years ago.
They didn’t! I guess there was such obvious care as detail in the models, that they thought there must be some value in them, but no. The value was all in quiet hours alone, thinking and shaping and painting, in Grandma occasionally bringing up a plate of cookies, in clean breezes when I opened all the windows while doping, in the satisfaction of seeing wood come together in flawless joints, in the quiet rasp of sandpaper. The important part was done and gone! It’s memories now, not objects.
It was a nice surprise to see the objects again yesterday, but I’m unattached. They can go.
My three year old grandson came to visit. I let him play. He wasn’t trying to wreck anything, but as you might expect, he snapped a wing off; he stepped on a tail plane; he wrenched off landing gear and tried to stuff it in the cockpit. He tried to make them fly, but I never built them to fly. Bits snapped off.
I was actually gratified to see how well they held together—the major structural elements were strong, despite being nothing but hollow shells of soft wood and paper. I built well. It was fitting to sit there with my son and watch my grandson bang them against the pavement, 50 years after I built them. It’s all part of the process, you know. Half a century ago I began a habit of quiet contemplation and today I watch my handiwork become a plaything for a grandchild. It turned out pretty well, I think. Fourteen year old me would even say it came out perfect.
That’s all the news from the family homestead, I guess. I have no plans for today, which is excellent. This weekend the whole clan is heading off to the ocean for more memories, and Monday I fly back to rejoin my other half in Minnesota and get back to living in the now.

Entering the void

I’m just about completely packed up for my exotic journey on an airplane, and will be leaving shortly for the airport. Unfortunately, my links to the interweb will be tenuous. I’m bringing an antique Windows XP netbook which will only be good for casual web browsing — no way will I be using that thing to connect to anything sensitive. I won’t even use it for email, which is moot anyway, because it outright gags at any attempt to connect to anything googlish. I will have my up-to-date phone, but it’s not great for typing, and has a postage-stamp sized screen. It’s gonna feel like 1995 again.

I guess I’ll have to focus on family, and looking for Pacific Northwest spiders. Instead of a useful computer, I’m bringing my camera and a small range of lenses. I decided to bring my 55-200mm lens just in case I wanted to look at something bigger than a spider (my 50mm prime would be ideal, but I have to cut way back to fit it all into a single bag), and a couple of macro lenses for things that are about the size of a spider. Hmm…I just realized that my metric for evaluating size is no longer a breadbox, but a smallish arachnid. Also packing a half-dozen 128GB SD cards, which might get me through the weekend.

I’ll be back on Monday, with BIG NEWS. We here at Freethoughtblogs have a major announcement to make then, so be sure to check in for that!

Absolutely mental

Ricky Gervais and Sam Harris have teamed up on a podcast called “Absolutely Mental”. It sounds like the title matches the content.

The most delusional thing about this is not the idea that aliens have been anally probing people for decades, but that government officials would call on Sam Harris to help them out in breaking the news to the public. Yeah, right, and the head of the CIA is going to ring me up next to arrange lessons in tact.

But if you want to read some real delusional stuff, check out the Reddit thread on this podcast by the the True Believers in UAPs (“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” — they changed the name because “UFO” carries the stigma of silliness. Were you fooled?)

That tone you hear in Sam Harris’s voice…? That’s called objective acceptance.
His words perfectly illustrate the gigantic implications this reality will have on a public that might not be properly prepared to process these forthcoming facts.

When Sam starts talking about the Tic-Tac he just flat out calls it an “alien spacecraft” without any hesitation or pause. Obviously he doesn’t know what it is, but it just illustrates the incredible shift in perception of UFOs that has come around that he (and others in media of course) can say “alien spacecraft” in serious conversation without batting an eye.

Sam Harris is measured, calculated, & matter of fact on everything he says publically. I find the probability of him putting himself in an “uncomfortable position” very low. If he is talking ET…we might want to listen.

Oh god. That’s always been Harris’s schtick, stating the outrageous with a totally flat demeanor. It means nothing, but it sure hooks the gullible.

You really shouldn’t believe this stuff until you see Trey Gowdy talking about UAPs on FoxNews. There’s the gold standard of integrity. Scientific American? Pfft. What do they know?

A last minute scramble

I am flying off to Seattle on Wednesday for an important family obligation. I think this will be the first time in two years that I’ve been on a plane. I’m not looking forward to it.

Especially since my laptop died yesterday, totally and irrevocably. It’s a shame, too, since it was a beautiful razor thin MacBook with a 12″ screen. Once upon a time I would have said that was too small, but man, it has been such a sweet lightweight computer that I was won over. Sometimes small is good. But then again, that compact efficiency is the reason I can’t repair it. Instead, Mary found an antique netbook in a closet that is horribly clunky and ugly, and runs (it runs! That’s good enough for now) Windows XP, so I’m going to be suffering with that for a few days. I guess I’ll be trying to find some pennies in the budget to get a replacement — I’m thinking I may go the Mac Mini route.

The other important mission today was to get the spiders comfortable for my absence. Everyone got new clean cages! I paired up a lot of the males and females, so they’ll have something fun to do while I’m away. They’re all accommodating themselves to their new digs, and tomorrow, once they’ve decorated with nice sheets of cobweb, I’ll be throwing in a lot of flies and a mealworm for each. They’ll be fine without me for a few days. They might miss me terribly, but we’ll all cope.

I may not have much of a computer, but I do have a nice camera and a lot of SD cards. Maybe when I get back I’ll upload a flood of photos of Beaches! And Ocean! And Marine Organisms!

I still don’t know her name

The US Army is making a token acknowledgment of crimes against American Indians by digging up and shipping back to their homelands the bodies of 10 children who died in their care. A lot of the Indian schools in the US and Canada were run by Catholic missionaries (including the one at the site of my university), but there were also some, like the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians in Pennsylvania, that were administered by the US government. They were all equally heartless and fundamentally racist. At Carlisle, the goal was to “Kill the Indian: Save the Man”, which tells you all you need to know about their appreciation for the culture the children they forcibly stole from their parents.

180 children died at Carlisle, and were buried on a local plot; many more died, but their bodies immediately shipped back to their homes. Apparently, the children who died of infectious disease, especially tuberculosis, were buried locally to prevent the spread of disease. Lots died because conditions were minimal and care rudimentary.

Now, finally, some of these kids who died over a hundred years ago are being sent back to families who have almost no memory of them.

The remains of 10 children who died at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Cumberland County between 1880 and 1910 are slated to be exhumed this summer.

Aleut family members will return the remains of one child to Saint Paul Island in Alaska, and Rosebud Sioux descendants will take nine children back to a tribal veteran’s cemetery in South Dakota or to private family plots.

Impressive. So we just rounded up kids from completely different nations, with different languages and customs, and threw them together in a dormitory far, far away from their homes. We took everything away from them, including their names.

Historian Barbara Landis wrote an essay debunking ghost stories surrounding a Rosebud Sioux child whose name translated to Take the Tail and who died within months of her arrival in Carlisle. Her name was changed at the school to Lucy Pretty Eagle and later used in a children’s historical fiction book as part of the Scholastic series, Dear America.

Landis and a group of non-native and native women wrote a review pointing out stereotypes and inaccuracies in the book, including its depiction of Lucy Pretty Eagle.

“She was not this ghost story,” she said. “She was a little girl who passed away far away from home under horrible circumstances and her remains were never returned to her home community.”

Take the Tail’s remains are among those of eight children being returned to Rosebud Sioux family members this year.

Picture this young girl ripped from her family in the fall of 1883, taken to this barracks 1500 miles away, and told that she was not allowed to speak any language but English. They take away her name and translate it literally into English as “Take the Tail”, and even that isn’t good enough, so they tell her her new name is Lucy Pretty Eagle, which has nothing to do with her culture, her history, or her family.

Then she dies in the spring of 1884. Her family gets a letter, nothing more. Her death is logged on a couple of 3×5 cards and mentioned in the school newsletter.

Finally, to complete her erasure, she’s turned into a character in a ghost story and historical propaganda.

To make up for all that, well, at least we’re sending her bones back to South Dakota now. What a feel-good story! Although her history won’t be complete until Disney makes an animated movie about her.

I do wonder what her name actually was — I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a string of English words, or a traditional European first name.

Looking on the bright side, it’s more evidence that natural selection works

The SARS-COV-2 virus is certainly benefiting from the power of natural selection. It’s spreading rapidly through a vulnerable population, that is us, and we’ve been half-assing our response, which simultaneously allows it to proliferate in large numbers and yet also favors variants that can overcome what barriers we do put up. What that means is that new strains will continue to pop up and take a run at our immune systems, and some of them will do better than the original strain. On an abstract, very academic level, it’s kind of cool. On a human level, it’s a disaster that threatens to get worse.

Right now, we get to deal with the Delta variant. It seems to have arisen in the giant petri dish we call India, but now it’s everywhere.

The B.1.617.2 coronavirus variant originally discovered in India last December has now become one the most — if not the most — worrisome strain of the coronavirus circulating globally. Recent research suggests it may the most transmissible variant yet and has fueled numerous waves of the pandemic around the world. B.1.617.2 has already spread to at least 62 countries, including the U.S., and undoubtedly contributed to the massive wave of cases that has inundated India in recent months. It also appears to have become the dominant strain infecting unvaccinated people in the U.K., and may be more likely to infect people who are only partially vaccinated than other strains. Below is what we know about B.1.617.2 — also known as the Delta variant.

How is B.1.617.2 different from other variants, and why may it be more dangerous?
The Delta variant has multiple mutations that appear to give it an advantage over other strains. The most important apparent advantage is that the mutations may make the strain more transmissible, which would also make it the most dangerous variant yet. One study indicated B.1.617.2 may be up to 50 percent more transmissible than the B.1.1.7 (U.K./Alpha) variant. Professor Neil Ferguson, a leading epidemiologist at Imperial College London and one of the chief pandemic advisers to the U.K. government, said on June 4 that the “best estimate at the moment” is that Delta is 60 percent more transmissible than Alpha, which is itself more transmissible than the original strain of the coronavirus that emerged in China in late 2019 — and that is why scientists believe it became a dominant variant globally.

Ah, yes, the terrible beauty of evolution. It works a little too well sometimes, and it’s the fast-breeding, large population size species that benefit most. I suppose a disease that’s going to hit anti-vaxxers hardest could be seen as a brutal Darwinian benefit, except remember that all those unvaccinated people are an easy reservoir for further experimentation by the virus.

A variant with higher transmissibility is a huge danger to people without immunity either from vaccination or prior infection, even if the variant is no more deadly than previous versions of the virus. Residents of countries like Taiwan or Vietnam that had almost completely kept out the pandemic, and countries like India and Nepal that had fared relatively well until recently, have fairly little immunity, and are largely unvaccinated. A more transmissible variant can burn through such an immunologically naïve population very fast.

Increased transmissibility is an exponential threat. If a virus that could previously infect three people on average can now infect four, it looks like a small increase. Yet if you start with just two infected people in both scenarios, just 10 iterations later, the former will have caused about 40,000 cases while the latter will be more than 524,000, a nearly 13-fold difference.

This is going to have further human costs. The Delta variant has tragically cropped up in Finland now. This is a global pandemic — you may think you’ve got it under control in your neighborhood, you may be getting cocky and think it’s time to party, but it’s not over yet, and the disease kills human beings.

THE OUTBREAK of the Indian coronavirus variant in Kanta-Häme Central Hospital in Hämeenlinna, Southern Finland, has resulted in nearly 100 infections and, directly or indirectly, 17 deaths.

Sally Leskinen, the chief medical officer at Kanta-Häme Hospital District, revealed yesterday in a news conference that the chain of infection started early last month with a patient who had contracted the transmissible variant from a close contact who had travelled outside Europe.

Further infections were detected in two hospital wards on 12 May, prompting the hospital to begin widespread screening of patients and staff.

“The virus had spread from the first patient through asymptomatic staff members,” said Leskinen.

A total of 57 patients and 42 staff members have been infected in the cluster, with 17 of the patients dying after being infected. Of the infected patients, 41 had received the first dose and two both doses of a coronavirus vaccine. While the infection is estimated to had a direct link to three-quarters of the deaths, it was not ruled as the primary cause of death for the remaining one-quarter due to a serious underlying illness.

One of the deceased patients had been vaccinated twice and 11 once, whereas five of them had yet to receive the first vaccine dose. The ages of the deceased ranged from 60 to 100, with the mean being 80.

Remember, people are fragile. We’ve got a disease that exploits that fragility and is expanding its power. Don’t think it’s done yet.