Training Wheels Begone!

No, it's Super Unleaded.

Me: "Emma, what is the name of the language that you speak?"

Emma: "Um... Regular?"

Or possibly a Paleontist.

Emma (age 5):

At school today, they had a thing where you put on goggles, and there was a nail you hit with a hammer, and there were dinosaurs underneath, and it let you be a Scientologist.

The Great Gold Confiscation

True Story:

On March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President of a crumbling nation. Amidst the torrent of changes in his recovery plan�his New Deal�he oversaw a strange reversal. Alcohol, long stigmatized and outlawed under Prohibition, was suddenly legal again. And gold, with which Dollars were supposedly interchangeable, became an illegal substance.

This is how it happened.


When Roosevelt was sworn in, banks across the nation were failing. Panicked people withdrew from the remaining banks, and some of those banks failed in turn. In Chicago alone, this vicious cycle claimed over 170 of the 228 banks. People demanded their money in gold where possible, worried that the dollar might soon lose much of its value. (As it happens, this is precisely what Roosevelt had in mind.)
In his inaugural speech, Roosevelt said "...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," by which he meant, in large part, "fear of bank failure." The cycle of withdrawal and collapse was choking the already battered economy. Forty eight hours later, Roosevelt's response was bold�and illegal.
He began on March 6 by closing the nation's banks. He called this "bank holiday" on the authority of an expired wartime trade act, and relied on a docile Congress to legitimize his actions after the fact. In the process, he declared "hoarding" (possessing one's own gold) to be a reckless, unpatriotic act.
When he reopened the banks on March 10, they were instructed to refuse all requests for gold. With all bank holdings under his control, Roosevelt set his sights on all the rest�the gold held by United States citizens. Through the Treasury Department he acquired records of all gold withdrawals from banks in the last two years, thus revealing which citizens and organizations might be "hoarding" gold.
Then, on April 5, he issued Executive Order 6102: all "individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations" in the nation were to deliver their gold to the federal government. In exchange, they would receive paper money. The penalty for defying this order was $10,000, 10 years in prison, or both.
In the following months this confiscation was aggressively implemented. People were indicted for refusing to turn over their gold�among them the daughter of a former U.S. Senator. Others were arrested at the Canadian border for attempting to smuggle gold out of the country. But the vast majority of Americans obeyed, and the Treasury's gold stockpile grew steadily into 1934.
It was during these months that Roosevelt repealed Prohibition. Thirsty crowds lined up outside bars, counting down the seconds to 4:32pm, December 5, 1933. Roosevelt famously remarked "I think this would be a good time for a beer." Millions of Americans agreed, and Roosevelt's popularity soared. He was showered with gifts and well-wishes on his first birthday in office: January 30, 1934.
The very next day, Roosevelt finally cashed in on the confiscation. By fiat, he increased the dollar cost of an ounce of gold from $20 to $35. This effectively devalued the dollar (which people had been forced to accept instead of gold) by 40 percent. On the strength of the gold stockpile, this yielded a profit of 2.7 billion dollars for the Treasury.
Roosevelt hoped that the devaluation would stabilize the dollar against certain foreign currencies and create a more favorable environment for export. But doing so had required an unprecedented, and possibly unconstitutional, confiscation and wealth transfer.
By this time Roosevelt had been in office for eleven months.

It's Math.

The other day Lucy (who is now 3) said

Tuesday plus Tuesday is Foursday!

Primordial Evil

I've been reading one of my H.P. Lovecraft books lately (The Tomb and Other Tales), and it seems to be one I haven't read before. I was surprised to see that Lovecraft ghost-wrote Imprisoned with the Pharaohs for Harry Houdini, who published it in his own name in Weird Tales. It's a lovely story. I also liked The Horror at Red Hook. (New York Detective Thomas Malone investigates the sinister underworld activities of one Robert Suydam, who seems to be involved in illegal immigrant trafficking and, as you might guess, Untold Terrors as well.)

Like the story He (which precedes it in this collection), Red Hook takes place in turn-of-the-century New York and treats cities in general as malevolent forces, not to be trusted, what with all their creepy tall buildings and--as illustrated in both stories--the tendency of buildings to collapse, floor by floor, at or around the denouement. Apparently this was a period when Lovecraft considered metropolitan areas to be scarier than, say, gargantuan tentacled underwater creatures. I wonder what he'd think of today's urban sprawl.

Anyway, near the end of Red Hook, Lovecraft says

Who are we to combat poisons older than history and mankind? Apes danced in Asia to these horrors, and the cancer lurks secure and spreading where furtiveness hides in rows of decaying brick.

I've noticed, in other places, Lovecraft referring to malevolent forces as destined to outlast mankind. It adds to the sense of bigness and badness to suggest that these horrors will still be around when mankind is no more. But this is the first time I've noticed (in my recent reading, anyway) explicit mention of evils predating mankind as well.

The mental image of apes dancing under nameless demonic influences is wonderful enough. (Demon Monkey Trance!) But let's take this to its logical conclusion. Pick your favorite Evils from Lovecraft, or Christian canon or Apocrypha, or the Kabbalah, or Sumerian Mythology, or wherever... Take them at face value, but put them in the scenario of evolved life instead of a world that was created in the same fiscal quarter as mankind (as most mythologies have it). This is essentially what Lovecraft is suggesting in the quote above, so let's think about the implications.

Evil as it's been portrayed in mythology has (for obvious reasons) such a human character, and such human concerns. The devil takes a personal interest in the downfall of individual men; demons specialize in endless specific human ailments. But if Evils are eternal, what the hell did they do before man evolved?

So, okay, they made apes dance. Fair enough. Probably a certain amount of mate stealing and inhospitable hooting during territorial disputes. The occasional pretending-to-groom-the-alpha-male-but-not-actually-removing-his-parasites as part of a nefarious-but-slow-moving coup. It's not that hard to think of ape-specific Evils, and, as this paragraph shows, it's more fun than it should be.

But what sort of unholy pressures did the eternal Evils apply to, say, the shrew-like Zalambdalestes in the Cretacious? Or the jawless fish Agnatha in the Cambrian? Or the earliest single-celled organisms?

Some specific Evils (death, disease) might have existed alongside Life the whole time, while others (betrayal, jealousy, porn addiction) presumably found their specialties later. But it raises the question: have these Evils had the same character all along, with some waiting untold eons for their respective victims to evolve? Or have the Evils themselves evolved, in which case there emerged, at some point, an Evil specially suited to the concerns of cyanobacteria?

Did the cyanobacteria's Evil have anything like an awareness of its horrifying purpose--a malignant mind of the kind we'd expect from Mankind's demons? Or did it have a tiny malignant non-mind appropriate to the level of cyanobacteria's development? If the latter, then what made it Evil, exactly? What does Evil mean if there's not a mind to revel in the depravity, or to recoil at the horror? Evil without sentience is just statistics.

The question Lovecraft's construction raises is this: if these Evils are eternal, then did they have more or less fun influencing Cretacious shrews than you and I? The obvious and boring answer is that mankind has allowed Evil to blossom in new and unprecedented ways. But I think it's more interesting to suppose the opposite.

I think it would be fun to explain these Eternal Evils in a way that's not at all humanity-centric, but that still retains some essence of what we understand to be Evil. It can't boil down to statistics, because statistics isn't evil--just boring. So what would it be?

Erdös-Bacon Numbers

I learned from Julian of a wacky ego game: Erdös-Bacon Numbers. Your Bacon Number is how far you are from actor Kevin Bacon, in terms of co-starring chains. Your Erdös Number is how far you are from mathematician Paul Erdös in terms of co-authoring chains. Add the two together, and you get your super-elite Erdös-Bacon Number.

My one publication gives me a legitimate Erdös number of 4 (E. Veach, P. Agarwal, N. Alon, P. Erdös). If film crew could claim Bacon Numbers (doubtful), my Bacon Number would be 2. (Me and Tom Hanks in Toy Story 2, he and Kevin Bacon in Apollo 13).

Hence, a dubious Erdös-Bacon number of 6! The current record holders are at 5, so I rule! Or I would, if my Bacon Number weren't actually infinity.