It just occurred to me, and the Digital Tolkien project confirms, that in all the books Tolkien wrote about war, he never once used the word “martial”. Which makes perfect sense — Mars would be as out of place in Middle-earth as Father Christmas in Narnia.  There is one use of the word in an appendix near the back of Unfinished Tales, discussing the Marshals of the Riddermark. But those are drafts, for which I do not hold J.R.R. Tolkien responsible. The word “Marshal” must have exerted a gravitational force, which would surely have been corrected before publication.

Looking for something else. Found this poem by W. H. Auden.  It’s rare for me to find a poet who both (a) perfectly describes a feeling I’ve had and (b) is taken seriously by experts.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=119&issue=2&page=5

Note, 50-year-old typesetting means this poem just barely spills over to a second page.

Leonardo Pacheco over on Mastodon has an epic pair of footnotes from mathematical monographs.

Peter G. Hinman, Recursion-Theoretic Hierarchies

“To anyone who has reached this note legitimately — that is, by following the proof of Theorem 4.18 — we offer our congratulations and suggest that some strong refreshment is in order. Try combining some hard-frozen strawberries, raspberries, or peaches in a blender with enough dark rum so that the result is a stiff mush (add powdered sugar if the fruit was not sweetened). Pour into a stemmed cocktail glass and relax! For an alternative, see the Notes to Barwise [1975, §II.6].”

Following the reference, he found Jon Barwise, Admissible Sets and Structures

When used in a class or seminar, section 6 should be supplemented with coffee (not decaffeinated) and a light refreshment. We suggest Heatherton Rock Cakes. (Recipe: Combine 2 cups of self-rising flour with 1 t. allspice and a pinch of salt. Use a pastry blender or two cold knives to cut in 6 T butter. Add 1/3 cup each of sugar and raisins (or other urelements). Combine this with 1 egg and enough milk to make a stiff batter (3 or 4 T milk). Divide this into 12 heaps, sprinkle with sugar, and bake at 400 °F. for 10—15 minutes. They taste better than they sound.)

Daniel Stride has dusted off an ancient copy of Bored of the Rings, a parody by the Harvard Lampoon. I think “Harvard Lampoon” means the authors were mostly Douglas Kenney and Henry Beard, bouncing ideas off a bunch of their old college buddies.  Spoiler: Dan thinks it doesn’t mean anything anymore.

To be fair, he’s too young to get most of the jokes. In fact, I’m too young to get most of the jokes, but at least when I read it ~1975 there were people around whom I could ask. (With one exception: anyone who knows what the verb “dry-gulch” means is requested to tell us in the comments.) I have occasionally thought that the most useless possible work of scholarship would be to compile a list of explanations of all the references in the text.¹ If anyone’s going to do that, they’d better hurry. The Baby Boomers they’ll need as sources are fewer every year.

I agree with Dan’s individual points. For example, it’s true that the authors kind of ratchet down after the story meets Orlon in Riv’n’dell. I can’t help noting that this contains a meta-joke that the authors couldn’t have made on purpose. Since the History of Middle-earth was published, we now know Tolkien himself thought there were only a few more chapters after Bingo & Co. got to Rivendell. Everyone thinks it’s a natural transition place.

Accept no substitutes.

Where I disagree with Dan is in the way of looking at Bored of the Rings. If we look at the Lampoon’s text as a parody of Tolkien’s text, we’re straying from the authors’ intent, and missing half the fun. Bored of the Rings should be seen as a physical object. A book, not a text. The authors are explicit about this in their Foreword — their purpose is to produce a thing they can sell to make money. If that requires words to be written, then so be it. But they’re not the main point of their creation. The authors’ real interest is in the book as an object. As evidence, the three laugh-out-loud-funny things I can remember, half a century later:

The green box on the back cover of the authorized paperback edition of LotR (which Dan mentions) ends with the line, “Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it, and no other.” The green box on the back of Bored ends with, “Those who approve of courtesy to a certain other living author will not touch this gobbler with a ten-foot battle lance.” That immortal line won’t work if it’s inside. It has to be on the back cover, to be read by people who have not yet purchased the book.

The second is from the Bored equivalent of “The Ring Goes South”:

“We cannot stay here, ” said Arrowroot.

“No,” agreed Bromosel, looking across the gray surface of the page to the thick half of the book still in the reader’s right hand. “We have a long way to go.”

This exchange takes place on page 80 of a 160-page book. Exactly half of the book was in my right hand.

The third is a masterpiece of typesetting: At the bottom of Page 143, Pepsi is worried about Sorhed’s imminent attack on Minas Troney. Goodgulf assures him the attack isn’t coming soon, and their reinforcements will arrive in plenty of time. The last line at the bottom of the right-hand page is, “Trust me,” said Goodgulf. “Wizards know many things.” Then you turn the page, and the top of Page 144 reads, “The surprise attack at dawn the next day caught everyone by surprise.”  This falls flat unless the text and the printer’s layout are in perfect harmony. Once again, the physical book is essential to the joke.

The later editions (such as the one featured on “A Phuulish Fellow”) don’t necessarily have all this right. It’s a miscarriage of humor, justifiable only by the fact that cashing in with the minimum possible effort is the stated purpose of the work.  In fact, cashing-in is more than a purpose. It rises to the status of Theme.  Because, after all, the real target of the parody isn’t Tolkien. It’s us. The tawdriness, the tackiness, the commercialization we see everywhere in Bored are a word to the wise about what awaits Middle-earth in the hands of people like us. When Burger King advertisements came out in 2001, offering cheap glass goblets as a promotion for the Peter Jackson films, I had to admit the Lampoon crew were prophets.

So that brings me to an interesting place. My disdain for the current state of copyright law is well known by everyone who’s had the misfortune to be in earshot, but in this case I can almost understand it. What force can stand against rampaging commercialization, but a pre-positioned commercial interest?

One of the few features of Old English poetry to have been embraced by the Internet is the kenning. We internauts tend to use them mostly for animals: “trash panda” for raccoon; “nope rope” for snake; “giraffe sheep” for a llama. My favorite has always been the vulgar one, in which we call the skunk a “fart squirrel”.

Yesterday my wife asked me where the word “skunk” comes from, and hypothesized that it might be from a Native American language. Off to the Oxford English Dictionary I went to find out, and she was correct. But also…

“Etymology: < an unattested Southern New England Algonquian cognate of Western Abenaki segôgw, Unami Delaware šká:kw, Meskwaki shekâkwa, apparently < the Algonquian base of Meskwaki shek- to urinate + the Algonquian base of Meskwaki wâkw- fox.”

OMG! The Internet was reproducing the Algonquian attitude almost perfectly.

This may be my new favorite Tolkien quote. It’s a refutation of scholars who thought the sigel in “Sigelwara-land” meant the sun:

The Ethiopians did not dwell in the sun, or have any such relation to it as exists between wara and its accompaniment in other compounds. They may have dwelt uncomfortably near it (east or west, the direct south seems to have been thought too hot even for them), but they were none the less earth dwellers, slowly roasted perhaps, but not cremated; they were not salamanders.

I think we have here a glimpse into the English mind-set that caused the UK Foreign Office to give 19th-century embassy staff  in Washington DC a pay augmentation because of the hazardous tropical climate. [citation needed]

Over on Mastodon, I was alerted to a paper about bee populations on the prairie.² The authors demonstrate that after the prairie is burned, ground-nesting bees move in in greater numbers than in similar patches of un-burned prairie. This is good stuff — it’s another contribution to our growing understanding that wildfires play a constructive role in the ecology of grasslands. (So say both the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy, among others.)  This paper is very well done. The next time I think my job is tedious and nit-picky, I can think of these researchers examining bees under a microscope to see whether their mandibles are worn down from digging holes.

Figure 3 from Brokaw et al.

I’m writing this post because the graph of their primary result makes me sad. The results they’re showing are for matched sets of burned and un-burned plots at four sites. On the left, graph (a) shows their estimate of the number of active subterranean bee nests. On the right, (b) shows the “effective number of species” calculated by a tricky mathematical process³ from the sample of bees they caught.⁴

The authors want to show that there’s a significant difference between the burned (orange) and unburned sites, but this graph doesn’t do that. The horizontal line indicating the mean of each case is inside the range of the other case.  Putting a couple of asterisks at the top of  plot (a) (which was statistically significant) doesn’t help the visual impact of the overlapping boxes. I guess we could read the text around the figure to find out what tests they used and why they think the difference is significant, but then what’s the figure for? It’s supposed to be worth a thousand words.

Plot of Table S3 from Brokaw et al.

Fortunately, this is an open-access paper and the authors have made their data available. Here are their data, as histograms of the number of nests they found in each of the sixteen samples at each of their four sites. The top row, burned, looks like they might have more nests than the bottom row, especially in the first and third sites (Devil’s Run and Miller), but the differences in sites 2 and 4 are harder to see. The main purpose of statistics is to make sure I’m not fooling yourself when I look at a graph, and this is an ideal place for it.

As it happens, my old computer joined the bleeding Choir Invisible a couple of weeks ago, and I’m just getting the new one properly furnished. I installed Richard McElreath’s “rethinking” package for R last night, so I’m all set to do some statistics.  Let’s see what I can do with Brokaw’s bees.

First, the number of nests they find is an integer. If we can make one more assumption, we can do a lot more with the data on hand. I’m going to say that the chance that a nest appears in a given sample site is independent of whether there’s already a nest there or not. I think this is pretty good. Their sample sites are squares 2-4 feet on a side. Every bee’s nest I ever dug up was a few inches across (the exact sizes were hard to determine while I was running away).⁵ The number of nests maxes out below 16, which means they’ve all got at least a foot between them. I think this is a good approximation.  [Edited to add: The Principal Investigator informs me that the things I dug up are wasp nests, which is indicated by the fact that I needed to run away. Bee nests are only a couple of millimeters across, the bees aren’t harmful, and the assumption is even better than I thought.]

That assumption lets us do a simple model: The number of nests they found is distributed according to a Poisson distribution. Poisson distributions have one parameter, the log of whose mean is a different number for each site, plus a constant for whether the site was burned or not. Prior distributions for all parameters were uninformative gaussians. The burning-constant is assumed to be the same for all sites. Here’s what comes out of the model.

Posterior distribution of the parameter for each site and treatment.

This graph makes it clearer how good Brokaw et al.’s research finding was. There’s no question here — using a Bayesian Poisson regression model eliminates almost all the overlap between burned and unburned results. The burning-constant is +82%, with a 95% confidence interval from +45% to +227%. (Some of those peaks are really broad.) That is, regardless of which site we start at, the number of nests we’d expect to see in a recently-burned site would be 82% higher.

How good is the Poisson assumption? Pretty good, based on just looking at how far apart the nests are. One other argument, though: this model would break down if there were lots and lots of bee nests, but in that case we wouldn’t be worried about whether we were harming bee populations by stamping out grass fires, and nobody would have done these measurements in the first place.

Notes

Twitter is going downhill. I’ll stay there as long as I can, but I’ve been looking for a new place. I’m back from safari. Here’s my report on a few alternatives. I’ve visited Reddit and Imgur as well, but they seem qualitatively different from an actual twitter successor.

Micro.blog

Been there: Since 2018. Cost: Everybody pays $5/mo. Activity level: Quiet.

The place’s affect is weirdly decaffeinated. The population trends younger X to Millenials.  People here don’t like my jokes much.

This is the most interesting place from the social/software point of view. You’re not supposed to be a mere consumer of social media and clicker of hearts. Your posts to micro.blog are actually links to a real blog in an old-fashioned web-ring. Things you post here, i.e. to your micro-blog, will show up in a Google search. Every account has a built-in podcasting capability, too, though I’ve never used it. The site doesn’t have passwords; the server sends an e-mail with a link to click every time you log in. The iOS app is good (and you stay logged in). You can’t “like” a post; you have to say something nice instead. Nobody uses hashtags; they use emojis instead. Supports markdown for formatting posts.

I’ve only found one interesting professor to follow on this site. Lots of photographers.

Counter.social

Been there: Since April. Cost: Free, but I pay $5/mo for Pro membership. Activity level: Firehose

The friendliest social network. Everybody there seems cheerful and they’re promiscuous with upvotes and shares. It’s run by a famous hacker (all by himself). Counter.social is built on the Mastodon platform. When I joined I thought it was part of the Mastodon fediverse, but they’ve had a disagreement, so it went its own way. That means you can’t follow other Mastodonians from here. The Jester is so serious about keeping misogynists and fascists out that he’s blocked entire countries. I trust the security on this site. Somebody may try to get in, but I pity the fool. There are places for Virtual Reality chat rooms on the site. If anybody has ever used them, I haven’t seen it.

Update: you can get to CoSo from the web. Here I am, and here’s Corlin who clued me in.

No academics here. It’s mostly for everyday life and snarking about politics. A stranger once congratulated me for a “Tolkien deep cut” on this site. It was a quote from LotR.

Mastodon

Been there: 1 week. Cost: I’ll start chipping in if I like the place. Activity level: Firehose.

I’m on the universeodon server, which I can’t spell. I chose it because a couple of people from my Twitter feed are there. This site is the closest to reproducing my Twitter timeline. People I follow are here, as well as quite a few people I never followed because all their tweets got retweeted to me anyway. Old-timers use pseudonyms; twitter refugees use their real names. The program has gotten a bad rap on Twitter but I haven’t had any problems with it. I use the web interface because I haven’t heard enough good things about the app. Weirdly, “log out” is under the Preferences menu. Is that an omen?

The hard part is choosing a server, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t pick the ideal one. They’re interconnected really well. All the admins seem to be suffering a mild case of shock these days. If things coalesce in a few months, we can all get together somewhere.

I’ve found lots of interesting professors to follow. Humanities Commons runs its own Mastodon instance, invitation only, but they’ve had a really bad week for crashes.

Post.news

Been there: 1 day. Cost: complicated. Activity level: Garden hose.

Intended to be a place for grownups. You have to ask to join, but if they let me in they must not be too picky. (Write something interesting in the box where they ask you who you are; it helps.) People mostly use their real names. In terms of appearance, Post looks like Apple where Mastodon looks like Linux. It’s a private, for-profit company like Twitter that’s planning to make money off its users’ network.

The site is changing by the hour – things that were bugs this morning are fixed now. Supports markdown for formatting posts. The unique feature here is that you can tip the writer for a good post. 1 point is a US penny; everybody gets 50 of them to start with. This might be a good way to pay writers who only occasionally come into my sphere of interests. People here like my jokes. I had followers within a few hours of joining.

So far it’s mostly journalists, humorists, and people with cats and dogs. This might turn into my new “front page”.

Tom Hillman’s latest post cites C.S. Lewis citing Tolkien musing about the effect of living in one place and eating local produce for generations. Maybe, the musing goes, that is the source of hobbits’ apparent power to resist evil.

As it happens, I was just reading about the dangers of eating locally. William Albrecht wrote a famous paper⁶ about the sorry condition of the teeth of military recruits during World War 2. The men with the worst teeth were geographically concentrated in areas where the combination of soil mineralization and rainfall caused calcium deficiency. Eating locally was the source of the problem. In our modern food system, we eat food from all over, so this doesn’t happen so often.

But then it struck me: I’ve never heard of the Native Americans who originally lived in the Appalachians having dental problems. Google Scholar only finds a few skeletons, explicitly described as anomalous. Bad teeth are found in only the descendants of European colonists. Eliot’s line about how ‘We are synthetic men, uprooted’ seems to be applicable in more places than just the Shire.

My favorite part of the Amazon “Rings of Power” series so far is when Disa is explaining how Dwarves understand the rocks around them. She sings to the rocks, and the way they resonate to her song tells her about the composition inside them, so she knows where to dig.

This resonates with me, too, because I worked in ultrasonic materials-characterization at NASA back in my salad days. That’s exactly how we did it. The speed of sound in rock is around 6,000 m/s and in gold it’s about 3,200 m/s, so this would definitely work. Wherever her song hit a vein of gold, the change in the speed of propagation means sound waves would refract and reflect back to the singer.

It also tells us something about Dwarves that we didn’t know before. Some background: The speed of a wave is equal to the wavelength times the frequency. The smallest feature you can identify with sound waves is about a wavelength in size. If Disa is a soprano, she can sing a note that’s about 1100 Hertz, which means she can’t hear anything in the rock smaller than 5.4 meters across, which is about 18 feet. That’s not very useful; she must be able to sing higher than that. You could do a lot with notes 10 times that high. A seam of ore is frequently a foot wide.  Maybe she can sing 10-20 kHz. That’s the top end of what humans can hear, but it’s well within a dog’s range. Dwarf women and dogs might get along well.

Domesticated animal

Real precision work will take more, though. The head of a rock-hammer is about 2 cm across. It would be more useful to find things that size. To hear something that small, she’ll need to sing about 300 kilohertz. That’s too high even for bats, who max out at 200 kHz, but there are clever things you can do to improve resolution if you have more than one transmitter. Disa is certainly doing something like that, since she’s talking about a song, not just a note. She could be accompanied by a bat chorus. Just like humans keep chickens in a coop near the house, Dwarves might keep a cave of bats near their own excavation to help with surveying.

Conclusions

1. We don’t know anything about female Dwarves because not only are they rarely seen, they’re impossible to hear.
2. People who compose film music for Dwarves that is dominated by bass notes have it all backwards.