The instinct to buy and hold on to stuff

There seem to be two iron rules of American consumerism.

The first one is that people love to buy stuff even if the don’t really need the items. This habit has become hugely magnified by companies making it extremely easy to buy stuff on impulse. You see something online that interests you? Just one click and it appears at your door the next day. The second one is that people hate to get rid of stuff that they do not use and perhaps should never have bought in the first place.

I know people who have ever increasing amounts of stuff even as their need for it decreases. They buy things because they met a specialized need, like some tool or a kitchen gadget that is designed for a specific task, and now lies unused They hang on to them for sentimental reasons or with the idea that at at some point they may need it again, however unlikely that is.

I tend to be of the opposite frame of mind. I am an anti-consumer and try not to buy anything, however small and cheap, unless I absolutely need it and nothing else can substitute for it or it serves multiple useful purposes.Recently I was in the supermarket in the kitchen items aisle that has lots of gadgets. I make omelets and recipes for that and other things often call for the use of a whisk. I picked one up to buy but after a few moments decided that a fork would be an adequate substitute and put it back. Then the other day, I saw a video of a neat little gadget. You put a raw egg in it, close it, and then open it and the two halves of the egg separate cleanly, with no bits of shell or a broken yolk. But did I really need it? I usually crack an egg on a sharp edge of a skillet or a bowl and most of the time it separates just fine but occasionally there will be bits of shell or the yolk breaks. But I figured that the occasional mishap did not warrant getting such a specialized gadget. But clearly there is a market for such items. Because of my attitude, although my apartment complex provides additional storage space, I have not used it at all.
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Who are the Houthis and what do they want?

Thanks to the ever-expanding conflict in the Middle East triggered by the war that Trump and Netanyahu launched against Iran, the news forces us to confront information about the geography and politics of the region.

As an example, we recently learned that the Houthis (or Ansar Allah to give them their formal name) had made a lightning advance along the coast of Yemen, ending up capturing various strategic locations such as the islands of Perim and the Greater and Lesser Hanish islands, giving them significant control over the Bab al-Mandab Strait that lies at the gateway to the Red Sea, a key artery for shipping in the Middle East.

So who are the Houthis and how have they been able to take over much of Yemen? Western media has painted this as a proxy war between two old rivals, the Houthis being backed by Iran, and the weak Yemeni government backed by Saudi Arabia. But Yohannes Woldemariam writes that this is a far too simplistic an account of a conflict that long predates any Iranian involvement and that the Houthis should be viewed more as a lately-created informal partner of Iran rather than a proxy.

To understand who [the Houthis] are, it is necessary to begin in Yemen, particularly in Saada, a mountainous region in the north with its own religious, tribal and political history. The movement that eventually became Ansar Allah emerged there from a Zaydi religious and political revival during the closing decades of the twentieth century. The Believing Youth movement, founded in the 1990s, sought to revive Zaydi learning and identity. Hussein al Houthi emerged from this environment, not from an Iranian project to establish an armed organization on the Arabian Peninsula. The Iran Primer’s account of the movement’s origins traces this history well before Iranian military assistance became important.
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Yemen’s history also warns against reducing the conflict to an ancient Sunni and Shi’a confrontation. In 1962, republican officers overthrew the Zaydi imamate in North Yemen. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt intervened on the republican side, eventually sending tens of thousands of soldiers, while Saudi Arabia supported the Zaydi royalists. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia were overwhelmingly Sunni.

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The Lincoln pool debacle continues

I have to admit that ever since I discovered the existence of the livecam that points directly at the Lincoln Reflecting pool, I have been checking it regularly to see what progress is being made in fixing what has clearly become yet another symbol, if a minor one, of Trump’s utter incompetence at doing anything. While nowhere close to the cost in lives and money of his blundering in Iran and the economy, shredding formerly good relations with allies such as Canada and others, and so many other missteps, this failure is highly visible, even if he tries to hide the debacle by surrounding the pool with high metal fencing and then covering that with black tarpaulin. I am surprised that he has not ordered the livecam to be removed, since it directly contradicts in real time his repeated claims that the pool is almost fixed.

I asked my browser search engine whether the pool can be fixed and its AI replied with a confident ‘yes’ and then linked to a New York Times article from a week ago, presumably in support of its answer. But reading the article, one gets the sense, reinforced by the accompanying photos, that while work is being done on the pool, the problems may well be insurmountable. In reports to the administration, the contractor Atlantic Industrial Coatings conceded that it was their own fault, and not that of vandals as claimed by Trump, that created this fiasco.
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US sinks deeper into the Middle East quagmire

It should be no surprise that Trump and Hegseth have been hiding the true costs of the Iran war from the public all the time and the Republican leadership in Congress has abetted this deception. Even right at the beginning, when Trump declared that the US strikes had totally obliterated Iran’s capabilities, it appears that Iran had severely damaged US bases in the region. The evidence is coming out now in the form of photographs sent to US media by service members in the region.

CBS News obtained and broadcast some of the footage.

The Intercept reports on the costs and the unrelenting attacks on US bases that has brought the US to “the brink of a breakdown”.
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Widow’s Bay shows how out of touch I am (minor spoilers)

Yesterday was the annual Emmy’s awards event that honors TV shows and it provided yet more evidence that when it comes to popular culture, I am hopelessly out of the mainstream. Usually I have not even seen any of the nominees, let alone the winners, of such awards but in this case I had watched the series Widow’s Bay that won a slew of Emmys since my daughters recommended it to me and there was a massive amount of positive publicity about it. So I watched the entire 10-episode series.

To say that I was disappointed is putting it mildly. I thought it was pretty bad. While there were some funny bits, what the series lacked was a story that made any sense. It is not the fact that it involves the supernatural that I found problematic. What is hard to stomach is when people act in utterly irrational ways in response to it.

Take for example, the basic premise that there is a small island off the coast of Massachusetts which has suffered from a curse for over three hundred of years. What caused the curse was never made clear but it manifests itself in many ways that are disjointed and lack coherence. One effect of the curse is that any resident born on the island dies as soon as they leave it. You would think that such a situation would create considerable unhappiness and trigger a massive investigation into what causes the deaths and how to escape the curse. But nothing. Nobody even talks about it, seeming to accept it with a “What can you do?” equanimity.
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AI generates a Navier-Stokes controversy

There is no question that AI systems, in addition to producing vast amount of junk known as AI slop, are also capable of solving major problems in mathematics and science. The problem is that the culture in which these private companies operate is very different for the culture of academic research. While academic researchers can be very competitive and argue over priority, there are some basic norms that they adhere to, such as acknowledging and giving appropriate credit to others in the field. This last week saw those two cultures collide.

Most people are familiar with Newton’s laws of motion that relates the forces acting on a system to its motion. The simplest case that is used in introducing the subject is where there is a constant force acting on single solid object. The situation becomes more complicated when there are multiple variable forces acting on many particles that are under various constraints, and thenthe equations take much more complicated forms.

One of the most important of such cases is where variable forces act on fluids, and the most general form of that situation is the Navier-Stokes equations that were developed by various people and achieved their final form around 1850. These equations are applicable to a vast array of physical phenomena, such as weather or shock waves or currents. They are partial differential equations which are notoriously difficult to solve and my own research did not deal with them at all. But the equations are of such importance that in 2000, one important aspect of the equations was selected as a Millennium Prize Problem, with a prize of $1 million to whoever solved it.
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What the hell is x?

Over at Pharyngula PZ had a post about Tucker Carlson and some guy mocking algebra, describing it as just inserting letters into numerical calculations for no apparent reason, and thinking that we could well do without it. It always amuses me when people take some deep subject and dismiss it as absurd simply because they are ignorant of it or they do not see any sense in it. What kind of mind must they have to so casually dismiss a venerable field of study that has been around for over a thousand years, developed by some of the finest minds, and is a bedrock of mathematics and science?

But I don’t want to waste any time on Carlson and his idiot friend but instead want to look at what algebra is about.

In learning mathematics, the first major stumbling block is fractions. Children find it hard to wrap their minds around fractions, how to add, subtract, divide and multiply them, and even locating them on the number line.

The next stumbling block for students the world over is algebra because it is their first experience with abstract mathematical manipulations. Indeed it is algebra that is the gateway to real mathematics. Up until that point students were doing arithmetic, which is what manipulating specific numbers is, and not mathematics, Mathematics is not about working with numbers (although they do appear) but about relationships between quantities and involve proofs and theorems to get widely applicable general results, all done symbolically using letters and other characters.
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Will this year be another Texas mirage?

Texas has long been a tease for Democrats. While it used to reliably elect Democrats to major offices, in the mid-1990s, it swung sharply to the right and since then has consistently elected Republicans to statewide positions. Democrats have felt that they had a chance to regain ground in previous election cycles but after some glimmers of hope, Republicans were able to beat back the challenges.

This year seems to provide one of the best chances to get a US senate seat with James Talarico competing against Ken Paxton. Paxton is widely viewed as a weak candidate, who is scandal-plagued on many fronts both major and minor, public and personal, in addition to having a lackluster personality. While being a state official on a $153,000 salary, he has managed to acquire 15 properties and has refused to give an accounting. Since he is the Texas attorney general, no charges were filed against him. Republicans would have had a much better chance if they had renominated incumbent senator John Cornyn but Trump, out of a sense of pique because Cornyn was not totally servile to him, threw his weight behind Paxton and got him the nomination.
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A reason to love the internet

Some time ago I was in the kitchen chopping onions and started singing “Onions, onions, ha, ha, ha”. My daughter who happened to be there asked what on earth I was singing. She refused to believe that there could have been a song that was that silly and implied that her wacky old dad must have just made it up.

Thanks to the internet I was able to quickly pull up this song to prove that it did indeed exist in the days of my youth and that there was a time when silly songs like this got play time on the radio.

Another view of Gloria Steinem

The death last week of Gloria Steinem at the age of 92 saw many tributes to someone who was widely viewed as a feminist icon. She was outspoken, photogenic, instantly recognizable with her long hair and aviator glasses, and had the knack of saying things that captured attention. She was much sought after by the mainstream media whenever they were looking for someone to provide a feminist viewpoint, especially after she founded the pioneering Ms. magazine.

But Jenny Brown argues that there was another Gloria Steinem who was no feminist trailblazer but someone who actually betrayed the radical roots of the feminist movement by taking it in a neoliberal direction, which was why she became a favorite of the political establishment and the mainstream media, sucking attention way from the more radical feminists who came before her. Her dominance tended to obliterate the major role that many other feminists played in laying the groundwork for the advances. Her focus on individual liberation also undermined the collective liberation that more radical feminists felt was necessary for full emancipation.
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