Are you singing yet? Perhaps you are not old enough to recall when the four Lads from Liverpool released “Sergeant Pepper’s.” Here is a reminder: please listen before going on. https://tinyurl.com/3hmve3y8
Ready? I can wait for you if you want to slow down and listen before we go on (more on that later). Really, I’m not in a hurry. About anything.
John, Paul, George and Ringo were delightfully delusional about the pace of deterioration associated with aging. They were young – Paul wrote this song when he was just 16 – so I am going to forgive their ignorance on this topic.
L to R: Paul, Arthur Kelly, George, & John in 1958 when Paul would have written this song about getting old. George was the youngest, and the group had to lie about his age to allow him to play in bars. Arthur who?
Today I read an article, a guest essay in the Washington Post, by geriatrician Dr. Rachael Bedad, regarding the characteristics of ‘frailty.’ Frailty refers medically to the steady slowing down of your body as you age, and the increasing vulnerability your body has to various stressors when you get older. Her essay was in part a response to the recent Presidential debate where President Biden appeared to be frail relative to his opponent, who was also about the same age but did not demonstrate the appearance of frailty on television. I quote from Dr. Bedad’s essay:
“Getting older often means accumulated wisdom, experience and even happiness, but it also means slowing down. Ours is a culture that greatly undervalues the potential contributions of older people who have so much to offer in terms of care, mentorship and experience and instead consistently portrays them as burdensome. To recognize that people are frail is not to think of them as no longer productive, dignified or wholly intact. It does not mean they are necessarily significantly cognitive impaired, nor does it mean they are imminently dying.
Elders who live successfully with frailty have transitioned into a phase of life in which they no longer expect and should not be expected to function in the exact same ways they’ve always functioned. It may mean changing one’s habits and routines to accommodate a slower-paced, less volatile life, accepting with grace both the privileges and the constraints of age.”
So, this has left me thinking hard about the question of how to best deal with becoming older than I was when I was younger. With any luck this will happen to all of us, and it will be helpful to have a way to accept whatever limitations come our way while enjoying life as actually experienced.
I have come to the conclusion that Frank Sinatra has already solved this problem by recording and making available to us his rendition of “That’s Life.” First, here is a YouTube video of one of his performances of this song. Please stop and listen, and then I will comment on why it’s relevant. There will be a quiz, so if you just skip over the video you will most likely flunk the quiz.
From a 1966 Television Special “A Man and His Dream Part II”, with Nelson Riddle conducting the orchestra. The TV special also featured his daughter Nancy whose boots were made for walkin’, although not in this clip.
First, listen for the all-white Hammond B3 organ (you can see it in the back, near the end of the video) with a Leslie rotating speaker cabinet. My wife had one of these (although with a standard Leslie cabinet and a maple wood finish) which she enjoyed playing. Hearing it makes me happy.
Where was I? I think my mind was wandering just then, which I don’t recall happening when I was young. Oh, yes: “That’s Life.” This should be Joe Biden’s anthem, reminding him that he has been up and down, over and out, and he knows one thing; each time he finds himself, flat on his face, he picks himself up and gets back in the race. That’s life. He’s been ridin’ high in April, shot down in May. That’s life, and as funny as it seems, some people get their kicks stompin’ on a dream. If he didn’t think it worth a try, he’d jump on a big bird and then he’d fly.
Did you hear the music as you read through the lyrics above? Then you passed the quiz.
Whatever happens with Joe Biden and the office of the President, I think that I am well served to attend to Dr. Bedad’s words. Being older “… may mean changing one’s habits and routines to accommodate a slower-paced, less volatile life, accepting with grace both the privileges and the constraints of age.” That’s life.
In the news today the governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, just signed a law (H.B. 71) requiring that every public school in the state display a copy of the Ten Commandments. The display must be at least 11 x 14 inches; the new law allows for the display to optionally be paid for via donations so that the law is not an unfunded mandate. Legislators included a carve-out in the bill for private (i.e., Christian) schools, which are not required to post the Bible passage in their classrooms because, I don’t know, perhaps they didn’t want to be told what religion to practice. The specific wording of the commandments is spelled out in H.B. 71, and has to be exactly as follows:
“I am the Lord thy God.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.
Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.
Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.
Honor thy father and mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”
Michelangelo’s statue of Moses holding the 10 Commandments tablets (presumably 5 each), part of the massive tomb of Pope Julius II
Notice that there are actually 12 commandments listed as required by H.B.71. There would be even more if you made the elements of the lists into their own declarations. The King James Version of the Bible in Exodus 20 lists 16 declarative statements, including a little bit more context for a few of them, such as a prescription on doing any work on the Sabbath, the addition of a few more farm animals, additional references to servants (which, like the man- and maid-servants were likely slaves when this was written) and so forth. You are probably asking yourself at this point why the legislators of the State of Louisiana thought that their citizens still owned slaves. It’s a good question.
One more note about the King James version; it is a translation that is in the public domain and therefore you don’t have to pay royalties to a publisher for each copy. This would have added up when you consider that the posters are required in every single classroom of every single public school – up through college – in Louisiana. It is a translation that is less authentic to the original Hebrew text than most others, but evidently this aspect is secondary to the authors of H.B. 71.
There are three different places in the Christian Bible where the commandments are expounded: Exodus 20, Exodus 34, and Deuteronomy 5. Each is unique, although there is some overlap regarding adultery, killing, stealing, bearing false witness, and holding the Lord as the one true God. (Exodus 34 seems to be the outlier, mostly dealing with rules regarding ritual Jewish animal sacrifice.)
The Ten Commandments as commonly understood here in the US are in two parts: part one concerns each person’s relationship to the Lord God, and part two concerns each person’s relationship to others. In our Western culture, the Commandments were among the very first statements defining the notion of the rule of law going back as far as 1500 BCE. They were a huge step forward from “the tribal chieftains decide what to punish,” where every tribe has their own rules based on preferences and whims of the elders.
Some of these commandments tell you not to do things that are already currently illegal, so perhaps these could have been omitted from the Louisiana law. For example, stealing: illegal. Killing: illegal under certain circumstances. Bearing false witness: illegal, when it leads to harm, although “little white lies” are fine, as are many other exaggerations or intentional misstatements.
On the other hand: adultery, not illegal, at least not in Louisiana. Graven or molten images: fine. Actually, not a thing. Swearing, if a reference to God is included: fine, normalized and encouraged. Coveting: fine, and it forms the basis for our modern American system of free enterprise and marketing. Dishonoring father or mother: not illegal, but discouraged. Working on the Sabbath day: What? Fine. Worshipping deity other than Judeo-Christian God: fine, for instance in New Orleans, the part of Louisiana where things like Voodoo and Santeria are accepted religious practices.
Does this mean that as Americans we have strayed from our ethical roots? It might. Or, it could just mean that our culture has evolved in the last 3,500 years to where our laws don’t have to be so blunt, don’t have include farm or pro-slavery references, and are now tailored to and better suited to what life is really like in Louisiana in the 21st century.
In the Biblical New Testament, Jesus is asked which of the commandments he considers to be most important. In Matthew 22, he strips the 10 down to just two:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
If I were posting Biblical commandments on the walls of elementary schools, I would just boil it down to these two. I think they are clear, relevant, and actionable. And very religious.
I could not find a photo of Moses, but I did find the next best thing: Cecil B. deMille, shown here holding the movie props for “The 10 Commandments,” the biggest, baddest and most extravagant movie ever made. This film gave the Commandments a huge boost when it came out in 1956, and started a long trend of movies that cost a lot of money to make. Don’t think too hard about what is actually inscribed on these tablets.
The authors of the Louisiana bill claim that, while HB 71 is “slightly” religious in nature, it is primarily a historical document of great significance to the founding of the country. The law was amended to respond to some criticism that H.B. 71 was too overtly religious; it now includes references to other historic documents, such as the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, although none of these other ones are required to be displayed in every public school classroom.
So, like me, you are probably wondering: “What is this historic Northwest Ordinance of 1787?” The ordinance was drawn up to define the rights of the people and territories north and west of the Ohio River, which area is now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Think Northwestern University. The ordinance included the right to representation, but only for non-enslaved and non-female residents. It included the freedom to practice the religion of your choice (which would seem to be antithetical to posting the Christian Ten Commandments in every public school classroom). It was enacted by the Congress of the Confederation of the United States, an entity that was dissolved and obsoleted just one year later in 1788 by the US Constitution. The Louisiana legislators are correct in identifying this as a document in the history of the US since it laid out the methods and procedures for territories not in the original 13 to become states. It did not make any reference to the Ten Commandments.
Where is this blog going? Feeling a bit lost, I am now going to take it back to the root of the separation of Church and State in America. And even before Thomas Jefferson, who famously used the “wall of separation” phrasing in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Connecticut Baptists. No, before this it was Roger Williams (1604-ish to 1683) who set the tone for religious freedom in the early colonies.
Williams was a Puritan, and came over from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s, eventually to become a Puritan minister. The Puritans were strict about having a civil government that enforced what they felt were their Christian values and beliefs, effectively turning these beliefs into covenant laws. After experiencing disagreements with the colony elders regarding the entanglement of the State with the Puritan Christian church, Williams was banished in 1636 to what is now Providence, Rhode Island, and in the 1640s went back to England to obtain a Royal Charter for his new home, making Rhode Island a haven for religious freedom, a British Colony, and eventually a US State.
The “Hutch,” or Hutchinson River Parkway, named for Anne Hutchinson who was also banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony along with Williams for holding views inconsistent with the theology of the Puritan Colony elders. She espoused “antinomianism.” I think having a Parkway named after me would be preferable to having Parkway bathroom stop named for me.
Unlike Jefferson, Williams’ primary concern was not that the Church would corrupt the government, but that the government would corrupt the church. Williams thought that if church elders were given civil authority that it would lead to abuse of the type that had occurred in the Church of England (which he felt was beyond redemption), as well as in the European Catholic Church prior to the Protestant Reformation.
As a reminder, Protestants split from the Catholic church in large part because the Pope was taking payments for telling people that their sins were forgiven, or that their route to heaven was assured, or that they had paid their way to one form or another of saving grace. This was called “selling indulgences.” It was widely considered to be a corrupt practice, in that the Pope saw it primarily as a source of income for use in plundering the believers.
Although the Puritans are often thought to have come here to escape religious tyranny, in fact they set up a theocracy that was just as tyrannical in its own way as the Church of England, with no tolerance for dissent or acceptance of other religious beliefs, even (or especially) other Christian denominations.
Williams best documented this in a book published in England in 1644, “The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience.” He coins the phrase “wall of separation between Church and State,” and argues from the text of the Bible that the Church should not have civil governmental authority. He understood how easy it was for church elders to take advantage of the parishioners to the detriment of the spiritual mission of the Church.
Here is an additional note regarding the Puritans, who Williams felt invited corruption through entanglement. Puritans form the basis for the society depicted in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which I have already commented on at some length. In that book, the founding fathers of a religious nation start off with the best of intentions, but inexorably are led down a path of theocracy, corruption, and harm to the citizens. The result is a religious dystopia where everyone is ultimately stripped of their freedom and free will, despite this not being the intent of those who set up the government.
In Margaret Atwood’s theocratic government, those who do not agree with and abide by the State’s religious tenets are killed or exiled. There is no freedom to express thoughts contrary to the tenets of the State (which are also the tenets of the religion).
Coming back to Louisiana, the Governor and others who passed H.B. 71 requiring the entanglement of Church and State have the best of intentions for the people. After all, how can it be bad to expose children to the Ten Commandments? Are these commandments not the foundation for our Christian values and the rule of law?
Yes, in a way they are. But the concern is really that we would lose sight of the lessons learned from the Puritans, the Church of England, and the European Catholic Church of the middle ages. This particular Biblical display is a small step down the path of integrating the Government with the Church. Perhaps it would be fine. But, if Roger Williams were alive, he would be concerned that the religious leaders are losing control, and that they would ultimately be consumed by the power they could wield over the people. The result would be a Church that has lost its way in guiding souls to heaven, as well as a government that would not serve the democratic interests of its people.
For the past few years, I inexplicably perk up whenever tardigrades are the subject of a news story. Perhaps you will understand when you see what they look like:
Scanning electron micrograph of a tardigrade, with false color added for clarity. Tardigrades are typically about 1 mm long, or approximately the thickness of a credit card. (From the Science Photo Library)
I know, you want to look away but you can’t. Here is a description of them, taken from an article last year written by Neal Patel of the Daily Beast:
“Tardigrades are some of the most compelling organisms to have ever evolved on Earth. Also known as water bears, these 1-millimeter long eight-legged creatures have been known to survive the vacuum of space, withstand boiling water for at least an hour, endure high amounts of radiation, and make it through unscathed from some of the most extreme colds imaginable. As a result, tardigrades have managed to find a home on nearly every place on the planet.”
Monday was “Earth Day” and the news that caught my attention was an article by NY Times science writer Carl Zimmer, who was also apparently fascinated by research about these cute little guys. He talked with Dr. Jean-Paul Concordet, a French researcher who recently co-authored a study about tardigrades’ ability to repair DNA after damage from ionizing radiation. Humans also have the ability to repair broken strands of our own DNA, but tardigrades manufacture the protein involved in the repair in prodigious amounts. Why do they do this? We don’t know. We do know that if we could replicate the tardigrade’s unusual ability to repair our own DNA, we could cure almost all disease. It would be a good thing.
Tardigrade’s mating behavior has also been studied. They are oviparous; that is, they lay eggs, like birds. Which they definitely aren’t. Boy and girl tardigrades need to mate for there to be babies, but the question posed by biologists in a paper published this past December was: How do the boys know which ones are the girls? They don’t have any sensory organs that anyone can find, nor are there any differences in how they look or behave. Challenge accepted by modern science! It turns out that they can smell the difference – even though they do not have noses. Justine Chartrain from University of Jyväskylä, Finland spent countless hours watching the tiny animals go after each other, setting things up so that it would be evident how they decided who was who. And it was the way they smelled. Those Scandinavians sure know a good time when they see it.
Chinese scientists are likely fans of the Incredible Hulk, whose transformation was triggered by a massive dose of gamma radiation.
Here’s something you probably did not know: tardigrades are evolved from lobopodians. Lobopodians lived between 485 and 541 million years ago, aka the Cambrian Period. So, tardigrades have been on earth for around 500 million years, and have survived all five mass extinction events. I am not including a picture of any lobopodians because, frankly, they are ugly. Please don’t Google them.
According to Stephen Chen of the South China Morning Post in an article published in March 29, 2023, Chinese scientists have been inserting tardigrade DNA into human embryonic stem cells to see if they could create people who are resistant to radiation damage, just like the tardigrades. This would allow the Chinese army to be populated by “super soldiers” who are not susceptible to radiation from nuclear weapons. Chen says that they have achieved some success, at least at the level of human cells in a laboratory.
I think this was made into a movie – Jurassic Park? SpiderMan? The Hulk? I’m not sure which one, but I have only one question for those hard-working Chinese scientists: “What could possibly go wrong?”
Perhaps my favorite news story appeared in LiveScience in December, 2021 where a tardigrade was “quantum entangled” with a separate subatomic particle. Quantum entanglement was predicted by Niels Bohr in 1933 as part of the initial development of the theory of quantum physics. When two particles are entangled, a change to one will show up instantly as a comparable change to the other even though they are infinitely far apart in space. This means that the connection violates the cosmic law of the speed of light, or in other words, it violates Einstein’s theory of relativity. Einstein himself thought that quantum entanglement was impossible. Experiments since then have shown it to be a real thing, so I guess there is still a lot we don’t know about how the universe works.
Researcher Dr. Lee explaining the experiment. Note the stuffed plushy tardigrade glued to the whiteboard. Nice touch, Dr. Lee.
Anyway, a group of eleven researchers headed by Dr. Kai Sheng Lee of Singapore took 3 tardigrades from a roof gutter of a university building in Denmark. (Tardigrades are common in moss and lichen, so gutters would be a happy place for them.) The scientists placed three of the little animals in the middle of a specially constructed electrical circuit and froze the assembly to less than one degree above absolute zero (or -459.67 deg F), with the tardigrades attached to one of two entangled subatomic particles. At this point, the tardigrades were technically dead. When one of the particles was “nudged” (vibrated?), the tardigrade and the other particle changed its resonant frequency, showing (in the words of the researchers) that the tardigrade was entangled. Then, after the tardigrades were slowly restored to room temperature one of them returned to life! (Oops- the other two died.)
I really have no idea what this means, other than these guys really had some fun with tardigrades in a very serious refrigerator.
Of course I had to see if I could find some tardigrades and examine them for myself. This part turned out to be a bigger and more frustrating project than I expected, and I have spent considerable hours this week scouring the area for moss and lichen, and then attempting to find a tardigrade in a microscope in my kitchen. Science experiments sometimes fail. I fired up the Internet and watched several videos explaining how easy it would be to gather them from your own backyard and see them in your kitchen.
The videos listed what equipment is needed: a microscope, petri dishes, a pocket knife, and bottled water. After ordering the petri dishes from Amazon and borrowing a microscope, I was set. Here is a picture of my lab:
My kitchen laboratory. The instructional videos don’t mention coffee, but seriously, it was essential to this project.
Next, I gathered moss and lichen from nearby trees. I did this every day for four days, each time from different trees, starting with the maple tree in my backyard, then a nearby creek, and eventually going to a local county park.
I’m not sure that you are allowed to remove moss and lichen from trees in a county park, but I did this at a quiet time and I’m pretty sure that no one saw me do it. Here is what one of the trees looked like, and you can see both the moss and some lichen:
I carefully removed a small sample of both moss and lichen, which tardigrades are commonly found in. Can you guess which county park this was? I hope not.
I ordered the petri dishes on Sunday and they arrived Monday (and thank you very much Amazon Prime). You are supposed to soak the moss for between 4 and 12 hours (depending on which Internet video you believe), then squeeze the wet material into a sterile petri dish where you might find a tardigrade.
In my case, on Monday: Gathered moss and lichen from my yard, let them soak. No tardigrades.
On Tuesday: again, no tardigrades. Back outside to look for better trees, this time in a neighborhood creek.
On Wednesday: and again, no tardigrades. Back outside to look for different and yet better trees, this time in the county park. I was becoming discouraged. Did I mention that in science, experiments can fail?
On Thursday: I saw a tardigrade!
Unfortunately, I was not able to capture a photo of the one I saw. It kept moving around. Here is the best I could do to capture the sort of thing visible to me in the microscope:
My view was not this blurry, but the 1990-era microscope was not designed to connect to an iPhone camera so this is the best I could do. I think the picture looks rather like a view of Australia from space, but you will have to use your own imagination.
Someday I hope to introduce my grandchildren to the fantastic microscopic world of tardigrades. They may hold to key to our species survival.
Quality and manufacturing were in the news today, bringing me back to the olden times 10 years ago when my job was walking factory floors and observing whether things were being done in conformance to approved manufacturing procedures. It’s Boeing that is in the news about this, of course. The process word of the day is “traveled” work. To “travel” a part or assembly means to move it along to a future stage of production even though, as manufactured, it does not conform to specifications.
For the record, if one of my clients “traveled” a part I would write them up. It would be a clear violation; repeating it could lead to shutting down the plant.
Parts or assemblies that do not meet specifications are supposed to be clearly marked or tagged with appropriate information about the defect, and set aside in a designated containment area. Records of these events are required so that the repair can be confirmed.
Apparently, allowing “travelled” parts was de rigueur at Boeing. If something could be fixed further down the line, the line kept going. This sounds good, right? Go faster? The problem is that these things pile up, and they don’t always get fixed correctly when they are moved to another factory where the workers are not as familiar with how that particular part goes together and by then have other things to focus on.
This was evidently a key factor in the Alaska airlines “missing bolts” incident, resulting in the door coming off of a 737 Max in mid-flight. A problem with the door assembly was observed in the Wichita plant where the fuselage was manufactured, but instead of fixing it, it was tagged as a “traveling non-conformance” and shipped, defective, to the Renton, Washington final assembly plant. The managers at the Renton plant were, I guess, in a hurry because they could not bill the customer until the plane went out the door. The employees working on the defective door assembly must have been told to finish quickly, and so they failed to put the door back correctly after dealing with the “traveled” problem. Boeing has not been able to find the repair sign-off record, so it looks like the hastiness involved recordkeeping as well as repairing.
Boeing’s CFO Brian West yesterday announced at a Bank of America investors’ meeting that their factories would no longer allow “traveled” work. In other words, they allowed it before. This will include shutting down two “shadow factories,” facilities that are not part of the regular process but are maintained just to repair defective parts that were made wrong and shipped anyway. It’s what Deming was saying 50 years ago; not doing it right the first time will eventually cause it to take longer, it won’t get done correctly, and it will cost more money.
Deming’s philosophy, now apparently being embraced by Boeing’s CFO, is a hard pill to swallow for this company. Not shipping defective parts is slowing down production, creating the appearance at Boeing of a huge cost hit, on the order of a $4 billion free cash flow reduction. I’m not making this number up. In other words, slowing down initially to allow employees to figure out how to get things right the first time looks to American management like a giant financial disaster.
This is the soft underbelly of American capitalism.
As we all know, this last week celebrated “Pi Day,” or March 14. Since this date is written 3/14 and pi is roughly 3.14, this date is set aside for reflection on the world’s favorite irrational number.
What is pi exactly again? It’s the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, which I have deliciously illustrated below:
The fact that this is an interesting number was known even in ancient times, as shown in the Bible. For example, in Kings 7:23, King Solomon describes the process of building the Temple of Jerusalem (my research indicates that this occurred around 760 BCE) and includes this royal observation. Solomon brought in Hiram, an expert in working brass, to do this part:
“He made the Sea [or washing basin for the priests] of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it.”
Since a cubit is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 inches, the “sea” was around 17 feet across. Wow! Big! Anyway, I decided that I should do an experiment to find out whether 30 cubits / 10 cubits was really the value of pi, given that this metal representation of the sea is in the Bible and all. Solomon is saying that a circle has a circumference of 30 and a diameter of 10, or that pi is equal to 3. Let’s try and find out.
So I started with a pencil, a piece of paper from the kid’s easel in the basement, and a Calphalon 10″ saucepan. (These saucepans are fantastic! You can bake stuff in the oven in them and everything. You can see that mine has been loved.) Here is the setup:
Using the pencil, I traced the circular shape of the pan on the paper. Next, I used a string to measure the distance around the circle and taped the string to the paper:
I can use the length of this string to measure the circumference of the circle. Let’s say this distance around the circle, and the length of my string, is 30 cubits. I next took the string off the paper, and folded it exactly into thirds, and cut a pink pipe cleaner to the exact length of one-third of the string. Voila! We have a 10 cubit pipe cleaner.
I now had a way to compare my 10 cubit pipe cleaner to the 30 cubit distance around the circle. If King Solomon was correct regarding the measurement of his model of the sea in the Temple, then the pipe cleaner should be exactly the distance across the circle, confirming that the value of pi is 3. Just like in my picture of the delicious apple pie at the start of this piece. I re-taped the 30-cubit string back to the circle and placed the 10-cubit pipe cleaner directly across the center.
Here is the result:
Oh, no!
No matter how I set the pipe cleaner across the circle, it sticks out of one side. If the relationship of the circumference to the diameter were 3:1 as described by the wise King Solomon, then it should have fit exactly. So I guess that pi is not 3.
At this point I feel that I literally owe an apology to any of you who thought that everything in the Bible was literally true. Clearly, King Solomon was literally wrong in his description of this part of the Temple, and also was being literally untruthful to Christians regarding a basic characteristic of the world, in this case regarding the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a literal circle. (See how I am literally having some fun at the expense of Biblical literalism?)
So, pi must be a little bit larger than 3. But, how much larger? How can you know? I enlisted my grandkids in the pursuit of the truth. And who wouldn’t? There is great truth in the young.
For this experiment, I reached back to the 18th century and to Georges-Louis LeClerc, the Compte de Buffon. (In English, that means that he was a Count, and gifted mathematically just like the titled muppet on Sesame Street.) Here is a picture of him.
He posed the following mathematical question, often referred to as the paradox of Buffon’s needle: suppose you have a floor with stripes of equal width, and drop a needle randomly on it. What is the probability that the needle will lie across the boundary between the stripes? It turns out that if the stripes are the same distance apart as the length of the needle, then the probability is 2 times pi.
OMG! This means that we can derive the value of pi by dropping elongated things at random on a surface properly marked with lines the length of the thing, and after some number of drops, the ratio of things dropped to things crossing lines will approach a multiple of pi. Divide by 2, which my grandson David knows how to do, and we are home free. I chose to drop hot dogs on a table, enlisting the kids to do the dropping so that it would be highly random. And I let them use calculators.
I started by buying an 8-pack of Boar’s Head gluten-free hot dogs and measuring them. I thought Boar’s Head would work well, and would taste good later. According to their manufacturer, they deliver exceptional flavor and a superior bite with a “snap.” Here are the results of my measurements:
Note that the hot dogs are not all the same. It’s part of what makes them so good! On average, the 8 in the package that I bought were 13.6875 cm long. I took a long roll of paper and marked lines every 13.6875 cms, or as close as I could get to it.
Next, the kids took turns dropping the dogs onto the paper. Here is John taking his turn, with his mom looking on for encouragement:
Each of the three grandkids had their own approach to the task. John tended to drop them with a flourish, while David would toss them more assertively so that we usually had a few “out of bounds.” James mostly just dropped them.
The results:
The totals on the outer columns were preliminary and turned out not to be consistent with the hash marks. Science! Things go wrong! There were 140 total hot dogs dropped (based on recounting the hash marks), with 81 of them crossing between two stripes. Plugging this in to the formula (2*total number dropped)/(crosses) yields the value of 3.45679 for pi. This is about a 10% error, but given the limited attention span we all have for science, it is a fantastic result.
I personally think that our answer was better than the actual “pi” since the first five digits are 3,4,5,6,7 which are a heck of a lot easier to remember than 3.1415.
In search of a better way to figure out the value of pi, I decided to turn to AI for a more modern approach. As we all do these days.
Given that I have a free account on ChatGPT, the world’s most famous AI chatbot, I logged in and asked it to “please calculate all digits of pi.” This was, of course a trick question! It is impossible to calculate all the digits of pi, since pi is an irrational, non-repeating number that has an infinite number of digits. Falling for the trick, I got this answer:
“Calculating all digits of pi would require a significant amount of computational resources and time, especially if we’re aiming for a high level of precision. While it’s theoretically possible, it’s not practical to do it in a reasonable time frame on a standard computer.“
Ha ha! After the laughter subsided, I asked it to write me a computer program that would calculate the value of pi. I got this answer, written in the programming language Python:
Not bad for a robot that thought it was theoretically possible to calculate all digits of pi. This program is sort of the computer equivalent of throwing hot dogs on the dining room table; it puts dots (think of them perhaps as M&Ms) at random locations inside a square, and then counts how many of them happen to fall inside one quarter of an inscribed circle. This turns out to be an approximation of pi! Who knew?
It starts by asking how many M&Ms you want to drop. So, I ran it with 140, to see how close our robot overlord would come to the answer I got by enlisting my grandkids. The answer: 2.914285714285715. I will let you do the math regarding who did better. I hope it’s the kids.
Thank you for reading this far. You deserve to treat yourself to a hot dog. Come back again for next year’s celebration of pi day, when I hope to get to the bottom of how best to make pi with ingredients that you might find in your kitchen.
Chief Justice Tom Parker last week ruled on behalf of the Alabama Supreme Court that all fertilized human embryos are children. The case arose because a man at a Mobile, Alabama IVF clinic accidently dropped a vial of cryo-frozen fertilized eggs, destroying them, and the parents from whom they came sued the clinic under Alabama’s “wrongful death of a minor” act. Judge Parker ruled on the appeal from a lower court that the embryos, or “extrauterine children,” as he called them, were subject to this particular law and therefore the clinic was to be held responsible for the children’s wrongful death. The ruling can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/ycydv35p, with Judge Parker’s concurrence starting on page 26. Here is a quote from his ruling, where he is talking about whether IVF procedures should be an exception to the Alabama state law defining unborn embryos as children:
“Carving out an exception for the people in this case, small as they were, would be unacceptable to the People of this State, who have required us to treat every human being in accordance with the fear of a holy God who made them in His image.”
Here is Judge Tom Parker, whose ruling gives preference to his Biblical beliefs over the US Constitution. In Alabama, the majority apparently agree with him, illustrating De Tocqueville’s concern about the “Tyranny of the Majority.”
Naturally, if this ruling becomes more widespread, then IVF would become impossible. Technically, although it might not be illegal, no U.S. clinic would want to take on the potential liability. Notably, he quotes the Bible copiously in his ruling.
We all recall the Bible passage in Matthew (or was it Revelation? I may have forgotten) that says that “Behold thee, ye microscopic fertilized but not implanted eggs, which you cannot see, for they are in thy mother’s womb, or perhaps they are not; they are all God’s children and their destruction is the sin of murder.” (OK, just for the record I made this up.)
NPR’s “On the Media” recently ran an interview with Matthew D. Taylor, an academic who studies Christian extremism. Taylor reports that judge Parker is a member of a group calling itself the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR. A central tenet of the NAR belief system is that God has given them a mandate to dominate (that is, take control over) the seven aspects, or “mountains,” of US society, which are family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. Yup, seven. Judge Parker is diligently climbing the government mountain.
“Appeal to Heaven” flag originally flown by George Washington and now considered an emblem of the NAR, as the flag predates the ratification of the Constitution and is a quote from John Locke. Michael Johnson, the House Chair, flies one outside his office in the Capital. This one is being displayed by adherents attempting to illegally overturn the last US Presidential Election.
NAR cites Revelation 17:1–18, verse 9 which reads, “And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains.” I did not make this verse up; you can read all of revelation 17 for yourself if you don’t believe me, although I would not recommend it. NAR believes that dominating all aspects of cultural and national leadership, and converting these parts of America to adhere to the NAR’s religious beliefs, will usher in the apocalyptic end times. They call this their “seven mountain mandate.”
Does this sound like a good idea to you?
Parker is not the only member of our government who ascribes to the seven mountain mandate – Mike Johnson, the current House Speaker, is also on board, as are several other members of Congress. They want to change the US Government away from our current Constitution so that it conforms to (their) understanding of the Christian Bible.
While I certainly am not a Biblical scholar, my reading up on this passage informs me that Revelation 17 describes the end times war between God and the idolatrous, or sinful, governments of the earth. A woman harlot and the beast represent the Satan-powered evil governments who rule over earth, but then succumb to Jesus in his triumphal second coming. After God gives four angels the temporary power to destroy everything. The seven mountains are thus to be dominated so that this prophecy can be fulfilled, the earth can be almost destroyed, and Jesus can return to rule on earth to live gloriously with the saints that are still remaining. The NAR must believe that they will be among these remaining saints. I wish I had made this part up, but sorry, no.
So, the NAR followers are on a Holy War to take over everything and drive out Satan from amongst us. Because of the high stakes of this perceived Holy War, where God is in the final battle against Satan, they are not interested in compromise. And since one of the NAR beliefs is that life starts at conception, Judge Parker feels pretty comfortable ruling that dropping a cryo-frozen fertilized embryo on the floor is murdering a child.
But wait! There’s more!
There was plenty of talk in the news about IVF as a result of this judicial ruling. But, it also got me thinking about the process of conception, and how life starts. Judge Parker, recall, believes that life – or humanity – begins when an egg is fertilized. However, biology doesn’t work that way. The medical consensus is that pregnancy starts at the implantation of the fertilized egg into the uterus, which is typically a few days following fertilization. Here is a short but ranty video by Bill Nye, the Science Guy. https://tinyurl.com/y4v3cpvh.
He points out that whenever a couple goes forth to multiply, some eggs are fertilized naturally by the process that do not implant in the uterus and therefore do not become children. The number of fertilized eggs that result from the “going forth to multiply” process is somewhat random. If, for example, two of the fertilized eggs successfully implant, then you get twins. The fertilized but not implanted eggs are naturally eliminated from the woman’s body as part of the normal process. It has always worked this way, even in Biblical times.
I have looked at a number of other sources of information about how babies are made, and what Bill Nye says is true. For example, according to the UCSF Center for Reproductive Health, about half of all fertilized eggs are lost in the normal process of conception.
This means that, according to Judge Tom Parker, you can’t get pregnant without murdering a lot of children. Or to put it another way, the Alabama law – and his ruling – make every mother a criminal, and make motherhood a crime. When Judge Parker figures this out he will be shocked. Let’s not tell him.
Today is another OMG! story! Last September I noticed that my Medicare statement included a payment to a “Royce Medical Supply LLC” for 400 intermittent sterile catheters. Which I don’t use and did not receive. These were ordered in bulk, totalling almost $4,000 which Medicare had already paid to Royce. (I’m not going to explain what an intermittent catheter is; you can look it up.) I immediately called the Medicare Fraud number and had a long conversation with a nice agent who told me that she would sent a note to someone about it, and agreed that, yeah, it kind of sounded fraudulent. I then called UnitedHealthcare, my supplemental insurance provider, who said that Medicare had approved the payment, but that she would also send an appropriate note to someone else in the company. I was told by Medicare that people who report fraudulent transactions like these don’t get any follow-up notification, and I hadn’t heard anything about it since then.
Until this morning. Here is a screen grab from my Medicare statement:
A screenshot of my Medicare statement showing the claim and payment to Royce. The supporting detail indicates the charges are for 400 “Intermittent Urinary Catheters, with Insertion Supplies” in two orders, one on 7/24/23 and the other 8/23/23. Because Medicare approved the catheters, my secondary insurance was responsible for the $744.
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post today reported on a fraud investigation underway involving Royce Medical Supply at the exact same address in Ft Lauderdale that showed up on my catheter order, 2950 W Cypress Creek Rd. What’s more, this is the biggest fraud ring that has ever been pursued on behalf of Medicare, amounting to about $2 billion in total fraudulent payments. There are alleged to be seven companies in the crime ring and they all billed for bogus intermittent catheters, apparently because this is something that typically does not get much attention by the Medicare auditors.
Although in this case, the giant spike in one product, all from a small select handful of companies, should have raised some eyebrows at the Medicare fraud desk. Especially given that I can’t have been only one to notice, although I will say more about this later.
The pattern seems to have been that the criminals legitimately purchased companies that already had licenses to bill Medicare for durable medical equipment, referred to in Medicare lingo as DME. Every company involved in the scheme was purchased in 2023 after being run legitimately before then. This avoided red flags based on the billing service provider, and gave the gang access to Medicare’s billing system.
How they obtained my Medicare ID and related information is a mystery. I had not done business with this company, or any of the seven, so they didn’t get my name from their own records. They must have stolen my Medicare ID, or obtained it from someone who did.
The Washington Post journalists interviewed Dara Corrigan, the head of the Medicare Fraud Prevention group. Corrigan declined to give any specifics regarding the state or scope of the investigation, stating that divulging any information might compromise an investigation that might or might not be ongoing. Ditto for FBI.
According to the Post, “The alleged scheme was uncovered by the National Association of ACOs (Accountable Care Organizations).” NAACOS is a non-profit trade group that represents hospitals and providers across the country. This role gives NAACOS access to Medicare records that enabled them to notice the seven companies that suddenly started a massive (and obvious if you were looking) billing spike. The Post and the Times reporters interviewed Clif Gaus, the NAACOS CEO. While NAACOS may have been the first accredited agency to report it, I am sure that many other individuals reported their claims as fraudulent. At the time I did a quick Google search for information related to my transaction, and there were plenty of people who had reported Royce to the Better Business Bureau with similar complaints, many of whom I am sure called Medicare also.
According to the NAACOS analysis, about 450,000 patients were billed for these catheters in 2023. Normally, Medicare gets about 50,000 billing transactions per year for them. This suggests that 400,000 billing transactions like mine were probably paid by Medicare as part of the scheme.
The Washington Post was able to contact the former owner of Royce Medical, who sold their business in 2023. She stated that this was a big problem for her. Even though she had nothing to do with the fraud – it all occurred after the new owners took over – customers were blaming her for the billing.
I know I did the right thing to immediately report the Royce bill to the Medicare Fraud Desk, but the response I got from Medicare was both unsatisfying and frustrating. I told them that I had not ordered the items, and it was almost as if they didn’t believe me. I thought at the time that if I was billed for this, it was unlikely to be a one-off event, and that there had to be a giant pile of similar complaints that were blinking red lights at the agent that I spoke with, who was part of the fraud prevention group. I have no way of knowing. I can hope that when fraud is this obvious, that our government jumps right on it. Which they may have. It’s hard to know.
Now let’s talk about how the news is reported. And mostly, I mean how they draw graphs! It would appear that the NAACOS people sat down with both the Washington Post and the New York Times reporters, explained what they had come up with, and shared the numbers. Here is how each of them drew their graphs illustrating the same data trend.
First, the Times online version:
This is the New York Times version of the NAACOS data, from 2021 to the most recent quarter.
And here is the Washington Post online version:
The Washington Post graph of the same data
And here is the version of the same data as shown in the print edition of the New York Times:
The Washington Post wins!! I did not expect this, but ok. They both correctly attribute the underlying data to NAACOS (and yay for honesty in journalism). Both versions correctly show zero-origin axes with appropriate scaling, and correctly label the vertical and horizontal. The Times online version includes dots that are distracting from the message, and leaves you to guess the peak medicare fraud amount. The printed version of the same plot in the Times shows the jump in a way that appears to be way more startling, so I will leave to you which one is the most “accurate.” The Post, on the other hand, uses shading to highlight the message about how out of proportion the billing is, omits the distracting dots without any loss of clarity, indicates the amount (nearly $1 billion), and adds an explanatory text that provides context for the figures.
This leaves me thinking that there are two remaining problems related to Royce billing my Medicare account.
One problem is that even if the money for my order went to Royce, I have no out-of-pocket liability. This gives me, and other older Americans, little incentive to pursue these sorts of claims. The Post journalists were told by their interview subjects that most people don’t read the detailed medical statements they get, allowing this type of fraud to go on longer than it should. Given that I did not experience any out-of-pocket loss because of Royce’s use of my information, was I really a victim? It’s an existential question like the one about a tree that falls where no one hears it.
A second problem is that I have no idea how Royce Medical was able to obtain my Medicare billing identification information. I now read the monthly statements very carefully, looking for evidence of providers that I do not know, or billing transactions that seem unfamiliar.
Today’s Obituary was for David L. Mills, the inventor of the Network Time Protocol (NTP). He was one of the original ARPAnet engineers, the original US Government design experiment that became the Internet we now know and love. NTP was the solution to an important engineering problem of the nascent Internet, which was: every computer had its own clock, and time differences would cause data to go the wrong way or otherwise be misinterpreted on the new network. His invention of NTP synchronizes clocks on a variable-lag network to within a few milliseconds of each other. The Internet as we now know it and use it could not exist without this invention. He was known as “Father Time.”
Here is a bit about his invention. NTP is implemented on dedicated computers that work in strata (or layers), where stratum 0 is a set of atomic clocks (including some that orbit on satellites); stratum 1 are the computers directly wired to the atomic clocks; and stratas 2 and higher are connected via “laggy” networks in a downward cascade.
Each computer in the downward cascade performs elaborate calculations to average out the amount of time it takes information to reach it from the other NTP computers, using complex math to arrive at a very close approximation to the time reference of the atomic clocks at the top of the pyramid. Windows (the software that runs everything) automatically synchronizes to this time system, so that our robot overlords hum along nicely.
The NIST F2 cesium fountain atomic clock, shown here with engineers pretending to fiddle with it. It uses the resonant frequency of cesium atoms to create a frequency reference, which then magically becomes the time. It would run for 300 million years without losing even one second.
One interesting fact about the protocol is that all time originates at midnight January 1, 1900 and is represented in a 64 bit number by the number of seconds (32 bits) and fractions of a second (another 32 bits) since then. The largest number that can be represented in 32 bits is (of course you knew this) 4,294,967,296. This means that Internet clocks have been counting up the number of seconds from January 1900 to now, so that each second and fraction are unique. When the maximum value is reached, what happens? The number rolls over to zero, which would be bad. Very bad.
At this point I hope that you are all getting out your calculators to do the math to answer the question: when will this blow up?
It turns out to be at 12:00:00001 am February 7, 2036. Not that long from now.
You can’t really blame David Mills for this, since he came up with the protocol in 1981 to support a network of maybe 2 dozen computers that were strictly a government experiment. And in his defense, NTPv4, the current version, has two 64 bit elements, which ought to be fine. Really. As long as we can upgrade every computer on earth between now and then.
So, we are mourning the loss of one of the key inventors of the technology that is now the Internet, or “Interwebs” as I like to call it. What is the status of some of those others who helped Mills blaze this path? I’m glad you asked! Here is a reckoning of some of the most noteworthy:
Larry Roberts: Roberts headed up the ARPA net project initial implementation. He’s dead.
Paul Baran: One of the two scientists who independently came up with the idea of a packet network. It’s total genius! I think you just have to trust me on this one. He’s dead, too – in 2011. If you would like me to explain packet switching vs circuit switching, just ask, but be forewarned.
Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs: Metcalf came up with the ‘ethernet’ protocol, which enables computers to inexpensively and reliably connect to each other locally (in the same room or building) even when the wire or communication among them makes mistakes and sends the wrong number of volts. Metcalf is 80 and still kicking (he went on to found 3Com), but Boggs, his partner who was the implementing engineer of the first ethernet circuit, just died this year.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn: These two in 1974 invented what we now call TCP/IP (for this one, please just don’t ask, really), which allows apps to talk to each other reliably, even when the network is faulty and tries to introduce errors in the transmitted information, or delays or drops some of it. Cerf is 81 today; Kahn is 86.
Tim Berners-Lee: He is a British computer scientist who first came up with the idea for what we now call a “web page.” A lot of people think that this is the Internet. At 68, he is a youngster and still expresses his opinion when someone tries to ruin the Internet.
Paul Mockapetris: Paul was one of the original internet engineers at the University of Southern California in the ARPA days. When the network became too big to manually set each individual computer to a numerical address, he came up with the DNS idea. These are the “something.com” names that we are all familiar with. Born in 1948, he was a youngster at the time and is still with us.
Al Gore: Poor Mr. Gore is ridiculed by conservatives and climate change deniers who think that he claimed to have invented the Internet. He’s only 75, so we probably will have him to kick around for a while longer. In any event, he was a pioneer among US legislators who, in 1991, put together and passed a bill that funded much of the innovation during that time, including funding for the University of Illinois research group where…
Marc Andreessen invented the first web browser, called Mosaic. Internet Explorer, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and many others are now available. Back then, though, Mosaic led the way. Because taxpayers paid for the staff and resources involved, it was offered free to anyone who downloaded it. Marc, born in 1971, is a youngster and is still with us. In fact, he’s a gazillionaire.
Bill Gates: Mr. Gates had nothing to do with the invention of any part of the internet, but he took a small piece of software (which he did not write) and turned it into one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the universe. Bill Gates represents the American dream. I just thought you would want to know.
That’s about it for David Mills and the invention of NTP, or the Network Time Protocol. So, what time is it, again?
Oh, gosh – I turned to One America News (“OAN”) this morning and bumped into a story by OAN’s Pearson Sharp stating that Democrats have a long history of claiming voter fraud, making them just as dishonest as the Republicans. I’m not sure why “being just as dishonest as the other guy” is a good thing, but, anyway, that was the sales pitch so let’s continue. Sharp’s “long history” claim is supported by one primary incident: Jimmy Carter’s run in 1962 for the Georgia state senate. The opinion journalist’s conclusion is that Trump is justified in claiming voter fraud because “the Democrats” have repeatedly made the same claim about Republicans.
Here is the lead-in to the Sharp OAN story: “Democrats have a long history of not only contesting elections they lose, but blaming voter fraud and even demanding the elections be overturned. One America’s Pearson Sharp reports.” Mr. Sharp’s argument is outlined below, on the left. The comparison to Trump is unstated in the OAN piece so I have taken the liberty of stating it.
Carter Situation
Trump Situation
Carter claimed voter fraud in one district, went to court
Trump claimed widespread national voter fraud by Democrats, brought 60 court cases
The Georgia State Court looked at evidence, concluded fraud had occurred in the one district
60 courts looked at evidence, concluded that no fraud had occurred by Democrats (or anyone) in any of the cases
Court: Fraud committed by Carter opponent
Court: No evidence supporting fraud by opponent
Recount ordered, resulting in overturning of prior result
Recount(s) ordered, no change to outcome of election
Mr. Sharp concludes from this that Democrats are just as guilty as Republicans in both fraudulent activity and in claiming the other guy cheated. Lots of additional innuendo that both sides are equally dishonest. Even though, in the Carter case, only one side was dishonest – and it was not Democrat Carter – although Sharp does not mention this.
The last part of the report is a litany of cases where Democrats have complained about Republicans who commit voter fraud. He goes through these so quickly that you have no idea what really happened, just like the Carter 1962 reference earlier. The result is that you are left with the impression that Trump’s complaints about the Democrats must also be legitimate. Please stop for a minute and think about this logic: a) my party commits election fraud; b) your party complains about it; c) therefore, my complaints are legitimate. Sharp, of course, does not give you time to think about his logic; he moves quickly with his monologue.
If conservative media sources like OAN were my only source of information, I would think that the deep state is out to get Trump, and that the Democrats have a history of unethical behavior. Pearson Sharp has a very compelling TV persona, and presents the story with a high degree of self-confidence. How could someone so sure of himself be wrong?
The Carter story is not what you’d think from Sharp’s quick recap; it turns out not to have anything to do with Democratic vs Republican politics.
Carter, in his first election to public office in 1962, ran for a seat on the Georgia state senate. On election day he was traveling to each of the Georgia county polling places when he observed a local political boss pulling Carter votes out of the ballot box, marking ballots for the other guy, and generally doing things to ensure that Carter would lose in tiny “deep south” Quitman county. This was evidently not surprising to the people who lived in Quitman County, as the local boss doing this was well known for these tactics. Carter complained to the local election officials, who ignored him, as they were friends with the local boss. He then went to the state officials and to the Atlanta newspapers, and the rest is history, since the evidence of ballot fraud was overwhelming, and a recount showed Carter to be the winner by a landslide. It is a story, not about Democrats or Republicans, but about standing up to an entrenched culture of political favoritism. Party affiliation was irrelevant.
This experience gave Carter a reputation for honesty and integrity which stayed with him for the remainder of his long political career.
So, what was that One America News thing about again?
I thought you might be curious, so here is a link to the OAN story which you can view, and then decide for yourself:
Grandpa Dave Reads the News 