Smoke, Mirrors, Ineptitude, Misdirection, Disinformation, and General Foolishness

Keep calm, and—this is not something I would say every day—ignore the news for the next week.

Intentionally to confuse people, or unintentionally because they're getting excited, various people are shooting news stories from the hip.  The most recent one is that a congressman, Anthony Wiener Weiner, who was disgraced a couple of years ago, has happened to mention Hillary Clinton in some of his emails.  The FBI had gotten permission to impound his personal computer, on which there were records of inappropriate sexual communication with underage kids at the time he was under investigation.  And now some of the hyperactive zombies in the Justice Department want to look through these e-mails to see whether there has been more wrong doing.

So a Federal Judge must now decide whether to allow the FBI to go prospecting in this dubious source of information, to see whether there might be some little juicy morsel that might discredit Hillary Clinton.  Oo, might she have been a party to Anthony Wiener Weiner's sexual escapades?  Remember how the media wallowed in the Monica Lewinsky scandal?  It appears that some people—not friends of Hillary Clinton, for certain—want to make sure that they can dig up some dirt on the Democratic Presidential nominee, so that she can compete with Donald Trump at the same level.  Leveling the playing field, as it were.

Now, this is unfair, but I can't really see anything popping up that could change my mind about which candidate to vote for; I could say the same for most of my liberal friends, and most Democrats: not only is Hillary a more moderate, and a more dependable candidate for President than we have fielded for many years—and we have fielded some amazing people—but Trump is somebody that even the GOP does not want.  But a few conservatives are out of the loop, and they are in a panic about what four more years of Democrats in the White House would do for the Conservative Cause.  They think the Democrats would plant some rabid liberal on the Supreme Court who would destroy the country.  The only liberals on the Supreme Court who were that determined to make changes succeeded in desegregating the schools, and making the social reforms of the Sixties, which gave all minorities the same rights as Whites.  Reading between the lines of the Trump campaign, these reforms are perceived to be the roots of everything that conservative, racist white males in the Trump camp do not like about America today.  These reforms give teeth to the human rights campaigns that America nags other nations with, or has, in the last several decades.  If they were reversed, racists and sexists throughout the World and at home could rest easy, and male bullies everywhere could get back their own, and we would not have to fight any wars to liberate the oppressed.  We would be back to the 19th century, when things were a lot better, according to the Neanderthals in the Trump Camp, and secretly the slimy underbelly of the GOP.  Progress never sat easy with people of low intelligence.

Some kooks, of course, are upset with marriage equality, transgender rights, etc.  More people are anxious about the prospect of higher taxes for Businesses.  And still others are in a tizzy about the various oil pipelines whose construction are being fought.  Shell wants to dig under the Ohio River.  So, like never before, desperate conservatives and big businesses are probably leaning on their moles in the FBI to hurry up and do something.

I really don't care at this point.  My sanity is worth more than any heroic efforts to get to the bottom of this sort of rumor mongering.  I for one am ignoring all this nonsense, though other liberals out there are hyperventilating!  My advice to my readers is: chill out.  It's going to be a crazy seven days, but we hope that the canvassing has proceeded as planned.  It is possible that the people who would normally have gone door-to-door were the Bernie supporters, and so the get out the vote effort is going to be a little feeble.  So, whatever you do in the direction of keeping calm is good, provided it doesn't keep you from mobilizing your friends to go out and vote on election day.  If everyone votes, Hillary will defeat Trump.  If the democrats stay home, anything can happen.

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A detailed opinion and lots of information about the Clinton Emails

This post by Ken Crossland goes through a lot of detailed thinking about Hillary Clinton's e-mail controversy.  The information is from the FBI, but his analysis is sympathetic to Hillary Clinton.

If you hate Clinton quite apart from the e-mail problems, this information is hardly likely to make you change your mind.  On the other hand, if the e-mail scandal is the only reason you're suspicious of her, this might alleviate your annoyance.

There is some information about her speeches at Lehman Brothers.  At a quick look, it seems as though she said that with the changing times, new legislation is needed to address new problems and potential abuses on Wall Street, and knowledgeable people from Lehman Brothers should be involved in creating it.  Whether she invited them to write this legislation is still not clear; that would be exactly what we deplore: lobbyists writing legislation for lazy lawmakers.

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More about keeping healthy

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I'm a member of Consumer Reports, so they occasionally put clickbait on my Facebook page; but as you can imagine, Consumer Reports clickbait is more like Kale than Dessert.

This particular post was about how to keep healthy as you grow older.  But, reading through, many of the pointers they give make sense for everybody.  I want to draw your attention to some of these that are particularly important, or particularly easy to do.

Vitamins.  These substances help with a lot of body tasks, and among them fighting infections, and bouncing back from being sick.  However: do not take mega-doses of vitamin supplements.  Some of these vitamins only work in tiny quantities.  Having said that, if you have terrible eating habits, by all means take a vitamin supplement.  But select one that gives you the Recommended Daily Allowance, or less.  If they say: "200% of the US RDA!!!" run away!

The better thing to do is to eat a variety of vegetables and fruits.  In these days, experts are recommending that you eat foods with a variety of different colors!  It so happens that this plan gets you a good variety of vitamins and minerals.  (If you can afford it, choose organic veggies, but not all of us can.)

Alcohol.  A drink a day is all that is recommended; and don't start drinking just because it is supposed to be healthy.  A drink a day is probably too many for smaller-built people.  You can easily check out why too much alcohol is bad for your health.

Smoking.  There are two reasons for quitting: saving your lungs, and lowering your nicotine intake.  Smoking in your youth makes your older years a torture.

Sleep.  I should have mentioned this earlier.  Getting at least 6 hours of sleep a day is said to vastly increase the body's ability to heal and bounce back.

Friendships.  As you grow older, your friends move away, some of them to the great Ranch In The Sky, and it is important to make new friends, and keep up with them!  (That's one advantage of Facebook, but unfortunately Facebook is more interested in things that aren't so useful to us...)  The article also talks about hugs.  I totally believe in hugs, but it is kinda difficult to talk about hugs with people you don't really know; like you can't walk up to, say, Joe Biden, and ask for a hug.  Or you can, but ... I am not suggesting that you go overboard, and try to make friends 24/7.  The art of friendship cannot be learned from a single blog-post.  Cultivate the art of being interested in subjects that might interest your future friends and acquaintances, but be honest about topics that leave you completely cold.

For my older readers: keep engaged with the world around you, and avoid getting too upset at every little social change.  The less engaged you are, the more upset you're going to get when you do learn something unpleasant about what's going on in the world.  Television, of course, is not the best way to keep engaged at all, unless you're very selective.  After having had no television for close to 15 years, we decided to get Cable, just to watch the Olympics.  And now we still have Cable, but we find ourselves watching very little TV; less than 3 hours a week.

[Added later:
These pieces of advice may seem as though we--our family--are sort of model citizens.  Actually we're pretty average; it's just that I blog about everything.  I strongly advocate blogging as a means of staying on the straight and narrow, especially if you're a teacher.  Writing about things go a long way towards clarifying ideas for the writer, regardless of whether the writing is being read by anyone.]

Arch, in a good mood this morning.

Your guide to getting sick

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Now, bear in mind that I'm not a medical professional.  But in these days of information overload, people get intimidated into outsourcing all their health decisions to experts.  If only you knew just a little about how these things work, you could head off a lot of simple health problems before they get serious.

Bacteria.  These guys have been around a lot longer than we have; millions of years.  They're one-cell creatures, and they increase by dividing in half, and growing.  Bear in mind that they are already in your body, and on your body: your face, your hands, etc, and do not cause a problem under ordinary conditions.

Luckily for us, they tend to multiply fast only when conditions are right.  On your face, for instance, they're not multiplying; for various reasons they're growing too slowly to bother you.  They usually multiply like crazy when we have been weakened by something: e.g. the body is concerned with an injury, or we've been weakened by another infection, or you're allergic to something, which triggers off a behavior that makes it appear as if your body is sick.

The times when we have to worry about bacteria is when they begin to grow very fast.  This happens usually in the mucous membrane: inside your throat, your alimentary canal, your eyes, your nasal passage, and other places where your skin is like the inside of your cheek: smooth and moist.  Oh, and don't forget your sinuses. These are just holes in your skull, lined with mucus, and connected with your nose, and if they get stuffed up, they become a sort of Woodstock festival for bacteria.

Mucous membrane.  All our orifices are lined with this stuff, which continually sheets outward, carrying bacteria and dust and other particles out of the body.  When it is healthy, the slimy layer is thin and wet.  In contrast, when we've got a cold, sometimes the slimy layer gets thick and sluggish, and that's not good.  Bacteria can get comfortable in thick, sludgy mucous membrane, and multiply like crazy.

Viruses.  These are things very much smaller than bacteria, and they don't even have cells, and they don't have proper DNA.  They're short-lived.  And they multiply by forcing our own cells to make copies of them, because they don't have cells.  Viruses do not live on our bodies normally (as far as I know); they waft in on some evil breeze, or we pick them up on some store counter or bathroom faucet, and without thinking, carry them to our eyes or mouth or nose, and they start to work bullying our cells into making copies of them.  Usually, this makes the victim start sneezing and coughing, because viruses have taken over the mucous membrane, and initially the body tries to shake them off by increasing the flow, which is great, as long as you get rid of the virus-laden mucus safely.  Incidentally, if it gets down into your stomach, that's usually fine.  The stomach has a lot of acid, which is pretty good at frying the viruses and bacteria.  (Some unfortunate people have very sensitive stomachs, and too much mucus gives them indigestion, so look out for that.)

The important thing is to keep getting rid of the mucus.  But all that moisture is leaving the body, and you're getting dried out.  If you don't drink a lot of water at this stage, your mucous membrane is going to get: what?  Thick and sludgy.  Now this thick, clotted mucous membrane is a great place for bacteria to move into.  They've been watching the progress of the virus with great interest, and like carpetbaggers, they come in and start multiplying in the slow-moving mucous membrane.

Another phenomenon that takes place after viruses and bacteria, or an allergy, has been going on for some time is that you get a cough.  Sometimes coughing is caused by the body trying to get rid of mucus in your bronchial tubes (the tubes leading from the nose to the lungs).  Other times, it is caused by mucus dripping on a sensitive spot in the back of your throat, called post-nasal drip.  (In all cases, a cough syrup that (a) thins the mucus, to make it easier to cough, and (b) raises the trigger level that makes you cough, is a good thing.)

So, the take-away is: drinking sufficient water keeps your mucus layer thin and flowing, which is good.  If your mucus starts getting thick and clotted, drink water to help thin it down.  If you have a very aggressive heating system, such as with a forced-air central heater, drink water to offset the drying-out of your nasal passages, or the bacteria already there will start to multiply.  If you have a cough, by all means take a cough mixture, and back it up with a steady flow of water, to help the cough syrup thin your mucus.

A long hot shower helps most people to thin the mucous membrane.  During a cold is a time when you're least interested in a shower, but take one anyway; most people feel better after one.  Brushing your teeth also helps thin your mucous, I don't know why.  A visit to the seashore, or to the foot of a waterfall, helps make your mucus flow.  Be considerate, and blow your nose, and get rid of your phlegm somewhere it will not bother other people!

If you have a cough, drink a lot of water (within reason, of course; drinking gallons can make you throw up).  Keep water by your bedside, and sip it all night long, and a little hard candy might help.

In case you get the impression that I'm pushing water in all circumstances, well, you would be right.  As I said, gallons and gallons of water is not needed.  But a little more water than you would normally drink is good.  And a lot more water is better!

If you have medical conditions that need keeping an eye on, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, and even a heart condition, these all affect what things make sense to do and what things don't.  For instance, certain cough syrups should not be taken by those with any of those three conditions.  Anything with too much salt is contraindicated if you have high blood pressure, which is a pity, because salt makes bacteria unhappy, and unable to multiply rapidly.  So if you have some medical condition, check with your doctor, and remember how he or she responded, and much the same advice you were given this time should work in the future.

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The communication gap is revealing itself

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For close on half a century, the phenomenon of men bullying women, starting from the egregious physical abuse some men inflicted on their women: wives, daughters, and sometimes mothers, and occasionally, quite unrelated women, to the sneaky innuendos thrown back and forth when men talk about women behind their backs, sexual abuse has gradually come to the forefront of public discussion, thanks to the casually effective methods of Donald Trump.

It's unfortunate that all these actions and activities are classified under the same heading.  To many women, all this is objectionable, and should carry the death penalty if convicted.  I personally believe that some of these behaviors are deplorable, but it would get a lot more deplorable if it is raised to the stature of a felony.  Without embarking on a war-of-the-sexes style diatribe, I suspect that women make fun of men behind their backs, and though this is deplorable, we have to face the fact that some girls will be girls, just as some boys will be boys.  The refusal to bring the level of abuse into the discussion, and the insistence on taking every perceived instance of abuse into equal consideration is threatening the whole concept of abuse.

Many of the antics that have emerged as escapades that Donald Trump reports, (some of which are probably wishful thinking, simply the sort of imaginative bragging that sixth graders indulge in while watching some of their buddies smoking behind the garden shed) can be dismissed as simply fantasies. At one time, he was rich enough for people to believe that perhaps he was able to grope women the way lots of guys imagine themselves groping famous actresses or models.  But now, having listened to Trump describe his fantasies, it becomes increasingly clear that the number of ladies that fell under his spell were fewer than a couple of dozen.  Some of the escapades involving unwilling women, if true, should make anyone think twice of considering Trump's candidacy seriously.  Either way, the machine of the GOP nominating process is clearly and utterly broken.  After several months of the core members of the Republican Party choking on their endorsements of Mr. Trump, the worms have turned, and they seem to think that the Party has suffered enough humiliation.  The candidacy is now supported exclusively by Trump's own campaign machine, and the GOP appears no longer to participate in trying to enable their Presidential candidate to move forward to Election Day.  Being a party which places a premium of matters of "honor", they undoubtedly feel this embarrassment keenly.

In a recent interview with Democracy Now, Noam Chomsky, the legendary linguist and political commentator, explained what has happened to the GOP.  Over the decades since the Sixties, the GOP has gained the support of sufficiently many blue-collar workers to win elections once in a while.  But now they have been unable to get enough support for the main political interests, and so they have gone with a candidate who focuses on peripheral issues of racism and sexism, and white identity politics.  The ideologically fragmented leaders of the GOP have been mixed about their core values; racism, sexism, white identity politics, xenophobia have never been core values of the party leadership, even if they were occasionally taken out for an airing when expedient.

I was surprised to see Donald Trump's apparent softening stance on certain divisive issues, and even more surprised to hear how one of his spin doctors explained it.  He hasn't changed his position, I think she was reported as saying, but rather that he only changed the language he was using.  That was too funny; Trump's somewhat uncritical fans would probably find that amusing!  Trump is learning to use euphemisms.

Asking Trump whether he had abused women is probably not appropriate.  I understand that Anderson Cooper was probably frustrated by Trump's refusal to answer the questions, and his casually insolent attitude on the debate floor, but if we continually put Trump on the spot about things that have little to do with taking on the Presidency (but admittedly, a lot to do with impeachment opportunities in a later year), Trump is going to keep making the debates sound sillier and sillier.  Trump does not want debates; he's terrible at them, and he knows it.

All parties seem to be bent on escalating the circus factor in this election, which unfortunately plays into the hand of the political outsiders, namely Trump and his followers, who view the prospect of destroying Washington with gleeful anticipation.  But it looks very much as if they will not get the opportunity, provided people actually vote against him.  (That is sort of a tautology, but the enormous number of people who do not want Trump in the Presidency is one number, but the number of people who will vote for Hillary Clinton is another number entirely.  A smaller number, unfortunately.)

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Where have they gone? Calculators

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Modern 4-function calculator

Back in the good old forties and fifties (and no, I wasn't around, he asserted defensively), people could do mathematics in their heads.  My grandmother, for instance, knew her multiplication tables up to 16× for example 16×12 = 192, and so on.  In school, my generation learned up to the 12× tables, but now I believe the standard is to teach up to 10× in around Grade 3, and stop.  Multiplication is viewed by a large proportion of people as the worst thing in mathematics, and among some American citizens, "I can't do math!" actually means "I have trouble multiplying."  (They will deny this, but that is true.)  Some elementary school teachers, however, still teach multiplication tables beyond multiplying by 10, under the mistaken belief that they're teaching higher math.  It's certainly better than just teaching up to only the 10-times table, and getting kids onto calculators right away.  But it certainly isn't higher mathematics.

Scientific Calculator of 1980s vintage

Then, in the eighties, inexpensive hand calculators began to find their way into the classroom.  There was some resistance, because calculator use was considered to get in the way of learning multiplication.  In about half the cases, students who used calculators exclusively for multiplying didn't suffer much conceptual shortfalls.  To explain: in math, some ideas don't really get through into your brain (your cognitive structures, as we say) unless you have some special mathematical experiences.  It was long thought that having a lot of multiplication facts to draw on was important.  But some kids sailed through not having these.  (They still don't know what 9×7 is, but that doesn't get in their way.)  But other kids do seem to keep stumbling around forever, never being able to really connect with the math they're being taught, or until they practice doing mental math.  So we don't know whether it is a matter of confidence, or some cognitive principle.  (I am not an expert.)

Graphing Calculator

By the time the nineties arrived, there were not only those little arithmetical four-function calculators that you could get for free, but there were graphing calculators, that could get you quick approximate calculus results.  They could find the area under a parabola, etc.  They could actually sketch a parabola, or a sine curve.  Just at about this time, smart cell phones were becoming affordable to everyone, and, to add insult to injury, some of the better ones actually had built-in basic calculators!

From the point of view of math teachers, these sophisticated calculators were a hindrance to testing.  If you're trying to find out whether your students could use some basic, important methods to sketch a certain type of graph, letting them use a clever calculator to sketch the graph defeats the purpose.  At this point it is as well to dispel some confusions about this whole thing.  Some parents (and some silly teachers) ask the question: when will students need to sketch so many damn graphs?  The answer is: the curve-sketching we test them with tells us whether they have understood the connection between certain calculations they do, and their geometrical implications.  It is a low-level skill that paves the way for fluent use of calculus and algebra.  A truck driver need not know how to replace a brake pad.  But there are certain benefits to knowing those things.  A common Texas Instruments calculator that had some of these capabilities cost merely around $90 at about this time.

My own solution to this problem was to split the test into two parts, and have one part completely without any sort of electronic aids, and the other part with free use of basic calculators.  Other teachers have gone a different route: they allow calculators on every test, but make the tests computationally challenging.  Yet other teachers use other approaches; they all have their advantages and their disadvantages.

A few years later, calculators were invented that could actually do symbolic mathematics.  Symbolic mathematics is what you do when you're factoring a polynomial, or solving an equation exactly; for instance finding x if you're given that x³ + 35x = 12x².  (The answer is that x could be 5, 7, or 0.)  The techniques for programming calculators to solve problems like this, and far more sophisticated problems, was developed in the eighties and nineties first for large computers, and then for even sophisticated handheld calculators.  Some of these calculators (that cost around $200) are amazing, but few students know how to use them, and I had quite a difficult time trying to figure out how to test students in upper-level courses, when they insisted that they needed to use their nuclear-powered calculators on their tests.

Then, of course, the Iphone and Android phones made an appearance, and Google (who are the driving force behind the Android system) opened up their system to anyone who wished to create application programs to install on the phones.  People stopped calling them application programs, and called them Apps, and anyone with a phone could actually create them.  Many of them are free, but of course they (the apps) try to sell you all sorts of merchandise, which you could easily buy by accident, if you're not careful.  So now, phones were becoming able to perform the sorts of graphing calculations that expensive calculators could do in the nineties.  Furthermore, Casio began to release a truly inexpensive Scientific Calculator that could do most sorts of calculations, including trigonometric and logarithmic calculations, for just about $12.  The expensive Texas Instruments, and Casio programmable calculators could still do some calculations that involved matrix algebra and other fancy math that the inexpensive Casio could not quite handle, but the fact that most of what a Casio Scientific could do, a phone could also do, brings us to the next giant leap.

Several Internet sites, notably Google and Wolfram Mathematica, offered the service of doing any calculation on demand.  You could just go on the site and ask: Solve x^3 + 35x = 12x^2, and it would actually give you the answer!  Let's try this now:

On Google, too, the query Solve x^3 + 35x = 12x^2 takes you to a website or two where the problem is solved in great detail, which is certainly impressive.  (Other suggested websites are places where x^3, and 35x, and so on are present in various paragraphs, which is obviously useless.

In other words, if you have Internet access, it appears that you don't need to have a scientific calculator, most of the time.  I'm not going to chase down some of the chains of implications that that observation could lead to.  But there certainly are some interesting observations we can make.

Doing mathematics is a skill.  People who are good at it have learned procedures, and seen examples where various problems have been solved, so they're able to solve a variety of new mathematical problems by joining the dots.  A calculator does the same thing, and in addition is able to remember various mathematical bits of data: for instance, how to find  sin(17π) exactly.  This is all programmed permanently into the electronic chip that is the heart of the calculator, and it will never forget it.  So this could come in handy for someone who happens to need that information.

But now, even if these capabilities are not programmed into smart phones, you can access the Internet through them, and get the information via a search engine, or a mathematical website.  Communication is taking over some of the tasks for which we used computational technology.  It is a distant cousin of "It isn't what you know, but who you know!"  To be absolutely precise: it doesn't matter if you don't know the information, provided you can find it on the Web.

As you will have noticed, the development of new, sophisticated calculators has ground to a halt.  New fancy phones, however, and being put on sale every five minutes.  Most people use the phones for entertainment (e.g. texting a friend while they're bored riding an elevator--and the boredom tolerance of young people is pretty low).

So, the most fancy calculators available today are not much more capable than calculators of 20 years ago.  (There might be a few, but something tells me that if they're not being aggressively marketed, they probably don't exist, or are out of the reach of typical citizens.)  On the other hand, if you have a conventional computer, e.g. a Windows 7 or more recent type, it is possible to get software such as Wolfram Mathematica, or Maple, for around $700, which is very, very powerful.  I mean that they can answer questions that most of us don't even know how to ask.  For instance, Wolfram Mathematica attempts to answer almost any question, e.g. what is the latitude of Tegucigalpa.

This is, in principle, a distant cousin of Distributed Computing, where a problem is solved by a system of several interlinked computers, each working on an aspect of a computation, and requesting intermediate results from whichever computer has obtained it already.  As long as there are locations on the Internet (the Internet is basically a network of computers; everything you get from it is sitting on some hard drive somewhere) that are willing to share their information, you could ask for it, instead of owning a little piece of hardware that will figure it out as needed.

For the specialist, however, dedicated mathematical tools are still useful.  But there's no real need, presently, for having mobile devices that can compute for you; most of the time, you can do the calculations at your desk.  Field engineers, I suppose, could use a combination of mobile browsers and conventional pocket calculators for their needs, so we can expect that pocket calculators will continue to not be developed very aggressively in the foreseeable future.

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