Black bears are clever and resourceful. I am keeping well away from them.

I like nature and wildlife and support efforts to preserve both but prefer to view them from a safe distance. Not for me safaris and camping and hiking in the wilderness in the hope of seeing wildlife. Nature documentaries are more my thing.

My aversion to seeing nature up close was enhanced by this article about how black bears have become very common in the very popular (and expensive) resort area of Lake Tahoe that is in the Sierra Nevada mountain region and straddles northern California and Nevada. During the pandemic, a lot of Silicon Valley types moved there and took advantage of the work-from-home policy to decide to stay permanently. But the increase in population and the garbage generated has attracted black bears that now roam the streets of towns and invade homes and cars looking for food. The problem is exacerbated by those the locals call ‘tourons’, a portmanteau of ‘tourist’ and ‘morons’, who are careless about keeping food out of reach and act in ways that attract bears.

Unlike grizzly bears that can be aggressive and vicious, black bears supposedly tend to avoid confrontations and can be scared away fairly easily.
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The name of the book

In the comments to my review of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, there was a side discussion about the enigmatic title. Written in 1980, the book was a critical and popular success, selling over 50 million copies worldwide. This strange, long (538 pages), and difficult book set in 1327 formed the basis of a 1986 film starring Sean Connery as the English Franciscan monk William of Baskerville and Christian Slater as his Italian Benedictine novice assistant Adso of Melk. My review of the book was very negative, seeing it as pretentious. The second edition of the book published in 1983 has an unusual feature for a novel, in that it has a postscript by the author where he discusses both the book and the writing of novels in general. He begins with a discussion of the title of this book and the role of novel titles in general.

There is nothing about roses anywhere in the book. The word itself makes its only appearance in the form of an untranslated Latin phrase stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus, which are the words that end the book. (There are many chunks of untranslated Latin throughout the text that contribute to the book’s difficulty.)
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TV Review: A Man on the Inside (2024)

I recently watched this enjoyable comedy series consisting of eight half-hour episodes that is being streamed on Netflix. I expected it to be good because it comes with a pedigree and it did not disappoint. The series creator is Michael Schur who has had such hits as Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Place with the last also starring Ted Danson who acts in this series.

Danson plays a retired professor of engineering who, after his wife dies after a prolonged period of dementia, falls into a lethargy that worries his daughter, his only child. She recommends that he take up some hobby and he stumbles across a classified ad in the newspaper that is looking for someone aged 75-85 who knows how to use a phone. He decides to apply and the job turns out to be with a private detective agency that has been hired by the son of a resident in an upscale retirement home in San Francisco to investigate the loss of his mother’s expensive ruby necklace. The detective agency feels that having someone pose as a resident would be a good way to solve the crime by gaining access to the all the people who live and work there. He does not tell his daughter exactly what he is up though, fearing that she might not approve or be worried.
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More on card randomization

After writing my post on the randomization of a deck of cards, I became more curious about this topic. In a deck of 52 distinct cards, there are 52x51x50…x3x2x1 possible arrangements. This is written in the mathematical notation 52! and is an enormous number. Perfect randomization of a deck means that starting with any given arrangement, after the shuffling process, all possible arrangements are equally likely and have the probability 1/52!. One can also think of it as saying that after the randomization process, a card that started out in any given position should be equally likely to be found in any of the 52 positions.

I learned that magicians for some of their tricks use the fact that shuffles do not guarantee randomizing of the deck, and so was curious to see how that might work. To illustrate this very simply, I started with a deck of just ten cards numbered 1 through 10 in order. I then cut the deck in two so that one half contained 1through 5 and the other half contained 6 through 10. Then I imagined a perfect riffle shuffle where the cards from each side are dropped one at a time alternately. You then get the order shown under the heading Shuffle 1.

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Book review: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980)

The setting is November 1327 in an abbey in the mountains of northern Italy. A highly learned English Franciscan monk William of Baskerville (formerly an Inquisitor) arrives with his aide, an Italian Benedictine novice named Adso of Melk to mediate a dispute between religious factions and investigate rumored claims of heresy. But just before their arrival, there is a mysterious death of a monk who falls from a high tower in the library. It is not clear if it was suicide or he was pushed but soon there occur a series of gruesome deaths so that it becomes clear that there is a serial killer at work and William sets about trying to unravel the mystery. He becomes convinced that the answer lies with a book that has been hidden away in a labyrinth in the fortress-like library which is zealously guarded by the librarian and the abbot to prevent anyone gaining access to some of the books.

William is described early in the book as having powers of observation and analysis that enables his to reach conclusions that amaze others (including Adso) by their perspicacity. He is an admirer of Francis Roger Bacon and William of Occam and the scientific methods they demonstrated. He is clearly modeled on Sherlock Holmes (his name being a hint) and Adso, as the narrator of the book, is his Watson chronicling his actions. So far, so good. One is prepared for a murder mystery set in a remote abbey in the Middle Ages.
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The Raygun controversy at the Olympics

I do not pay much attention to the Olympic games and never watch any event in real time. I tend to like only those events where the performances are measured using instruments and have little interest in those where people make judgments as to the difficulty, aesthetics, and so on. The events that interest me are the track and field ones and I sometimes watch clips of those events if I read that something interesting happened. The fact that I already know the result does not bother me. It is seeing top athletes pushing themselves to the limit that I find interesting, but not enough to devote more that a few minutes to it.

However, during the Paris Olympics this past summer, various news headlines registered in my consciousness in passing and I became vaguely aware that there had been some controversy involving the new event of breakdancing that was introduced for the first time, part of a trend by the people behind the Olympics of trying to attract younger viewers who do not find the traditional events interesting enough.
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Blog comments policy

At the beginning of every month, I will repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. An email sent to me privately by a long-time lurker brought home to me how people might be hesitant to join in the conversation here, even if they have something to say, out of fear that something that they write, however well-intentioned, will be seized upon and responded to in a hostile manner by some of the most egregious offenders.

So here is a rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.

It is well known that the comments sections on the internet can be a cesspool. I had hoped that the people who come to this site would be different, leading to more mature exchanges. But I was clearly too sanguine. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

The other issue is the hostility that is often expressed, often triggered by the most trivial of things. People should remember that this is a blog, not a journal or magazine. There are no copy editors, proof readers, and fact checkers. In such a casual atmosphere, people (and that includes me) will often inadvertently be less than precise or accurate in what they say. If the error is trivial but the meaning is clear, the error should be ignored. If the meaning is not clear, clarification can be politely asked for. If it is a genuine error, a correction can be politely made. If I think people are being rude or condescending or insulting (and I do not mean just abusive language but also the tone), I will ban the person.

For me, and I suspect for the other bloggers on this network, the rewards of blogging lie in creating space for a community of people to exchange ideas and views on a variety of topics. But that is pleasurable only if people post comments that are polite and respectful towards others, even while disagreeing. Some time ago, I wrote a post that a good philosophy of life is “Don’t be a jerk”. That would be a good rule to keep in mind when posting comments as well. There is absolutely no call for anyone to be rude or sneering or condescending towards others.

Almost all the commenters on this blog contribute positively and it is a pleasure to read their contributions and interact with them. It is a very few who think that a sneering, condescending, or abrasively argumentative tone is appropriate. My patience has been worn thin by some of their comments in the past. If I think, for any reason whatsoever, that someone is behaving like a jerk, I will ban them. I am in no mood to argue about this. I will not make any public announcement about who is banned. They will simply find that they can no longer post comments.

So I would suggest that in future commenters think carefully before they post anything, taking into account what they say and how often they say something. They should try to put themselves in the shoes of the person they are arguing with and think about how they might feel if their comment had been directed at them. They should also think about how their comments might look to others. It surprises me that people do not realize how badly this kind of behavior reflects on themselves.

Readers may have noticed that there are no ads on any of the blogs on this network. Nobody is making any money at all. In fact, it is a money sink and PZ Myers pays for the costs of the servers out of his Patreon account that you can contribute to if you would like to support the network. The bloggers here blog because they want to create spaces for conversations on issues that they care about. ‘Clicks’ have no monetary value. That means that I do not care how many people come to the site.

I realize that these guidelines are somewhat vague. So a good rule of thumb would be: If in doubt as to whether to post something because it might violate these boundaries, that is a good sign to not post it. I will be the sole judge of whether the boundary has been crossed.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I have zero tolerance for people who try to find ways to skirt the guidelines such as, for example, skirting the three comment limit by continuing it on another thread. I also reserve the right to make exceptions to the rules at any time, if I feel it is warranted. These decisions will be solely mine and will be final. There will be no discussion, debate, or appeal. If anyone objects because they think that I am being arbitrary, they are of course free to leave and never return.

Pete Hegseth makes Matt Gaetz look good by comparison

Trump’s nominee for defense secretary Pete Hegseth brings no discernible qualifications to. the position. Like some of the other nominees, his main qualification seems to be that he looks good on TV. But today a new report by investigative reporter Jane Mayer of the New Yorker has a whistleblower making serious allegations about his behavior when he was the head of a non-profit. He looks so bad that Matt Gaetz, who was forced to withdraw his nomination as attorney general, looks good by comparison.

Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

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Exodus of ob-gyns from Texas

The state of Texas has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, resulting in the needless deaths of women whom doctors were fearful of treating for pregnancy-related problems because the state could prosecute them under the law. ProPublica has been exposing these cases and reports on yet another one.

Wrapping his wife in a blanket as she mourned the loss of her pregnancy at 11 weeks, Hope Ngumezi wondered why no obstetrician was coming to see her.

Over the course of six hours on June 11, 2023, Porsha Ngumezi had bled so much in the emergency department at Houston Methodist Sugar Land that she’d needed two transfusions. She was anxious to get home to her young sons, but, according to a nurse’s notes, she was still “passing large clots the size of grapefruit.”
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