The above is a well-formed human skull. For most of us, this is what we have under our skin by age 20 or so, and will not change for the rest of our lives. Imagine this lies under all our faces.

Note a few things about this skull: The nose cavity is flush with the face, so that the human nose itself, made of flexible cartilage and other stuff, can be altered in appearance. It can be shortened or flattened, or a sharp piece of plastic can be inserted to make it pointier. Plastic surgeons often do this sort of thing.

But understand, the nose itself cannot be moved on the face. Bone structure prevents that.

Note the same with the ears – they too are made of cartilage and other stuff, and can be made smaller or be tucked. But their location on the head cannot be changed.

Most importantly for my purpose here, note the eye sockets. They too are in place by age twenty or so, and do not change throughout our lives*. They will always be in the same place on the head, and the distance between them will remain constant until death. They are, after all, bone material.

Continue reading “Lies of the eyes” →

The older one gets, the more it becomes clear that it is a great mistake not to have been brilliant when very young. Difficult to arrange, I realize, but for the splendid saving of time it is to come into one’s intelligence early! Alexis the Tocqueville, who so handsomely did, is a case very much in point. He was not a traditional genius, at least not at the blazingly-high-IQ-learn-six-languages-while-writing-and-oboe-concerto-at-11-years-old sort of genius. The young Tocqueville was indeed a genius of perception, of the type that Henry James would describe as someone “on whom nothing is lost.” He was a man assailed by perceptions, observations, insights. Where others were confused by the jumble of life about them, he was fascinated by it; where they saw chaos, he perceived patterns. No phenomenon – be it a certain kind of personality, a common thread tying together a group, or the character of an institution – could pass before him without his working his way to a determination of its underlying cause, reason for being, ultimate significance. His was an intelligence organized for almost perpetual intellectual penetration. (Introduction to Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, Bantam 2002 edition, by Joseph Epstein. Link to Gutenberg Book 1, Book 2)

Continue reading “The knockout punch” →

I just clipped and saved the image to the left, and then when I went to download it to this post could not find it. Finally I traced it to a file in my photographs called “Family Photos”, and I was going to move it to another file and then realized, wait, that’s probably the right place for it!

The man in the photo is Alfred E. Newman, a creation of William Gaines, also the man who gave us Mad Magazine. It still exists, part of DC Comics, but, you know, like the Beach Boys, still on tour, it’s not the same as it was. I have just a couple of stories about Mad Magazine, the first of which involves urban legends.

I was led to believe that William Gaines was a talented artist and humorist who could not find employment anywhere in entertainment or publishing because he was Jewish. In fact, his father, Max Gaines, was the publisher of All-American Comics division of DC Comics. In 1947 his father was killed in a motorboat accident on Lake Placid, and so Gaines quit school to take over the family business, EC Comics. He did OK, and otherwise was on his way to a career as a teacher. Instead, he worked in comic books. I find that a nobler profession.

Continue reading “The Newman Chronicles” →

The above image illustrates what is called “Mercator Projection,” created in 1569 and named after Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594). On the right is the standard view we get from flat maps. But true map coordinates are based on a circular globe, so that longitudinal lines approach one another in distance until they meet a the poles. By making them equidistant on a flat map, we distort the size of landmasses closer to the equators. See how, on the map above, Greenland appears larger than Africa.  In reality (unless you are a flat earther, in which case, vamoose!), Africa is fourteen times the size of Greenland. This explains why when we flew to Nairobi last year it took nine hours from Paris. The two places appeared much closer on the map.

The explanation for this is that Mercator projection is more practical for navigation on the high seas, giving better angles … I’m repeating what I read and don’t really get that, but accept it, as Mercator maps are all about and in use.

Continue reading “Mercator maps, some Beatles fun” →

“Behold!  human beings living in a sort of underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all across the den; they have been here from their childhood, and have their legs and neck chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them; for the chains are arranged in such a manner as to prevent them from turning round their heads. At a distance above and behind them the light of a fire is blazing, and between the fire in the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have before them, over which they show the puppets.

I see, he said.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying vessels, which appear over the wall; also figures of men and animals, made of wood and stone and various materials; as of the prisoners, as you would expect, are talking, and some of them are silent?

This is a strange image, he said, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the buyer throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

True, he said: how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would see only the shadows?

Yes he said.

And if they were able to talk with one another, with enough suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?”

The Republic of Plato, Book Seven

Continue reading “The Cave Allegory” →

My mother and father were raised on farms. On Mom’s side, there were seven daughters doing what I presume to be sharecropping (a word Mom never used) near Greenbush, Wisconsin. When the farmhouse burned down, 1928 or so as near as I can tell, none were harmed but they were homeless. My grandfather, George Leonard, contacted his brother Mike, who was dryland farming near Ekalaka, Montana. Mike, of course, offered to have him come out and work the farm. As the story goes, George did not tell Mike he was bringing his wife and seven daughters. Mike had a three-room house with an outdoor privy. Mom said Mike was usually in a bad mood, and reflectively said she could see why, having nine people move in on you. Mom said that when Grandma got off the train onto the platform after the long journey, she said “This is it?”

That lasted for a couple of years, I gather, before George and Marie moved their family to nearby Baker, to the spacious house, the front porch of which is seen above. That’s my two older brothers, and in case you lack detective skills I will tell you the day of the week … Saturday. The following day all would ride off to church. Saturday was bath day. (Thanks to my cousin, Eileen, who took photo negatives we found in Mom and Dad’s house after they moved to assisted living, and developed them. My towhead brother Steve has no genitals, so I can run this photo. Early Photoshop, that is.)

Continue reading “Ancestry dot com” →

Case study 1: William Summerlin

In 1974, William Summerlin was conducting research in transplantation immunology in the laboratory of Robert Good at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. The research dermatologist had reported successfully transplanting skin between genetically unrelated animals by culturing the skin in a special laboratory medium. The research had major implications for the field of tissue transplantation, but neither he nor other scientists had been able to reproduce his original results.

When Summerlin used a black pen to alter a patch of black mouse skin transplanted onto a white mouse, animal care technicians quickly discovered the fraud. Subsequent investigation by Memorial Sloan-Kettering revealed poorly conducted experiments and misleading statements about research results made by Summerlin in reports and to colleagues. All of his work was discredited, but the 1973 article in Transplantation Proceedings was never retracted.

Oh, if only such research fraud was so easily uncovered. The book I took this from, Unreliable, by Csaba Szabo, noted that “the most lasting contribution of Summerlin’s career seems to be that the term “painting mice” is still used to describe fraud and deception in research. As the footnote to this paragraph says, however, “Most scientists who use this term don’t even know where it comes from.”

Continue reading “Michael Mann … painting mice?” →

I own a bunch of small overriding royalties in various natural gas wells in Grand County, Utah. I no longer receive revenue from them as the company that operates the wells, ARB Energy of Utah, simply stopped paying me. They cannot relieve me of ownership, and their obligation to pay me is both written in to Utah regulations but is also a legal “fiduciary” responsibility, an obligation of trust.

Its’ not just me, of course. There are scores of others in my shoes. For me, I planned to have the overrides as part of my retirement, but can survive without them. What I have learned from scuttlebutt is that ARB, taking over the properties in 2019, started out with good intentions, and then made a huge and bad investment in a plant that produces helium, that promptly went broke. The company acted in desperation, and the executive in charge, Humberto Sevint, is a resourceful man who manages to come up with stopgap funding to stay afloat.

Continue reading “Quiet desperation except … I don’t know how to keep quiet” →