Friends, Romans, countrymen

11:02AM - Not a Turkey, Nor a Turkey Vulture

5:04PM - Perisan Fire, Chapters 4 & 5

Tom Holland, Persian Fire; Chapters 4 and 5, "Athens" and "Singing the King of Persia's Beard:"

Holland describes the intricacies of the Athenian state, mainly before the advent of democracy when Athens discarded any hope of eunomia with the promise of isenomia. The last paragraph deals with Athenian ambassadors who "gave a gift of Earth and Water" to Darius. The Athenians censured them, but didn't send word to their new lord and master that they weren't particularly pleased about all this.

In Chapter 5, we hear up to the Battle of Marathon, with some additional Spartan politics (mostly, the Spartans seem to have voted with their knives). Cleomenes got all the best lines, including one that should have been in a recent movie. Too bad he was murdered before Darius really got going. Frank Miller would have had an even better story to tell.

The prose is good, and the story is fun. The anachronisms do detract somewhat, making a reasonably interesting history into a puerile metaphor for the Iraq war. The thing that saves it is that Holland can't decide which actor is the US, so when someone does something he doesn't like, Spartan, Athenian, or Persia, he compares the feelings he imagines them to have to Bush's rhetoric.

We get to hear about the Persian "Shock and Awe" campaign and "fifth columnists"* betray Eretria. Someone is called a "Freedom Fighter." The Spartans were "terrorists" to the Persians, although no meaningful reason was given. Obviously, the asterisk indicates that I don't remember the best examples (I only read about twenty pages today), and that not all of the anachronisms are from the past decade.

The Persians, however, were objectively terrorists. In his treatment of Miletus, including the desecration of temples and castration of the boys-Darius shows himself to be a terrorist's terrorist-serving it Stalin side up with a rasher of genocide.

3:33AM

Q: Which is worse, movers fondling you or having the elevator break just before they get the piano out of your third-floor apartment?

edit: what is worst of all is when you get your apartment manager to call the elevator repair guy and he actually gets out there within an hour and then actually fixes it in another hour and then yet another hour later your molesty movers come back load the piano up on the dolly shove it in the elevator and then it breaks again. GOODBYE PIANO I am giving up on you, I am selling it back to the sleazy piano dealership whence it came because they will pay me for the privilege of taking it down three flights of stairs, perhaps they will give me just about enough to buy a new pair of shoes. (I need a new pair of shoes.)

EVERYTHING IN MY LIFE IS VERY DIFFICULT.

1:44PM - The Village, Chapters 14-16

Bing West, The Village; Chapters 14-16, "Work Very Hard-Never Look Tired:"

After the combined attack by the viet cong sappers and the NVA battalion on the the little fort-a farm house surrounded by a bamboo fence-the VC claimed that the marines would turn tail and run, abandoning Binh Nghia to the communists. General Lowell English gave them that option. None of them took it; they were Marines.

Instead, the started patrolling and, since Sgt. Sullivan, their leader was dead, they received a new sergeant, Sgt. White. I hadn't really noticed it prior to this, but the four parts have coincided with the leadership of one or another figure: the Vietnamese assassin-policeman Lam (or perhaps, Cpl. Beebe), the informally attached Lt. O'Roarke, Sgt. Sullivan, and now, Sgt. White. White was able to rally the troops.

There were two important events here, one being the killing of the battalion's second in command in the village and a patrol where the marines and PFs, under the leadership of the PF Soung (their leader after Lam died; if he has a rank, I've forgotten it) killed a platoon's worth of vietnamese, forcing them out of the area. The marines also had to deal with a "sniper team," really an band of assassins considering that they only seem to have killed people in their homes.

Finally, on Christmas Day, the VC attacked a mandatory, government-organized party while every man, woman, and child was in attendance with mortars from across the river. This is very odd, since so many VC were from the village. The first two mortars were duds, the third exploded far away in some rice paddy. After the first two, Sgt. White had called in some reinforcements, artillary and helicopters, which took care of the threat.

This was doubly bad for the VC: first, they were attacking a population (not good publicity), second, they didn't do any damage (alleviating any terror that was the whole point).

These episodes rewon the confidence of the villagers after the attack on the fort.

West explains why Binh Nghia was generally safe: economics. Both the village and the Phu Longs used the Tra Bong river. The advantages of Phu Long going to the VC, West suggests, must have come at the expense of Bing Nghia.

Something I wondered about was if Missy Top, mentioned earlier in the book, was really as anti-communist as West claimed. She'd been abducted and forced to be a VC "nurse" in the mountains; she'd escaped and slept in different places to keep the VC from recapturing her. Couldn't that be a ruse? Couldn't she be a spy?

Another young woman, who did laundry for some of the marines, was given that choice by the snipers in this chapter. She refused, her parents said afterwards, and so she was shot. "Nursing" didn't sound like a good idea to her.

A girl who was a favorite of Lcpl. Wingrove was the key to killing the second in command of the Phu Long VC. She was said to invite his guitar over, gratiously allowing him to tag along. Her name was Missy Tinh, and there are pictures of her in the book: I would have tagged along were I lucky enough to be in his boots. Her father was seen talking to the VC 2nd in command after curfew in the middle of the night, which started the long firefight and two fires. Her father was a VC spy.

And therefore, she must have been, too.

1:27PM

I encountered this sort of stuff twice:

Once, as district head for a third party in trying to get enough signatures to put some candidates on the ballot in 2000. We succeeded, but there was a lot of work driving down to the state capitol to verify them.

Then, when I was also a candidate in 2002 for state sentate, we were found out (after the deadline for filing) that the widget the secretary of state's office had us use to determine where people could run was invalid after redistricting. Somehow, the Republicans and Democrats knew before we received our new voter cards in the mail (which is how I found out). We lost a quarter of our candidates.

7:47AM - I've been about a bit

visited 40 states (80%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or determine the next president


visited 33 states (14.6%)
Create your own visited map of The World

5:53PM - The Village, Chapters 6-13

Bing West, The Village; Chapters 6-13, "Night Patrols" and "Defeat:"

The first of these sections, chapters 6-11, describe several months of patrolling. Incidents are common, but deaths are rare. The period corresponds to the time that a Lt. O'Rourke was attached to the unit. It gives a good background about different marines' and PFs' personalities. It lets you get to know them, with a lot of action peppered in.

Just in time, in chapters 12 and 13, to describe one night of hell where four of the marines, their corpsman, five of the PFs and a Vietnamese politician who had just been elected to the national assembly the day before were killed by a the sappers from a battalion of VC regulars who'd infiltrated the fort. There were several "errors:" the PFs assigned to cover the flank disappeared, only one marine was left on guard duty (the only one that survived), the support platoon didn't send a squad in until two hours after the attack.

A very nasty attack in the middle of the book.

5:27PM - The Great Wall of China, Chapter 11

Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China; Chapter 11, “The Wall Acquires New Meanings:”

Waldron ends the book discussing what people thought of the Great Wall.

Chinese opinion, from the Han on to the Communist era, preferred to think of the wall as a monument to the idiocy of tyranny. Both the Ch’in and the Ming walls proved useless and were regarded with the same suspicion. Waldron traces a snippet of verse that appeared in many poems throughout the Han dynasties:

If a son is born, mind you don’t raise him!
If a girl is born, feed her dried meat.
Don’t you see just below the Long Wall
Dead men’s skeletons prop each other up.

He also discusses the story of Meng Chiang-nu, a woman who went looking for her husband, as conscript laborer, bringing him warm clothes for the winter. She finds that he is dead and buried in the wall. She cries and wails, the wall opens up, his corpse is revealed, and she takes it home for a proper burial. It turns out the story doesn’t include any reference to a long wall at all until about a thousand years ago, although its antecedents can be traced more than twice as far back.

The Ming were aware of these traditions, and critiques of these stories were used to slyly criticize the Ming in their project at the time, and helped deride it in the Ch’ing era.

The glorification of the wall began in Europe. Early travelers didn’t see the wall and what they heard of it was bad, but references in the middle ages and from Islamic scholars tend to conflate the wall with the one purportedly built by Alexander in the Caucasus (as mentioned in the introduction). The philosophes, however, used the wall as a symbol of stuff, Voltaire among them (although he vacillated about what exactly that was). Still, it was decided that the Great Wall was one of the most amazing things in the history of history, and all that.

The Chinese didn’t buy it until the Republican period. Most significantly, the revolutionary impulse in the Republican period. Mao used the wall as a symbol for China both in his wartime propaganda and in the early years of the PRC. When Mao’s personality cult developed, he reduced its significance, but it resurged in importance in the early 70s when Mao was worried about being compared to the first emperor of China, who killed lots of people and burned lots of books—just like Mao. So, Chinese history was changed so that the Ch’in became heroes to the point that children were told to write essays describing the faults of Meng Chiang-nu in her mourning. I haven’t asked Y. about this; I know she’s familiar with the story. She may be too young to have participated.

The wall became even more important after Mao’s death. Without the personality cult to keep it together China needed a raison d’etre. The history of the wall provided a symbol of the nation that would allow a European-type blood and soil nationalism to develop.

Not that we see any signs of that in China twenty years after the publication of Waldron’s book.

11:34AM - Dimensional Analysis, Chapters 4 & 6

HE Huntley, Dimensional Analysis; Chapters 4 and 6, “Simple Examples” and “Vector Lengths: Examples:”

I thought what I discussed last time with this book was a little unclear: what does it mean, length having a vector dimension? How does it work? So, I’ve decided to reproduce two of Huntley’s examples. First, the Nicholson hydrometer discussed with dimensional analysis, then Huntley’s use of vector dimensions for the same problem two chapters later.

The problem in both cases is the same: Find an expression for the time of vibration of a Nicholson hydrometer of mass M when the instrument floating in a liquid…is given a small downward displacement and then released, supposing the cross-section of the neck of the instrument is s and the density of the liquid is ρ.

We’ve been given four of the variables to begin with. Since the downward displacement is small, we don’t have to worry about it. The dimensions of the time, mass, cross-section and density are T, M, L², and ML^-3, respectively. T means time, M means mass, and L means Length. We’ll note that there is no explicit coupling between the time of vibration and the rest of the variables. The acceleration due to gravity is implied; it has the dimensions LT^-2, solving our problem. So, we make a table of the variables:

Physical Quantity	Symbol	Dimensional Formula
Time of Vibration	t	T
Mass of Hydrometer	m	M
Cross-Section of Neck	s	L2
Density of Liquid	ρ	ML-3
Graviational Acceleration	g	LT-2

We can express this as a very general equation,

t = C m^as^bρ^cg^d

which has a dimensional equation

T = M^a+cL^2b+d-3cT^-2d

We can now equate the powers of the dimensions, giving us d = -1/2 immediately, and a = -c. b = -3a/2+1/4.

This leaves us with a model

t = C (s^1/2)/g)^1/2(M/ρs^3/2)^a

We don’t have enough equations to get rid of all our unknowns.
So, we try it again with the vector dimensions, starting with our table

Physical Quantity	Symbol	Dimensional Formula
Time of Vibration	t	T
Mass of Hydrometer	m	M
Cross-Section of Neck	s	Lx Ly
Density of Liquid	ρ	M Lx-1 Ly-1 Lz-1
Graviational Acceleration	g	LzT-2

Using the same starting equation, we have the dimensional formula

T = M^a+c L_x^b-c L_y^b-c L_z^d-cT^-2d

Again, we immediately have d = -1/2, but the condition on L_z means that c is also -1/2, and the conditions on L_x and L_y (which are degenerate and could have caused problems) have b = -1/2, and the condition on M means a = 1/2.
So, we have the equation

t = c(M/sρg)^1/2,

although we’d need to do real mathematics to discover that C = 2π, this shows the power involved.

I should take back what I said about Szirtes. I found this problem (for which he references himself in 1999) in his 52 examples at the back of the book; afterwards, I found section 16.3 which descibes this method (it's about seven chapters past where I stopped reading Szirtes). In a few of the examples, a subset of the ones I see in Huntley, he uses “directional dimensions” like these, although they’re downward meters and transverse meters rather than lengths (the only thing I don’t like about his book is that he gets the role of unit and dimension reversed). He does do it more elegantly than I do it here (which, I think, is how Huntley did it) by using only the transverse direction and the downward direction.

Despite what I don't like about Szirtes, it is a very good book (as I said in the initial reviews), once you understand units and dimensions and can correct for his errors.

I also read chapter 7, which gets into the Reynolds number and some other topics in fluid flow.

10:16AM - less than 24 hours. that must be a new land-speed record for bullshit

I have read about cultures where, if you have something good or important, you never praise it in public. A passing demon might hear you, become jealous of your luck and break or spoil the thing that you are so happy about.

I don't even believe in demons. You'd think that would be enough to get them to not fuck with me.




...





Hrmmm.

"Hey all the credit card debt I have from the trip - isn't it great! I'm really loving that bit!"

5:28PM - EPIC! update

Still battling post-travel piles of laundry, cleaning camping gear, sorting bills, refilling the fridge and otherwise trying to get back to normal life. Getting out of the car on Tuesday night and getting up for work at 5 AM on Wednesday Did. Not. Help.

The road trip was built out of awesome. We never get to do all the things on the itinerary, but we did enough really cool shit to make it a week of solid fun. Write-up and photos to follow. Some day. Honest. Along with the California trip we did in February. :-p

Convergence in Tampa was arguably the best one yet. As usual I didn't get to hang out with nearly as many cool people as I wanted to, but the fact that there was nothing but cool people there definitely made it easier. Bob and Rafe, you have re-kindled something that a lot of us old farts thought was over for good.

For bonus points on our trip home we briefly got to abuse the hospitality of the_tsm and his charming wife. We sang for our supper with tales of the Creation Museum and Graceland Too.

Work is kicking my ass, but in a good way

I haven't been this content and happy in... In...

Um.

*eyes the universe suspiciously*

You're up to something, aren't you?

What I'm listening to right this second: Dark Orchid

9:07AM

Thursday morning, um. Crap, it is already fading from my head. People showed up - two of our other hotelmates, noralise and missjanette. We arranged with the front desk to move rooms to get two adjoining rooms as we'd requested, and moved up to the 13th floor, where one of our rooms proved to be in the corner and have lots of delicious space, all the better for room partying. We asked them to move our minifridge, which we had stocked with food the previous day. They misunderstood and dumped the food, so we had to go to the store again. The elevators weren't running. We learned how to use the service elevators. We showed other people how to use the service elevators. I asked yet again at the front desk about my bag, and was told no, any bags they'd gotten had been sent up to rooms. Can we see an 'imcompetent hotel' theme here yet? Wait, it gets better.

So we decided, having time to kill, to take a drive out to the airport in the rental car and ask *them* what happened to my bag. Well, it had definitely arrived. And it definitely wasn't still sitting there. The nice lady at the desk called their delivery service. No, they didn't have it either, and, in fact, claimed they had delivered it to the hotel at 2pm the previous day, about when I'd originally told to expect it. So she called the hotel. The front desk told her, as they had told me 'no no, we don't have it.' 'But our delivery company delivered it!' she told them. And then they transferred her to 'guest services', apparently, where it turns out they did have it after all and had had it the whole time. *headdesk*

So we drive back to the hotel, and I find 'guest services' (a desk all of six feet away from checkin) and the guy takes me in the back and there, lo and behold, is my bag. When I inquire why they didn't take it up to my room and how they didn't seem to know it was there, he gives me some lameass answer about how it didn't have a tag. But! I had bag, and bag was good.

Met up with and said hi to other people over the course of the day, including blackavar, eveofdstruction, and sailorgloom. In the early evening we showed up to help stuff goody bags, and I met marchenland and someone gave me rum. Also met blackironcrown (*finally* It's only been how many years?) After that the plan was to hit up a local tiki bar, but when we wandered down there it seemed closed. One of the people we were with called our fearless organizer etcet on the phone and he directed us another couple blocks to a place called 'Wet Willies'. I begged an orange sharpie off someone and dragged edwards with me back up the street to put a sign with an arrow on the gate of the closed tiki bar, figuring not everyone has etcet's phone number. Wet Willies supplied me with an excellent frozen pina colada and some crabcake quesadilla thing and there was much hanging out until tiredness overcame us.

Summary, day 2: frozen drinks++, hotel--

11:19PM - transcendent suckiness

Befuddlement.



Princess Leia starts singing at about 1:50

4:18AM

The Grimoire Verum suggests that we take the severed head of a suicide and bury it on a Wednesday morning before sunrise with seven black beans. The beans must be watered each morning thereafter with the very best brandy you have, until on the eighth morning, if you are successful, a spirit will appear. The spirit must be thoroughly tested, and if found true, allowed to water the head for you. The following morning, the beans will be seen to be sprouting, whereupon you must have a small girl pick and shell them for you. One of these beans will have the peculiar quality of making you invisible if you put it in your mouth.

This experiment was actually tried at London in 1680 by two Jewish merchants, who used the garden of Mr Wyld Clark for the purpose. Procuring the severed head of a suicide is a bit of bother even for a magician, and so the merchants made do with the head of a black cat, but in every other particular they observed the requirements of the grimoire with the greatest severity. They killed the cat under certain astrological aspects described in several versions of the grimoire, and severed the head and buried it with great ceremony, placing the magic beans in the cat's brain. When all was done, they awaited the morrow anxiously, then returned to the scene the following morning with a bottle of their very best booze. Alas for them, though! They had not buried the cat's head deeply enough. Their little experiment had attracted the attention of one of Mr Clark's roosters, who apparently was something of an occult student himself, and who dug up the head, thereby ruining all their Qabalistic symbols. 'They were crafty, subtile merchants,' wrote the source of the story, and yet 'they did believe it.'

--Steve Richards, Invisibility: Mastering the Art of Vanishing: A Guide to Hiding Yourself from Sight Using Techniques Culled from Alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Medieval Magic and Advanced Yogic Practices, chapter 6, "How to Obscure Vision."

4:47PM - Dimensional Analysis, Chapter 5

H.E. Huntley, Dimensional Analysis; Chapter 5, "Components of 'Fundamental Dimensions:'"

I don't think I've talked much about this book. There hasn't been very much to say so far: He gives a lucid description of dimensional analysis in mechanics in the first three chapters, and a large number examples in chapter 4 that I've been treating as problems when I go downtown in the mornings. I've gone through the notes I took, and there are some interesting things to for lectures, but not very more than you get in Serway's page and half, or whatever it is in today's edition, except for a very nice historical outline and the examples.

This chapter, however, just blew me away. First, Huntley showed how keeping track of the vectorial components of spatial dimensions (length L) not only clarifies the relationships between units. Torque no longer has the dimensions of energy (ML²T^-2) because [E]=ML_x²T^-2 and [τ]=ML_xL_yT^-2, but he uses it to derive an equation for the range of a horizontally projected particle from a height h under gravity. Something normal dimensional analysis failed to do because the equations were underdetermined. He shows the same thing by redoing exercise 4 of chapter 3 as exercise 1 of chapter 6.

This is important, because the metaphysical motivation didn't strike me as interesting at all. "Every physical quantity has a unique dimensional formula, so we would like every dimensional formula to correspond to a unique physical quantity." I thought, "why?" The utility of this method was interesting.

But that's not what blew me away.

The second component of this chapter did the same with mass. Now, mass isn't a vector, but it has multiple interpretations. And even though one of the triumphs of Newtonian mechanics is their equivalency, by keeping track of the meaning or role of the mass in different quantites (asking, "Is this an intertial mass or a gravitational one?") allows him to "determine the mass of a viscous fluid flowing" through a pipe, among other examples.

That is, if we have an idea of the physics, we increase the usefulness of dimensional analysis for modeling. This makes it odd that Szirtes doesn't use it. He prefers to talk a lot about dimensionless paramters, etc. Huntley calls this "dimensional homogeneity."

4:43PM - Experimental Designs, Chapter 8A

Cochran & Cox, Experimental Designs 2nd Ed; Chapter 8A, “Some Methods for the Study of Response Surfaces:”

Response surfaces are where the Design of Experiments really comes into its own. In fact, the first eight chapters, including 6A, are barely useful. The fact that Cochran & Cox ignore the real power of the statistical method until the ninth chapter, and this an addendum chapter to boot, is a little disconcerting to me. Experimental maximization with a lot of variables is exactly what I’d want to use it for in my research.

Of course, they begin with “a word of caution. Polynomial response surfaces have the great advantage that they are easy to fit. With a suitable choice of design, even a quadratic surface in 6 variables…is not too formidable a task. On the other hand, polynomials are notoriously untrustworthy when extrapolated. A polynomial surface should be regarded as an approximation within the region covered by the experiment.” Even within that region, I’d note, if you use too large a polynomial, the error can be extraordinary. You’ll remember that theorem in linear algebra that says you can fit any finite data set with a finite polynomial from your sophomore or junior year of college; never use it for extrapolation. The curve oscillates wildly, so never go beyond the cubic unless you have a good reason to.

Not that I’ve had to lecture anyone about this when teaching labs or anything.

The chapter goes through the use of first- and second-order response surfaces only, discussing when you should use rotatable designs and so on. It also gives a few iterative techniques, the single factor method and the method of steepest ascent. Both start with a set of initial guesses and proceed repetitively until the surface converges. Very Newton. The last section describes the effectiveness of the methods using simulated data for several different functions plus error. The method of steepest ascent worked best, followed by the single factor method. However, they both require that an experiment can be both performed and analyzed quickly.

Various statistical hints are used. For example, in the second order rotatable design, to keep error even across the response surface, it suffices to keep the error similar along the boundary of the experiment and at its pivot point (which exists because the design is rotatable); this requires there to be multiple experiments around the central region but limits their number. A good method of testing how good your response surface is, is just to look at the coefficients for each variable: if they’re all negative, then the experiment was a provisional success. If they weren’t, you’ll have to repeat it whether or not the error is surface is large or small.

7:46AM

ok, my vacation, from the top (but probably in the normal bite sized chunks spread over far too much time)

My work had been crazy stressful, after our recent hire stopped showing up to work the other week. Not really what we needed when we were already bursting at the seams with work. So it's Tuesday night (last week), going on 7pm, my flight's at 10, I'm not done packing, and I'm trying desperately to get everything I need to done at work so I can leave. And my cell phone begins ringing off the hook. It's edwards, already in Tampa. He was going to find a motel or something for the night, but it's thunderstorming and he's having trouble finding one, and he wants to know if the room reservation at the hyatt can be extended, but the front desk says I have to do it because my name is the one on the reservation, so can I please call them? So I do, and then try to call him back, to his UK cell phone, and Sprint connects me with an operator. Who can't seem to hear me and hangs up on me. I am so stressed out at this point that I let loose one of the most colorful strings of swearwords I personally have ever heard pass my lips. Thankfully, the second try goes much better and he seems all set as I get my ass in gear towards home and the airport.

The flight is uneventful for the most part. I watch kung fu panda. I watch an amazing thunderstorm light the distant sky. (I don't think I've ever seen one from above before.) I sleep. I change planes in Philadelphia. I land in Tampa. edwards is there to meet me. My luggage, sadly, is not. They tell me it will probably be on the next flight that afternoon, and they will deliver it to my hotel when they get it. We exchange edwards's rental car for a different one.

The hotel seems lovely and comfortable at first glance. Due to the changed checkin, they'd done some weird stuff with the reservation, so if we wanted the adjoining rooms I'd originally requested, we needed to come back later and they'd move us. I think I took a nap. Later in the afternoon I inquired about my bag, but the front desk affirmed they would send it to my room when it arrived. We also requested a minifridge and took a trip to the grocery store. Then we drove around for hours trying to find someplace to eat real food that was open after ten. The Garmin GPS that came with the rental car led us roundabout to several apparently nonexistent restaurants. Growing increasingly frustrated and hungry, we inquired at the hotel, where the valet wrinkled his brow and finally, under examination, told us where there was a Dennys some way down the freeway. Ah, Dennys, better known for being an open place than for its cuisine. On our return to the hotel I inquire about my bag again, but it still has not arrived, so we visit the Walgreens so I can get a toothbrush and underwear.

Summary, day 1: too much driving, most of it around in circles.

5:44PM - The Village, Chapters 1-5

Bing West, The Village; Chapters 1-5, "The Setting:"

I'd had this sitting on my shelf, and then I read Bing West's editorial in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week and decided it was about time to give it a read. I'm glad I did. This is all background about the operation, before West got there (I'm not sure if he does anything except report), and the prose is excellent. It's not personal like a good war memoir but it's competent and novel-like without losing believability.

The Village is about the battle for Binh Yen Noi, a community of seven hamlets on the Tra Bong river. It was chosen for defense because the mother of a very good policeman, Lam lived there. After compromised provincial politicians started spreading rumors that he was in league with the South Vietnamese government, Lam thought he would lose his informants on VC activities. The town was compromised, so his boss suggested that he lead the popular front's men there with a platoon each of marines and police officers--something the marines were up for.

He said yes.

Lam and the marines set up a small fort on one side of the village; the best of the vietnamese were former vietminh and the viet cong had infiltrated the popular frong forces. The farthest and most dangerous hamlet was a couple of kilometers away. Early on, three people were killed, a PF, a marine, and Lam.

Lam had been set up for assassination and all of the marines had a bounty on their heads. Why? Because the town was very near the VC's Phu Long battalion across the river. The presence of so few marines so close to so many guerillas was an insult to the VC and very bad for propaganda. They'd have to be eliminated. Also, the river was a major supply route.

Was it good luck or bad that they'd set up this program at such a militarily strategic location?

Well, I expect that's the rest of the book.

5:26PM - The Great Wall of China, Chapter 10

Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth; Chapter 10, “The Great Wall and Foreign Policy: The Problem of Compromise:”

Waldron charted a course through the Chinese politics of the great wall. He depicts late Ming policy on the Northern Chinese border as a failure to reach a pragmatic solution—trading with the Mongols—due to a misguided ideological presence in the Ming court, who advocated war. As neither option was possible, a third policy that nobody liked—building a defensive wall—was followed. The problem wasn’t an attempt by the Mongols at conquest; rather it was raiding parties by the nomads. They weren’t self-sufficient. When a later, politically powerful grand secretary, Chang Chu-cheng made policy, Mongols were recognized, trade ensued, and there was peace for twenty years.

This doesn’t seem to be the actual case. In this period the Ming first obtained a military victory and then gave the concessions. This is probably the best way to look at it practically: show yourself to be generous in power or victory—if there’s a clear way to get to “root causes.” These were clear with the Mongols, since they begged to be allowed to trade with the Chinese. In earlier times, Waldron showed the same dynamic: a strong China has more to gain from trading with militant neighbors, thereby pacifying them, than by outright conquest or by exclusion.

I do not see the evidence that trade, itself, is enough. The Western Han, as I discussed earlier, suffered extortion from its nomadic neighbors from the north.

Waldron looks at it differently: he characterizes the war-like approach as ideological, a part of a nationalism (i.e., cultural unity) that kept the Ming together with weak emperors (and prevalent today). “War-like” doesn’t get to the root of it: the Ming needed a moralistic myth to keep them from falling apart, a myth of cultural superiority. This dogmatism by the intelligencia kept them from pursuing the policies that Waldron considered to be practical.

How to use this today? It is probably useful, but you really need to think carefully about how it worked. If a solution is off the table because of vehement opposition by one faction, it should probably be considered.

The chapter discusses the meaninglessness of the Great wall under the Ch’ing, who took China from Manchuria by going around it. There was no real border there, except the “Chinese”—I assume the Han—weren’t allowed to pass north of it.

12:23AM

The soundtrack of the everglades is the whine of mosquitos, punctuated by the occasional bird or frog. I have been well bitten. However, contrary to the_axel's dire predictions did not, in fact, die. Just look like I have the pox.

Am home now. More later, with photos.