Obsidian Wings

A saturday morning fusion thread

by liberal japonicus

As is usual, the perfect open thread topic appears after I post an open thread. Looked in my google news and there this was, and because Gary Farber is in my Google + circle, it's got his seal of approval.

A short one or two sentence summary can't do this article justice, so here's a taste to get you started:

Shortly after his 14th birthday, Taylor and Brinsmead loaded deuterium fuel into the machine, brought up the power, and confirmed the presence of neutrons. With that, Taylor became the 32nd individual on the planet to achieve a nuclear-fusion reaction. 

As they say, read the rest. And then comment on what you were doing when you were 14.

a restarting friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

I recently restarted doing Tai Chi. I only started doing it because a colleague was teaching it, and a schedule conflict made it impossible for me to join the group, but that conflict has disappeared, so I'm at it again. Quite amazing what a workout it is.

So have you restarted anything recently? How did it turn out?

Homicide statistics, wtf?

by Doctor Science

I got statistics for the previous post on Intimate Partner Homicide (IPH) from the Bureau of Justice Statistics Homicide Trends Report. I see that report comes from Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data Series, which I don't know how to massage.

But I wonder how reliable that data really is. In our discussion, Jason Kuznicki linked to 2003 paper about the possible role of changing to unilateral divorce laws. In discussing the data they used, the authors state:

One outlier to this is Illinois where the Chicago Police Department failed to report any murders in 1984, 1985, November 1986–May 1987, July 1987–
December 1987 and July 1990–December 1990. As it is implausible that there were no murders during these periods, we omit Illinois from our homicide samples.

I have no idea if these holes are there in the data used from the Homicide Trends Report, or if they're significant for other cities, states, and years.

I'm pretty sure, too, that somewhere in my browser history there's a paper about IPH that was using a figure of 300-and-something for a recent year, which is also wtf.

Basically, I get the feeling that the US homicide stats may have some serious holes, but I don't know enough about the field to know where/why/how. And everyone agrees that homicide is the crime for which stats are most accurate.

I was googling for images of "counting house" when I found this: wool samples and ledgers from Fox Brothers archives, or, to be more accurate, the attic.

What looking for statistics feels like. And I'm allergic to wool.

Meanwhile, I went looking for international comparisons. Here we run into a problem: the US has an extremely large population (3rd in the world) with a high homicide rate, so the total number of homicides (more than 15,000/year) is large enough for all kinds of statistically significant analysis. The countries that are closest to the US culturally are both much smaller and have a much lower homicide rate, so the number of homicides they experience makes for much less robust statistics. Canada has fewer than 600 homicides/year, the U.K. has fewer than 800. Countries that have a total number of homicides comparable to the US -- Brazil or Mexico, for instance -- aren't culturally very similar.

So I've flailed about for a bit, trying to find data from either the UK or Canada that can be compared to the US trends in IPH, but failed.

If anyone has any better links or more authoritative insights, cough 'em up. All I can say is that, almost everywhere in the world, the overall murder rate has been falling for a decade at least.

Murder mystery

by Doctor Science

I was working on a post (about school and other shootings) and wanted to check one fact. Result: a couple days of work later, I have found out something really odd about murder in America. I'm nothing of an expert in the field, so I'm hoping that someone who *does* know about it can come along and say what the experts think is going on -- or if I've noticed something that the experts haven't.

I'm talking about two things, possibly related, concerning intimate partner homicide (IPH):

1. 30-40 years ago (and possibly earlier), it was almost as common for American men to be killed by their partners as for women. This is extremely unusual: in other countries and cultures, the rate of IPH for women is two to four times that for men.
a. Since then, the US pattern has changed, so that nowadays many more women are victims of IPH than men are.

Note on the charts: All data in this post are taken from Homicide Trends in the U.S. from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, especially the section on Intimate homicide. Charts with a gray background and yellow margin are taken directly from the BJS report, while those with a white background were created by me based on BJS data. Let me know if I need to show my work in GoogleDocs.

The fall in the number of Intimate Partner Homicides, by gender of victim.

b. This is almost entirely due to a change in IPH among black Americans. The high American rate of husband-and-boyfriend killing was largely a black phenomenon. Since the 70s, the death rate for black men due to IPH has plummeted, faster than the drop in IPH for black women.

Rate of Intimate Partner Homicide, by race and relationship type. Earlier, I had summed the spouse + x-friend rates for each gender, having overlooked that the rates were calculated using different base populations.

Cut for length and images --

Why is this Open Thread different from all other Open Threads?

by Doctor Science

... because it's being put up by me!

Pewter Seder Plate, made in Germany in 1771, Victoria and Albert Museum

For your LOLz, alternate versions of The Four Questions:

In the style of Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

Why -- Do I ask thee? Let me count the queries.
I ask thee of the length and width and height
Of a crumbly, flakey matzo slice;
I ask thee of the bitterness of herbs
Ingested, swallowed in a trice.
I ask thee of the fashion put to use
By salty brine immersed in twice;
I ask thee of leaning and idle grace
In reclining, feeling rather nice.
Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if I choose,
I shall but ask again being more precise.

By Efrat Tsur.

In the style of a turgid academic:

What functions are served by the departure from hegemonic practice on this occasion, in contradistinction to other, comparable occasions, most notably with regard to the preparation of grains without -- and this is particularly deserving of our attention in this context -- without, dare we say in the interests of humor, without "hot air," leavening with our humor, as it were, the questions regarding the unleavening of grains; and the further departure in the specific use of bitter -- bitter being of course a relative concept, differently understood in different vocabularies of food consumption, but still, bitter in this context, bitter herbs; and then too, regarding the dyadic pairing of foods, notably the salt water immersions we repeatedly engage in; and finally the general aura of relaxation, perhaps not apparent to those who have engaged in frantic preparations for the past two weeks, but nonetheless, on this occasion, an aura of relaxation being normatively required?

What, then, are the functions of these practices?

Source unknown, via the Velveteen Rabbi.

Speak of all your customary practices, or not.

Random Internet Walk: Hindle Wakes

by Doctor Science

I'm working on a post for tomorrow or maybe the weekend which is hella depressing, so instead today you get: Today's Random Walk Through the Internet! Featuring: silent movies and self-directed women.

Tamara de Lempicka's "Auto-Portrait." Perhaps the first woman artist to make herself into a *brand* -- no wonder Madonna is a fan.

Universal values?

by liberal japonicus

A few folks have lamented the absence of foreign policy posts, so I thought that some of you may be interested in discussing this article about the problems of US NGO's in other countries. A few grafs:

The Times reports that the United Arab Emirates has shut down the offices of the National Democratic Institute, a nonprofit U.S. agency whose mission is to promote democracy around the globe. The NDI is often called an NGO, short for nongovernmental organization, which might leave some people a bit quizzical given that this particular NGO is funded to a significant extent by the U.S. government. But Wikipedia helpfully explains: "In cases in which NGOs are funded totally or partially by governments, the NGO maintains its non-governmental status by excluding governmental representatives from membership in the organization."

Given the language of the Times story on the matter, by reporter Steven Lee Myers, one could get the impression that most people consider it the most natural thing imaginable for the U.S. government to fund organizations that send people into the world to spread democracy, even to the point of helping to foster revolutions in countries deemed insufficiently Jeffersonian. Myers calls the UAE decision "a surprising act of diplomatic defiance." He also labels it "especially provocative," given that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was scheduled to arrive in the region shortly for talks with the UAE and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

On the other side? Well...

One contrarian voice on this issue is Patrick J. Buchanan, the conservative commentator (and member of the TNI advisory council), who argues that such activity is not only wrong but harmful to American interests. He asks: "Does the United States interfere in the internal affairs of nations to subvert regimes by using NGOs to funnel cash to the opposition to foment uprisings or affect elections? Are we using Cold War methods in countries with which we are not at war--to advance our New World Order?"  He replies: "So it would seem."

I hate it when I have to agree with Buchanan. How about y'all?

 

The Mind-Killer

by Doctor Science

danah boyd just put up for comment the text of a presentation she did at SXSW on "The Power of Fear in Networked Publics". She argues that because the limiting resource on the Internet is attention, people online are ever-more-inclined to monger fear, that great attention-grabber. I disagree: it seems to me that, compared to old media (especially TV) the Internet is *less* fear-saturated and fear-prone. I think a lot of this has to do with the nature of authority.

The Folly of Fear, by Francisco Goya. Part of his series Los Disparates [Spanish], "Nonsense" or "Folly". It's always amazing to look at Goya etchings, because they seem so anachronistically *modern*. I find The Disasters of War pretty much unbearable, but they should be a required study for military officers -- and for Presidential candidates.

Emperor for the day

by liberal japonicus

McT, who along with dr ngo, is poised to join the expanding granddaddy demographic here, suggested that a more general thread on the Trayvon Martin shooting about the issues raised by bobbyp and russell. This is not exactly that thread, but I've just landed at Haneda and have a bit of time to burn, and being in the air or at airports for almost 26 hours and thinking about this, I thought I'd crack open a thread to try and get a different look at this.

So, if you were emperor for a day, at this moment in time, what would you do? This means you can't go back in time and tell the police to do x. It also means you can't explain what liberal or conservatives or whoever is doing wrong. It also means that you are not constrained by (the various interpretations) of the law unless you want to be, but if someone chooses not to be, you don't get to complain about it. The onus is on you to create a framework of actions to move forward. 

I may be making this a bit too tough, but after I get back to Kyushu and settle in for a bit, I'll try to lay out my emperor for a day (or as I was tempted to call it, the carpe deus thread). Try hard to describe your own program rather than shooting holes in everyone else's. Let's see what happens.