Carrying my stuff

I wear my wedding ring unless I’m around equipment or something. I used to wear a wristwatch, but stopped some years ago and haven’t missed it. There seem to be clocks everywhere I go.

I’d always carried my wallet in my left back pocket and a handkerchief in my right, then last fall I switched them, to equalize wear on my pants so I could get another six months out of them, and to shake things up – “Without change, something inside of us sleeps…”

When I first started carrying a wallet, I had also carried a comb behind it, because that’s what we did back in the day. A few years later I got my hair cut very short and started wearing a hat most of the time, so I stopped carrying the comb.

For as long as I’ve had to carry keys, I’ve dropped them into my right front pants pocket. A few weeks ago, I started carrying them on a short loop so they hang from my belt. They still go in my pocket, but they hang about half way down instead of falling to the lowest point. This is a big improvement; they don’t tangle up so much; it’s more comfortable; I can get them out without taking off my gloves. I’ve been able to add a small flashlight to the keyring.

Years ago I got a Leatherman multitool that I like very much, but never knew quite where and when to carry. Since the new year, I carry it on my belt all the time. Well, unless I’m flying, because with my particular background the government just can’t trust me with hand tools. Not to be either mysterious or too specific, once before 9/11 airline personnel insisted I discard my razor blades, but then asked me to please check before boarding to make sure I didn’t have a round in the chamber. My point being, stupidity isn’t new, the TSA has just greatly expanded it, so I’ll have to remember to not take the Leatherman through “security.”

It remains to figure out where to carry my cell phone. Right now I put it in a pocket, but maybe some kind of belt pouch would be better. I’m also considering wearing a sports coat as much as possible. That would let me more easily carry a notepad and pen, and would hang down over what’s quickly becoming my utility belt. The best thing to do might be to have two or three long-ish windbreaker-type work jackets, with a name embroidered on the upper left. Not my own name of course, some short name like “Al” of “Bob,” a different one on each jacket. That’s probably not really practical, but there aren’t a lot of alternatives. A cape would just be a nuisance.

Unanimous

“The Supreme Court has just ruled that police need a warrant if they want to place a tracking device on a suspect’s vehicle. The court’s decision was unanimous. NPR’s Nina Totenberg says that this debate has been a contentious issue in the digital age.” — Supreme Court Rules Police Need Warrant For GPS Tracking

Nine to zero suggests it wasn’t a contentious issue after all, merely unreasonable search and seizure.

Words and music

Several pieces of good short fiction here; links to good music there.

God’s Providence

What is that exactly?

So the other day the power steering fails, potentially an expensive disaster. It’s not like I can keep a spare car to drive to work while one is in the shop. Seemingly it’s a catastrophe, but the steering works well enough to get home. The pump’s not in stock, and must be ordered. By the time it comes in the weather’s supposed to be bad, but the pump still works well enough to back the car into the garage. I’m inside under cover, with good light so I can work on it at night. A scheduling change at work gives me some extra time.

Getting into it, I find the top mounting bolt loose, and the bottom mounting bolt sheared off. Catastrophe! I’ll have to get some special gizmo to extract the stub from the mount, maybe even have the car towed in to the shop. But no, the stub is loose and comes out easily. I replaced the power steering pump about three years ago. I figure this failure is the result of me not torquing the bolts to specification, or not using Loctite, or not inspecting the mounting bolts every 3,000 miles like a neurotic gearhead. So, off to pick up the new pump, that’s supposed to have come in now.

The pump is in, but doesn’t include the drive pulley. You take the pulley off the old one and reuse it. You need a special tool to remove and reinstall the pulley. The store rents the tools, the parts guy tells me. I expect an extortionate charge, but it turns out there’s no charge to borrow the tool, just a deposit you get back when you return it. The rest of the process goes as smoothly as anything I’ve done on a car.

So the new power steering pump is installed, and I’m out of pocket no more than fifty dollars – not bad at all. But the steering still doesn’t work quite right. I assume there’s still some air in the system, and indeed it seems to get better. The next morning I get in the car to go and do something, and the battery is dead. So, an hour’s delay while I put the charger on it, then it starts right up. Going to close the hood, I see hydraulic fluid jetting out of a hole in a line up by the left front wheel. What now, a brake line? Well, good thing it failed in the driveway and not ten miles out in the country. I give up, and call the shop.

Christianity and automotive maintenance

The mechanic says bring it in and he’ll take a look when he gets a chance. If the brakes don’t work it’ll have to be towed, which I imagine will be like thirty-five hundred dollars. In fact it’s (wait for it) a power steering line. The foam in the power steering reservoir was too subtle a clue for me. It still works well enough for me to get it to the shop, and it’s a forty minute walk home – my cardio for the day.

Now the car’s in the shop, and I haven’t heard anything yet. It will be a few days before I have to go anywhere I can’t walk. So far things have worked out every step of the way, and I trust in God’s providence that things will continue to work out. But what does that mean exactly?

It doesn’t mean if you go to church bad things won’t happen to you. It doesn’t mean if you put money in the plate God will send you ten times as much money, or any money at all. It doesn’t mean if you’re a Christian you’ll be happy all the time. I don’t entirely know what it does mean, but whether things look good, or things look bad, God is guiding everything for the best in the end.

Sometimes you see it, usually you don’t, but God is always at work. “Therefore, take no thought of the morrow, saying what will we eat or what will we wear” doesn’t mean you don’t have to wash your clothes anymore, or that you can just sit by the side of the road waiting for someone to bring you food. Power steering pumps will still fail when they wear out. Your car may break down by the side of the road; you may not be able to get to work; you may lose you job, then come home to find your garage in flames. There will be catastrophes. Somehow, you shouldn’t worry about it. You should pitch in and work with God, and let Him work through you. That’s what I’ve got so far.

God didn’t just create the universe and then let it go like a wind-up robot. He’s continually involved in sustaining the world and advancing His Plan. When we see evidence of this, we call it Divine Providence, but it’s there all the time. Sometimes when we need it we get a glimpse of the Plan. When we can’t see it, we have to remember there is a plan, and keep doing what we can to advance it.

Gentleman Jim, 1942

Errol Flynn engagingly portrays James J. Corbett, a champion boxer from the 1890s. Gentleman Jim is fun and entertaining, but a bit too long. The jokes become repetitive. There’s plenty of historical atmosphere about the beginnings of modern boxing. Gentleman Jim is worth watching once, probably not twice.

Romney and LBOs

There are things to be said both for and against leveraged buy-outs. The “for” case mostly involves economic theory, creative destruction, and the malign consequences of government regulation over the long term. The “against” case involves the near term, a profitable company moving its factory to Mexico, and a few men getting rich.

I don’t much care if Romney wins or loses, but the most effective way to deal with [this] criticism might be to embrace it: “I fired people I could do without, and outsourced work that other companies would do cheaper. I was a businessman, and I made money. Barack Obama is an intellectual, and his theories have bankrupted us. Vote for me and I will run Washington like a business, with lay-offs and privatization.”

Now that’s only half true; if Romney is elected the federal workforce will grow, the federal government will spend more money, and five years from now it will be bigger than ever and deeper in debt. But for whatever it’s worth, saying he’ll fire federal workers effectively exploits the politics of envy, and is more likely to win him the presidency than talking about Schumpeter and Pareto.

Multiplication

“Alex Bellos demonstrates a very cool, and strange way to multiply,” with agreeable musical accompaniment. I’m going to assume you’ve watched the video.

This seems like a pretty general method, potentially practical. It’s independent of base; group the marks however you like. At one extreme you can draw 21 lines one way and 32 the other, and count up all 672 intersections. Nearer the other extreme, you can do it working in base 16 by drawing a total of 8 lines and counting 12 intersections. What’s the minimum?

When dealing with larger digits, if you don’t want to draw eight lines and count up a bunch of intersections, you can draw a single tens line and two negative-one lines, then subtract.

The method extends directly to multiplying polynomials. It seems like some word problems could be interpreted very directly like this, but no interesting examples occur to me.

Where money came from

“The economists tell us a neat story about the development of money. The primitive world, they tell us, begins in barter, develops in money, and matures in credit systems. The problem however, is that the historians and the anthropologists have been telling the economists, and telling them for over 100 years, that they can find no record of this development; in fact, the actual history seems to be just the opposite: first comes credit, then money, and finally barter systems. Widespread barter systems only come about after the collapse of monetary systems, and even then money is still used as a unit of account, as a way of equating dissimilar items.” — Friends and Strangers: A Meditation on Money, by John Médaille

Hmm… Well, the author has examples from Mesopotamia through the Rome and medieval Europe, and on to contemporary Greece. And gosh, I wish I’d written that.

But of course what people want to know is not so much where money came from as where all the money went. I think it has something to do with the obelisk shortage.

Catholics and protestants

Having read Doc Rampage’s apologia for protestantism and John C. Wright’s The Pure Church of Imagination Land which Doc is responding to, here are some random thoughts about religion.

The church in which I grew up didn’t make a big distinction between Catholics and Protestants; we denied being protestants; “we aren’t protesting anything,” we would say. The big division was between people who baptized by full immersion, and people who didn’t. If your church “sprinkled babies” your church was wrong, Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, whatever.

The Body of Christ

We also claimed to read the Bible in its literal and obvious meaning, instead of reading it through a lens of human interpretation, or starting with a set of per-existing beliefs, then picking and choosing passages to support those beliefs. This gives the obnoxious teenager an opening to ask,

“Is the communion the actual body and blood of Christ?”
“No, Marcel; that’s something Catholics believe.”
“What about Mark 14:22 where Jesus says “This is my body,” and John 6:53, where Jesus says…”
“I know what the Bible says, Marcel. In those passages Jesus is speaking as in His parables. You’d understand if you could read the original Greek.”

Maybe not the best answer, but I really was pretty obnoxious. They were, and are, good people trying their best to follow Jesus. Now I attend a Methodist church. If I asked a Methodist preacher, “Are the elements the actual body and blood of Christ?” I might get any of a variety of answers. I’d be surprised if very many at all were a simple “Yes” or “No.”

“Pastor, does scripture teach us that the bread and juice^* are the actual body and blood, or that they’re symbolic?”

“Well, it’s complicated. Paul says this, Isiah says that, this is in John, but looking in context, the Masoretic text the Apostle was quoting must also inform our understanding. Throughout history, different scholars have…”

“Pastor, does scripture tell us to tithe?”

“Yes.”

“?”

“Well, strictly speaking we are encouraged to give more than 10%…”

So I’d not be willing to say much at all about what Methodists believe, let alone what Protestants believe. I’m not always entirely sure what I believe, so I shouldn’t be too hard on the preacher.

Ora pro nobis

It doesn’t bother me that people pray to Mary and the Saints. I don’t think most Methodists agree with me on this. Certainly it can become superstition and idolatry, or it can become mechanical, but if it’s just a matter of “Pray for us sinners,” I don’t see the problem; in fact, I appreciate being included in their prayers.

PowerPoint, a projection screen, and loud contemporary music bother me a lot. I’m sick to death of hearing Amazing Grace. There are lots of other things I dislike, but there’s no benefit to my sitting here trying to recall others. “Sufficient onto the day,” etc.

I’m not bothered by stained glass, paintings, or statues in church. Every year our church’s Christmas decorations include an angel with gold wings and a pulsating multicolored fiber-optic halo. Contrary to expectation, I like it. I always make it a point to mention how nice the sanctuary looks with “the stature of Saint Gabriel up by the alter,” so I’m still pretty obnoxious.

nunc et in hora mortis nostrae

What about Limbo, Purgatory, and all those circles? Where were Lazarus and Abraham, and where was the rich man? No idea. We know enough to do what we have to do now. I don’t think we’re going to know everything we want to know until later. Did Jesus die for our sins and rise from the dead? Will he come again to judge the living and the dead, and establish a new Heaven and a new Earth? Yes. That’s plenty for now.
—

^*We use grape juice regular bread from the bakery instead of wine and matzos.

The Longest Day, 1962

At nearly three hours, it’s a long movie too, but it’s time well spent. The Longest Day is a canonical classic about the second World War. Cornelius Ryan, a journalist who covered the war as a correspondent, wrote both the book and the screenplay. The subject of The Longest Day is the allied invasion of France on D-day – June 6, 1944. It’s presented as interleaved scenes about particular units and people – French Resistance Fighters, American and British infantry divisions, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, a hapless German sergeant, allied paratroopers and commandos, General Eisenhower.

Much of the dialogue is German and French with English subtitles, so the movie does require focused attention. The cast includes John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Peter Lawford, and many others. They all do good work, without being more prominent than their parts. The Longest Day is an engaging and satisfying movie. It’s not quite a documentary, but not really a vehicle for narrative or character development either. It’s not a military procedural, but it is about the events of the day more than the people.