Rescued

 Reading the Saturday morning paper I was pleasantly surpirsed to see that there was a fly-in airshow in progress at the Double Eagle Airport on Albuquerque's West Side.  I packed a couple cameras and headed across town in Margaret's Nissan Versa.  (She had gotten a ride to Santa Fe with friends and the Nissan is nicer to drive than my old pickup.)

I took Central to Atrisco Vista and headed up the road to the airfield.  Some construction barriers partially blocked the road.  I went straight in the absence of signs and landed on some rough road.  Hitting a pothole while going too fast blew out the front-right tire.

I decided I could drive on the deflated tire and headed back a half mile to a truck stop.  I parked and opened the trunk to start the tire change.  I found that the cover over the spare's compartment had some weird latch that I couldn't seem to figure out.

I pried open one side of the compartment cover.  I could see the spare and the jack, but there was no rod for raising the jack and no lug wrench.  Time to go for some help.

I went to the repair shop where I found a couple people working on a big truck.  I was told they could not work on a car and I was given a road service number to call.  I called, but no one answered.

I went around to the gas station/convenience store and asked at the counter for a service contact number.  Nobody knew any.  Then, a big kid working behind the counter said "I can help fix the problem". 

The kid went out with me to where the car was parked and quickly figured out that the spare tire compartment cover needed to be rotated to open.  He took out the little spare tire and had it on the car in about five minutes.  What a relief!

We walked back into the store together.  On the way he told me his was a freshman at UNM majoring in BA.  I got eighty bucks from the ATM and gave half to the kid.  He tried to give me twenty back.  "No", I said, "you earned it."

Lies and Delusions

 Social media has enabled unfounded conspiracy theories to propagate at lightning speed.  Such distortions of reality, however, are not a new phenomenon.  The earliest I can personally recall occurred in 1954 when I lived near Seattle.  It was the Windshield Pitting Mystery. The first reports originated in the nearby community of Bellingham where - as reported by local papers - "tiny holes, pits, and dings ... seemingly appeared in the windshields of cars at an unprecedented rate"  Purveyors of the story came up with explanations which included cosmic rays, sand-flea eggs and fallout from H-bomb tests. 

Seattle Post- Intelligencer Collection

Police departments in the Northwest were forced to exhaustively investigate the windshield stories and soon concluded that the whole thing was the product of what was deemed at the time as an example of collective hysteria.

A careful combing of news archives would no doubt turn up many similar examples of theories based on flimsy reasoning.  I particularly recall a couple from the 1990s which appeared among communities of people looking for explanations and relief from disabling psychological and developmental conditions.

I was employed for a time as a training program developer by an agency providing care services for people who needed extensive help in meeting the challenges of daily life.  We frequently relied on presentations to staff by therapists from the area who were familiar with issues of the population we served. One such therapist came with an invitation from our program's director to tell us about her practice of Recovered Memory Therapy.

The underlying assertion of the therapeutic approach was that people commonly repressed memories of sexual abuse which led to severe psychological problems later in life.  The therapist which came to address our staff claimed to be able to help people uncover the repressed memories and thus appropriately address the treatment leading to recovery.

I recall being very skeptical myself about the claims made about the Recovered Memory techniques.  I do not remember any very clear opinions from other staff about the presentation and I do not know if any referrals to that kind of therapy were generated by the agency I worked for. However, the beliefs and practices related to the idea of recoverable memories of abuse became entrenched in therapeutic practices on a very wide scale.

Ultimately, the claims of value in the Recalled Memory movement were debunked by real scientific investigation, but not before a lot of damage was done to patients and their families. Even now after many years it is not hard to find remnants and variations of the movement which include beliefs in the existence of cults of satanic child abuse, as was alleged during the attacks on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.

Another destructive outbreak of pseudoscience in the disability treatment field contributed to my decision to quit the agency that employed me.  I recall going to a big training session which included people from all over New Mexico in which a case was made for using Facilitated Communication for non-verbal autistic people.

The idea was that the afflicted people could spell out meaningful messages on a typewriter with a facilitator providing physical support at the elbow.  The likelihood of deception was so transparent that I stood up in the middle of the presentation to point out the problems with the approach, and also to express doubt that the presenters had not seen the many available news articles about the refutation by legitimate scientific sources of any validity in the technique.

Today, we see many examples of rational and ethical failures similar to those of the past. What is new is that the damage is routinely being amplified by government agencies which originally offered some protection from such abuses. Perhaps real science will come to our rescue as in the past, but there seems no clear path to that at the moment.

Finding Hope

 The daily onslaught of right-wing political atrocities makes it hard at times to maintain any sense of optimism about a rational way forward.  I found a NY Times article today that seemed very encouraging  about the two rising stars of the progressive left:

The Wary, Warming, Wildly Consequential Alliance of Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani

Lens Design

 Physicists and mathematicians discovered centuries ago that spherical sections of glass could bend and focus images onto a flat field.  That discovery enabled lens designs well into the Twentieth Century.  For instance, the Sonnar-type lens for my Nikon S from the 1950s has seven elements, all circular in cross section.

The combinations of lens elements provide a high degree of resolution along with minimizing aberrations with the widest possible aperture for each design type. Glass of great purity was essential to the process of sharp image formation. 

The lenses in my Iphone also have seven elements, but they embody complex aspherical shapes made possible by computer aided design and ultra-miniaturazation. It would be physically impossible to form such tiny lenses using the mechanical polishing processes for glass lenses.  

Instead, the cellphone lenses are made of injection molded plastic with very high light transmission qualities.

A Perspective on Violence

 

It does seem that we are seeing an uptick in violence, including the lethal varieties. I also seems important, however, to not lose sight of the broader context.  Perhaps the most important element is that instances of violence are reported instantly and world-wide.  In the longer term it also should not be forgotten that politically-connected violence and assassinations are a time-honored feature of American life.

Which is not to deny that recent killings have a clear connection to the current political climate, but there are other contributing factors unique to our time.  Internet-based social networking and gaming are an obvious place to look. It seems a little simplistic, though, to ascribe violent tendencies to mere exposure.

It is possible that the more important aspect to examine in the online experience is that so many people seem to easily become totally immersed in digital interaction, and perhaps even subject to a confusion of reality with imagined scenarios in which violence has no consequences.

What has so far been revealed about the life of Charlie Kirk's assassin points to just such a disconnection from reality.  Look at the bravado of the online statements prior to the killing.  And then consider the fear expressed when the killer was actually confronted by police.

So, what can be done to lessen the psychological and societal damages that are occurring?  Perhaps a more immediately practical question is to ask what should not be done.  One loud and immediate response has been to call for the execution of the miscreant, partly it is clear out of a need for revenge, but also with the assertion that the example will serve as a deterrent.

There is ample evidence that such a course will have little effect on behaviors based on impulsivity or a distorted sense of reality. It might also be argued that State-based killing is really just another contributor to the acceptance of violence as a legitimate solution to complex problems.

In the What Might Be Done category, the fact that the country is awash in guns should point to one course of action.

First Light

I got an Iphone; not the latest model, but quite an improvement over my old Android.

Your Money

 

It is abundantly clear that Trump's invasions of LA and D.C. did not move the needle at all in regard to crime control.  An article in The Intercept points out what those millions of dollars could actually accomplish if properly used:

Trump’s Chicago Occupation Could Cost Four Times More Than Housing City Homeless

Sending troops to Chicago could cost $1.6 million per day, four times as much as housing the city’s homeless — plus it’s illegal, experts say.

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Trump’s domestic troop deployments aren’t about crime – they’re about intimidation

by Moira Donegan in The Guardian