Dance Like It's 1518!

Five hundred year anniversary of a very strange event:

It started with just a few people dancing outdoors in the summer heat. Arms flailing, bodies swaying and clothes soaked with sweat, they danced through the night and into the next day. Seldom stopping to eat or drink, and seemingly oblivious to mounting fatigue and the pain of bruised feet, they were still going days later. By the time the authorities intervened, hundreds more were dancing in the same frenetic fashion.

... And it happened 500 years ago this summer in the French city of Strasbourg. It was there, over the course of three roasting-hot months in 1518, that several hundred people developed a compulsion to dance. The dancing went on and on until – to the horror of the crowds who gathered to watch – some of them collapsed and perished on the spot. Just what was happening?

...The rich burghers who ran the city were not amused. One of them, writer Sebastian Brant, had devoted a chapter of his moralising bestseller, Ship of Fools, to the folly of dance. Mystified by the chaos in the streets, he and his fellow city councillors consulted local doctors who, in keeping with standard medical wisdom, declared the dancing to be the result of “overheated blood” on the brain.

Work On The House - Eaves

Lots of rapid progress

Tuesday Progress

Thursday Progress

Open Office Layouts

Open office layouts, like open classrooms, just don't work very well. Creativity depends on being able to choose when to be sociable, not having sociability thrust upon you:

Why do companies deploy open office layouts? A major justification is the idea that removing spatial boundaries between colleagues will generate increased collaboration and smarter collective intelligence.

As I learned in a fascinating new study, published earlier this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, there was good reason to believe that this might be true. As the study’s authors, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, note:

“[T]he notion that propinquity, or proximity, predicts social interaction — driving the formation of social ties and therefore information exchange and collaboration — is one of the most robust findings in sociology.”

But when researchers turned their attention to the specific impact of open offices on interaction, the results were mixed. Perhaps troubled by this inconsistency, Bernstein and Turban decided to get to the bottom of this issue.

Prior studies of open offices had relied on imprecise measures such as self-reported activity logs to quantify interactions before and after a shift to an open office plan. Bernstein and Turban tried something more accurate: they had subjects wear devices around their neck that directly measured every face-to-face encounter. They also used email and IM server logs to determine exactly how much the volume of electronic interactions changed.

Ricky Romero, Back in the Day

Mike London's Sunday televised wrestling was an Albuquerque treat when I was young. This is 1975, though. A bit late. Ricky's a bit long in the tooth here.

Rushing Water Hits The Dry Santa Fe Riverbed

It's summer in New Mexico!

The Hurricane Gaze Shifts West

There are two tropical storms east of the United States right now - Tropical Storms Beryl and Chris - but indications are both will stay well offshore.

The big action right now is the western Pacific. Super Typhoon Maria is likely to plow directly into China this week, with new typhoons waiting to generate in its wake.

Roses Are Red; Tacos Are Enjoyable

Thief in the Night

Sitting in the kitchen around midnight, I heard a soft surreptitious sound. My suspicions were aroused. It must be my old nemesis, that thief in the night, a raccoon on the roof! They can be so destructive. So I ran outside to confront the beast.

Instead, I noticed that a man was removing the window screen on the apartment next door. “I know how this must look, but I assure you, I’m not a thief,” he said. Deeply embarrassed, he hastened to explain that he was supposed to take care of the dog in the apartment, but the dog’s master failed to leave a key, leaving him no choice but to break in.

My first reaction was confusion, since this man looked nothing like a raccoon. But as unlikely as his story sounded, I knew he was being truthful, because he knew the dog’s name.

Microburst in Phoenix

Manipulation

Wandering through symbolic thickets here....

In "Breaking Bad" or "Better Call Saul," Monkeys, Chimpanzees, or Gorillas represent heavy-handed manipulation. Whenever you see a primate, someone is getting played.

Color may also play a role. When Jesse shows Jane his drawings from childhood, in the background a song is quietly playing: ‘Zungguzungguguzungguzeng,’ by Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall artist Yellowman ("Breaking Bad," Season 2, episode 10, 'Over').

Yellowman endured the stigma of being albino. He eventually embraced his uniqueness by calling himself Yellowman. Albinism is (or at least, used to be) a tough condition to carry in Jamaican society:

"Albinos in Jamaica were seen as not being "real" Jamaicans because blackness is seen as divine or godlike in the Rastafarian religion. And in fact, the darker you were, the more holy and worthy of heaven you were. So by default, and by Rastafarian teachings, albinos are seen as less of a human being and are accused of trying to be or looking like the white men of the west who colonized them."

As far as I know, this is the first time where the concept of a color alternative meaning white – yellow – is introduced in “Breaking Bad.” In some cases and circumstances (still not well-defined), yellow may also signal manipulation. Examples include:

• Jane sucks on a yellow popsicle while denying that she and Jesse have a relationship ("Breaking Bad," Season 2, episode 10, 'Over');
• Walt leaves Hank’s garage and immediately tries to contact Skyler while the neighbor kid is playing with a yellow R/C car (“Breaking Bad,” season 5b, episode 1, ‘Blood Money’; episode 2, ‘Buried’);
• The license plate number of the van Walter White uses to transport his money out to the desert "D4DD31" is HTML code for a shade of yellow (“Breaking Bad,” season 5b, episode 2, ‘Buried’);
• Both Hank and Walt wield bright-yellow containers of honey in their Awkward Guacamole lunch (“Breaking Bad,” Season 5b, episode 11, ‘Confessions’).

Another case where a yellow man, The Man with the Yellow Hat, represents white – a white European - is in the tales of Curious George.

Curious George is a particularly-intriguing chimpanzee. The relationship between Curious George and the Man with the Yellow Hat mirrors the relationship between Walt and Jesse in “Breaking Bad.”

The tales of Curious George, written from a European perspective, always have an undercurrent of white dominance. An undercurrent of – White – dominance….

Mockery

The Russians mock the Republicans who came groveling at their feet on July 4th. No one likes traitors:

Russian broadcasters mocked the Republican lawmakers who visited Moscow over the Fourth of July holiday and gloated about the Kremlin’s role in electing President Donald Trump.

Seven U.S. senators and one congresswoman — Sens. Steve Daines (R-MT), John Hoeven (R-ND), Ron Johnson (R-WI), John Kennedy (R-LA), Jerry Moran (R-KS), Richard Shelby (R-AL), John Thune (R-SD) and Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX) — traveled to Russia for closed-door meetings with high-ranking Kremlin officials.

Blame Fabio

Why was Sacramento suddenly cloudy this morning? Blame Fabio, weather experts say:

While temperatures around Los Angeles and across the globe are hitting record highs, the Sacramento area is getting a one-day reprieve from its normal hot and dry weather due to the remnants of a dissipating tropical storm system off the coast of Southern California, according to the National Weather Service.

Hurricane Fabio was active off the coast just west of Baja from Monday to Wednesday, said Bill Rasch, a NWS meteorologist. While it was considered a weak storm system, Rasch said leftover clouds from Fabio have traveled north, keeping temperatures cooler in the Sacramento area and increasing humidity levels by 10 to 15 percent.

...Rasch did note that the lower temperatures and higher humidity can also be helpful for fighting fires.

California is smack in the middle of fire season, and recent weather conditions have fueled blazes across the northern part of the state.

As of Friday morning, the County Fire burning in Yolo and Napa counties has ravaged more than 88,000 acres, while the Klamathon Fire in Siskiyou County has burned 8,000 and caused one fatality.

The tropical weather push we are seeing in the area has helped the County Fire by bringing up field moisture, said Cal Fire spokeswoman Heather Williams. But she said that can change in a few hours.

Ballooning Spiders use the Earth's Electric Field

Wow!:

Spiders have no wings, but they can take to the air nonetheless. They’ll climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away. This behavior is called ballooning. It might carry spiders away from predators and competitors, or toward new lands with abundant resources. But whatever the reason for it, it’s clearly an effective means of travel. Spiders have been found two-and-a-half miles up in the air, and 1,000 miles out to sea.

It is commonly believed that ballooning works because the silk catches on the wind, dragging the spider with it. But that doesn’t entirely make sense, especially since spiders only balloon during light winds. Spiders don’t shoot silk from their abdomens, and it seems unlikely that such gentle breezes could be strong enough to yank the threads out—let alone to carry the largest species aloft, or to generate the high accelerations of arachnid takeoff. Darwin himself found the rapidity of the spiders’ flight to be “quite unaccountable” and its cause to be “inexplicable.”

But Erica Morley and Daniel Robert have an explanation. The duo, who work at the University of Bristol, has shown that spiders can sense the Earth’s electric field, and use it to launch themselves into the air.

Annual Fourth of July Cotton Candy Adventure

We return to Davis’ Community Park every year for Fourth of July, like salmon. Davis Musical Theatre Company sold cotton candy, popcorn, water and sodas. Last year, it was nuts here, like cotton candy was caviar, or something. It’s breezy (maybe too breezy given the County Fire), but temperatures were as pleasant as they have ever been.

There was just one disturbing element in yesterday's cotton candy adventure at Davis' Community Park: a wisp of a girl, age about eight, who approached and explained that she had no money, and her parents had no money, and could I just give her some cotton candy? We said no, but told her maybe come back later. I saved waste pieces of cotton candy for her, but she never returned. I just hope she's OK.

Afterwards, I was covered in cotton candy. Sticky and gooey!

I Want My Models Back

A couple of months ago, I dawdled on a news story featuring Victoria's Secret advertising, and accidentally clicked on the ad. The algorithms caught wind of my apparent interest in negligees, so for weeks afterwards, whatever web page I went to, there were beautiful models everywhere. Several days ago, I went shopping for security lights, which alerted the algorithms once again, so now all my web pages are a utilitarian gallery of lighting technology, often featuring just the same, single light. I want my models back.

The County Fire Volcano

Driving across the Yolo Causeway, looking west through the forest fire smoke at what looks like an immense volcano in the hills (at Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area).

Interpreting Metal

The County Fire - A Very Uncomfortable Fact of Life These Days Near Sacramento

Fire tracker.

Words Matter

I like this term, schizo-fascism, to describe the challenge of our times:

In a recent talk in Washington, the historian Timothy Snyder observed that Russia’s annual budget for cyberwarfare is less than the price of a single American F-35 jet. Snyder challenged his audience to consider: Which weapon has done more to shape world events?

Snyder is an unusual historian-activist, both a great scholar of the terrible cost of 20th-century totalitarianism and also a passionate champion of endangered democracy in Ukraine and Eastern Europe—and now, the United States. Increasingly, he sees his concerns fusing into one great narrative, as methods of manipulation and deception pioneered inside Russia are deployed against Russia’s chosen targets.

Wes Craven's "The Hills Have Eyes"

After my friends and I got ill watching Wes Craven's first film "Last House on the Left" at the drive-in theater in 1972, and stormed out - it was the chisel on the front teeth scene - I pledged never to watch another Wes Craven film. And I've kept that pledge. Nevertheless, I decided to watch Wes Craven's 1977 film "The Hills Have Eyes," because it's apparently part of the oral background of "Breaking Bad." The inspiration for the battle between the biker-gang family and the White nuclear family may have come from “The Hills Have Eyes,” which features a pitched battle between the white-bread family from Ohio and the feral family in the desert. Jimmy McGill even mentions “The Hills Have Eyes” in his Bingo rant (“Better Call Saul,” Season 1, episode 10, ‘Marco’).

The film is pretty good - better than expected for what I thought might be just a low-cost Seventies slasher flick.




The making of the film is good too. Ideas for the film came from classical mythology. Better than expected for what I thought might be just a low-cost Seventies slasher flick.