James Clerk Maxwell

I've been rereading Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed for what may be the 15th or so time. The main character is an alien physicist in a relatively far future who is on the verge of developing the theoretical framework needed for transilience, the technology of communicating across space instantaneously.  

It felt like an odd juxtaposition when I saw a post this morning about James Clerk Maxwell, a 19th century Scottish physicist who I don't remember ever hearing of, given my deficient science education.

From his Wikipedia page, I learned that in his short 48 years of life right in the middle of the century, Maxwell was the first to describe how light, electricity, and magnetism are all different aspects of the same thing. He created equations for electromagnetism that are considered the second great unification of physics (Newton is credited with the first great unification). 

Based on that work, Maxwell predicted that radio waves exist. He figured out that color (in light) can be reproduced with just red, green, and blue, and "presented the first durable colour photograph in 1861..." 

He did work in several areas not related to his main fields, like structural engineering, and "was the first to recognize chaos, and the first to emphasize the butterfly effect." He worked in a number of scientific areas I can't even explain. 

He's considered to be the founder of electrical engineering. He introduced the terms relativity and quantum mechanics to the field of physics. 

All of that is from the introduction to his Wikipedia page. I almost didn't read the full version because the introduction seemed pretty thorough. But here's one notable fact from the longer text: Maxwell almost died from smallpox in 1860, before he had published any of what became his best-known work.

The post I saw this morning, which started me on this topic, was about a fundraising effort in the UK to buy the church where Maxwell is buried in Parton, Scotland.  

The community needs 70,000 pounds to buy Parton Kirk from the Church of Scotland and do some immediate repairs. As I understand it, if they do not acquire it, the land (or the building? I'm not sure) will be sold to a storage business. Why the Church of Scotland can't donate the building for such a measly amount of money, I don't know. 

They have until November 1, 2026, to raise the money, and as of this writing the campaign is at just under 45,000 pounds. 

A Shirt Happens

One of my bridge compatriots sometimes wears this shirt:

Summer is drawing to a close, and soon we will have to wear coats on the bridge in the early morning chill, since it's a place where it's always at least 10°F colder than anywhere else. 

Time to appreciate the shirt while I can.

Anniversaries

Today, on the 25th anniversary of September 11, I just realized that I've missed noting two significant anniversaries in my own life.

I moved to Minnesota 40 years ago at the beginning of September (I don't remember the exact date I arrived). 

I moved into the house I live in 30 years ago, just before the beginning of September.

That means September 11 was only five years after we moved into this house. It seems like more than five years had elapsed between the two, and not nearly as many years since.

This is not an original thought, but the collapsing of time as I get older is something I will never get used to.

Another Reason to Never Elect Republicans

The recent mass shooting at an apartment building on the edge of downtown Minneapolis was carried out by a man with both a criminal record and permit to carry the handgun he used.

Aside from the murderous actions he took, it was pretty clear even beforehand that he should not have had that permit. But the Hennepin County Sheriff, Dawonna Witt, signed off on it in April of this year. (Star Tribune gift link with many details on his record here.)

There are three particularly notable things to me in that article. 

First: Up until 2003, Minnesota had one of the most restrictive gun-licensing laws in the country. That year, when our last Republican governor came into office and Republicans controlled one house of the legislature, the current law was passed, essentially requiring county sheriffs to issue permits to anyone who wasn't a felon or had been civilly committed. 

Before the new law, it was an affirmative test, and not many people met it:

When the state Legislature made it easier to carry a gun in public in 2003, there were 12,000 active gun permits in Minnesota.... In March of this year, there were 375,551 active permits in the state, or around 8.5% of the adult population in Minnesota.... [That's a 3100% increase in permits.]

At the start of 2026, there were 49,314 active permits to carry in Hennepin County.

In other words, there are more than four times as many permit-holders in Hennepin County alone, 2026, as there were in the entire state of Minnesota in 2003.

Even under the new law, sheriffs have discretion to deny permits. The story says that a sheriff in a rural county is more likely to know a person who applies, and permits are denied in varying amounts. But the county with the highest number of denials is urban. 

The second notable thing:

Last year, Ramsey County [home to Saint Paul] denied 68 applicants because they were deemed a danger to themselves or the public. No other county in the state denied more than 10. 

Hennepin County denied only five.

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher says in the story that he would have denied the shooter's permit, and given his track record on permits, that seems believable. I am about the farthest thing from a Bob Fletcher fan, but I agree with him on this.

The third notable thing:

Last year 5,467 crimes were committed by individuals with a gun permit, the highest number since 2003, though the BCA noted that was still just about 1% of permit holders. 

So much for the pro-gun argument we always hear about legal gun owners never doing anything illegal with their weapons. 

The story does not say how many crimes were committed with a gun, and therefore what percent of all gun crimes were committed by permit-holders. Or how many crimes committed with guns were carried out with weapons stolen from permit-holders — another big problem. There are too many guns out in the world in the first place, and stealing them is a much too easy. And then there's the straw-buyer problem.

I want to thank Republicans for passing that bill back in 2003 (with the help of [probably rural] Senate Democrats). You've made us all so much safer. 

Hurray for Cougars

Here's a random bit of information that I've cited several times since I read it, so I thought I'd better post it here.

Mountain lions (also called cougars or pumas) make American roads safer by keeping deer afraid and therefore away from developed areas, including roads. On Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, for instance, deer-vehicle collisions decreased 76%. 

Deer kill 200 to 440 Americans each year; mountain lions have only killed 29 Americans since 1868.

I know which wild animal I'd rather have around.

__

I originally saw this on BlueSky from historian and science fiction writer Ada Palmer. This is the article she linked to.
 

The DN3.1 Meter

There are so many outrages every day that one has to limit the aperture to a lot of them.

My personal F-stop for when one of Trump or the regime's acts cannot go without remark is whether I have to call Daughter Number Three-Point-One and tell her about it, or see if she's already heard about it.

That happened today when I heard that Trump had stood in front of a group of New York City first responders and made up a story about his heroics on 9/11. How he was pulled from the rubble at Ground Zero by two strong men (they carried him under his armpits... nice detail!). Somehow it seems worse to me than the AI images of him as a five-star general with his chest covered in medals.

There's lots of discussion on BlueSky about whether he's lying to take credit, as memories fade of that day, or is it a symptom of his cognitive decline.  

I think it's the latter, having known people in cognitive decline who've created similar though less egregious stories, inserting themselves into situations they had nothing to do with. 

It's shocking, but it will be worse if this laughable piece of confabulation causes nothing more than a ripple (or no ripple at all) in coverage of Trump, and no one holds Republicans accountable for supporting him. 

The man should be in memory care, not in charge of a government. 

Chernobyl, 2026

I finally watched the HBO five-part miniseries Chernobyl over the past two days. I'm not sure why I didn't see it when it came out in 2019. I think it was because I was busy then with people in my family dying and a small business I was trying to launch, plus a few other things since it came out in May, that month when I'm always doing something else. 

If you haven't seen it, I recommend it. 

I've been trying to bring to mind what I remember from 1986, when the disaster occurred. It was not long before I moved to Minnesota, but after I had decided to come here. I remember hearing about it as it hit the news in the U.S. a few days later, and being freaked out about it, but no details about why it happened or anything. 

I moved here just as the Soviets were working to contain the radiation: while people were dying, and they didn't know if it would poison all of Ukraine. I don't know how soon afterward there was very complete knowledge in the West. Was it one of those stories where, by the time the Soviets let the facts out a few years later, U.S. media couldn't be bothered to make a big deal about it? Or was I just too busy with life by that point and I missed it?

I somehow managed to accumulate some general knowledge that people were evacuated from a wide area around the plant, and that the reactor was enclosed in concrete, but not how that happened. Until I watched the series, I had no idea how many people died along the way. 

This summer, I've been consuming a media diet of Soviet-life-as-cautionary-tale. First there was Star City, then Ponies, and now Chernobyl. Each show is a different example of how creating a society where people are afraid to tell the truth to the people in power above them causes dangerous problems. Chernobyl particularly emphasizes why it's a bad idea to subordinate science to political power and priorities.

It's hard to watch any of these shows in our current time without seeing them as a warning. Too bad that message appears to be too subtle for the people who should learn from it. 

If You Have to Learn Anything About AI

I try to avoid thinking about AI as much as possible. That said, here are are two Why Is This Happening podcasts that pair well together.

The AI End Game: Boom or Bust? with Ed Zitron. Zitron is one of those guys whose posts I see on BlueSky, but I never quite knew who he was or why everyone seemed to be quoting him.

The Nerd Reich with Gil Durán. (This podcast is not so much about AI as it is about our tech overlords, but the connection between the two is obvious.) The episode is named for Durán's new book, whose subtitle is "Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy." Lots of stuff about the dark interconnections of Peter Thiel that need to be documented and understood. It sounds paranoid but it's not. 

And Cory Doctorow is always worth reading on AI and the coming bubble. This recent post called Born on technology's third base is a good example.

That Dialect Map

Did you do the most recent version of the U.S. dialect quiz? (I took the 60-question version.)

I don't know how valid it is, even for native English speakers in this country. Here's mine:

This was my second attempt. My first landed me even more solidly in northern Michigan with almost no medium red in Minnesota, and listed my most similar cities as Milwaukee and Chicago. 

Quizzes like this are hard for me as an East Coast transplant. Sometimes I hear word choices from my earlier life and don't know which one I should answer. Do I say soda or pop these days? It depends on who my audience is.

On this second pass, I consciously went with more "Minnesota" answers, and the medium red now extends into the place I've called home for 40 years, with Minneapolis showing up as one of my most similar cities. 

It seems pretty odd to me that Upstate New York would be in the low end of the blue range for me, though. I think the quiz-makers don't know how people talk in that part of the country and think they're the same as people from the New York City area, which is not true. (The Mary/merry/marry question for instance: that is not something people from Upstate New York differentiate, in my experience.) 

Where do your words say you're from? How accurate do you think this quiz is?

Two Terms I'll Never Use

There are two terms that have become common in modern usage that I don't like and I think I will never use. I'm not sure if they're only used online, or if they're frequently used by younger people. I only see them written.

I didn't understand what either one meant when I started seeing them, and I find both of their apparent meanings counter-intuitive to their actual meanings. 

One is own goal and the other is based.

I think I saw own goal first. To me it sounds like a positive thing, as when someone makes one of their goals, their own goal. But that's the opposite of what it means: it comes from a time when a player (probably in soccer) scores for the other team against his or her own goalie.

It's (over)used as a metaphor for times when a person or an organization does something that ends up damaging their own cause.

An example: "This administration's damage to our country is strictly an own goal." –Joyce Vance

Based, in my experience, is a more recent term. At first I thought it was a typo of "biased," or maybe there was a word missing. I have finally determined from context that it essentially expresses agreement — especially with something that's controversial. Essentially, a short way of saying "fuck your feelings."

Urban Dictionary says it's "used when you agree with something; or when you want to recognize someone for being themselves, i.e. courageous and unique or not caring what others think." 

Its etymology is pretty twisted, and it sounds like I wasn't the only one who didn't know what it meant. 

I'm sure I dislike it partly because Elon Musk is fond of using it when he reposts his white supremacist and anti-Semitic trash on X. Mostly, it makes him sound like a 50-something teenage-wannabe. 

I hope Musk's old guy cooties have soured young people on using it. Maybe it will (or has already) gone out of style.

State Fair 2026, Part 2

My non-resistance State Fair photos are not as numerous, have no fear. But they aren't all non-political; they just are not necessarily related to Metro Surge like the ones from yesterday.

First, the crop art. I'm not sure I've seen any of these on social media.

As always, click any piece to enlarge and see the details. 

Curatorial arrangement is sometimes key. (Note that the left-hand piece is completely made with quinoa, which is being eliminated as a usable crop next year.)

More squirrels. 

Did you know the Tilt-a-Whirl ride is from Fairbault, Minnesota?

I'm not so interested in the fact that one of our local radio stations is 21 years old this year, but I can't get over the fact that the white braided-looking parts of the octopus are made from hand-painted wild rice grains. 

This is one of the works where the artist used red onion skin as a background element. It looks like stained glass.

Then a few pieces from the art show:

American Huaco: AR-15 by Guillermo Guardia, ceramic.

Tomato Garden,  Lily Lund, porcelain. Probably my favorite piece in the Art Show.

The Fairy Who Bartered Her Wings, Ryan Dolan, ceramic.

I didn't take any photos of two-dimensional work, except a few Surge-related pieces. It was very busy in there and kind of overwhelming. 

I walked 6.4 miles going to, at, and from the Fair.
 

 

State Fair 2026, Day 1

I went to the Minnesota State Fair yesterday. As you may have heard, our crop art has been getting more and more popular. Last year we waited about 20 minutes before the building opened to get inside. This year, news had spread that the waits even for those who got in line before the building opened were an hour, and through the day they were worse.

As expected, there's a high percentage of imagery related to ICE, immigration, and Metro Surge. Many of the pieces can be seen in this PDF posted on cropart.com or in this wonderful BlueSky thread (with alt tags, and it also gives background on crop art generally).

Unlike some other years, I didn't take many general Fair photos that are worth sharing: just ones from Crop Art, Creative Activities, and the Art Show. So I thought I would do two posts: today is resistance day, and tomorrow will cover everything else.

As always, click on any image to see it larger. 

First, the Guernica crop art by Jennifer Nelson that has gotten a lot of attention:

This is a beautiful piece with many details to appreciate, but the one I had completely missed before was the use of wild rice on the loon's wings:

(If you haven't already heard, the markings in the triangular word balloons coming out of Alex Pretti and Renee Good's mouths are their last words rendered in Morse code.)

Other Metro Surge crop art that I hadn't seen talked about online before going to the Fair much or at all:

Just beautiful craft on this one. The green peas (?) around the edge add just an extra special touch.

These three were together, very high on the wall. 

This George Morrison-like piece is made out of pieces of birch bark.

There were so many creative ways of covering up the "F" in FUCK ICE. (Crop art has only one rule: it has to be family-friendly.) This one says "Free to be nice."

Resistance images in the Art Show have gotten less coverage than the crop art. The ones that have are the grid of STOP ICE stop sign photos and a dramatic black and white tear gas photo. Both are great, but here are a couple that are less in your face.

Faye Passow is a well-known Minnesota lithographer. Her small print, Worry and Wonder, captures the feeling of the time.

The sculpture It was Time to Blow the Whistles by Barbara Bridges serves as a memorial.

The Creative Activities building had its share of Metro Surge as well:

A weaving of the Burlesque of North of America screen print that was everywhere. (For those not from here, their screen print is based on the Minneapolis snow emergency signs.)

Knitting and crocheting, and other craft work by many people, all on surge themes.

Doll clothes of the resistance, ICE, and Greg Bovino's Nazi coat.

Each year, Creative Activities invites themed one-panel "quilts on a stick." This year the theme was "250 years," for obvious reasons. 

Many of the ones submitted didn't turn out as the planning committee might have anticipated:

Yes, that is a dumpster fire on the right.

And then there are all of the versions of bathrobe woman, Sam Stroozas, a Minnesota Public Radio producer photographed in her green bathrobe in February as she filmed ICE crashing and then chasing a man in Saint Paul. She was in all three areas.

She appears in crop art:

Ceramics:

Painting:

Crochet:

And I hear she was knitted, but I didn't see that one.