Clovis not the original, claim academics

In our on-going series, "Everything you they know is wrong," the notion that the Clovis people were the first humans in North America has been hit with a couple of separate blows, at least one of which is probably going to be fatal.

In this article, excepted from Nature, large-scale work with DNA shows that there were at least three separate migrations from Asia, not the one big one that Clovis-first postulates.

Much more to the point, though, is this piece, in which DNA again, this time from Paisley Caves in Oregon, appears to show that there was a pre-13,000 year old culture that is also pre-Clovis. The authors of a piece in Science are taking a somewhat cranky line about it all, since they apparently got beaten up severely by the Clovis cult types (read: people whose reputations and bodies of research have been based on the Clovis-first assumption.)

If you want the quick cocktail-party sound bite, you can just say, "Well, of course Paisley Caves stratigraphy demonstrates that the Western Stemmed tradition pre-dates Clovis ... oh, you hadn't heard? Really?"

Anyway, poke around in the articles if you care for this sort of thing, but I won't be offended if you don't. As always, I'm fascinated by the resistance to change exhibited by people who are supposed to be trained to read the data and react with what Gene Wilder's Dr. Frankenstein character called "quiet dignity and grace."

Old news but with an inevitable twist

So by now you've heard that the Higgs boson or something that looks like it to particle physicists has been seen, flying by the window at the LHC. I was so relieved, personally, since now we'll be able to ... um, something or other. The standard model of the universe doesn't need to be rewickered or the shingles on Einstein aren't curling or something like that. But let's be clear about all this: a speculative view of how things are and came to be, realized mostly in abstruse mathematics, has had one of its more wild-ass conjectures initially verified. Years of quibbling remain, metric tonnes of chalk dust (more likely, white board marker fall out, these days,) and oceans of misunderstood media hooey (such as calling the Higgs "the God particle," a term physicists almost universally hate) lie ahead of us before anything you or I can experience will result.

But wait! One group, outside the common run of quantum-maddened theorists, does feel passionately about all this. No, it's not the crew of idiots over here who thought starting up the Large Hadron Collider would create black holes and end the universe. It's not the GOP, since no one has so far managed to find a way to blame quantum mechanics on Obama. No, it's those fun-loving Islamists, who "scorn" the only Nobel laureate Pakistan has yet produced, because he's a ... Christian? No. An atheist? Sadly, no. It's because he was an unpopular kind of Muslim. Who cares that he actually predicted the existence of the Higgs? That he was honored by the thinking part of the world for his achievements? He's a stinkin' heretic (or was; he died some time back.) See, Pakistan is largely Sunni, it turns out, and our guy, Adbus Salam, wasn't even a Shia, he was an Ahmadi. And the government of Pakistan has been at some pains to erase this particular sect from the canon of folks who can even call themselves "Muslim."

Still, Pakistan remains an important US ally, and acts as a bulwark against ... what, again?

A simple question

It's 12:30 AM on a Saturday, and it is not the Fourth of July. Who decides to go outside and set off half a dozen or so large fire crackers? And why? Choose one or more of the following reasons:

• I am an inconsiderate prat.
  
• My neighbors are getting too much sleep. I'm doing them a favor, really.
  
• I'm trying to see how quickly the Ann Arbor Police can respond.
  
• I don't agree with Michigan's recently liberalized fireworks law, and consequently I want to influence voters to lobby for more restrictive ordinances.
  
• Those weren't firecrackers. I was shooting at kids to get them off my lawn.
  

Whichever of these reasons (except the last one; we're cool with that) motivate pyrotechnics enthusiasts, they should consider the following: when and where I grew up, we didn't pay for expensive fireworks. We just stepped out the back door and cranked off a few rounds of ammunition. Old habits die hard.

I know you're as crushed as I am

Thad McCotter has resigned for reasons of cluelessness, a first for incompetent politicians, whose reasons for bailing out are usually picked from a short list:

• Having been indicted for something (or actually convicted, in extreme cases)
  
• To spend more time with their families
  
• To spend less time with their families
  
• "Health"
  
• The voices in their heads told them to
  

Questions, always questions

For no good reason whatsoever, I was looking around the snopes.com site (they collect and categorize dubious claims, urban myths, and other legends,) and ran across the list of probably apocryphal dumb questions asked by Olympics visitors in various locations through the years.

I say "probably apocryphal," partly to show off by using a big word and partly because the list is clearly just edited for different venues of the Olympics. However, it did cause me to think about our own upcoming influx of sun-addled imbeciles art fair, and how we might want to develop a similar list of our own. Here's a start:

• How do you get to Zingerman's? Head east on Washtenaw and keep walking until you witness a drive-by shooting. Then ask.
  
• Where can I park? Drive south on M-23 until you get to Cabela's. Or, if they're full up, here's an address on Berkley Avenue you can try.
  
• Do they speak English in Ann Arbor? No, everyone here communicates by signal flags or in Latin.
  
• What does it mean, "One Way?" I think you'll find that it doesn't matter.
  
• How long is it? That's rather a personal question.
  

DTE: threat or menace?

It's not often that when you hear a device malfunction described as "My system blew up," the phrase is meant literally. However, thanks (probably) to our beloved electrical futility, DTE Energy, we can say with complete candor, our air conditioning condenser exploded.
Shortly after a major power outage, caused by some malfunction or other in a transformer, our AC condenser (the large, noisy, ugly thing that sits outside and actually cools the air that your forced air furnace then flings around the inside of the house) stopped working. We were able to get a repair guy to come by early the next morning, and he shut off the power to the unit, and pulled off a sheet metal panel. When it came away, a large component fell out, never a good sign in my experience. The inside surface of the sheet metal was scarred and smoke blackened, and the piece that fell out was a beer-can sized capacitor which had blown itself out of its housing and into pieces.

The repairman had heard of another such incident from one of his colleagues, and had himself replaced a number of burnt-out motors in a flurry of post-outage overtime work.

Replacing the hand grenade capacitor solved the problem, and I've added the cost of the repair call to the growing list of items DTE owes us for, including a large Toshiba television set from a few years back, toasted by a brown out. All together now: Who works at DTE?

While we're at it ...

2012 07 09: Update
The West Liberty construction is now finished, and the street is open again.

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Posting pictures, that is, here are a couple of screen shots to ponder. First, here's the overall 2012 satanic plot summer construction plan, as reported in A2.com and enhanced by our crack ground-truth team.

Click on it for a bigger version. The yellow lines are streets torn up, closed, or with lane closures -- or planned for this fate. Note, in particular, the damage being inflicted on East/West traffic on Stadium, Liberty, and Miller. These projects are underway now, simultaneously.

Update 2012 06 18: per ground truth conducted this morning, the Huron Parkway devastation is just about over with. There's still some work going on at the Geddes and Fuller intersection, but otherwise, it was clear sailing.

If you look very, very closely at the center of the image, you can see a tiny segment of green. That's the one block of 5th Avenue that was recently completed and reopened to traffic. In case it's too small, here's a bigger picture.


Given that it took two years to complete that one block, anyone with the ability to perform a linear projection should be able to conclude that we will never be able to go across town again. Of course, this would be unscientific, as unscientific as, say, the good legislators of North Carolina, who want to require their state government to use only linear models for climate change. But that's a totally different story, innit?

Oh, and by the way, look how badly the roof of the transit center is skewed! Hasn't anyone noticed by now? I want my money back!

A suggestion WRT the Ann Arbor Marathon

Having not sufficiently contributed to divisiveness and partisanship, not to say clan violence between the Evil Westsiders and the Righteous Sons of Liberty who dwell on the East Side (you can see how far this gone, already,)the city allowed this weekend's Ann Arbor Marathon to be routed along Main Street from the heart of downtown clear out to Briarwood, effectively preventing any traffic from getting anywhere along any east/west route.

Now, my understanding of marathons and other examples of self-abuse healthy exercise is limited, but I do know that they pose a planning problem in that the course has to be 26.something miles long, or -- and this is the key point -- it has to add up to that number, with sufficient repetition. So for next year, if there's still a city here next year, I suggest that the run be set up to utilize another inspired piece of recent traffic engineering, and that it be routed around and around and around the Maple Road traffic circles, south of Miller.

This would inconvenience the least number of residents and taxpayers inconsequential and irrelevant members of the populace, since no one in his or her right mind would voluntarily use that piece of road to operate a motor vehicle. And it would provide entertainment, as the runners became dizzy and staggered off into the surrounding countryside.



As an alternative, the race could be set up on Yost Blvd., over on the East Side, and run around the tiny obstacle traffic-calming device that was thoughtfully constructed there in the not too distant past.

2012 06 19: Update: the Mayor appears to agree.

Around and around

The Latin tag that appears at the top of this Blog is attributed to Julius Caesar, and it means, roughly, "It's easy for men to believe what they want to."

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about this same phenomenon, under the label "Confirmation Bias." Essentially, if you have some results of some kind, or some observations, or something that passes for data, you are exhibiting or can be accused of exhibiting confirmation bias if you choose to interpret that data in a way that supports your pre-existing beliefs. It is my pre-existing belief that although CB certainly takes place, perhaps more often than not, it's the act of a fool to start flinging mud on that basis, since such criticism contains a serious logical flaw.

Consider: New Scientist recently ran a story about how CB might well be the basis of all positive interpretation of results, leading to support for the reality of paranormal phenomena. People, they said in effect, interpret observations as showing the existence of paranormal hooey if they already believe in it.

Well, a reader, somebody with some physics chops (he apparently won a Nobel prize, back in the Seventies,) wrote in, saying, "Oh, yeah! Well, maybe your authors think that because they're applying confirmation bias due to their not believing in paranormal stuff." (Or words to that effect.)

To which anyone, of course, could reply, "Ha! You just think that because you have a a pre-existing belief in the possibility of paranormality!"

To which he could then reply, "Oh, Yeah? Well, what if you ..."

You get the drift. It's all just a bunch of intellectual smack-talking. Yo' mama so credulous, she believe in ghosts! Oh, yeah? Yo' mama got confirmation bias in favor of not believin' in 'em! Oh, yeah? Well, yo' mama ... and around and around we go. It isn't a useful rhetorical device.

My point, if I can be said to have one, is that this isn't the most professional way to conduct intellectual discourse. Something that seems to have gotten lost along the path is that a scientist, even a social scientist or, God help us, a psychologist, should be extremely reticent to claim results or causalities on the basis of anything less than multiple, repeatable experiments. The right thing to say is that, based on the data I collected, there seemed to be nothing happening or, conversely, something happening, or -- much more likely -- nothing conclusive was observed, but I got tenure anyway.

This is how science was done, back in the dark ages when I was supposedly being trained to do it. What's gone wrong with the world?

Gee, Mom ...

"Oh, my, my look at the time - I've got to dress for my bridge club."

"Gee, Mom, isn't that bridge built yet?"

"No, Son, and it won't be until free hands on both sides of the big ditch can push the same button at the same time!"

Firesign Theater, Don't Crush That Dwarf

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Although that bridge (you know which bridge I'm talking about) isn't built yet, Fifth Avenue is. It took two years, five hundred and sixty-eight billion dollars, and the lives of twenty-six hundred underpaid Irish laborers, but the project is finally done. Don't you feel better now?

Editorial note: two of the three statistics related to the Fifth Avenue Project cited above are incorrect and the product of a deranged mind. The person responsible has been sacked.