Dancing with the Internet

1. Another "earth-like" planet bites the dust.

A trinary star system. Alpha Centauri AB, a double star, on left; Beta Centauri on right; Proxima Centauri, circled in red is at 5:00 relative to Alph.

Too bad, because it's real close by, circling Proxima Centauri (the "proxima" is a dead give-away), the closest star to ours. The planet is only 30% more massive than earth (1.3 earths) and circles Prox within its "habitable" zone. Alas, there is more to "earth-like" than size and distance from its sun. It has to be the right kind of sun. Prox is a red dwarf. (No, not that Red Dwarf.) Which means the planet must orbit real close to the star (0.05 AU), and hence whirl real fast (1 year = 11.2 earth-days). This probably puts it into tidal lock, with one side always facing the star and the other in perpetual night. Red dwarves are stable, but given to periodic petulant outbursts: X-ray flares that could strip water vapor from the atmosphere and sterilize the sunside of the planet.

Yeah, earth-like.

2. Was the Early Universe Cream of Wheat or Oatmeal?

Robert Scherrer, a cosmologist at Vanderbilt, wonders how lumpy the early universe was.

3. The Madness Continues

I bet you didn't know that data and statistics were racist. Neither did TOF! And yet, according to a "discipline" called "QuantCrit" and "Critical Race Theory", which sound awfully serious and academicalistic, they apparently are.

Quantitative research enjoys heightened esteem among policy-makers, media, and the general public. Whereas qualitative research is frequently dismissed as subjective and impressionistic, statistics are often assumed to be objective and factual. We argue that these distinctions are wholly false; quantitative data is no less socially constructed than any other form of research material. The first part of the paper presents a conceptual critique of the field with empirical examples that expose and challenge hidden assumptions that frequently encode racist perspectives beneath the façade of supposed quantitative objectivity. The second part of the paper draws on the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to set out some principles to guide the future use and analysis of quantitative data. These ‘QuantCrit’ ideas concern (1) the centrality of racism as a complex and deeply rooted aspect of society that is not readily amenable to quantification; (2) numbers are not neutral and should be interrogated for their role in promoting deficit analyses that serve White racial interests; (3) categories are neither ‘natural’ nor given and so the units and forms of analysis must be critically evaluated; (4) voice and insight are vital: data cannot ‘speak for itself’ and critical analyses should be informed by the experiential knowledge of marginalized groups; (5) statistical analyses have no inherent value but can play a role in struggles for social justice.

-- David Gillborn, Paul Warmington & Sean Demack. "QuantCrit: education, policy, ‘Big Data’ and principles for a critical race theory of statistics." (Race Ethnicity and Education, Vol. 21, 2018 - Issue 2: QuantCrit:Rectifying Quantitative Methods Through Critical Race Theory.)

Reading between the lines, TOF suspects the authors are writing about quantitative analysis in something called social "sciences," and in this TOF actually agrees with them. As Daniel Dennett observed regarding efforts to study "religion" in the social "sciences,"

There can be no science of any hard empirical variety when the very act of identifying one’s object of study is already an act of interpretation, contingent on a collection of purely arbitrary reductions, dubious categorizations, and biased observations. 

which is essentially the same complaint as made by Gillborn et al. Of course, to them, it is all in service to white (is there any other kind?) racism. When your only tool is a hammer, everything becomes a nail, and one can never expect a paper appearing in a journal entitle Race Ethnicity and Education to discover a case of no racism!

However, TOF disagrees with them that reified numbers are themselves racist, let alone that we may "interrogate" them. One may as well call genes "selfish." LOL. It is entirely possible that data are used by racists -- we note that all three co-authors are white and therefore, ipso facto, racists (though TOF notices a deficit among those who find society "deeply rooted" in racism to include themselves among those entangled in those roots); but it is more likely that their confreres have been using statistics ineptly in an effort to imitate real scientists. Their efforts to measure the immeasurable are cute, but calling a questionnaire an "instrument" does not make it the equivalent of a micrometer or a telescope.

It is not likely that confirmation bias has allowed the authors to see that this applies equally well to "studies" of religious believers, "free will," Republicans, conservatives, or any other targets of their colleagues' gimlet eyes.

4. A Lament for Canada

By David Warren may sound familiar to more southern [USAn] ears. The whole is worth reading.

We confront today a State which has taken upon itself an interventionist rôle in every aspect of daily life; which claims an authority far beyond that of the Church in the most remote theocratic corner of the Dark Ages. And through modern technology, neutral in itself, the State has acquired absolute power to enforce its authority and its whims.

We have what I now call the State as Twisted Nanny, imposing her insatiable will on the motherless children of our post-modern orphanage, now that the traditional family is largely destroyed. Twisted Nanny treats her “clients” as wayward children, of no individual significance, and with “rights” only insofar as they are organized in groups for whining, and need to be bought off. 

-- David Warren, "News to a foreign country" (Essays in Idleness)

Commenting on the "media," he goes on to say:

"I would call very few of my former [journalist] colleagues Leftists or fanatics of any kind, or even uncritical supporters of the mainstream progressive agenda. In private, many will utter things that would explode the heads of the politically correct — if they were listening. But first they look around to see who is listening. That caution, about being overheard, is a sign of our times.
###
Never expect the agents of publicity to be on your side; think one step ahead of them, instead. They won’t be on your side today or tomorrow, or until the day that you win everything, and even then, they won’t be on your side. For they will be on the side of power and comfort, as they always were. If the whole country turned Mediaeval Catholic, tomorrow morning, they would kneel and take up their Rosaries; and have as much faith as they had the day before."

 5. Le Steampunk Ancien

Mark Koyama, an economist at George Mason University specializing in economic history, law and economics and institutional economics, enthralled by an alt-hist novel, Kingdom of the Wicked by Helen Dale, asks, "Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?"

The short answer is, "Of course not." The rather longer answer, by Mr. Koyama, is "Sure could have!" He writes:

"Dale forces us to consider Jesus as a religious extremist in a Roman world not unlike our own. The novel throws new light on our own attitudes to terrorism, globalization, torture, and the clash of cultures. It is highly recommended."

Well, whatever. When the only mental tool you have is a hammer, all of history is full of nails. Another possibility is that Jesus was of no particular secular consequence at the time, and it was Rome that was into torture and globalization, and wrt to the Jews [and the Gauls] was on a roll clash-of-cultures-wise. Not to mention the Persians. with whom they were more-or-less in a permanent state of clash.

Mention is made of Heron of Alexandria's invention of the "steam engine" in Early Imperial times and suggests that this did not catch on because the vast number of slaves meant human labor never lost its economic comparative advantage, almost as if Progress™ were a given unless something "impedes" it. This analysis loses its charm when we realize that Heron's aeolipile was not in fact an engine of any sort. That is, it could not do work, for the excellent reason that the arts of metallurgy were not sufficiently advanced to produce steam boilers sufficient to retain the necessary pressures to drive jack. Prior art matters. 

Dale, a lawyer, speculates that an early industrial revolution might have been realized had Archimedes not been killed during Marcellus' sack of Syracus. But this supposes that Archimedes was an inventor of some practical kind based on yarns about his inventions during the siege, some of which are downright fantastical. Now, these gadgets had been built well before to illustrate theorems in geometry and just happened to be sitting there when the Romans showed up. Others had done so in ages past, only to be denounced by Plato for involving base matter in what should have been the pure spiritual pursuit of geometry. In Plutarch's Life of Marcellus (written ca. AD 75 about events that took place in 212 BC) we find the source for these stories and learn that:

Yet Archimedes possessed so high a spirit, so profound a soul, and such treasures of scientific knowledge, that though these inventions had now obtained him the renown of more than human sagacity, he yet would not deign to leave behind him any commentary or writing on such subjects; but, repudiating as sordid and ignoble the whole trade of engineering, and every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit, he placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life; studies, the superiority of which to all others is unquestioned, and in which the only doubt can be whether the beauty and grandeur of the subjects examined, of the precision and cogency of the methods and means of proof, most deserve our admiration. 

 IOW, it is unlikely whether, had he lived, Archimedes would have been the Spark of an Industrial Revolution. The mental attitudes were not there. He certainly had not been so up to then. As Brian Stock wrote in "Science, Technology, and Economic Progress in the Early Middle Ages," [the Roman’s] "daily experience led him to believe that nature’s forces could be imitated, even placated; he was less sure they could be understood." In the same essay he adds, "The failure of Greece and Rome to increase productivity through innovation is as notorious as the inability of historians from Gibbon to the present to account for it."

Tabclearing Day

An Unbelievable Item Found on the Web

"Text messages between FBI investigators, include one in which an agent said he could “smell” the Trump supporters at Walmart."

Now, what is unbelievable about this text is not that the FBI investigator shows clear prior bias about the subject of an investigation, but that he admits to having entered a Walmart at some point and mixed with people who were not graduates of Northeastern Establishment universities! Who would've thunk it! Imagine the cooties he might have acquired from the Great Unwashed proletarians!

Watch That First Step, It's a Doozy!

Chaos Manor reprints Jerry Pournelle's blog posts on SSTO. Much of this was background fodder for TOF's Firestar series.

Once and Future Power Source

A new paper, Nuclear Power Learning and Deployment Rates: Disruption and Global Benefits Forgone, finds that nuclear power could now be around 10% of current cost, and have avoided up to 10 million deaths and 164 Gt CO2 between 1980 and 2015, if not for disruption to progress in the late 1960s and rapidly escalating costs since.

A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight

We've been having a lot of wildfires lately. Or at least better publicized ones.

"A pronounced decrease in fire frequency occurred at the time of Euro-American settlement, coinciding approximately with the arrival of railroads, intensive livestock grazing, removal of many Native American populations, and subsequently organized and mechanized fire fighting by government agencies."

“Multiscale perspectives of fire, climate and humans in western North America and the Jemez Mountains, USA” by Thomas W. Swetnam et al. in Phil Trans B, 5 June 2016.

Two reasons suggested for recent (since 1980s) increases: habitat preservation laws preventing the clearance of brushwood (a.k.a. "tinder") from around houses, esp. in CA.; and second, increases in houses in scenic yet problematical sites.

Could Rome Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

The short answer of course is No. A longer answer, given in an alternate history novel, is yes because if it were no, there would be no novel.

Dale locates her Roman Industrial Revolution in the early and mid-2nd century BCE, before the large-scale influx of slaves from the conquests of Greece, Carthage, and Gaul. The Middle Republic provides a window in which, she argues, it is plausible to imagine a machine-based culture taking root. In the world Dale envisions, an industrialized Roman empire then follows a British-style path towards a constitutional monarchy (under Augustus).

The technological development path, she describes, sees the Romans push ahead in medicine and biology. In this scenario, Rome benefits from a technology trajectory that takes place in the absence of Christianity with its prohibition on dissecting human bodies. A point of tension in the novel is the Roman occupier’s sanguine building of an abortion clinic in Jerusalem, simply because this is what Romans have at home; they do not — and did not — consider abortion wrong. Here I want to ask: What do these reflections tell us about the possibilities of economic growth in the premodern world?

How you can have a "machine-based culture" along the British model before developing a metallurgy capable of steam boilers is an intriguing thought-experiment. And it was not the massive influx of slaves from the Punic and Gallic wars that shifted the ancient world to the use of muscle power as a source of energy. It had always been that way. If not slaves, then animals. It was the early Middle Ages that saw the shift to mechanical power.

It was the pagan Romans, not the Christians, who had the horror of touching dead bodies and maintained a special college of priests for the sole purpose of ritually touching the dead to free the body for the undertakers. The Christians never had the prohibition mentioned, save to the extent that many of them were themselves Romans to begin with. The medical schools of the Middle Ages  began doing medical dissections and noticed that Galen had gotten things wrong -- because Galen had gotten his anatomy from dissecting pigs.

The idea that the Romans had abortion clinics is absurd. The storied sexual liberties of the Romans applied only to Those Who Could Not Say No -- slaves, lower class women, young boys. Women of their own class were another matter, and were subject to a pretty rigorous control of their sexual lives. Abortion in that day and age was rather risky to the mother, and not used lightly. However, as a form of genocide directed against inferior races, as envisioned by Sanger and others in the Modern Age, it is imaginable, were it not for the nature of Imperial Law. (see next Item.)

Don't Make Me Tell You Twice!

"The Roman Empire was still rather ramshackle in its administration of laws compared to later states. Laws of this kind usually began as a suggestio: a report or statement of a situation needing attention. Officials in the Imperial consistory would then meet and frame a response and, if this response was acceptable to various counsellors and advisers, it would be submitted to the emperor for approval. It would then be distributed to the praetorian prefects, who often added amendments and additions, and then distributed by them to regional governors, who in turn could add to it or amend it to fit local conditions. Finally, it was up to these local officials to see the edict implemented and to enforce it as much as they could. This all meant that what began as a statement of the emperor’s desire could get watered down as it passed down the administrative chain and could also be largely unenforced if the local prefect or diocesan governor was not enthusiastic about the decree. And even if he was, many of these broad statements were very difficult to enforce with any uniformity. As a result, what various laws and decrees said and what actually happened on the ground were often two very different things. The fact that some laws of this kind had to be repeated several or even many times shows that subsequent emperors recognised that previous decrees had gone essentially unenforced and there was often little they could do about this."

-- Tim O'Neil History for Atheists.

Why do we always imagine pre-modern states as having all the moxie and wherewithal of our modern scientific states?

Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Why some discussions are lost before they are engaged.

Rule Number One

Keith Burgess-Jackson offers six items of sound advice, each both prudential and moral. Here is #1:

Don't touch a woman without her specific consent. Consent, to be consent, must be informed. Don't resort to trickery, subterfuge, dissimulation, or manipulation (including getting her drunk or high).

The Maverick Philosopher would add a qualification: ...unless she is your wife and you have a loving relationship. (And if you don't share a loving relationship, why are you still married to her?)

The Usual Suspects had much to say about the Veep when he said he would not dine alone with a woman not his wife, offering all sorts of misogynistic reasons for such a policy. The one reason never proffered was that the woman could not then come back years later claiming she had been harassed or touched.

TOF is also struck by the thought that if only men had comported themselves in accordance with the precepts of Christian morality that were abandoned in the 1960s, many of the movers and shakers in Hollywood and politics could have saved themselves considerable obloquy when the inevitable counter-revolution came about and the sexual Robespierres got sent to their own guillotines.

Buy everyone will notice that no one -- accuser or accused -- can think of any words more severe in description than "inappropriate" to describe behaviors like sexual harassment or sexual assault or even rape.

Edward Skidelsky wrote in "Words that Think for Us" (Prospect Magazine 18 Nov 2009) that modern society avoids explicit moral language.  Words like "improper and indecent" have been replaced by words like “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” "An affair between a teacher and a pupil that was once improper is now inappropriate."  
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=indecent%2C+inappropriate&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cindecent%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cinappropriate%3B%2Cc0

But improper and indecent express moral judgements, while inappropriate and unacceptable suggest the breach of some social convention. Such “non-judgemental” forms of speech are tailored to a society wary of explicit moral language.  Skidelsky writes that liberals "seek only adherence to rules of the game, not agreement on fundamentals. What was once an offense against decency must be recast as something akin to a faux pas."

"But this new, neutralised language does not spell any increase in freedom. When I call your action indecent, I state a fact that can be controverted. When I call it inappropriate, I invoke an institutional context—one which, by implication, I know better than you. ... This is what makes the new idiom so sinister. Calling your action indecent appeals to you as a human being; calling it inappropriate asserts official power."

And note, too: "As liberal pluralists, we seek only adherence to rules of the game, not agreement on fundamentals."  Note how this rejects the Western idea of conscience (synderesis) and hearkens back to the old non-Western definition of good behavior as adherence to statutes promulgated by the Father-figure in the palace. 

Lest We Forget

AIDS is still around. New Diagnoses in 2016 per the CDC

Note: MSM means men having sex with men. These are not always gay or bisexual men. Men in prison being an example.
https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/overview/ataglance.html

Nota Bene: This is not a "How To" manual

On Evil

Yale Beats Up on Itself for Not Beating Up on Itself Enough.

The Manhattan Contrarian has noted some intriguing email. 

Yale has long championed its commitment to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, to building a faculty and student body that respect the multicultural reality of the world around us and a community where everyone feels valued and welcomed. But while these beliefs are laudable, they have not always translated into meaningful and lasting policy and action. In late 2015, students of color and their allies voiced their frustration that inequity on campus and a lack of focus by the administration on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) meant the university was falling far short of its ideals.

-- Yale DEI Report

 The best they can come up with is a claim that there has been a "lack of focus" -- on the very issues as to which Yale has for decades been demonstrably not only focused, but obsessed.

-- The Manhattan Contrarian

And the recommendations do flow, and flow, and flow.  Like: 

•     Commit to becoming a leader in DEI in the eld of higher education!
•     Engage young alumni and alumni of color!
•     Promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in all levels of AYA leadership!
•     Build a bridge between current and future alumni in tackling DEI issues!
•     Build infrastructure to continue to champion and implement DEI work!

Anyone familiar with management boilerplate and blatherskath will recognize these bullet points as being full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. None of them are stated in terms that can even be objectively verified to determine whether they have been achieved or even to measure whether progress has been made. Yale will "engage" young alumni of color! She will "build a bridge"! Before you suspect that the latter will involve structural engineering, simmer down. Nothing so difficult will ever sully the mind of people who engage in such projects.

The Contrarian notes that "there doesn't seem to be anything in that list that they weren't already doing and talking about endlessly for the last 50 years." Faithful Reader may be forgiven for a moment's doubt in supposing that a renewed commitment to talking about it some more is going to change anything.

The March of the Tabs

March comes in like a lion, the proverb says, and this is surely true of the march of the tabs, which have accumulated unpruned on TOF's tab-bar over the unruly winter months, frozen on the branches like cherry blossoms in global warming. Hereunder, with appropriately short shrift:

1. "Everything Old is New Again" Remember the torrential rains in California this past winter? The following article appeared in Scientific American back in 2013:

THE INTENSE RAINSTORMS SWEEPING IN FROM the Pacific Ocean began to pound central California on Christmas Eve in 1861 and continued virtually unabated for 43 days. The deluges quickly transformed rivers running down from the Sierra Nevada mountains along the state’s eastern border into raging torrents that swept away entire communities and mining settlements. The rivers and rains poured into the state’s vast Central Valley, turning it into an inland sea 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. Thousands of people died, and one quarter of the state’s estimated 800,000 cattle drowned. Downtown Sacramento was submerged under 10 feet of brown water filled with debris from countless mudslides on the region’s steep slopes. California’s legislature, unable to function, moved to San Francisco until Sacramento dried out—six months later. By then, the state was bankrupt. 

It gives the usual nod to "but this time the rains will be worse because global warming blah-blah-blah," but it's hard to overlook the pre-emptive catatastrophes that look so much like those of today.  

However, when the "rivers in the sky" were reported during the California deluge this winter, none of this background was reported. This was not likely because they wished to conceal the context, but because the needed more air-time for commercials. These days, you may notice they sometimes don't have enough time to complete a sentence. 

2. La Grande Scazzottata Copernica is up. If you read Italian, enjoy it.

Some Miscellany

William Harley and Arthur Davidson (1914).

h/t Cousin Tom

Now, This is Kool

https://www.facebook.com/thisisinsider/videos/1538237373150322/?pnref=story

Just in Case You Thought It Was Something New

    War always brings with it an increased price of necessary living
commodities. The War of 1812 was no exception to this inflexible consequence.
Sugar reached thirty-five cents a pound, coffee was forty cents, and all classes
of cotton and woolen goods commanded prices as high in proportion. ...
  

More Odds and Ends

Today, TOF presents for your delight a Quote of the Day, a Science! Marches On!, and a Statistical Puzzle for you to solve, among the usual sundry miscellany.

Quote of the Day

"An enemy is just a friend who wants to kill you." – Doug TenNapel

 

Elephant in the Room

"Boko Haram has been carrying out atrocities for years. The group has murdered thousands and caused thousands more to flee. It has burned churches with people inside them; it has massacred people in the streets. But until now, the Western media has paid little attention. Why the change?

Here’s a possible explanation: the majority of Boko Haram’s targets and victims have been Christians—according to one estimate, something like 60%. In fact, 60% may understate things. Boko Haram considers schools and places of entertainment  “Christian” institutions, so one should see attacks on those places as part of an anti-Christian campaign as well. In fact, although it hasn’t been widely reported, Chibok is a predominantly Christian city, and most of the kidnapped schoolgirls are Christians. That was the point."

-- Mark Movsesian, "Choose Your Victims Well"

The term "boko" is derived from the English word "book."  "Haram" means "unclean."

Revenge of the Scotsman

A: “All fish breathe through gills rather than lungs.”
B: “But whales are fish, and they breathe through their lungs.”
A: “Whales may look and seem like fish, but they aren’t truly fish because they breathe through their lungs.”

-- Amod Lele, "The No True Fish Fallacy"

Think about this one the next time someone tries to pull the "No True Scotsman Fallacy" fallacy. There are formal fallacies and material fallacies, and the latter are only fallacies depending on the matter of the proposition, not the form.

We Were Expecting an Auto Race

"Cycling Event Kicks Off Bike Month in Toronto"--headline, CityNews.ca, May 26

Despite

"Despite Enrollment Success, Healthcare Law Still Unpopular"--headline, Gallup.com, May 29

What if They Gave a Winter Olympics and Nobody Came Because They Had No Place to Go

"No Countries Want to Host the 2022 Olympics"--headline, ABCNews.com, May 28

Science!™ Makes Astonishing Breakthrough

"Tired All the Time? Maybe You Need More Sleep"--headline, Philly.com, May 29

A New Concept of Bipartisanship

h/t Mark Shea

At a recent commencement speech at West Point, President Obama called for closing Gitmo and blasted the U.S. for spying on innocent civilians.  We need to find out who's been president all that time.

No Sh*t?

"U.N. Vows to Eliminate Open Defecation by 2025"--headline, Inter Press Service, May 28

They're going to... "eliminate" it...

Science Marches On!

"Does Porn Affect the Brain? Scientists Urge More Study"--headline, Agence France-Presse, May 29

Computers Are Taking Over!

"New 'Electric Brain' Records Store Sales, Gives Receipts"

--headline, Reading (Pa.) Eagle, Jan. 24, 1938

Solve the Statistics Puzzle! It's Fun, Boys and Girls!

"More than half of the world's 671 million obese people live in the U.S., China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Germany, Pakistan and Indonesia."

-- Bloomberg.com May 28 2014

All Time Favorites

According to Blogger, this is the list of all-time most-viewed posts on the TOF Spot

Entry	Pageviews
Adam and Eve and Ted and Alice Sep 1, 2011, 40 comments	10,103
Statistics, Obamas, and Internet Memes Feb 13, 2012, 37 comments	3,508
De evolutione evolutionis Oct 5, 2011, 16 comments	2,127
A Darwinist Mob? Mar 15, 2013, 18 comments	1,926
The Passing of the Age of Reason May 4, 2013, 50 comments	1,919
The Masque of Science. May 5, 2012, 17 comments	1,797
Even More Ethically Fraught Jul 19, 2012, 7 comments	1,781
Commentary on Jerry Oltion Apr 2, 2012, 45 comments	1,749
Finality vs. Efficiency Sep 18, 2011, 6 comments	1,638
Bambi vs. Godzilla May 13, 2012, 33 comments	1,583

The Feast of All Saints

 

This is a reprint of a post from two years ago in Live Journal.

Everyone thinks this is the Irish Feis Samhain, which began at sunset on 31 Oct and that the Church co-opted the date.  However, the  feast "in honor of all the saints in heaven" was originally 13 May, and Pope Gregory III (d. 741) moved it to 1 Nov to mark the dedication day of All Saints Chapel in St. Peter’s at Rome.  There was no connection to distant Irish customs, and the parishioners of St. Peter would not likely have been beguiled by it.  Not until the 840s, did Pope Gregory IV declare All Saints to be a universal feast, not restricted to St. Peter's.  The holy day spread to Ireland.

The day a feast is the "vigil mass" and so after sunset on 31 Oct became "All Hallows Even" or "Hallowe’en."  It had no more significance than the "Vigil of St. Lawrence" or the "Vigil of John the Baptist" or any of the other vigils on the calendar.

In 998, St. Odilo, the abbot of the powerful monastery of Cluny in Southern France, added a celebration on Nov. 2. This was a day of prayer for "the souls of all the faithful departed." This feast, called All Souls Day, spread from France to the rest of Europe.

That took care of Heaven and Purgatory.  The Irish, being the Irish, thought it unfair to leave the souls in Hell out.  So on Hallowe'en they would bang pots and pans to let the souls in Hell know they were not forgotten.  However, the Feast of All Damned never caught on, for fairly obvious theological reasons.  The Irish, however, had another day for partying.

How Long Does It Take

to fix a highway?

Depends on how big the earthquake is, right?

The Translation of Thomas Aquinas

Today is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas.  Do something logical in his honor. 

Now properly speaking, it is the feast of his translation; that is, when his remains were moved (28 January, 1369) from the site of his death to the Dominican Church in Toulouse.  Just as the Marines do not leave a man behind, neither do the Dominicans. 

The feast was initially celebrated, as is traditional, on 7 March, the data of his death, and is so-listed in older missals.  However, this resulted in what is called a "clashing of feasts," since 7 March was also the date on which Perpetua and Felicity were martyred.  The Feast of St. Thomas demoted them to a Commemoration.  So in 1969, Tom was moved to his translation date and Perpetua and Felicity restored to a place of greater honor.  (They are, after all, among those mentioned in the roll call of the ancient Roman Canon used in the Mass.) 

Oddly enough, there were no festivities in the streets today.  But then this is no longer the age of reason that the middle ages were.  There is a humorous comment on that situation, here. 

+ + +

However, the Angelic Doctor keeps turning up in odd places, often accompanied by his old pal the Stagerite.  Today's unexpected appearance is here: Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas

The Meaning of Thanksgiving

in Greek is εὐχαριστία (eukharistia) or Eucharist. 

There is a school of thought in the US, often called "rugged individualism" in which the individual (envisioned as "rugged", usually male and adult) claims that he stands in a grand and solitary isolation, owing no-but nothing to no one.  He is under no obligation to others, and words like altruism, generosity, charity, and so forth are hurtful to his ears. 

This is nonsense, of course.