Category Archives: personal relationships

Of cigars and marriage, Kipling and Freud.

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My last post included a rather gruesome bit of poetry by Rudyard Kipling where he describes the Afghani women coming to kill the wounded British soldiers in the first Afghan war. It’s sexist, or anti-sexist, if you like. Since it reverses a stereotype of the non-violent, female home-body. Then again the Afghanis had wiped out an entire British army, killing virtually everyone including civilians.

What follows is The Betrothed, one of Kipling’s first published poems, appearing in “the civil and military gazette”, Lahor, India (near Afghanistan), November, 1888. Kipling was an assistant editor). It has a more traditional view of women, or of British women who do not go out murdering, but who do wish to control/ stop a British man’s cigar smoking. In a sense, such stoppage is murder. The inspiration was a breach of ‘Promise of Marriage’ case in Glasgow, August 1888, where a young woman, Maggie Watson, sued her fiancee because he continued to smoke cigars after she insisted he stop. Kipling explores the psychology of the choice between smoking and marriage. I think Freud would approve.

The Betrothed.

OPEN the old cigar-box, get me a Cuba stout, For things are running crossways, and Maggie and I are out. 

We quarrelled about Havanas—we fought o’er a good cheroot, And I knew she is exacting, and she says I am a brute. 

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider a space; In the soft blue veil of the vapour musing on Maggie’s face. 

Maggie is pretty to look at—Maggie’s a loving lass, But the prettiest cheeks must wrinkle, the truest of loves must pass. 

There’s peace in a Larranaga, there’s calm in a Henry Clay; But the best cigar in an hour is finished and thrown away— 

Thrown away for another as perfect and ripe and brown— But I could not throw away Maggie for fear o’ the talk o’ the town! 

Maggie, my wife at fifty—grey and dour and old— With never another Maggie to purchase for love or gold! 

And the light of Days that have Been the dark of the Days that Are,
And Love’s torch stinking and stale, like the butt of a dead cigar— 

The butt of a dead cigar you are bound to keep in your pocket— With never a new one to light tho’ it’s charred and black to the socket! 

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider a while. Here is a mild Manila—there is a wifely smile. 

Which is the better portion—bondage bought with a ring, Or a harem of dusky beauties, fifty tied in a string? 

Counsellors cunning and silent—comforters true and tried, And never a one of the fifty to sneer at a rival bride? 

Thought in the early morning, solace in time of woes, Peace in the hush of the twilight, balm ere my eyelids close, 

This will the fifty give me, asking nought in return, With only a Suttee’s passion—to do their duty and burn. 

This will the fifty give me. When they are spent and dead, Five times other fifties shall be my servants instead. 

The furrows of far-off Java, the isles of the Spanish Main, When they hear my harem is empty will send me my brides again. 

I will take no heed to their raiment, nor food for their mouths withal, So long as the gulls are nesting, so long as the showers fall. 

I will scent ’em with best vanilla, with tea will I temper their hides, And the Moor and the Mormon shall envy who read of the tale of my brides. 

For Maggie has written a letter to give me my choice between. The wee little whimpering Love and the great god Nick o’ Teen. 

And I have been servant of Love for barely a twelvemonth clear, But I have been Priest of Cabanas a matter of seven year; 

And the gloom of my bachelor days is flecked with the cheery light Of stumps that I burned to Friendship and Pleasure and Work and Fight. 

And I turn my eyes to the future that Maggie and I must prove, But the only light on the marshes is the Will-o’-the-Wisp of Love. 

Will it see me safe through my journey or leave me bogged in the mire? Since a puff of tobacco can cloud it, shall I follow the fitful fire? 

Open the old cigar-box—let me consider anew— Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon you? 

A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke; And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke. 

Light me another Cuba—I hold to my first-sworn vows. If Maggie will have no rival, I’ll have no Maggie for Spouse! 

Sigmund Freud with his cigar. The whole attraction of cigars, is a strange one, as Freud knew better than most. Cigars are deadly, but casual, often with a good flavor, and a sucking comfort. The death-risk of one is small and distant. Cigars thus represent risky fun they are thus life, in a temporary, risky way. Marriage is permanence and safe, and binding. The binding permanence is a sort of death, but children are good, and that’s life. Freud’s choice was to smoke himself to death. Kipling got married and eventually gave up smoking.

Robert E. Buxbaum, September 17, 2021. Kipling has a great sense of words, and an attractive sense of the subjects, great and small. For years he was the voice of his generation in Britain, but by the end of his life, his views were unacceptable. sexist. On the other hand, he remained staunchly anti-Nazi, anti eugenics, and anti Soviet. By comparison, George Bernard Shaw was a vocal fan of Stalin, of Hitler, and of the eugenic removal of Jews and other undesirables. Shaw’s words remain fashionable, while Kipling’s do not. Such is the nature of fame.

The British Exit from Afghanistan, and ours

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As bad as our exit from Afghanistan has been, the slow British exit in the 1840s to 1920 was worse. While we lost a lot of stuff and left hundreds of Americans and contractors behind, the British, in their first try at leaving, lost a whole army including thousands of civilians. Then they returned and left repeatedly for 80 years, having to fight against their own weapons and people that they had trained. We did many of the same things the Brits did, like trusting our security to folks we’d been trying to kill, but we have not lost anywhere near as many people (yet) and we have not returned (yet). What follows is a look at the British exit, based mostly on Wikipedia articles: “The First Afghan War“, and the retreat from Kabul, 1842, and the biographies of Shah Shujah and Akbar Khan, pictures below.

Akbar Khan. The British tried to kill him, then negotiated with him. Sketch by Vincent Eyre
Britain’s Puppet King, Shah Shujah, Sketch by Vincent Eyre.

The British went into Afghanistan, as we did, to create a more stable and western-friendly government. Their first act was to remove the king, Mohammed Khan, and install a more pliant leader, Sultan Shujah. Mohammed was part of the Khanate, that is the Moguls (Mongols), a deadly violent group who the British were fighting in India. We did the same when we entered Afghanistan. We removed the elected president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, a “radical Moslem” associated with the Taliban leader, Mohammed Omar, an even more radical moslem. Omar was associated Osama bin Laden who’d attacked the US on 9-11. We replaced these, long-bearded Moslems with Hamid Karzai, a moderate Moslem: short beard, reasonably popular, US-friendly, elected in Bonn, Germany. The problem with Shah Shujah and Hamid Karzai is neither one had legitimacy in the eyes of the people, nor respect from the army, either. In part that’s because we put them in power and kept them there, in part that’s because we never let them lead in war or diplomacy. Our follow-on leader, Ashraf Ghani, had no beard, and even less legitimacy and respect. The Afghan army left Ghani as soon as we started leaving; they’d done the same to Shah Shujah when the British left in 1842.

William Macnaughten, the British Envoy, prison sketch by Vincent Eyre, the same fellow who sketched Akbar and Shujah above.

Shah Shujah had a habit of mutilating those who worked for him whenever he got upset. All of Shujah’s servants were missing ears or noses or testicles. Strangely, this seems to have given him more legitimacy than Ghani had. Perhaps if we allowed our leaders to lead, or at least mutilate, the army would have stayed loyal. Then again, maybe nothing would have prevented the puppet from collapsing when the puppet-master left. Both we and the Brits relied on our own troops to keep the peace, along with payoffs and occasional assassinations (we call those airstrikes). It worked for a time, but did not build loyalty or love.

Among those the British paid off and occasionally tried to kill was Akbar Khan, the son of imprisoned Mohammed Khan. Eventually, the British felt they needed Akbar’s help to protect their exit, as he controlled the hills around Kabul including the old Silk Road that the British hoped to travel. Similarly, in the end, we found we needed Taliban help to clear the road to the airport. We didn’t quite get the help, nor did the Brits.

On December 23, 1841, the British envoy, William Macnaughten, visited Akbar Khan and proposed that he would hand over Shah Shujah and make him king in return for safe passage for 16,500 people under General Keith Elphinstone on a journey from Kabul to fort Jalalabad: 93 miles due east. Akbar agreed, but had Macnoughton arrested and later killed. His body was hung in the bazaar. Akbar seems to have figured that anyone willing to betray his old friend would be likely to betray him as well.

Kipling was stationed in India, near the Afghan border. His view of the locals is rather gruesome.

General Elphinstone left Kabulon January 5, 1842 with 4,500 armed soldiers, several cannon, and 12,000+ unarmed civilians. The going was slow and supplies didn’t arrive. Five days later, January 10, allies of Akbar attacked in the hills and killed or captured most of the group. Akbar invited Elphinstone to tea the next day and announced that the group was now his prisoner. He offered safe passage for the women and children, but demanded payment. The alternative was that they freeze in the hills. Elphinstone, at first refused, then ransomed himself and others, in all nine people. The rest of the group were shot, stabbed, taken by the Afghanis to be wives, or stripped of clothing and left to freeze. Younger children were raised as Afghanis, only identified as British sixty or more years later– the British liked to pretend they had not left them. Of the rest, only two survived. One soldier, William Brydon made it to Jalalabad, January 13, 1842. Elphinstone died in captivity in Kabul, April, 1842. According to Kipling’s poem, the Afghanis mutilated British bodies. More likely it was animals.

Hamid Karzai, American supported President, now under house arrest.

The British re-invaded Kabul several times after that, each time hoping to free captives and show who’s boss. There followed a second Anglo Afghan war (1878-80) and third (1919-20), and arguably a fourth (2001-21). Our exit isn’t as bad, at least not yet. We’ve left behind 200-300 Americans plus hundreds of helicopters, trucks, and high-tech weapons. The Taliban are now in charge, folks we’d tried to kill, all of them were associated with Omar, and several with Osama bin Laden, too. Our security forces have been shot, the embassy translator is scheduled to be beheaded, the new government includes several senior members who had been detained at Guantánamo Bay, released to Qatar in a prisoner swap for Bowe Bergdahl in 2014. Hamid Karzai is in captivity, and we’ve taken 100,000 Afghanis who may not integrate well into US society. But at lest there is no sign we’re going back, not for Karzai, or the Americans, or for anyone else. It’s very bad, but it could be worse. Biden calls it a success. Compared to the British exit, it is so far.

Robert Buxbaum, Sept. 5, 2021. IMHO beards are associated with commitment.

What I learned by running for office.

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I’m an enemy of unity and a harborer of prejudice. During the election, I was told that all Republicans are, and I’ve come to accept it as true. I’d run for county water commissioner (drain commissioner) as a Republican, see web-site, and the charge is fair. I wasn’t happy to that George Will write to not for any Republicans because, in his opinion, we’re all prejudiced, and thus a Democrat is better for all jobs. When George, or anyone else, talks about getting rid of the prejudiced, it sounds to me like he wants to get rid of me and those who think like me. We’re to be replaced by those who think like him, or (since he has few solid ideas) whose ideas are gleaned as an average of those running the respectable media (It turns out there are only a fairly few people running the respectable media).

Biden seems to have fallen into the presidency. He didn’t campaign, but the press and a lot of people didn’t like Trump, and could not settle on anyone with opinions.

I didn’t like how the Water department was run, or how the costs were distributed, and some of this has to do with prejudice — engineering aesthetics, I call it. After living with these prejudices or aesthetics, I’ve come to think of them as part of me. I worked to form my opinions — opinions of what was fair, and who was likely to do good work, and what was good engineering. My prejudices and opinions were developed over many years. They’re not perfect, but I like them. I don’t want to have to exchange my opinions and prejudices for the government’s. If I felt otherwise, I would not have run for office. I also resent sensitivity training — the person running them rarely shows any sensitivity, IMHO.

One of the things that anti-racists hate, and I support is zionism. It’s a founding principle of Black Lives Matter that black people in the US can’t be free so long as the zionist state (Israel) exists. Why is this? There is an assumption that all black peoples are one, and that zionists are oppressors. Not that you could tell a Palestinian from a zionist by skin color, but it’s a truth that the faculty of Princeton endorses.

Not long ago the faculty of Princeton University voted unanimously for BDS including a ban on any zionist speaker from speaking on campus. The faculty also picked George Will as the graduation speaker in 2020. Most of the professors chose to not vote, but of those who did (1/7 of the total including many Jews) the pro-BDS vote was unanimous. As a result, if Einstein were to rise from the grave, with the unified field equations finally worked out, he’d have to speak off-campus because he was a zionist, and the university is committed to BLM and anti prejudice. (Tell me again, how does anti-zionism help black lives to matter?; how does BLM help you get clean water or good sewage treatment?)

In terms of sewage treatment or bringing clean water, I’ve found that the sort of person willing to do the work is usually someone with an opinion, and that usually it’s a rough opinion. My sense is to let people have their opinions and to say, if you treat the sewage right, I treat you right. Good work isn’t cheap, and people who do it can’t be culled from those with the right views and political opinions.

While campaigning I told leaders of the pipe-fitters union that I could tell that the Pontiac sewage plant was badly run just by smelling the air around the plant — you shouldn’t be able to smell a sewage plant from miles away. They said that was a racist statement. I then told them that the boilers were rusty, and that at the roof of the digester cad caved in, at least a year ago. They said they’d already endorsed the Democrat, and only spoke to me as a courtesy.

Robert Buxbaum June 25, 2021

Dark Academia, the new mood.

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Old libraries and old books play a big part in the aesthetic.

The movie version of academia is typically a leafy campus, with great libraries, bright minds, and deep intellectual discussions. It’s a happy grove where the young and talented go to bloom to superiority, eclipsing their parents and their well-meaning, but fuddy-duddy teachers. It’s also where oppressed middle-agers go to complete a journey of self -discovery. To the extent that professors are there in older movies, it’s to confer degrees and, eventually praise.

But there is a new mood in literature and movies where professors are sinister, and competition is darker and more dangerous place, both for the body and the soul. It’s called “Dark Academia.” Consider the recent hit movie and book, “The Secret History,” by Danna Tartt. It follows a talented person without any particular view or direction. The person arrives, looking to make friends and to become special, and through misguided efforts, students end up damaged or killed. Any friendships that result are sinister, and often exploitive.

An early version was Hitchcock’s “Rope,” where two students get excited by a professor expounding the ideas of Nietzsche. They go on to kill one of their fellows who they come to decide isn’t, quite as enlighten as they. Secret History is similar, except that the professor teaches Greek. Another early version was Frankenstein, whose early chapters are of crazed collegians pushing the limits of science in a dark laboratory and similarly dark library settings. For Dr. Frankenstein, the crushing pressure is from inside the student, and not so much from his professors or classmates. University is still a place of refuge, without the pressure of drugs, sex, or fashion.

Harry Potter and friends in dark academic garb. Casual, clean, active, hip-academic.

The evil professor trope of Dark Academia first appears in Harry Potter, I think. The school is both helpful and hurtful, both refuge and enemy. It’s education in a building that tries to trip you, with sadistic professors, plus slave labor, and some murderers or “death eaters.” There are friends too, with the friendship bound by fire-whiskey, or butter-beer, and an intense desire to excel over each other at ones craft, in this case magic. Fashion becomes important in dark academia. Harry Potter’s round glasses, robes, and school neckties, but the alcohol isn’t excessive in HP and the books are pretty chaste where sex is concerned.

Alcohol abuse, fashion, and sex are more central in “The Secret History”. There is a cultish professor, Morrow, and students fashions are described in detail. Most dress in tweeds, and all of them wear round glasses, like Harry Potter’s– in this case with metal rims. All are rich. And as in Hitchcock’s “Rope,” they conspire to murder the least special of their group in the goal of understanding the ancient Greeks. Unlike in Rope, they get away with it.

A yet more recent example is “Kill your darlings” — the main character is played by Daniel Radclift, the same actor who was Harry in the HP movies. It takes place in Columbia University in 1943-46 and portrays the young Alan Ginsberg. As in “Secret History” there is a cultish leader and a murder. Alan enters school not knowing what sort of poetry he’d like to write, or if he’ll write poetry. In the movie, Jack Kerouac, William Burrows and a few others who introduce him to drugs, including heroin, gay sex, wanton destruction, and benzedrine. As in Secret History, there are no bad effects from the drugs, though he tries suicide and one of his group murders another — the least special one as in other dark academia. He gets away with it, as in Secret History, the cult leader is rejected, and the others become special — a happy ending of sorts. Ginsberg writes a great “absurdist” essay and goes on to become a great poet.

Danna Tartt, author models the Dark Academic look. Notice the cigarette.

The mood of dark academia is a mix of repressed anger and innocence that takes place on a campus, but might as easily taken place in bohemian Paris. The movie architecture includes vast dining halls, gothic bell towers and forbidding libraries. The devoted student searches here for hidden light but finds only darkness. Murder follows. Students stare into space like Oscar Wilde with a heartburn, smoking like well-dressed longshoremen on break. See Danna Tartt at left.

The main contributions of Dark Academia is the fashion: Shades of brown, black and gray mostly, casual and active, but clean. The look says, “I’m both sexually active and criminally active; I do drugs think great thoughts, but don’t do homework. I might do murder too, but it’s OK since I plan to submit a killer final project. Morality is for losers, and “Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.” It’s a line from “The secret History,” appears, slightly altered, in Hitchcock’s “Rope.” The tremendous desire to be pure and special; great in a word, and that involves a destruction of the ordinary: an academic aesthetic where murder is the crowning creative act.

Robert Buxbaum, April 2-5, 2021.

Difficult chess puzzles and on-line games

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While I was writing my essay on the chess ratings formula, I recalled enjoying the occasional chess game, and joined Chess.com, an intern chess site with many features. In one month I have played 12 games against humans and 5 or so against the computer. It’s fun, and Chess.com gives me a rating of 1323. It’s my first rating, and though it’s probably only accurate to ±150, I find it’s nice to have some sense of where you are in the chess world. But the most fun part, I find, are the chess puzzles; see some below. At first I found them impossible, but after playing for a bit, the ideas began to resolve, and I began to solve some. There’re not impossible, just difficult, and they only take a couple of minutes each. If you guess my name, you could win a match.

White to move and win. I see it now, but didn’t originally.
White to move and mate in 2. Magnus Vs Sergey, 2016 World Championship Tiebreaker. I see it!
This is from redditt. It took me forever to see through this.
White to move and win. I see it, I think.
white to move and win in two. I see it!
white to move and mate (in one?). I see a slower mate.
Mate in 3. White to move. I see it.

Robert Buxbaum, January 22, 2021

The equation behind Tinder, J-swipe, and good chess matchups.

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Near the beginning of the movie “The social network”, Zuckerberg asks his Harvard roommate, Saverin, to explain the chess rating system. His friend writes an equation on the window, Zuckerberg looks for a while, nods, and uses it as a basis for Facemash, the predecessor of Facebook. The dating site, Tinder said it used this equation to match dates, but claims to have moved on from there, somewhat. The same is likely true at J-swipe, a jewish coating site, and Christian mingle.

Scene from the social network, Saverin shows Zuckerberg the equations for the expected outcome of a chess match between players of different rankings, Ra and Rb.

I’ll explain how the original chess ranking system worked, and then why it works also for dating. If you’ve used Tinder or J-swipe, you know that they provide fairly decent matches based on a brief questionnaire and your pattern of swiping left or right on pictures of people, but it is not at all clear that your left-right swipes are treated like wins and losses in a chess game: your first pairings are with people of equal rating.

Start with the chess match equations. These were developed by Anand Elo (pronounced like hello without the h) in the 1950s, a physics professor who was the top chess player in Wisconsin at the time. Based on the fact that chess ability changes relatively slowly (usually) he chose to change a persons rating based on a logistic equation, sigmoid model of your chances of winning a given match. He set a limit to the amount your rating could change with a single game, but the equation he chose changed your rating fastest when you someone much better than you or lost to someone much weaker. Based on lots of inaccurate comparisons, the game results, you get a remarkably accurate rating of your chess ability. Also, as it happens, this chess rating also works well to match people for chess games.

The knowledge equation, an S curve that can be assumed to relate to the expected outcome of chess matchups or dating opportunities.

For each player in a chess match, we estimate the likelihood that each player will win, lose or tie based on the difference in their ratings, Ra -Rb and the sigmoid curve at left. We call these expected outcome Ea for player A, and Eb for player B where Ea = Eb = is 50% when Ra = RB. It’s seen that Ea never exceeds 1; you can never more than 100% certain about a victory. The S-graph shows several possible estimates of Ea where x= Ra-Rb, and k is a measure of how strongly we imagine this difference predicts outcome. Elo chose a value of k such that 400 points difference in rating gave the higher ranked player a 91% expectation of winning.

To adjust your rating, the outcomes of a game is given a number between 1 and 0, where 1 represents a win, 0 a loss, and 0.5 a draw. Your rating changes in proportion to the difference between this outcome and your expected chance of winning. If player A wins, his new rating, Ra’, is determined from the old rating, Ra as follows:

Ra’ = Ra + 10 (1 – Ea)

It’s seen that one game can not change your rating by any more than 10, no matter how spectacular the win, nor can your rating drop by any more than 10 if you lose. If you lose, Ra’ = Ra – 10 Ea. New chess players are given a start ranking, and are matched with other new players at first. For new players, the maximum change is increased to 24, so you can be placed in a proper cohort that much quicker. My guess is that something similar is done with new people on dating sites: a basic rating (or several), a basic rating, and a fast rating change at first that slows down later.

As best I can tell, dating apps use one or more ratings to solve a mathematical economics problem called “the stable marriage problem.” Gayle and Shapely won the Nobel prize in economics for work on this problem. The idea of the problem is to pair everyone in such a way that no couple is happier by a swap of partners. It can be shown that there is always a solution that achieves that. If there is a singe, understood ranking, one way of achieving this stable marriage pairing is by pairing best with best, 2nd with second, and thus all the way down. The folks at the bottom may not be happy with their mates, but neither is there a pair that would like to switch mates with them.

Part of this, for better or worse, is physical attractiveness. Even if the low ranked (ugly) people are not happy with the people they are matched with, they may be happy to find that these people are reasonably happy with them. Besides a rating based on attractiveness, there is a rating based on age and location; sexual orientation and religiosity. On J-swipe and Tinder, people are shown others that are similar to them in attractiveness, and similar to the target in other regards. The first people you are shown are people who have already swiped right for you. If you agree too, you agree to a date, at least via a text message. Generally, the matches are not bad, and having immediate successes provides a nice jolt of pleasure at the start.

Religious dating sites, J-swipe and Christian Mingle work to match men with women, and to match people by claimed orthodoxy to their religion. Tinder is a lot less picky: not only will they match “men looking for men” but they also find that “men looking for women” will fairly often decide to date other “men looking for women”. The results of actual, chosen pairings will then affect future proposed pairings so that a man who once dates a man will be shown more men as possible dates. In each of the characteristic rankings, when you swipe right it is taken as a win for the person in the picture, if you swipe left it’s a loss: like a game outcome of 1 or 0. If both of you agree, or don’t it’s like a tie. Your rating on the scale of religion or beauty goes up or down in proportion to the difference between the outcome and the predictions. If you date a person of the same sex, it’s likely that your religion rating drops, but what do I know?

One way or another, this system seems to work at least as well as other matchmaking systems that paired people based on age, height, and claims of interest. If anything, I think there is room for far more applications, like matching doctors to patients in a hospital based on needs, skills, and availability, or matching coaches to players.

Robert Buxbaum, December 31, 2020. In February, at the beginning of the COVID outbreak I claimed that the disease was a lot worse than thought by most, but the it would not kill 10% of the population as thought by the alarmist. The reason: most diseases follow the logistic equation, the same sigmoid.

Thanksgiving thoughts for Christmas dinner.

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Enjoy those loaves and fishes. Even the ones from the store are miracles.

Enjoy dinner with your family and friends, even if it’s awkward. It’s the awkwardness of your friends that makes you love them. No one really loves perfection. And enjoy your dinner. No one really likes a prig, not even God.

My cousin and his wife are coming to dinner. They’re both Bugs Bunny fans. He proposed via a WhatsApp.doc

In terms of the holiday ham; Jesus was Jewish. No ham. When doing with the disciples, he probably ordered falafel and 13 glasses of water.

Relatives are easier if you don’t have to look at them.

Robert Buxbaum, November 2, 2020

Locked down so long, it’s looking up: the up-side of COVID-19.

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I’m not crazy about the COVID isolation, but there are up-sides that I’ve come to appreciate. You might too. Out of boredom, I was finally got into meditation. It was better than just sitting around and doing nothing.

It’s best not to look at isolation as a problem, but an opportunity. I’ve developed a serious drinking opportunity.

And it’s an opportunity to talk to myself. I told myself I’ should quit drinking. Then I figured, why should I listen to a drunk who talks to himself.

A friend of mine was on drugs, but then quit. Everyone in his house is happy, except for the lamp. The lamp won’t talk to him anymore.

The movies are closed, and the bars, and the gyms. It gives me another reason not to go to the gym.

Did you know that, before the crowbar was invented, crows used to drink at home.

The real reason dogs aren’t allowed in bars: lots of guys can’t handle their licker.

There’s time to spend with my children. And they look like me.

I like that I don’t commute. Family events are over zoom, funerals (lots of funerals), meetings, lectures. They come in via the computer, and I don’t have to dress or attend. No jacket, no pants… no travel …. no job.

My children are spending more time with us at home. We have virtual meals together. I discovered that I have a son named Tok. He seems to like my dad-jokes.

My wife is finding it particularly tough. Most every day I see her standing by the window, staring, wondering. One of these days, I’ll let her in.

I asked wife why she married me. Was it for my looks, or my income, or my smarts. She smiled and said it was my sense of humor. 🙂

My wife is an elementary school teacher. She teaches these days with a smart board. If the board were any smarter, it would go work for someone else. It’s necessary, I guess. If you can’t beat them, you might as well let the smart board teach. I think the smart board stole the election. It began by auto-correcting my spelling. Then it moved to auto correct my voting. The board is smarter and better than me (Hey, who wrote this?)

some mask humor
I’ve learned to love masks, though some of them are hot.

You’d think they’d reduce the number of administrators in the schools, given that it’s all remote. Or reduce the price of college. It would be nice if they’d up the number of folks who can attend. So far no. Today the Princeton alumni of Michigan is sponsoring video-talk by Princeton alumnus, George Will. I wanted to attend, but found there was limited seating, so I’m on the waiting list (true story). By keeping people out, they show they are exclusive. Tuition is $40,000 / year, and they keep telling us that the college is in service of humanity. If they were in the service of humanity, they’d charge less, and stream the talk to whoever wants to listen in. I have to hope this will change sooner or later.

Shopping for toilet paper was a big issue at the beginning of the pandemic, but I’ve now got a dog to do it for me. He goes to the store, brings it back. Brings back toothpaste too. He’s a lavatory retriever. (I got this joke from Steve Feldman; the crowbar joke too.)

I don’t mind that there are few new movies. There are plenty of old movies that I have not seen, and old TV shows too.

This fellow is the new head of Biden’s COVID-19 task force. He’s got a science-based plan for over-population and the disease.

I like that people are leaving New York and LA. It’s healthy, and saves on rent. Folks still travel there, mostly for the rioting, but lockdowns are nicer in Michigan.

More people are hunting, and hiking, and canoeing. These are active activities that you can do on lockdown. The old activities were passive, or going out to eat. Passive activities are almost a contradiction in terms.

We’re cooking more at home, which is healthier. And squirrel doesn’t taste half bad. If I live through this, I’ll be healthy.

I’m reading more, and have joined goodreads.com. I’ve developed a superpower: I find can melt ice cubes, just by looking at them. It takes a while but they melt.

A lot more folks have dogs. And folks have gotten into religion. Wouldn’t it be great, if after death we fond that dyslexic folks were right. There really is a dog.

Let’s love the virus. If we don’t, the next crisis will be worse.

There was an election last week. My uncles voted for Biden, which really surprised me. They were staunch Republicans when they were alive. My aunt got the ballot and convinced them. She was a Democrat when she was alive.

I got pneumonia vaccine shot, and a flu shot. That wasn’t a joke. I think it’s a good idea. Here’s why. People mostly die from pneumonia not the virus.

Before COVID, the other big crisis was global warming. Al Gore and Greta Thunberg claimed we had to shutter production and stop driving to save the planet. COVID-19 has done it. The next crisis is over-population. COVID is already curing that problem — not so much in China, but in the US, Europe, and South America.

Just As a final thought, let’s look at the bright side of the virus. If we don’t, the next crisis will be worse. Take Monty Python’s advice and Always look at the bright side of life.

Robert Buxbaum, November 20, 2020.

Pneumonia vaccine in the age of COVID

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A few days ago, I asked for and received the PCV-13 pneumonia vaccine, and a few days earlier, the flu shot. These vaccines are free if you are over 65, but you have to ask for them. PCV-13 is the milder of the pneumonia vaccines, providing moderate resistance to 12 common pneumonia strains, plus a strain of diphtheria. There is a stronger shot, with more side-effects. The main reason I got these vaccines was to cut my risk from COVID-19.

Some 230,00 people have died from COVID-19. Almost all none of them were under 20, and hardly any died from the virus itself. As with the common flu, they died from side infections and pneumonia. Though the vaccine I took is not 100% effective against event these 13 pneumonias, it is fairly effective, especially in the absence of co-morbidities, and has few side effects beyond stiffness in my arm. I felt it was a worthwhile protection, and further reading suggests it was more worthwhile than I’d thought at first.

It is far from clear there will be a working vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COV-19. We’ve been trying for 40 years to make a vaccine against AIDS, without success. We have also failed to create a working vaccine for SARS, MERS, or the common cold. Why should SARS-CoV-2 be different? We do have a flu vaccine, and I took it, but it isn’t very effective, viruses mutate. Despite claims that we would have a vaccine for COVID-19 by early next year, I came to imagine it would not be a particularly good vaccine, and it might have side effects. On the other hand, there is a fair amount of evidence that the pneumonia vaccine works and does a lot more good than one might expected against COVID-19.

A colleague of mine from Michigan State, Robert Root Bernstein, analyzed the effectiveness of several vaccines in the fight against COVID-19 by comparing the impact of COVID-19 on two dozen countries as a function of all the major inoculations. He found a strong correlation only with pneumonia vaccine: “Nations such as Spain, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, Peru and Chile that have the highest COVID-19 rates per million have the poorest pneumococcal vaccination rates among both infants and adults. Nations with the lowest rates of COVID-19 – Japan, Korea, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand – have the highest rates of pneumococcal vaccination among both infants and adults.” Root-Bernstein also looked at the effectiveness of adult inoculation and child inoculation. Both were effective, at about the same rate. This suggests that the the plots below are not statistical flukes. Here is a link to the scientific article, and here is a link to the more popular version.

An analysis of countries in terms of COVID rates and deaths versus pneumonia vaccination rates in children and adults. The US has a high child vaccination rate, but a low adult vaccination rate. Japan, Korea, etc. are much better. Italy, Belgium, Spain, Brazil, and Peru are worse. Similar correlations were found with child and adult inoculation, suggesting that these correlations are not flukes of statistics.

I decided to check up on Root-Bernstein’s finding by checking the state-by state differences in pneumonia vaccination rates — information available here — and found that the two US states that were hardest hit by COVID, NY and NJ, have among the lowest rates of inoculation. Of course there are other reasons at play. These states are uncommonly densely populated, and the governments of both made the unfortunate choice of sending infected patients to live in old age homes. At least half of the deaths were in these homes.

Pneumonia vaccination may also explain why the virus barely affected those under 20. Pneumonia vaccines was available only in 2000 or so. Many states then began to vaccinate about then and required it to attend school. The time of immunization could explain why those younger than 20 in the US do so well compared to older individuals, and compared to some other countries where inoculation was later. I note that China has near universal inoculation for pneumonia, and was very mildly hit.

I also took the flu shot, and had taken the MMR (measles) vaccine last year. The side effects, though bad, are less bad than the benefits, I thought, but there was another reason, and that’s mimicry. It is not uncommon that exposure to one virus or vaccine will excite the immune system to similar viruses, so-called B cells and T-cell immunity. A recent study from the Mayo Clinic, read it here, shows that other inoculations help you fight COVID-19. By simple logic, I had expected that the flu vaccine would help me this way. The following study (from Root-Bernstein again) shows little COVID benefit from flu vaccine, but evidence that MMR helps (R-squared of 0.118). Let men suggest it’s worth a shot, as it were. Similar to this, I saw just today, published September 24, 2020 in the journal, Vaccines, that the disease most molecularly similar to SARS-CoV-2 is pneumonia. If so, mimicry provides yet another reason for pneumonia vaccination, and yet another explanation for the high correlations shown above.

As a final comparison, I note that Sweden has a very high pneumonia inoculation rate, but seems to have a low mask use rate. Despite this, Sweden has done somewhat better than the US against COVID-19. Chile has a low inoculation rates, and though they strongly enforced masks and social distance, it was harder hit than we were. The correlation isn’t 100%, and masks clearly do some good, but it seems inoculation may be more effective than masks.

Robert Buxbaum, November 7, 2020.

Great mistakes: Sultan Mohammed II steals from a Mongol

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There are small errors and great mistakes. I’d previously written about the mistakes that caused Britain to lose America — e.g. General Tarleton burning churches because he thought the sermons were anti monarchist. They were, but if he thought they were anti monarchist before burning the church, they were far more so after… He’d misjudged the American character, something that I think the Democrats are doing today with BLM. Another example was the British attack on Bunker Hill. They spent the lives of 600 soldiers, won a hill they didn’t need, and lost the colony. It’s a mistake we would make reputedly in Vietnam.

Another one of the larger of mistakes of history – and one that changed hsotry massively was made by Mohammad II, ruler of Persia and eastern Islam, from Turkey to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan. He had an army of 100,000 and ruled from the walled city of Samarkand. Mohammed’s uncle, Inalchuq, served as a governor in Kazakhstan. With an army of 40-50,000, he ruled from the walled city of Otrar. A Mongol leader named Temujin contacted them asking to trade. Mohammed II ignored the request, but his uncle accepted it. Temujin ruled a poor, distant community of perhaps 100,000, and boasted a motley horse army of perhaps 10,000. But, what Mohammad II didn’t appreciate, was that these Mongol horsemen were uncommonly warlike, and that Temujin, also known as Genghis Kahn, was an uncommonly talented leader.

Gate of the mighty, walled city of Otrar. It’s now a ghost town.

Temujin was not someone to insult. He had laid waste to northern China, and defeated an army of over 1 million, because of an insult. The Chinese emperor had demanded Temujin come to Peking with a grift, then bow low and pledge allegiance. That is he wanted Temujin ,to Kowtow, a request that emperors had made to every tribal leader for centuries, but Temujin took it as an insult. He defeated the Chinese army and killed a good fraction of China’s population. Using methods that are discussed in Mongol literature, but are almost unknown in the west, or highly perverted, as in Mulan. I’ve written in speculation of one aspect of Mongol success here. Another aspect was psychological: Genghis Kahn was able to co-opt the Chinese army, and get them to fight for him. It’s a useful skill.

Now Temujin, Genghis Kahn, was writing to the leaders of eastern Islam asking to trade along the silk road. Inalchuq offered safe passage, and in 1218, the first trade caravan arrived with 100 laden camels and 450 men including an ambassador. Inalchuq did what sultans before him had done: He executed most of the men, sold the rest as slaves, and took the goods, selling them in markets of Bukhara. Mohammed II and his uncle were sure that Temujin would do nothing, he was 2000 miles away, but Temujin sent another peace delegation. This time 3 men direct to Mohmmed II asking for his goods back and for the punishment of those responsible. Mohammad II killed the lead ambassador, blinded one of the others, and had the face of the third disfigured. A year later, 1219, Genghis Kahn showed up in Otrar with siege engines.

Otrar held out for 5 months, falling when a traitor opened the gates and defected with part of the army. The Mongols took the city and let most people live, though he killed Inalchq and his army, as well as the defectors.. Genghis Kahn figured he could not trust a soldier who defects this way. Inalchq was killed by having molten silver poured into his eyes and ears.

Death of Sultan Mohammed II, Picture from the History of Rashad Al-Din.

Genghis then went after Mohammed II, but first defeated the Assassin sect. Mohammed had the sense to run. It didn’t save him, but it did buy him some years of life. When caught, Genghis locked him in a prison fed him gold coins. He is supposed to have explained that, had Mohammad II not hoarded gold, but shared it with his soldiers, they would have fought for him as Genghis’s soldiers had. It’s not a message we like to hear today because it’s practical, but not very charitable. Then again, Genghis Kahn was nothing if not practical.

The Mongols brought many innovations: paper, stirrups, the blast furnace, the number zero, “islamic numerals” (they’re really Mongol /Tibetan numerals), the compass, the printing press, the triangular plow, gun powder, and a new way in war (The Germans called it ‘Blitz Kreig’). I find that schools don’t teach much about Genghis Kahn or our debt to the Mongols, nor do they properly contextualize these innovations as means for a small nation to dominate many larger ones. Perhaps that’s because we find the whole idea of management disturbing, or it’s embarrassing. Western scholars used to write like we invented these things. There are several histories of the Mongols, one was written by Rashid Al-Din (Aladin), vizier over all Persia, the person responsible for renaming it Iran. He wrote an illustrated history of the world, particularly of the Mongols, called Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh (“Compendium of Chronicles”). I suspect it would be worthwhile reading but like much of Mongol literature, it is not available in any local library, nor is it referred to by most histories. Another Mongol history, also not available in libraries, is called the Secret History of the Mongols. This was likely written for and by Genghis’s third son, Ogedei, to describe for his children and grandchildren the true story of the early years, the conquests, his father’s and his management methods (some fairly brutal) and as a review of what Ogedei thought worked and what did not. It sounds like an honest book, worthwhile book — the sort modern readers would rather forget exists.

Rashid Al-Din (Aladin), Vizier of Persia. He renamed Persia Iran, and wrote a history of the world from the Mongol perspective. Known as a fictional character, or not at all today.

In general, I find our scholars would like to ignore the more unpleasant lessons of history, including that family matters, and that people like honor over kowtowing, and that they get surly if they’re not rewarded,. Much of our society is built by warriors for the purpose of destruction, as in this engineering joke. We are now in the process of destroying statues of warriors because we find they were often non-nice people who often did not-nice things, or held not-nice views. That’s the way it is with warriors, especially the successful ones. While I’m not a fan of having statues to bums, I think that ignoring successful warriors is worse than honoring them. I discuss the dilemma of military statues here. Without statues to important wars and warriors, modern leaders might repeat the mistake of Mohammed II, or Bunker hill , or of Mohammed IV, or of the Chinese emperor.

Robert Buxbaum, September 20, 2020. I’ve come to wonder if Mohammed II would have fared better if he didn’t steal from the Mongols. He would likely have put off the attack as he learned more about them, and they learned more about him. When the war came, as likely it would, he might have had gun powder, paper, the compass, and the stirrup. Then again, war might have come immediately. The proud Polish officers who collaborated/ surrendered to the Soviet Russians, were quickly murdered in the Katyn forest.