Irrationality? Floating rocks? Rockbergs! Feb 14, 2018

Floating ice and floating rocks, small pond on campus, March 7, 2016

Time to reread one of my favorite books, Irrationality, by Stuart Sutherland. An excuse for a few quotes. He's funny; you have to watch for it.

"What constitutes a rational decision depends upon one's knowledge. There is a rider to this. If one has reason to believe one's knowledge is insufficient, then it is rational, particularly in the case of important decisions, to seek out more evidence: unfortunately, as we will see, when people do so, they usually act in a wholly irrational way, since they only seek evidence that will support their existing beliefs." (p. 5)

"The effects of conformity on beliefs and attitudes are the more injurious because people tend to associate with others who have similar beliefs to themselves. ... the only way to substantiate a belief is to try to disprove it. But because like mixes with like, people are rarely exposed to counter-arguments to their more deeply held convictions, let alone to counter-evidence. Their beliefs conform to those of their associates: hence, there is little possibility of eliminating persistent errors. "(p. 41)

"Everyone is irrational some of the time and in particular everyone is susceptible to the availability error. I give a final striking example ... In 1969, Jerzy Kosinsky's novel Steps won the American National Book Award for fiction. Eight years later some joker had it retyped and sent the manuscript with no title and under a false name to fourteen major publishers and thirteen literary agents in the US, including ... the firm that had originally published it. Of the twenty-seven people to whom it was submitted, not one recognised that it had already been published. Moreover, all twenty-seven rejected it. All it lacked was Jerzy Kosinsky's name to create the halo effect: without the name, it was seen as an indifferent book." (pp. 28-29)

"People have an amazing capacity to remember pictures. After being shown 10,000 photographs just once they can correctly recognize almost all of them a week later. This is in marked contrast to the very poor memory for isolated words."(p. 19)

"The term 'love' was defined in an authoritative dictionary of psychology as 'a form of mental illness not yet recognised in the standard diagnostic manuals'. (p. 115) [The authoritative dictionary was written by S. Sutherland...]

Now, about those floating rocks. I have seen that pond drained. It is about knee-deep, and there are no rocks sticking up in it. What happens is that when the pond freezes over, students throw rocks out onto the ice, trying to break it. At first this doesn't succeed, and in the freeze-thaw cycles, some of the rocks get frozen to the ice. When they finally break it [that's why there are those entirely unnatural sharp edges to the ice], some of those rocks are attached to large enough pieces of ice to support them, mostly invisible under the water, and the rocks go floating around the pond. Rockbergs.

Re-examine what you see. Go over the evidence. There are floating rocks, and underground jumping rocks. More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.

But real. With rational explanations.


He gives citations for almost everything, but not for the Jerzy Kosinsky story. I have to wonder who that 'joker' was who re-submitted the story...

OK Kelvin, if these aren't interference patterns, what are they? Republished 2/6/2018

Photo taken in February. First published for Feb 28, 2009

My brother is a physics professor, who teaches optics. He said years ago that I couldn't be seeing interference patterns on a macroscopic scale, from light coming through a narrow crack in a door hinge.

Here, the light is coming sideways through a narrow gap between a curtain and window frame. The bands certainly look like interference patterns to me. (When I was an oceanography student, I used to watch the waves reflecting off the sides of the ship canal as I walked to school. They made interference patterns as they crossed. I also knew all the types of wave patterns I could get in a coffee cup from my hand shaking as I walked across the cafeteria.)

This is a South-facing window, and the photo was taken on 2-28-2007. It has been photoshopped only to bring out the best in the image. I think that if the light is coming sideways to the opening, you can get the effect of a very narrow slit.

Or, if these aren't interference patterns, what are they?


The vertical lines are possibly from the vertical bars on the porch railings. Although the railings are less than waist-high; the early morning sun would have to be very low down to cast light through them up to this ceiling. I don't think the sun through the trees could be that low; maybe a reflection off a pan of water?This is early morning light, by the angle, and it comes through a lot of trees, so it is often a focused beam, coming through a narrow gap between the trees, as can be seen sometimes casting wavery light through the old float glass windows. (Pictures previously published.)

Stay Warm

Lassie on heater, probably spring 2011

Doesn't she look grumpy? And she is looking down. I think someone might have been there to dispute the possession of the heater with her.  She is glaring "Don't you push me off!"

This is probably the kittens' first year, spring or early summer 2011. She doesn't have her adult color green eyes yet. And that year they were kept in the bathroom with a heater, separate from Rex. That was the year that they were all on my lap in the chair, and we were enjoying a fire in the woodstove - on June 2nd!

We had a dry December this year - bad news in case we go back to drought conditions without fully recovering from the last one. We haven't had snow yet here, but back east they are having feet of snow in a winter cyclone, and record low temperatures.

I recently asked myself, "what do you do when the power goes off?"

And the answers I immediately came up with:

What do I do when the power goes out?
I get a fire started in the wood stove, (and if it happened today I’d be cursing myself while I cleared away the clutter in front of the stove) and be sure to cook dinner over the stove before dark. And go bring in more firewood before dark. Before it rains. Or snows.
Or dye some fabric, or take a bath, or wash the dishes with the last warm water in the water heater.
Or put extra blankets on the bed, and curl up in the dark and call my mother, whose phone number was the one I knew in the dark.

Seriously. There are lots of things to do to take advantage of/survive the situation. Those with a live-in lover have another option. Why they have lots of births 9 months later in cities.

Those answers are in reverse order, most recent to oldest, of things I have actually done over the years. It depends a little on what time of year, and time of day it is. But the latest wisdom I learned several years ago, when my power was out for more than 3 days.

[That is common enough here that it is necessary to have another source of heat and cooking, and lights, handy for when it happens. The bus driver, a few blocks away, had his power out for 2 separate weeks that year.]

That time, after a couple of days I had used most of the wood I had inside, and was wading through a foot of snow carrying firewood. And the lights I had were not bright enough to see what I was doing if I had to cook dinner after dark.

I learned to bake bread the summer I turned 16, at the cabin in Northern Idaho. In a woodstove. And the little woodstove heaters don't channel heat to the top the way a cookstove does. Much harder to cook over.


The next time the power went out that year, it came on only a few hours later. But by that time I had started a fire, and heated some leftover soup, and was having dinner.


2020 Last October, 2019, PGE turned the power off 6 times -- more than 10 days off total! We all, including grocery stores, lost freezers-full of food. There wasn't any rain all month, some wind -- not necessarily where the power was off. They were doing planned maintenance.

Tablet-weaving / Card-weaving

One of my first learning projects, showing how you can make many patterns with one warp setup.

A new thing I researched and learned last year, and wrote an illustrated how-to paper on. And I really fell in love with it. The weaving process can be simple and quick (a few hours or days for a band). Or it can be very complex and time-consuming. I might not tackle those - my strength has always been to learn a simple technique, and then design complex patterns for it. And I am already doing that.

The technique is ancient (at least Roman, Viking, Anglo-Saxon, 1500BCE at Hallstatt, 1100BCE in Italy are recent discoveries), and related to weaving on the warp-weighted loom (which is at least neolithic in age). The woven bands can be very strong, "camel straps", or 1 cm wide delicate silk strips used for headbands (fillets), or clothing borders, sometimes woven-in. 

My enthusiasm for this is encouraging me to get involved again with the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), which I have always considered myself part of the community of, and make some clothing. Viking, Anglo-Saxon, 12th century London. . .

But of course, current retro/boho fashions are also the perfect place to wear these decorative bands. Wish I had run across it back in the day.


One of the things I was doing while I wasn't posting. (While I didn't have internet from home)