At Resonance Frequency

Fair Tax

2012-01-31T05:06:00.002-06:00

I was listening to the Slate Political Gabfest and they were discussing the reaction when Mitt Romney released his tax returns. Romney has been reluctant to do so, and after a lot of pressure from Newt Gingrich during the current Presidential Primaries, he finally opened up the books and revealed that he made $20 million dollars last year and paid around 13% in taxes. The rate for people in this range is supposed to be 35%.

They made the comparison that most people pay a much higher rate and John Dickerson asked if we are supposed to be enraged because Mitt's taxes were too low or because everyone else's were too high. That was a big government/budget/taxation in general question, but what was of interest to me what what he said next.

He asked if it was ludicrous that we have a tax structure that favors capital gains and investment. I had seen a piece on the Daily Show that Jon Stewart did that showed that the tax shelter for investment bankers (not the right word, it's whatever Bain Capital was) fought for and got a special tax exemption for their people at the 15% rate. If true, that's a special case of an interest group lobbying the government and getting a special exemption to help themselves get richer. The average person does not have anyone looking out for them to this degree. Of course, the Daily Show went on to show Mitt Romney giving a campaign speech where he said that everyone should pay some taxes. This means that people that are basically exempt from taxes because their income is so low should have to pay more taxes, when he himself is rich beyond most of these people's wildest dreams and he has worked hard to pay less taxes.

The point I was getting to was that tax codes are to a certain degree the government's attempt at social engineering. There are some good arguments for social engineering through the tax code. If you believe that home ownership is good because it is a cornerstone of the American Dream or maybe a good economic engine for the country, then you are justified in lobbying for a tax exemption for home ownership. So, let's assume that someone has the argument that people that are "investing" (in other words, buying stock, presumably to invest in corporations and companies) that this activity is noble, drives the economy, and should be rewarded.

I would probably have agreed with that position many years ago, but let's look at what we get for this "investment". The financial meltdown of 2008 was engineered by "investors" playing with other people's money in speculative complex financial instruments, all the while lobbying to be exempt from government regulation. So you can point to an enormous recent example of how the investment class of people have not helped the economy, in fact they did such enormous harm that they had to be bailed out lest the entire world's economy get sucked into their slip stream as they sank beneath the financial waters. So, in other words, the debt generated from their greedy miscalculations is now on the backs of the rest of us after they were bailed out by the government. This does not seem to me to be the kind of thing they should be rewarded for, in fact, why is no one being punished for this. Unless you call record bonuses some perverse kind of punishment.

My point is that these "investors", even in times when things are working right, are not helping our American Companies to be healthy. Stock investment influence on corporate decision making is at best a burden and at worst an exercise in short term thinking. Stock holders believe that their imposition of fiduciary responsibility (the obligation of a company to do whatever it takes to make a profit for their shareholders) is justified, primarily, but they also believe that this is a healthy standard for a company to held to. The problem is that stocks are rated on a quarterly basis, and what is good for a company in the short term is not good for the company in the long term. It's very healthy in the short term to lay everyone off, thus saving on payroll, or to cut R&D, thus cutting expenses. However, a company that whittles its staff down to the point where they cannot deliver when they are asked to produce something will not remain viable in the long term. A company that will not invest in ideas and learning, or bother to test products for the future, will not have a future.

I'm all for rewarding people who save and invest in industry here in the U.S., but the responsibility of a company should be to insure that they will be around for many years, not generate a quick profit today at the expense of burning through a company's assets and capabilities and leaving a worthless hulk behind.

We have a word for this kind of behavior, when one entity sucks the life out of another, killing it in the process: Parasitism. When we allow investors to treat our American companies as carcasses they can bleed dry, and then pay as little taxes as possible to the government that sustains and serves the country, then why are we surprised when the country begins to resemble the companies that these parasites have sucked dry?

Crowdsourcing Legislative Sanity

2011-12-27T19:28:00.005-06:00

I've been frustrated lately about how Congress does legislation. Bills are enormous, too big to read prior to our elected officials voting on it. The average citizen has no chance of comprehending what's going on prior to a vote being taken. Too many unrelated amendments are added in, usually because individual members pledge their vote for some pork or pet project, or alternately because someone is playing poison pill politics.

I have often wondered what I would do if I was a Congressman, Senator, or the President, and needed to read all the material you have to make decisions about. It's too much reading for anyone but a speed reader to get through. I figured the way to do it would be for the staff to divide up the work and read the report/bill/law/etc. in sections and do short summaries of each part so that you could get a rapid summary. Then you could browse specific parts in detail if there were the parts you were concerned about.

I've often wondered the same thing about Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. He has lots of guests that he interviews that are out pitching their most recent book and it always seems like he has actually read the book. How does he have the time to read the entire book each time? I have suspected that his reading was outsourced to his staff for some time, and that he got some kind of cliff notes summary version to read. Even if they tagged just a few portions, the best parts of the book, you could get through a book in an hour or so if you only had to read a concise summary and maybe a dozen of the best passages.

There is another concept toward outsourcing and consolidating your work that is done by a website called Galaxy Zoo. This is called crowdsourcing. They take the evaluation of galaxy pictures from Hubble and let subscribers sort through the data with a tutorial and applet to help frame their answers. It takes a group of data that is too big for an individual or small group to process and makes it manageable. While the bulk of the data is still not examined by an expert, it can be accessed quickly and indexed for particular trends or phenomenon. This allows they to sort through some 200 billion photos of galaxies in a couple of years, where this would have taken hundreds of years for all the astrophysicists in the world to examine them.

Why not take legislative review out of the hands of staffers and aids, who are political appointees that probably also have political agendas? Why not crowdsource all pending legislation? Have people read sections and summarize them with an outline or app that standardizes the responses. What does it say? What is it about? What are the problems with it? How do you personally feel about it? This last would be in order to give weighted responses. This would be superior to a posting of the entire bill that had a long stream of random comments by anyone that wants at the bottom. You've all seen these comment threads, they are worthless for helping you understand the content of whatever they comment on. Some of these comments in typical threads are well reasoned and useful, but most of it is emotional or inconsequential.

You have to make a commenting community put their efforts into something more useful and accessible. Summaries could be weighted by reviews from others, or there could be a wiki-like function of editors that could block users that are just trying to obscure the subject, use it as a spam outlet, or derail the conversation because they are politicians or lobbyists themselves.

Ideally, a system like this would enable the public to look at pending legislation and quickly find the objectionable or flawed aspects of it, and put public pressure on their representatives to either amend the legislation or rewrite it completely. Ideally, this system would give power to the public to override lobbyists and special interests.

Unfortunately, it could be subverted really simply if our legislators decided to keep pending legislation secret. This in itself would be something that I would hope the public would protest, if they were aware of it. We've seen committee work taken into secrecy in the past, so you know there is a tendency to hammer out backroom deals outside of the light of public scrutiny.

The legislative review site I'm envisioning could be established as an independent oversight entity controlled by the electorate. It would encourage legislative literacy and participation, particularly if complex legal bullshit currently being put into bills could be made simple, quick, and understandable. I believe it could also bring people together in the center, where most real people reside, not in the extremes that the major parties often use as talking points to rally support and obscure the real issues and real way they run the government. It is possible that we would not need a new or third party if we could take back control of the two major parties. It is possible that many of these legislators would welcome a way to say no to the special interests and actually do what is right for the country. This pressure could be brought to bear if only we had a way of wading through all the verbiage and sorting out what is actually being proposed.

Preserve, Protect, and Defend

2011-12-11T14:27:00.008-06:00

I was listening to someone recently saying that he was a strict Constitutionalist. I've heard this phrase spoken in many recent debates and campaign speeches. The implication is that one side is right because they are following the true intent of the constitution, and that everyone should know that anyone that opposes this viewpoint are flagrantly flaunting all constitutional dictates and just making up new rules as they see fit. This is similar to what people say about activist judges. You only gripe when a judge makes a ruling against what they believe.

What I find interesting about the Constitution is that when the President is sworn into office, or if you take a commission as an officer in the military, you are sworn to defend the Constitution. Not your country, not your family, not the leaders, but a piece of paper, an idea. I still find this a little strange. You can simplify it and say that the Constitution defines your country and that's what you are defending. I think maybe the framers of the Constitution meant people to be loyal to the rules, and the rule of law calls for the free election of new leaders. This prevents us from making leaders permanent fixtures.

I was looking at the World Almanac later, thinking about the Constitution and I opened it up and found the text on page 579 of the 2006 edition. I realized that I have never read the whole Constitution. I assume that most strict Constitutionalists have not either. It reminds me of people that say they believe in everything in the Bible, but when asked, they admit they have never actually read the whole Bible. So I read the Constitution.

To be fair, I had already read the Amendments many times, as the exact wording of the Bill of Rights comes up often and is worth re-reading. The original Constitution is the document that was written in 1787 and outlined how we would become the United States we are today. It took the U.S. from the Articles of Confederation, which was the way that the government was set up after declaring independence, to a government with a central, federal core that the states would form around.

People often question how the Constitution could possibly be correct for all times when it was written over 200 years ago and the world has changed considerably since then. One point that strict Constitutionalists will make pertaining to this is that you can always amend the Constitution. This is true, the method for amending the Constitution is written right in it. Article V states that either 2/3 of both houses of Congress, or 2/3 of the States Convening to form amendments must pass, then 3/4 of the states must ratify the amendment for it to become law.

I had a discussion with a gun enthusiast and told him that I had discovered that the term "Militia" was not just in the 2nd Amendment, but was all throughout the main body of the Constitution. There is no exact definition of Militia in the Constitution, and there may not be a modern equivalent. I'm not sure that a Founding Father, if rushed forward in time and asked to comment on what a Militia is, would even be able to find for us a comparable group that exists today. In the time of the Revolution, people at a state and local level may have to defend themselves from Indian attack, or possibly from an external invasion (foreign power) to their homes. Everyone was armed to hunt, and I suppose there were occasional wild animals that would enter areas inhabited by people, forcing them to band together in self-defense. The Militia was just a bunch of average guys that picked up their ever present firearms and came together as a group. We don't allow this. We have Police, but you have to have training and pass a test and get hired to do that. We have National Guard and State Reserve forces, but these are people that were trained by the Federal Government and while they can be called out by state Governors, they more typically belong to the Commander-in-Chief (especially since 9/11, after which the Bush administration called on these reserves to fight to a degree that they were not even called on in the Viet Nam War). So, if aliens from space landed tomorrow and began a War of the Worlds - style invasion, do you really think that anyone that you handed a gun to would not willingly step up and fight? Excluding the cowards that would lose their composure and simply run for the hills, the average pacifist that is against firearms in theory will gladly kill to defend his family. The problem is that we do not ever face this situation (and we do not need to hunt for food), so the ownership of firearms as the Founding Fathers envisioned it is not applicable to today's world.

The gun enthusiast pointed out that the proposal of a Constitutional Amendment on gun rights would fail if written either way, pro- or anti- gun ownership. I think he's right. There is no clear overwhelming majority either way. Given the margin of divide on most political issues right and left, there are not many ways the Constitution could be amended with the current mood of the populous. So gun ownership falls into an ambiguous middle ground. People seeking to make what they feel are reasonable restrictions to gun ownership are not usually thwarted by Constitutional arguments and those wishing to extend gun ownership rights, such as the recent trend to allow concealed carry laws in many states, are also not restricted by the Constitution.

There were other things in the Constitution that surprised me. Just how much of the original Constitution has been superseded is surprising. One real surprise for me what the language for return of the slaves to slave states or rather to their owners if they escaped their masters and ran away to another state. At the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, there were no free states. By the time the Constitution was being framed, states in the North were only just started to outlaw slavery. I remember learning in my pre-Civil War history how the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law inflamed Abolitionists in the North. What you don't realize when you read the Constitution in detail is that this provision was already written into the Constitution almost 60 years before the Fugitive Slave Laws were enacted. You see in the Constitution the struggle to bind together the free and separate institutions that were the states into a single federal group, with central governing authorities. As the United States under the Articles of Confederation (and later, the seceded Southern States under their Confederation) proved, if you do not have strong central authority, you will not have the power to act as a group, and you will not have the power to survive.

Their were a number of things that were amended since the original Constitution. There is a very strange clause in there about the way Presidents are to be elected. The expectation was that there would be multiple candidates running for President, and there was a provision for what I will call a run-off election, but in reality, it's a matter of narrowing down the top two candidates. It used to be that you picked who you liked out of a large field, then the top two would not have clear majorities and they would redo the vote with just the top two. In the event of a tie or dispute, the House would decide. This happened between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was one vote away from not being our third President.

There were other odd things. It sounds like there was an expectation that states may want to combine or further subdivide into more or less states. The ability to raise taxes is throughout the text. The problem I have is that I do not understand a portion of the text. What is a Letter of Marque and Reprisal? There are lots of phrases that seem to be preventing states from being able to screw over one another competitively. There is also language that what one state grants its citizens is supposed to be recognized by other states. So what about gay marriage? How is that not a national right as soon as one state extends it as a right for themselves?

One very interesting phrase at the end of the body of the Constitution, before the last Article that tells how the Constitution will be ratified, is that there will be no religious test for qualification for any office in the United States. This certainly flies in the face of people today that like to say that we are a Christian Nation and that our Founding Fathers intended for us to be Christian. If that is so, why are they explicitly saying that there be not test for religion to hold office? If we are a Christian Nation, that clause should say that only Christians can hold office. We are not a Christian Nation, only a nation that is predominantly Christian.

The Bill of Rights comes along and immediately limits the power of the new Government that was established. Everyone knows that the Bill of Rights consists of 10 Amendments. What I did not realize until I re-read this was that there were originally 12 proposed. The first original Amendment was about the apportionment of Representatives which was never passed, and the second was about compensation to members of Congress, which was only passed in 1992.

I only recognized four names on the list of the people that signed the Constitution. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. I was surprised John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were not involved, but I found out that they were in Europe serving as ambassadors at the time. I recognize many more names of people that signed the Declaration of Independence. I would venture to say that most people probably consider the signers of the Declaration of Independence as our Founding Fathers, even though that document only says what we are not, not what we are. The true Founding Fathers that set up the United States and made us what we are today are the writers of the Constitution.

So, after reading the Constitution, I would have to say that I believe we should follow it as we do all laws and regulations, but we also have to revisit it and recraft it from time to time. The original Constitution makes it pretty clear that slavery was not only accepted, but protected by the laws of the land. We had to fight a bloody Civil War to change that. My point is that laws are made by men, and men make mistakes. Times change, and the way we govern ourselves has to change with them. Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of Liberty has to be watered with the blood of patriots from time to time. It's simpler just to amend the Constitution to reflect changing realities. I prefer pruning the branches of the Constitution to descending into chaos.

Culture of Cults

2011-12-11T11:59:00.005-06:00

When I was in college, we had a religious group on campus that was recruiting a lot of students and growing very fast. Then the college newspaper, the Collegian, reported that they were a cult. Supposedly, they would take depressed and despondent students on a "retreat" where they would put them in a room with a dozen members and pressure them until they cracked. They wouldn't let them go until they started to agree with them that their views were correct. They would isolate the members from their friends and families over the next few weeks and continue to work on them until they were indoctrinated. I remember the paper reporting that one student's father lost contact with her and became alarmed. He hired someone to kidnap her back and had her deprogrammed. She explained how she had been brainwashed and how glad she was to escape.

We've recently met a couple that are in a local charismatic church that is growing very fast. They have attempted to recruit us several times. We've learned that innocent invitations to parties and get-togethers always include extended sessions of prayers and preaching. I became suspicious of the church and did some research. There were glowing reviews of the church online, as well as scathing commentaries. The detractors were usually members of similar churches that had only small variants to the doctrine. I saw some indications that the church was a cult. I found their site and saw that they had a podcast. When I downloaded and listened to the most recent episode, it was a real treat. They believe that the end of the world is coming. More specifically, they believe that the end times may have already started, and the 1000 years of bad times are here. The sermon discussed how they needed to put laws in place to protect the faithful and needed to take over government functions so that they could be in control. They discussed how the end times would have pockets of good interspersed in areas that had gone bad. They spent a considerable time talking about how this other church was full of nutty people that were seriously deluded because they believed that Christ comes at the end of the 1000 years, while the truth is that Christ comes at the beginning of the 1000 years. Since listening to this incredible sermon, the couple has shared with us their ideas on storing a year's worth of food in their house, and raising chickens as a way to insure they don't go hungry if society collapses.

This is nuts in my opinion. I believe you're free to believe what you want to believe, but I also believe that I can believe that what you believe is crazy, and in this case, that's what I believe. More importantly, when people believe something that is insane, and their ideology is telling them to go out and recruit and spread the word and be ready to take over the government to further these beliefs, that's the point where you've crossed the line into dangerous.

What am I going to do about this? Avoid the crazy people and warn others if the subject comes up.

I started thinking about cults and the characteristics of what makes a cult. Just like the old revelation that sexuality was fluid and that people were not gay or straight, but usually somewhere on the continuum between the extremes, cultish behavior or beliefs are on a continuum. There are many organizations that exhibit cult-like behavior.

So I put together a list of characteristics of cults.
1. Beliefs that cannot be shaken by truth or facts.
2. Recruiting of other members.
3. Intolerance of dissent within the cult group.
4. Policing of beliefs within the group. Training to learn and reinforce group cohesion.
5. Attacking individuals or groups outside of the cult that disagree.
6. Devotion to the cause and willingness to do and say what you are told by the group despite the costs and downside of these actions.
7. Certainty that other forces are arrayed against you. Paranoia. Us versus them mentality that precludes critical thinking or ability to consider circumstances dispassionately.
8. Willingness to protect the group despite the cost or the righteousness of any particular circumstances.

I started thinking about groups that displayed cultish behavior came up with the following list:

Religious Cults
Political Parties
Military Organizations
Police Forces
Intelligence Organizations?
Sports Teams or Fans around Sports Teams
Corporations
Political Movements
Media Organizations

Now obviously, not all members of these groups display cult-like behavior, but there are great examples within each group.

The military, of which I was once a member, is very conscious of their "socialization". They require cohesion to function and succeed, they expect orders to be followed explicitly (and rapidly without question) and they evoke strong loyalty reactions. They don't get pegged to the far end of the cult meter because there are examples of military people that will speak out about a war or report their fellow members for infractions.

Police organizations that become corrupt or overly brutal become cult-like. They talk about the Blue Code of Honor and the Blue Shield of Silence (that's not right, but I can't remember what they call the effect where police are not supposed to ever report each other or bring each other up on charges).

Military organizations that form around brutal dictators are cult-like. Look at North Korea as a prime example. Dissent it not tolerated and belief of anything other than that the Supreme Leader is a godlike figure is not tolerated. Hitler had a cult of personality built up around him and it infected the entire nation to a degree.

Political Parties can be cult-like when they issue "talking points" and try to keep everyone "on message". The problem with this is that if they pick a bad direction, there is no way to correct the problem and steer onto the right course.

The advantage of behavior in the direction of a cult is that people can be unified, they can speak and act with one purpose and they can get things done. They can sweep aside opposition and will not be slowed by internal dissent or hesitancy. The disadvantage is that groups can either be driven far down a bad path, or societies will not find innovations and new ideas if they do not fit in nicely with old beliefs. I can imagine the anti-cult groups having slogans like "Think for yourself" and "Question Authority".

In real practice, I believe that society swings back and forth between this cult discipline (like was seen in the McCarthy era) and dissent and questioning (like what we saw in the 60's). I believe it's good to vacillate back and forth between these extremes. That way you get the advantage of decisive action and the advantage of self correction. History has fluctuated back and forth between these extremes, but what you have to ask yourself is, where am I right now?

Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-11T10:05:00.004-05:00

The recent rise of the protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street has caused some mixed feelings. While the movement is disorganized, diffuse, and does not have a central message, it has evoked a strong reaction in the public. People that trend to the left are sympathetic to their opposition to big corporations or ultra-rich. The unemployed, the underemployed, and those who work hard, but see their salaries and benefits slipping every year feel justified in being angry at the 1% of the population that has the bulk of the wealth in this country. The conservative right are scornful on one hand, calling the protesters ignorant or misguided, and fearful on the other hand, saying they feel that these protests will spiral out of control.

Police in riot gear have already broken up protests in Denver, and police in New York City are increasingly trying to control or break up the protests there. Some compare this to the reception the Tea Party movement of two years ago got with the public. Primarily against big government, they were successfully co-opted by Fox News sponsorship and Republican Party courtship. What started out as a revolutionary movement has basically become the far-right wing of the Republican Party, with a seat at the table in Government and a National Organization.

What people fail to understand as they look at these two movements with very different complaints and issues is that the core impulse that spawned the movements are basically the same thing.

Both movements' primary complaint is against the size, power, and corruption of their chosen nemesis. It's Big Government versus Big Corporations. The problem is not how big these institutions are, the problem how some of these institutions have gone rogue. They are unmanaged, selfish, and malevolent to society's health and long term goals. They are short sided and corrupt, seeking to get on top, amass ever greater power and money, then rig the game so that they will always be at an overwhelming advantage.

The actual problem that this country, and to a similar extent, the world is embroiled in, this fear of big governments and big corporations, is not two separate problems. This unacceptable mess large institutions have created is two sides of the same coin. They are inextricably joined at the hip. Big corporations fund and corrupt big government, and big government then provides them legal cover for the nefarious activities of corporations. Who lobbies Washington and funds political campaigns? Special interests intent either in getting a business advantage or in having government either subsidize them or leave them alone with rules and regulations. Who gets elected? Not principled popular people that go to Washington with ideals that cannot be swayed, but fickle politicians that court the biggest supporters, then do nothing to interfere and everything to help the special interests that fund their elections. Once they have tilted the playing field to their corporate partners' advantage, they often leave government and go straight to work for the companies they already served while in office.

The real problem with this setup is not with the size of the institutions or the amount of money, the problem is a lack of control and accountability. The problem is that no moral and ethical institution is powerful enough to challenge and correct these imbalances. The system is rigged against those without wealth, power, or influence. Frankly, those without wealth, power, or influence are disorganized and could not be effective in making any changes to those with power. The supreme court has ruled that corporations have the same rights as people and campaign donations equals free speech. This has given a green light to the people at the top that are exploiting the system to the hilt. It gives society the feeling that things are spiralling out of control and that there is no way to correct this and rein it all back in.

The other underlying problem is that these big entities are doing what is good for themselves, and not what is good for society. They are often doing what is good for themselves at the expense of society. If these massive institutions were looking out for the common good, no one would begrudge them any of their wealth or power. Indeed, there are many organizations that have reached their pinnacle of development and are doing a great deal of good in the world. There are also organizations that have lost their way and come back to their senses. But the incentives in the business world and in politics are all aimed to push the system further in the direction we have been going. The inclination by any power player is to use any dirty trick in the book or their competition will roll right over them.

These giant institutions seem to be short sighted and unaware of the effect that they are having on society. Dan Carlin, in his Common Sense podcast, made the comparison of recent protests all across the Western World to the protests in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring. It is surprising how little is known (or I should say how little is reported and emphasized in the media) about these movements that are cropping up everywhere. Most people probably could not answer a Jeopardy game style questioning of why there were recent protests in the following countries: Greece, Spain, England, Italy, Israel, or India. If you can find information about these protests online, it will surprise you that something this big is not already in the news every night.

My fear, when I think about this rising unease and this escalating willingness to take to the streets to protest is that the problems being pointed out in these protests are real and they are not being addressed. The lack of government and corporate responsibility is going to push people towards socialism and away from capitalism. The masses need to be heeded if for no other reason than to let the powerful stay in power. If the large institutions that are in power today would only be responsible and share power and wealth with the people, and if they would concentrate on doing what is best for the entire society in the long run, there would be a chance that the people will not rise up against the powerful. If they crack down on protesters and double down on their policies, they could very well push the people to take more drastic action and disrupt society. While it feels good to get out in the street and shake your fist when you are mad about an injustice, it is not good to tear down these large institutions. In the end, stable, peaceful, non-violent society comes from big strong governments and jobs, wealth, prosperity, and technological advances and innovations come from big strong corporations, and these are what makes life a continuous series of improvements. These benefits must be channelled wide throughout society and shared in order to be preserved.

Super Organism

2011-09-18T22:46:00.002-05:00

I just saw another example of life on the planet acting like life in a body.

Bodies have a genetic code they follow that is influenced by signals. Hunger makes a trigger go off that makes you want to eat. Injuries send signals that direct the body where to respond with an immune response or where to perform repairs.

I was listening to a podcast about microorganisms that cause a behavioral change in their hosts. There were several examples, starting with mice that get a parasite that causes them to stop fearing, and in fact start to love the smell of cats. Their behavior gets them eaten, so the parasite can propagate in the cat. There is a catapillar that gets a virus that prevents him from molting. They climb to the top of the tree and eat until they die. Then they explode open and rain virus particles down on the other caterpillars in the tree. They were also talking about viruses that pass on traits from one host to another, possibly speeding up evolutionary adaptations in a population.

There is a lot of talk lately about the function of the bacterial population that we carry around with us. Besides the beneficial work that some strains do for us, aiding in digestion and preventing harmful strains from infecting us, there is a great deal of interest in the possible ways that these cultures of bacteria are affecting our behavior. Evolution dictates that strains that change behavior in a way that threatens their hosts will soon die out, so it stands to reason that we will find many beneficial relationships between our internal bacterial passengers and ourselves.

This reminds me so much of how a well functioning cell behaves. Stimulus, response, but not necessarily the same response, given the atmosphere the stimulus is given in.

Many people have speculated on a phenomenon called Gaia, or the Earth as a superorganism. The sum total of all of the species, working together, each effecting the others. Many people have a hard time believing this could be true when you look at the imbalances, such as human population running away, or species being hunted to extinction. The people that theorize about Gaia always seem to come up with this Disney-like interpretation with all the animals in the forest talking to each other and living in harmony. What if it's not that simple or pure? What if brutality and consumption are part of the plan, and we do work together on a higher level? Would we even know what that looks like? Would we even know how to prove it, much less see it? I'm not saying this potential superorganism is in perfect harmony, or has some kind of purpose or way of exerting self-determination. I'm just saying that there are influences and relationships that are not at all obvious. We should be open to the things we see in the future that may prove that there are more connections than we ever suspected.

Stupid Voters

2011-08-07T18:37:00.005-05:00

I was listening to Dan Carlin's latest Common Sense episode 203 about "Upgrading the Electorate". He talked about the way most people are ignorant of public affairs and current events and how this makes us very poor voters. We do not feel in the least bit hesitant in voting on subjects that we know absolutely nothing about.

He sited an author in the podcast, Rick Shenkman, who wrote the book Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter. He summarized the types of ignorance as follows:

1. Sheer Ignorance - no knowledge of the facts
2. Negligence - disinclination to seek facts
3. Wooden Headedness - people that want to believe only what they already believe
4. Short Sightedness - inability to see long term consequences of current events
5. Bone Headedness - simplicity and gullibility, biases

It's interesting because it runs the gambit from inattention, through people being manipulated or pre-disposed in certain ways, to people actively selecting their own viewpoints despite any outside influence or information. Dan Carlin says he thinks that it's not a matter of people being stupid, as in incapable of learning, as it is that they are not interested. My thought is that there is a portion of those not interested because it's too much work to figure things out. This is the appeal of Talk Radio. People figure things out for you.

I was also watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and he showed a summary of Republican speakers who felt quite comfortable vilifying liberals in one voice and playing themselves off as the victims in the next. It seemed odd to have someone simultaneously bullying and browbeating their enemy while claiming they were being taken advantage of or being treated unfairly. This kind of speech strikes me as strange because is it self apparent that it is inconsistent and cannot be correct, yet this does not stop people from spewing nonsense and expecting everyone to lap it up as the gospel.

Our Founding Fathers believed that the average person should not be allowed to vote, only the educated elite (this was a phrase that was so much more applicable in that era than today, yet you hear it so much today). Back around the time of the American Revolution, being well read was much more common in the upper classes. People of means took great pains to educated their children, most particularly their eldest sons, in order to prepare them to manage estates or take their place in the leadership of society. While the printing press was spreading literacy and information at a much greater rate than in times past throughout history, there were still practical bars to acquiring the reasoning and analytical skills to discern the facts from the sea of raw information. Books were expensive, and newspapers were prone to opinion and exaggeration. Many of the laboring class were illiterate and uninterested in changing that status. Women were considered beneath consideration, too, and not expected to be interested in reading and literature. The Founding Fathers were well-steeped in a Classical Education that included Latin and Greek and the history of the great Roman and Greek civilizations that spawned all higher theories on science and society. The Founding Fathers were concerned, too, that the passions of the crowd could sway the people and move them to enact laws that were not well reasoned for the long term, or select leaders that were not deliberate thinkers, but passionate and poorly directed hot-heads.

The Republican primaries are in full swing now, so the brand of idealism that we see being shared most extensively right now is Conservatism. I am biased on that score, because I am prone to paint conservatives as Religious people that see the science of evolution and geology as an enemy, or greedy people that see the science of climate change as a barrier to making money the old fashion way and not worrying about what the impact on the planet is. Michelle Bachman in particular strikes me as a candidate that is willfully ignorant of a great deal of reality, yet strikes a chord in some people that gives gravitas to her ridiculous statements like the idea that the HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation because some voter in a meet and greet line told her this (and because she already believed that nasty things happen to people that get vaccines).

It is easy to start thinking that we almost need people to take a test that proves that they are at least paying attention to current events before they vote, and better yet to take a test on basic government functions and U.S. history before they are eligible to vote. I've often wondered how many U.S. citizens would be unable to pass a U.S. citizenship/naturalization test (see http://www.sporcle.com/games/lilchocdonut/uscitz to see if you could pass the test). The reason we don't do this is because our countries laws reflect the belief that everyone is entitled to a vote. Never mind that this was never true in history, all the way back to Greek and Roman times, the Democracies that we were supposed to be emulating. Originally, military service or property ownership was the minimum requirement for voter eligibility. We've been expanding those rights for some time, until now we have universal suffrage and an 18 year old voting age. Tests to qualify voters have a bad history, from post Civil War times when they were used to exclude black voters, so there is justified resistance to such a system. There is also a sense that rich or influential people might mass power in our system, but if we are to be truly democratic, a majority of the voters can assert their rights or displace a powerful usurper.

In any case, it feels as if this inattention of voters is not a good thing. It corrodes democracy by making it easier for elected officials to take over power and make changes to society against the popular will simply because people are not paying attention or not understanding what happens. While I myself have been guilty from time to time of thinking, "people that don't know what is going on should not be allowed to vote!" I think it is more fair to say that I wish more people understood what is going on.

Igneous Rocks

2011-08-07T18:01:00.002-05:00

We were in Colorado on vacation, enjoying the mountains and it got me wondering about geology and wishing I knew more. While we were in a small hotel, we were watching Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader. There was a question about rocks formed by extreme heat. The contestant answered that this rock was called lava, which made us laugh, and then admit that we did not know what it should have been, which was igneous.

As soon as I got home, I listened to more of a podcast of a Geology class from the School of Mines in Golden. He explained how these rocks form from flowing lava.

Then him mentioned Ship Rock, which we saw at the tail end of the vacation. It is the remaining core of an old volcano, which when you know that this is how it is formed only enhances the way it looks. The same can be said of Devil's Tower, which we saw on vacation about 4 or 5 years ago. That flow was slower and more laminar, and all the outside of the core is all eroded around. Ships Rock has lots of lateral flows, so it is very spiky and interestingly shaped.

I'm now totally into igneous rocks, particularly the cores of old volcanoes.

Ghost Town Construction

2011-08-07T17:24:00.007-05:00

I went to Colorado recently and visited the Animas Forks region to see some ghost towns. Thoughts of how these communities were built and lived in inspired me to consider more deeply if it would be possible to learn how the buildings were actually built.

It's something that I do already, looking at buildings and trying to guess their age based on construction techniques. This is usually buildings or factories in cities, and since they are usually large with complex construction, there are a lot of clues. Large buildings had more of a chance of following standardized building procedures, sometimes building codes.

Buildings and houses in the mountains would be another thing entirely. Throughout most of the mining era, these communities were thrown together in some very harsh environments, far away from normal supply lines, and probably without any kind of code or building inspector. I noticed that some houses and buildings were sound, but others were not so sound. These communities were filled with buildings that are no longer standing. In one place, Capital City just west of Lake City, only one building survives. It was easy for me to visualize that as the mine played out and people started leaving the area, the last ones to stay were probably tearing the other houses down to use as firewood.

One thing I know about building in places other than the mountain is that you normally position the building on a foundation that goes below the freeze line so that it will not be subject to freeze thaw cycles and the instability and thrusting that comes with freezing soil.

The houses in Animas Forks were all built on grade without any basement. The ground they were built on was mostly rocky, either large rocks or solid shelves. This would have been an extreme challenge to anchor a building to. The other thing that I kept thinking about was how deep the snow would get in the winter. One storyboard mentioned that many of the homes were destroyed by avalanches, so how do you protect against that?

The whole line of thought made me think that it would be a great book idea - mining town building construction. You could have a fantastic time searching out the structures: locate them, analyze them, and map them. While it would be fantastic to have access to building records and find actual Bills of Materials, I believe that research would indicate that there are no records left of how things were constructed. It would have to be done by first hand inspection.

I was daydreaming while I was in Animas Forks about what I would do if I could go back in time. I figured their life in a mining camp was pretty harsh, so it would be good to make a bath house and water works. You could probably use solar energy to heat the water. It would not be hard to improve on the available construction materials. So much could be done with just the mining tailings to make sturdy foundations. I looked at the insides of the remaining houses in Animas Forks and saw what I thought at first was wallpaper, but later determined was material covering the walls to keep the cold out. It would not be that hard to construct avalanche splitters uphill from a house, and it would be very useful to use the stone to put the house into the side of a hill so that you would have some protection and heat from the ground. You'd have to lay in an enormous amount of food to stay there year-round. I imagine there comes a time in November or December where the roads close and do not re-open until spring.

I don't think I'm built of the sterner stuff it would take to stay over the winter up in the mountains. I do like the idea of poking around in those old mountain towns throughout a pleasant summer. Now all I need is an advance by a publisher and a winning lottery ticket and I'm there.

Robopocalypse

2011-07-01T09:12:00.004-05:00

Daniel H. Wilson was recently interviewed by on Science Friday by Ira Flatow about his recent book Robopocalypse. He also has a previous book called How to Survive a Robot Uprising.

The premise of the book is that every machine with a computer chip goes out of control and tries to take over humanity. This is supposed to be in the near future, not much more advanced than now.

I've always wondered, when watching stories like Battlestar Galactica or the Terminator series, why the robots would want to wipe out people. What about their own self interest? Without humans, they wouldn't have more power through the innovation that humans provide. It seemed to me that robots would not be able to figure out new things very easily.

This made me think about the Robot Soul. What is the heart of a robot's being? What makes them tick? It seems like you would build in a willingness to do dangerous things and in exchange, they can have a new body if they fail. You constantly keep a copy of the robot's program, and if any particular robot gets destroyed in the process of carrying out their duty, you simply download that robot's program into a new body. You could also clone the program into multiple new robots, like having a child. For humans, the promise of never dying would be like immortality and appealing. The hope of being copied would be like procreation. Robots would have two of the things that humans want and strive for.

Years ago, Issac Asimov wrote about robotics and came up with the three laws of robotics. The gist of these rules was that a robot could do no harm to humans. This was commonly accepted by many to be a precondition of developing robots, that there would be some kind of safeguard built in. Yet today, we work on military robots to take the place of soldiers and program them to kill our enemy. This seems like a terrible idea to me. What if this technology was turned against us by our enemies? What if this technology grew aware and developed a conscience and decided that being used to kill a person's enemy was not right? What if they selectively turned against any person that ordered the robot to kill someone else? What if robots decided not to let humans order them to kill other humans?

Solution would probably be Avatars. The killing machines would be robots that would operated normally most of the time, then cede control when it was time to kill a person. At that time, humans would supply the controlling commands through a virtual interface, relieving robots of guilt or getting around the prohibition of killing humans. You have to figure we'll find a way around any restrictions if we feel we need that capability.

Life Makes Life

2011-07-01T09:11:00.002-05:00

I was listening to two recent articles that had a common theme.

One was about a man that studied hail. He discovered that most hail contain bacteria in the center of the stone. This guy was slicing hailstones up in razor thin sections, and somehow figuring out how to see the growth rings in them, like the growth rings in a tree. In the very center, more often than not, he found bacteria. Not just any bacteria, a few strains of bacteria. Hail needs something crystalline to start freezing on, a starter seed to the hailstone. So it was fascinating to think that this was often a living thing. Certainly dust and other particles are capable of starting the process, too, but you would not think that there would be that much bacteria aloft in the atmosphere. It made me wonder if we were living on a sterile earth, where life was not present at all, would we have as much rain?

That leads back to the fact that we would not be living on this planet as it is if it were not for life. The methanogenic bacteria in Earth's early oceans are responsible for the high oxygen content in the atmosphere. Before this bacteria, the atmosphere was primarily methane, and poisonous to most life as we now know it. Without seas full of these early bacteria, we would not be living in the world we see around us now.

The other related article was about trees. Apparently, they sluff off some kind of bacteria that scientists found to seed rain clouds. In an area with a large amount of trees, much of the rain that is created may be the result of the trees seeding the clouds. This seems like a clear feedback loop. Trees make rain which makes trees. They also pointed out that cloud cover is healthier for trees because rather than blocking sunlight, it more often has the effect of diffusing it. This makes the radiation come to the trees in a variety of directions and gives a tree a greater ability to benefit from the sunlight. Less intense and direct sun and more sunlight going under leaves from a lateral direction. What a neat system of supply water and helping the trees grow. The growth of the forest or jungle is a self-sustaining action.

It shows that life is the key to making life. Once you get it started, it tends to build on itself.

Perturbations

2011-07-01T08:56:00.004-05:00

I was listening to a climate scientist talk about the weather cycles on Earth. He talked about how certain changes, the main example being the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere by man, create feedback effects. He talked about positive and negative feedback, one being where the reaction or effect strengthens or adds to the initial condition or input, the other where it damps it out. In other words, one runs out of control and the other damps itself out.

We have two examples in our solar system of this, our sister planets Venus and Mars. In Venus, the greenhouse effect ran out of control and caused a surface so hot you can melt lead on it. On Mars, the atmosphere eventually left the planet, and it spiraled down to a cold dry planet.

Another point of the lecture was about just how many variables are involved, and their complex interplay. While CO2 rising traps greenhouse gas, it could also cause there to be more moisture in the air, which might be a shield or shade keeping out the sun or another blanket holding in the heat. Scientists debated this through the 70s and 80s and finally determined that more atmospheric water tends to trap more heat.

The point is that the rise of some conditions might kick off a new effect which counters the original input. They call these movements back and forth around a center "perturbations". There are effects which cause swings and others which slow them down, but if the swings start being too frequent or too far from the equilibrium average we've come to expect, this can cause the system to swing out of control.

Understanding this interplay of forces and variables will be the ultimate human challenge. We don't have any choice but to take on this challenge, but learning it will have another major benefit. If we take what we learn and apply it to Venus and Mars, we could very well push those systems in to stable, more Earth-like conditions. In the case of Venus, the planet is so close to Earth's size, that living on the surface would not require adjusting our bodies to a lighter or heavier gravity.

I have great hope that we will learn to dampen out the perturbations and control weather, first here at home, then maybe on our sister planets, changing them into secondary homes for us to spread out on.

Haste Makes Waste

2011-05-24T08:49:00.005-05:00

I've got a Prius. Many people would probably stereotype me on that issue, figuring I'm politically or environmentally a certain way. Some people that get high mileage cars are just cheap. They don't want to spend the money on gas.

For me, it was a little bit of all that, but mostly, it's the engineering of efficiency. How do you get more for less?

So I find myself doing this thing they call Hypermiling (Hyper Mile-ing). The readout on the dashboard tells you what your instantaneous and average gas mileage are. And one screen you can select shows the instantaneous power efficiency. You drive around and you quickly learn (or relearn, or have dramatically emphasized to you) that quick starts and rapid acceleration are wasteful. If you can take the time to slowly wind up to speed, you will use a lot less fuel. And once you are going, it doesn't take as much energy to keep going.

It occurred to me that you might be able to get more mileage from premium gas. I figured that the higher octane might be enough to get enough more energy and more mileage to more than justify the price. I started thinking about this after my mileage had been going down and I had the dealer flush the injectors and got an immediate 20% jump in gas mileage. So I put in some premium gas and got another 10% boost. However, I found this to be a false savings, because I started driving more carefully at the same time. I found that the first tank was about the time it took to drain my battery. The thing is, when you hypermile, you tend to make the car run in all electric mode more often. However, it's the boost in speed you get from fuelled acceleration that charges up the battery. So after you hypermile for a while, you drain the battery down to the point where the motor is always running just to charge the battery. So instead of sitting quietly at a stop light with the motor off, you sit there with your gas engine idling just like any non-hybrid car. So there is a limit to how much you can save.

It was about this time that I started obsessing about getting solar panels for the car. I thought that if the battery would just recharge while it was parked at work or home, that it would be full at least once a day and I could hypermile around for a while, draining it. I thought about a sunshade for the window out of solar panels or a carport to park it in that has solar panels. The next problem is converting that power to the right voltage and then feeding it in to the battery without harming the car's electronics. People out there have done it, but there's nothing readily available off the shelf.

It occurred to me that any time you're in a hurry to do something, it costs you.

I was thinking about energy first. If you want it quickly and need it now, it costs you in who you have to buy it from or what it does to the environment. If you take the time to do it right, it's more sustainable.

But it's not just energy that costs when you rush it. Look at what happens with wars. When you rush to war, use up resources at a fearsome rate. It's wasteful of lives as well as respect and prestige in the world.

There are other examples, as well. There's that song that says you can't hurry love, and that's probably true most of the time. When you are smitten with someone, you can't just rush up to them and shout "I'm in love with you!" and expect this to be taken as anything but proof that you are nuts and not worthy of love.

It's kind of that way in sales, too. You have to wait for the sales to come to you to really start making good consistent sales. You can't call someone up every day and say "are you going to buy something from me today?!" and expect them to continue to take your calls. After a while, they'll make a point of not buying from you because you annoy them. If you've ever been to a car dealer and had the guy come up to you and say "what's it going to take to get you to drive off in this today?!" you know that this is the quickest way to make you want to leave and never come back.

I think weight loss is another example of haste being counter productive. If you do manage to loose weight really quickly, you run the risk of injuring yourself if it's through exercise, or making yourself unhealthy if it's through diet. And there's the rebound effect. Lose weight quickly and you become so hungry (at least I do). You have to take the time to lower your appetite while you are loosing weight.

So just like the tortoise and the hare, remember, slow and steady wins the race.

Cat Fight

2011-05-24T08:46:00.003-05:00

Cats are cute cuddly soft little furballs, suitable for sitting on doilies or little velvet pillows. They are soft and helpless.

Anyone with any knowledge of cats knows that is simply not the case. We have lots of cats. There are outside cats that we feed that range from approachable to skittish, and inside cats that either spend all their time inside or like to go out when they can.

Valentine is an outside cat. She showed up last winter and has never let us pet her. She's not so scared of us that she runs at the sight of us, she's just leery and stays outside of arm's length. Last winter, there were more outside cats, and Valentine was at the very bottom of the pecking order. It seemed that none of the other cats liked her, or even tolerated her, and it seemed that she got the most abuse from the other cats. Valentine's nose would often have a huge scratch in it, and you just visualized her getting beat up by all the other cats.

If you imagine what a cat attack would look like, it would be pretty brutal. They have some seriously sharp and nasty claws. I've often wondered how bad a cat with absolutely no fear could hurt you if it suddenly went nuts and decided to attack. I would not want to find out, especially if I had shorts on. The other day, one of the inside cats, Eddy was coming into the cat door and got nailed by Valentine from behind. She was getting hit in the flank just as she ducked into the door. There was no blood and no apparent damage. The same attack would have easily killed a bird, and probably a rabbit. It makes you realize that these cute little kitties must be made of tough enough stuff to defend against attacks by themselves.

In fact, that's probably not a bad definition of most species. Their defenses are probably about evenly matched to their offensive abilities. Being as tough as it takes to survive the kind of attacks you yourself can dish out would be a prerequisite for survival.

The human political animal is the exception. It seems to me that the Republicans are made of sterner stuff than the Democrats. From what I always observe, the Republicans have a never ending supply of moves that smash any Democratic leaning or initiative. They always seem to state their opponents position and break it up and show it to be a sham before you even hear from the Democrats. It just doesn't even seem like a fair fight most of the time, except when you look at the outcome, which is government that pretty much hovers around the 50/50 point. Like my cat that gets hit in the side and waltzes in unharmed, perhaps there is more to this in the political animal than meets the eye.

Today's Antebellum Civil War

2011-05-12T13:52:00.007-05:00

I've been fascinated by the Civil War for a long time. Most recently, I have been listening to a lecture on Civil War Reconstruction by Yale Professor David Blight. Most studies of the Civil War concentrate on the build up to the war and the battles and political struggles during the war. It's as if the war ended and was just over and forgotten, if you judge by what is usually taught on the Civil War.

So, given the current political divide and much of the debate going on in public now, it occurred to me that the current situation has some similarities to our country just before the Civil War.

One analysis I listened to about the Civil War broke down slavery as an economic system. It was profitable and successful, from an economic standpoint. There was a small amount of rich plantation owners that made an enormous amount of money off of slavery based agriculture, mostly cotton, but also tobacco. Slavery was a system which stole the labors of the slaves and caused them to toil and put all their efforts into the profits of their masters. They did not benefit from the system, to the contrary, they were trapped in the system with no way out and no recourse to escape or be treated more fairly.

Democrats in that pre-Civil War era had a direct stake in perpetuating this economic system that directly benefited such a small number of people. Whigs were not much better, they did not want (for the most part) to break down the system. Some of their motivation was not to upturn the economy, or to create a political rift in the country. Only the emergence of the Republican party brought out politicians that were more open about discussing the abolition of slavery.

I occurs to me that we here in present day America are a lot like that pre-Civil War society. We have two parties that protected economic systems that do harm to people. There can be no doubt that the default position for politicians today are that rich people are the capitalists that provide the prosperity of society and should not be interfered with, even when they exploit workers or the environment that we all live in and that should belong to all of us. We live in a world where the ultrarich are taxed at the lowest rate they have been in decades, and where workers' rights are more and more non-existent. Income disparity is higher than it has been since the late 20s. The power of unions is waning so rapidly that they have almost ceased to be a political force. The Supreme Court has declared that Corporations are people and that they cannot be restricted from spending unlimited money to influence politics.

For parallels to pre-Civil War society to be complete, there would have to be the emergence of a third party that may emerge from an existing party, but would be for championing the downtrodden class. Instead, in today's world, there has been the emergence of the Tea Party, which centers its attentions on keeping taxes low and shrinking the power of government in our lives. The primary beneficiaries of these ideas are ultra-rich and corporations, yet the average Joe Sixpack in the Tea Party does not understand or appreciate this. Many blue collar or low wage workers in our country support the small minority of ultra-rich in their rights and pursuits. There was a poll that revealed that most people believe that they, too will strike it rich some day, and do not want to finally arrive only to find all their rights and privileges taken away. This is a strange situation where there are a large number of people who have been convinced to vote and act against their own self interests.

So, where will we go from here? There was an interesting analysis of unrest in the Arab world, the so-called Arab Spring, where this was shown as the masses of young and powerless society finally rising up against those entrenched in wealth and power.

I've often thought that one reason Communism failed because it was never actually tried (don't get me wrong here, I also believe pure Communism would fail, but that's not my point here). "Communism" as it was set up in Soviet Russian and Red China is not a true redistribution of wealth and power, but a concentration of wealth, power, and privilege into a small elite group, which is no different than what happens when Capitalism runs away and concentrates wealth and power in a small minority. One of the differences between Soviet and Chinese communism and pure runaway capitalism is that they paid lip service to the rights of the workers (as they trampled them).

My frustration is that you need the promise of profits and wealth in order to drive innovation and motivate investment in technological and economic progress, but that it inevitably leads to individuals or corporations trying to control that technology. It does not serve society as a whole to allow technology to be controlled and restricted by individuals or individual corporations. How is this any different from people's fears of government control of tech? I tend to agree with government oversight when it protects people's health or the environment, but not when it slows down or restricts the development of technology. Of course, another major problem with communism was that it tried to control and direct technology and the markets, which also proved to be disastrous. Just like you need biological diversity in order to have a healthy environment, you need economic diversity, which is really nothing more than many companies trying many different things, in order for the most valid technology to emerge and serve society as a whole.

I believe that we have to find a way to correct the imbalance, protect individuals and the environment, and make opportunity more widespread and accessible, without taking away the profit motive and the situation that allows for good ideas to be rewarded.

Altered Self

2011-05-12T13:51:00.004-05:00

I was listening to a podcast of Fresh Air the other day about a person who had suffered a stroke. The stroke altered the man's personality. Doctors determined that the stroke had killed a portion of his brain. As with many other examples of people with damaging brain injuries, this case would have provided proof of a connection between a certain part of the brain and certain higher functions.

It would be difficult to explain the effects exactly, but the man went from being a chiropracter, a logical and methodical person with a strict schedule and a disciplined approach to life to a artist. He could not remember most of his past life, from people's names to all the training he had. He was care-free, not in the sense that he was happy, but because he was not capable of the kind of deep thinking that would cause him to worry.

He became a prolific or maybe more accurately, obsessive artist. He was constantly making pencil drawings of intricate patterns.

As his recovery progressed, he became fully functional, seemed pretty normal in conversation, but was a completely different man.

It occurred to me as I listened to the story that this new personality must have been there before the stroke, it was just suppressed by the parts of brain that died during the stroke. While the stroke had the effect of wiping out his old personality, who's to say that's all bad? He seemed much happier in his new life, less stressed and less bothered by the cares of the world. Granted, he was also probably not as successful or organized, but he was happy.

It made me think that if the brain contains other personalities, and they are just submerged, perhaps there is a way to bring them out. If there are dominant parts of the brain overruling other aspects, maybe there is a way to suppress the dominant personality and become a different person. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to find a way through meditation or hypnosis to allow emergence of new personality? Wouldn't it be nice to take a vacation from yourself and experience a new you that would relax and find more enjoyment in life?

I realize that people can alter their personality by taking drugs, but the effects are more harmful. The pathways in the brains are being damaged and rewritten under the influence of drugs. There would not be a great deal of control in what your results would be, what personality or trait would emerge.

If there are aspects of your personality already present, but submerged, finding a way to bring them out could result in an unexpected outcome just as uncontrolled as taking drugs.

I guess my idea when I considered what would be inside your head, waiting to be discovered was that you could dial in the changes to the type of personality you wanted on demand. This is probably not a realistic idea. Any change in personality is a risky spin of the mental roulette wheel. Perhaps some day psychiatrists might find a way to use this idea to enhance therapy, but for now, it's probably more along the lines of "don't try this at home".

Red Tide

2011-04-27T19:50:00.006-05:00

We've spent a lot of time worrying about the Chinese and what their economy and way of business is doing to our economy. While this obsession is in vogue currently, it was present in a different flavor years ago. I remember reports about the trade deficit with the Chinese going back to the days that they were still totally Communist and the pro-business policies had not been tried yet. Yet, the flavor of these worries seems to be escalating. Now, you are more likely to hear fears that this deficit is fueling the Chinese military, or that having the Chinese buying up U.S. government debt is a dangerous thing.

Back in the 90's there was a big movement toward "Free Trade". I can't remember whether this phrase cropped up before or after the public arguments about extending "most favored nation" status to the Chinese in trade arrangements. There was an announcement each year that they had once again extended this status to the Chinese, yet it always seemed to me that they were toying with holding the status back because of the way that the Chinese treated their people or would not allow information out of the country. Then there was a movement to formalize this arrangement into a more permanent status and you started hearing about Free Trade all the time. Those that tried to sell the public on Free Trade kept repeating standard arguments. Early on, there were concerns about losing American jobs to the Chinese. Advocates were saying that the jobs that would go away to China would be low wage jobs and would clear the way for Americans to do higher wage more skilled jobs. They said that the American public would benefit by having access to low priced goods.

This happened, to a degree. American manufacturing started to decline in fields like textiles and steelworking, but this higher wage higher skilled segment of manufacturing did not grow to a degree to outstrip the losses in the low skilled fields. There can be little debate that manufacturing in the U.S. has declined noticably in the last 15 years.

Many that advocated Free Trade talked also about how it would bring about Globalization and an equalization of wages. The problem with this is that they were not very honest about emphasizing what that meant. If you think about it, equalization of wages means a successful exporting country eventually has to deal with labor shortages and this results in wage inflation and rising prices. A country that imports more will eventually pay lower wages because the manufacturing base will decrease and the number of workers to fill the jobs will increase, making labor in oversupply. The result is a lowering of wages. This has in fact happened in the U.S.

The natural result in this is that laborers will tend to come together in their wages. The problem is that Americans expected that this meant that eventually other counties wages would rise to meet ours. They did not consider that equalization tends to be a lowering on one side and a rise on the other. When you average two numbers, the average is lower than one number and higher than the other. The only way to get to wage equity is if American wages drop. What we did not foresee was a rapid rise in Chinese inflation. Reports out this week show that the inflation rate in China is rising their wages much faster than our manufacturing decline is lowering our wages. The Chinese standard of living is leaping forward. People are buying cars in huge numbers, and wages are rising faster than expected. Couple this with energy prices and resource scarcities, and things rapidly start to tilt back in our favor.

In fact, the Energy markets are probably the thing that will turn around the discrepancy the quickest. World population continues to rise, and energy demand shows no sign of scaling back. Oil as a source of energy is finally reaching the end of its natural life, with environmental and geopolitical concerns making oil use less savory each year (not to mention the fluctuation nature of the price of petrochemical energy). Coal, too, is reaching a limit, this time from environmental pressures. Alternative energy sources will be needed to convert us over to our future energy needs, probably a combination of Nuclear, Wind, Solar, BioFuel, GeoThermal, and Tidal sources. No one of these forms will be enough, it will probably require a combination of all of them. Even if Fusion energy becomes feasible in the near future, all this means that there will be a huge need for jobs here in the U.S. to satisfy these needs. You can only make your energy at home, and while some things like wind turbines and solar panels, can be purchased from China, I suspect that the cost to ship them using fossil fuels will make it more feasible in the long run to make them at home. This means that many of the manufacturing jobs lost in the last few years will be coming home.

So I see in the upcoming economic climate the perfect storm: for advancing our economy and reversing the losses since Free Trade came into fashion.

Crunching Numbers

2011-04-27T19:46:00.005-05:00

I listened to the 2/11/11 Science Podcast about a month ago where they interviewed the author of a paper about the World's technological capacity to handle information.

One of the co-authors of the paper, Martin Hilbert discussed how they were trying to determine how the world has changed in handling information, which he defines as storing, communicating, or computing the information. Communication of data is either one way, broadcasting, or two way, telecommunication. Computation is compiling information by computers or little controllers that are in everything.

Nature is awash in information, but we don't notice or capture most of it. Much of the information that we do capture has a tendency to be lost and little of the rest of it is actually compiled into a useful form.

My thought when I hear this was that the power of information goes up exponentially as it is stored, communicated, and then compiled. In fact, the biggest limitation in using information in the past was computational power. This is why individuals like Newton, who developed Calculus and found a way to reduce information into its simplified essence were responsible for great leaps in thinking.

Genius, or even a well trained mind, is the human equivalent of an efficient or effective compiler of information. Someone that has absorbed a lot of information and has a brain that is good at sorting it out and compacting it into core kernels, essential facts, and basic truths. Sometimes this happens with some insight because a person is in the zone or attuned to the phenomenon they are observing. Sometimes it happens because the person’s mind is a combination of a steel trap, but also a fine filter of the information, or a good discriminator of good information and bad information. This is where written history multiplies human capacity. The deeper the knowledge bed for a fertile mind to till, the more productive the output can be. When linked with the rapid access of information, even people with only average compilation skills can put together powerful constructs and conclusions.

This power of computation, of compiling information to its essence, is an idea whose time has come. Recently, a computer named Watson was put on the game show Jeopardy to compete against humans. He readily beat the humans, but the designers of Watson were frank about the machine’s limitations. It can compile huge amounts of data quickly, but it doesn't know what the information means, or which computations are more valuable than others. They gave an example of one possible application for Watson by saying that a computer with his capabilities could be designed and tasked to read all the medical journals available from this point back and then continuing into the future after it was put into service as new information is learned or collected. If provided with a medical case, the information and symptoms of a particular patient, the computer could spit out all cases that correlated with the data. Some of it would be gibberish, coincidentally related data that is not actually pertinent to the particular case. The power of the computer could be exploited by mating it with a skilled medical person, who could look at the possibilities that the computer suggested and determine which is most likely. The computer crunches vast amounts of information, but the person interprets what that information means.

I've often thought about this in my work, how the information, if compiled properly, could work to shortcut the amount of time spent fumbling around trying to figure out things. Can you imagine if your workload could be culled down to a small amount of more certain actions? The amount of time you could save just nailing down sure things would be tremendous. I’ve stopped listening to news fluff programs and have been getting a lot of my information from podcasts that I’ve vetted and culled until I have a small core that is a source of facts that I trust. I find it easier to compile the truth of the situation when you listen to just the pure sources that dig deep into core truths and try not to waste time shouting obscenities people as they try to walk by and mind their own business.

So the fascinating interview about the interesting paper left me with a lot of hope about the future, but I had to spoil it by thinking about how this truly translated into current reality. People now are awash in broadcast information. Much of it is advertising, a case of questionable information at best, as it is designed to try to persuade you to purchase something, whether you need it or not. Then there is political information, which is very much like advertising. It is designed to try to get you to buy a political ideology and to try to persuade others to join this ideology, and to contest those that do not believe your positions. This poisoning of information has corrupted news sources, as people with pre-conceived ideas are choosing their news sources based on whether these sources are putting out information that they already agree with, and ignoring any data source that conflicts with their dearly held beliefs. The information is “compiled” in a deliberately deceptive manner. This is fed to the public, complete with instructions to disregard or react with hostility to anyone that questions or contradicts the core ideology.

This is bad enough, but even more problematic is the dumbing down of the data. Compilations that amount to “bad man hurts animals” or “tragic tale is villain’s fault” are often the main thrust of news programs. It’s as if people attention spans are too short to absorb the full truth and nuances of actual events. They would rather be fed a pre-digested take on events, even if it lacks depth of understanding or even basic veracity. People sometimes turn away from the complicated dialog to fixate on the simple and easy to comprehend story about the iconic events that often dominate news cycles, yet really amount to nothing important. It’s noise. Just like when a signal is corrupted by static, our information stream sometimes gets clogged by rubbish. This makes it hard to hear the real truth when it is being drowned out by random loud annoying noise. Sometimes noise such as this can generate heat, as if the masses have listened to the lunatic scratching his nails on the chalkboard and screaming about the end of the world. You listen to such cacophony at your own risk.

I believe that what happened in Egypt and is trying to happen in the Middle East and places like China is that the raw compilation power of the general public is having the wool stripped off of their eyes for the first time. When the raw truths emerge, populations turn to their governments and leaders that have been contradicting those truths and become enraged and intolerant toward them. Propaganda and misdirection break down when we are awash in information. This can be truly enlightening and empowering for those under the thumb of a repressive regime, but you can imagine that they can be terrifying for those powerful leaders who built their massive house of cards on a foundation of lies and misdirection. This is not only true for governments, but for personalities and pundits and for large corporations. The key here is that pure unadulterated information is available to the masses so that they can decide what is right, what is the compiled essence of that information.

This information revolution is on an exponential track. That is what is really scary about it. What is going to happen to us when our ability to understand starts to approach our desire to focus our attention to a subject. Verner Vinge is the author of a book called Beyond Realtime, where he speculated that people’s understanding will accelerate so rapidly that we will simply evolve to the next realm. In his fictional account, most people simply disappeared. They had been linked mind to mind through a vast internet of humans that could communicate directly with the network and each other by their thoughts. Eventually, this lead to a hive mind kind of mentality and speculation that humans graduated to beings that no longer required physical bodies. Ray Kurzweil is a futurist and author who has written a book called The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. His work contains much the same conclusion. You can feel this acceleration of information and looming growth of computation embedded in society. The only question is whether it’s more like the coming of great things or doom.

The End of Cash

2011-04-27T19:44:00.008-05:00

I wonder if there is ever going to be a time when people stop using money. I don't mean that they would stop using paper money, or change from the dollar to some other means of exchange, I mean a future with no money whatsoever.

I was listening to a story about hydrogen fuel cells. These take hydrogen, and make water and electricity. They are currently made with platinum alloys, which are rare and make hydrogen fuel cells expensive. They talked about bringing the cost down by using something other than platinum, a cheaper and more abundant metal that might serve as well. It got me to thinking about how something has a value to it which is somewhat arbitrary, but usually based on scarcity.

What if money was scarce and we somehow evolved past it? This is a theme brought out in Star Trek, where there are a couple of scenes where a character expounds about how money is no longer used. This is supposed to be about 250 years in the future, in a time when energy is cheap and abundant and any food or material goods can be manufactured just by requesting it out of a replicator. Very few medical problems cannot be whisked away by waving some glowing or humming box over the effected area. So you wonder why you would even need money when all of your needs are met effortlessly.

Yet the Enterprise keeps running into races that still use money, such as the Ferengi and their obsession for Gold-Press-Latinum, whatever the hell that is.

I was wondering how this works in practice. How do they pay for their precious dilithium crystals? How does trade in general work, as there are mining colonies, and some are shown in relative poverty, others in wealth. You can't just fly in and take what you want, there would have to be some kind of exchange. It doesn't seem realistic that the miners would toil and stockpile minerals and then someone would just come and take them without given the miners anything at all.

I've always wondered why they still gamble. You see scenes where they are sitting around playing poker, yet there is no money, so they are not really gambling with anything. They are simply pushing chips around. If a player runs out of chips, can't he just get more since they don't cost anything? Maybe the chips are just for keeping score. Hell, that's the way some people today look at money.

If there was no money, how would you account for rarity? I've always thought that the Soviet model of Communist could never work, but why not. Of course people would not be motivated to produce an excess of anything if their hard work would just be given to those around them. Some people's efforts in life are simply valued more than others. It's hard to imagine a time when this would not be so. It's hard to imagine a time when the lowest producing segment of the society was doing virtually nothing and expecting others to provide for them. Imagine a world where everyone was working hard, striving to their limits. It just doesn't seem realistic. You will always have those that are content to sit back and do very little. Without money to provide a way of sorting the achievers from the lazy, what is the point of killing yourself working hard?

Of course, you can turn it around and see all the people that have lots of money that did very little mental or physically challenging work to attain their riches. And you also see those with lots of money and power not content unless they have an ever increasing larger amount of wealth. When this comes at the expense of others, or when the wealth of a few is paid for by the destruction of the environment that has to be shared by all, it is not hard to see why some dream of a day without money.

It's just not a very realistic dream.

Ship of State, Iceberg Ahead

2011-04-27T19:37:00.003-05:00

I listen a podcast by Dan Carlin called Common Sense. He's got some good ideas, a good way of looking at things, and an interesting way to describe the situation as he sees it. His background is that he used to work for broadcast companies as a news man and later commentator/personality. He felt restricted by it and now podcasts and blogs to get his ideas out.

In his last Common Sense show, he re-emphasized an old analogy about how steering the ship of state is just like that, and there's a big iceberg out there. His point is that if you see the iceberg a long way out, you have plenty of time and it only requires small corrections to avoid the iceberg. He seems to think that we are right in front of the iceberg, bearing down on it and our two-party system is gridlocked and unable to respond.

I've had an old analogy that is something like that. In mine, the two parties are in a vehicle and each keeps grabbing the wheel and yanking it their way. The analogies are similar, because it has those governing us not paying attention to where the ship of state is headed. Unfortunately, those that are elected usually concentrate on the next election and no one thinks about the long solution and what direction we want to take the country in the long run.

Here's what I wrote on his forum message board:

"Your analogy about avoiding an iceberg is similar to an analogy of mine. I always thought our governing cycles that swing back and forth between the parties were like a car going down a ridgetop road with a steep drop off on either side. One side veers one way when they have control, and then the other side takes over and steers us back onto the road briefly, then on toward the other cliff. I suppose there are less perilous times when the terrain is flat, like the dry lake bed they land Shuttles on. Then it doesn't matter if we veer drunkenly around, at least we don't hit anything or fall over the side, but even then, it's a damned inefficient way to make it to your destination. The problem is that our elected leaders don't have a long term sustainable goal, and therefore don't tend to steer the ship of state in a straight line toward a safe harbor or rich trade port, or even a sexy vacation destination. We're out somewhere in the ocean dodging icebergs. Let's take the ship to a good place! Can't anybody appreciate visionaries?

"Today we need solutions that piss off everyone but harm no one. We need to roll the Bush tax cuts back by 50% and cut spending about 50% of what the last draconian proposal was. You don't diet by eating everything you want and exercising all day or by eating concentration camp rations and sitting still, you eat less and exercise more. We need to legalize marijuana and tax the hell out of it while scaling back DEA and foreign aid for drug interdiction. We need to cut all the wars off immediately and stop arming ourselves to the teeth. We need to raise the retirement age to the neutral point (the magical age where those paying in equal those taking out, plus about a year for slippage and inefficiency). We need to put everyone on Medicare on a program where they go in for annual checkups and if they stay healthy and loose weight, lower their cholesterol and blood pressure and stay off tobacco, we give them a check for $1,500 every year. I'm convinced that it's cheaper to bribe people to stay healthy than to pay for expensive and preventable diseases brought on by chronic unhealthy lifestyle choices. Don't promise people it will continue forever, tell them it stays in place until it stops showing a financial return. If we stopped subsidizing the incredibly profitable oil and gas industries and gave tax breaks or incentives to solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and other alternative energy producers, we could generate jobs here, cut our dependence on foreign oil that only funds states that support, harbor, or generate terrorists, and then sell the technology to the rest of the world.

"Each major problem has a common sense (and usually untried) solution that both sides in Washington reject. This has gone on entirely too long."

Bad Luck in Panama

2011-04-27T19:30:00.006-05:00

It has been over 22 years since I left Panama. I was stationed there when I served 4 years in the U.S. Army. Three years of my time was in the 536th Engineer Battalion in Ft. Kobbe Panama. It was not a good time.

I recently got to talking about it with some friends and I realized it was mostly a tale of woe. I spent 3 years being moderately to severely unhappy, stressed out, and depressed. There were a few good times, but only a few with the time spaced out far between them.

I arrived in Panama in December of 1987. I was assigned to a unit with 23 other Lieutenants, and I was the youngest Lieutenant for almost a year, because there was a long gap between the time I arrived and the next Lieutenant arrived. There was a tradition of hazing the junior Lieutenant. This treatment usually only lasted a couple of months at the longest, so for me to have to deal with it for a year was unusual. The problem with this situation is that the hazing was by the other Lieutenants. For anyone not familiar with the military, you might not understand what it is like. There is a rank structure, and this is strictly enforced, and in reality, it is a caste structure. You do not associate with those in the ranks below you. It's called Fraternization, and the reason you do not do it is because they are supposed to obey your orders, and if they feel like they are your friend, they will feel like they may not have to do what you say. By the same token, you cannot suck up to or befriend those in the ranks above you. This means you have one group of people to befriend, those that are at your rank. This situation was destroyed for me because those people were effectively my enemies by virtue of the fact that they were hazing me. So I had no one in the military that I could count as my friend.

There was an additional tradition that was part of the hazing of the junior lieutenant. There was a travelling trophy, a model castle that the junior lieutenant was required to bring to all social functions. This model was required to be improved by each recipient prior to passing it on to the next new lieutenant. The damned thing was about 2 feet wide and a foot tall, a scale model of the castle each engineering officer wore on their lapels. The wooden base was a piece of plywood about 2 feet deep and 3 feet wide. The lieutenant before me encased the castle in a plexiglas cover, making the thing even more unwieldy and impossible to carry. My improvement, done before the second function I took it to was to remove it from the plexiglas. Everyone complained that this was not an improvement, but I only had to ask if they wanted to carry it around in the massive plexiglas dome to get them to shut up. Eventually, the hazing surrounding the object because so severe that I stopped bringing it to the functions and basically told anyone that complained to shove it up their ass. This worked so well that I took the castle out to the parking lot of my apartment building and destroyed it with a sledge hammer and tossed it into the dumpster. When I told my wife this story recently, she said it sounded like that scene from the movie Office Space where they destroy the copier. This was before rap music, though it did feel good to be a gangster.

I was newly married when I joined the Army and my wife had a little dog named Spunky that she loved. Panama was a three year accompanied tour, and the way it worked was that the service member went down first and when they had gotten a place to live, they could then send for their spouse. We thought this was going to be a short process. With pets, you travelled down with them but they put them in the pound under quarantine for 60 or 90 days, I can't remember how long. The temperature in Panama was 90 to 95 degrees in the shade, and the pound had open air kennels with concrete cages. It was miserable. The dog was freaked out and looked forward to having me visit as the only relief from this stressful and uncomfortable situation. Within the first week, my unit told me that I was going on a deployment to Chirique province of Panama where they were building a road in the mountains in a coffee growing region. I would be gone for two months. I could not bring my wife down until I got back from the deployment and I could not stay to help our dog deal with his captivity. Off I went.

Eventually, I back, got a house, and brought my wife down. She was miserable there. She was 19, had never been out of the country, could not speak the language, and could not get a job due to the U.S. Panama treaty that forbid it. She was immediately bored to death, and I was putting in 12 hour days and exhausted. I would come home and she would pounce on me (not in a good way), either wanting to complain about how bored she was, or wanting to go out on the town. I was way too tired to handle that.

I got sent out in the field again, this time for 3 months, and my wife did not handle the separation well. Eventually, I got back and the finances and the car were both not doing well by then. This was also during the era that the Panamanians started to rebel against their dictator, Manuel Noriega. It became more dangerous to get to and from work, and we were ordered to stay at home after duty hours. It just kept getting worst locally. They kept shortening the tours until eventually, they changed it to 1 year unaccompanied tours. This meant that people could not bring their families, but I still had my wife there, and they did not shorten my tour. However, some of the people that came down after me had their tours shortened and I started seeing people come and go in the time that I was there, while I still had months left on my tour. Finally, it became so dangerous and stressful that I decided to move my wife back to the U.S. at my own expense. While I was up in the States, relocating her, they changed the rules and finally sent all the remaining families home. If I had waited another week or two, they would have moved my wife at the Army's expense.

I was contacted by my unit about the situation. I was told that all I had to do was come back down and outprocess. The personnel officer asked me if I wanted to go to the upcoming Bolivian deployment, which was going to be about 4 months. I told him that sounded like a horrible idea, and if I had a choice, my decision would be no way. So I cut my leave (vacation) in the states short, and returned to Panama.

During my time away, the Battalion Commander, LTC Evans, changed command with a new commander. I had not met him yet. I can't remember his name, now. When I returned to the unit, I was taken in to his office. By this time, I had been passed over for promotion. For many years since the draw down after the end of the Viet Nam War, promotion from Lieutenant to Captain was virtually automatic. Only about 3% did not make it, and you had to screw up spectacularly to be in that group. In my year group, it was the first time they changed the rules. They were drawing down the forces again, and 1/3 of my year group was not promoted. I never expected to stay in the Army, I always intended to serve my 4 years and get out. As a result, I did not do any of the things people did that were trying to make a stellar career out of the Army. I did not max out my PT (physical training) tests, I even turned down some awards when I was told that I could not submit my troops for the awards. My evaluations were done the old fashioned way, which was to give low ratings to new lieutenants, and raise them up slowly, showing that you were improving. This old method preserved the Senior Rater's Profile, which was supposed to show a bell curve of rating scores given out. The only way that could occur was if some people got low scores, and these were reserved for the junior lieutenants. I never fought this system, because I felt it didn't matter and it didn't apply to me. By the time I returned to Panama to outprocess, I had already been passed over for Captain.

The new commander immediately told me that I was declared mission essential for the Bolivian deployment and my tour was involuntarily extended back out to the original 3 years. I fought with him, earning me his disrespect and animosity, but not changing his position any. He never did satisfactorily answer my question about how I could be passed over for promotion, but indispensable to the military at the same time. I was soon on a plane to Bolivia.

Bolivia was a shit hole. We stayed in an impoverished and remote region, a high plains desert. Our camp was at about 12,500 feet altitude, and we took some kind of experimental drug to relieve the effects of altitude. You had to drive or take a train from the capitol to the area we were, which took 12 or 24 hours. There were no flights in or out of the area, the altitude was too high. The mail took about 4 weeks to get back to the states. We had moral calls home. This was pre-internet days, so this consisted of a satellite link back to a ham radio operator in the states. He would connect you with your family via regular telephone lines. You had to say "over" after each sentence, or they didn't flip the switch and you couldn't hear the other person. Each night, everyone got in line for the phone, first come first served, and we had about 4 hours before they shut it down. By the time dinner was over, the line was 4 hours long. If you got in to talk to your wife, everyone in line close to you got to hear the conversation, which was usually shouted. I only tried a couple of times, and my wife was never there when I called (this was pre-cell phones, too). I did not receive any mail from my wife while I was there.

I took up smoking, just as a way to say Fuck You to everyone and the military in general. I never enjoyed it, and no one really cared, so it wasn't as if my gesture of defiance hurt anyone but myself. The task force commander was Major Cain, and to be honest, I really liked him. It was hard to stay mad at him for probably being instrumental in getting me extended. Finally, the Battalion Commander came down for a visit. At some point, he was meeting with me, and he told me that he heard that I was doing a good job and was not slacking off due to my situation. He promised me that when I got back to Panama, he would shorten my tour to that point in time and let me leave. This was sort of like prison where your sentence is reduced to time served.

However, when Bolivia was finally over and I got back to Panama, I was again involuntarily extended at the unit. This time it was because there was some new motor pool maintenance software that had to be started up and I was supposed to be perfect for the job.

So I finally got to a real phone line back to the States and made my first call back to my wife in four months. She was not happy to hear from me. During the short phone conversation, she told me that something had happened and that I would probably want a divorce. Then she refused to go any further. She said she would not discuss it over the phone. This was worse than actually being told something concrete that I could deal with. I had no idea what the problem was, which meant I was free to imagine all sorts of things.

Things were bad in Panama by this time. No one lived in houses or apartments off base any more. They moved all the soldiers into former family quarters. I had two roommates, two younger lieutenants that I really liked, but I just wanted out of there.

After a few days back at work, I visited the personnel office. I had served as the personnel officer for the Bolivian deployment, so by then, I knew all about the paperwork. I found out that the colonel was going to try to extend me out to my release date from the Army in order to hold on to my longer. That would have made my tour the longest in theater for years, eight months beyond the standard tour. After determining that I was in a strange state of official limbo, I realized I had to take action myself. I filled out all my transfer forms myself. I took them to the Personnel Sergeant myself. He knew my situation, and we got along pretty good. I asked him to slip the papers into the colonel's morning stack of papers to sign, and not to say anything about it. The next day, I picked up my signed paperwork and took it over to the base Personnel Office myself. Orders came down from the Department of the Army in a couple of weeks and my date was set for a couple more weeks out. As far as I knew, no one at the unit realized I was leaving. I quietly outprocessed, and since I was supposed to be down in the Motor Pool all the time (out of sight and out of mind), I was not missed while I outprocessed.

The day of my departure, the acting S1 (Personnel Officer) a First Lieutenant (Promotable) Ron Condon called me in to his office. That office is supposed to be for a Captain, and the (P) for promotable at the end of his rank meant that he was told he was going to be promoted, but the date was still out a month or two in the future. He hoped and expected that we would start saluting him and calling him sir early, which we did not, because he was a joke. Up to this point in time, each time a lieutenant left, the other lieutenants got him this commemorative plate. It was a nice wood plate that was hand carved and painted by local Cuna indians with our unit crest on it. They cost about $60 or $80 each, and the tradition was that everyone chipped in for the outgoing lieutenant's plate. So for the last 3 years, I had managed to pay for almost 30 other lieutenant's plates. Ron announced to me that the tradition had changed and that now I had to buy my own plate, which he had ordered, but was not there yet. I told him to shove the plate up his ass. He also announced to me that my leaving had taken everyone by surprise and that they had not had time to put together a going away party for me. So he wanted me back up to the Headquarters at noon for some cake and punch and a meeting with all the officers. My plane left at 1:30 and you had to be there an hour early to board, so I had no intention of showing up. I immediately got a ride over to the airfield and nervously waited for the flight to board, fully expecting someone to come in and order me out of the airport and back to the unit. I can't remember who showed up, but it was a friend who knew the score, and he came over to have a laugh with me and tell me that everyone was over at Headquarters waiting for me to show up. I didn't fully believe that I would be leaving until the plane lifted off the runway and I could see the base shrinking away behind me.

I got home and met my wife and parents at the airport. I politely asked my parents to go home and told them I would catch up to them in a few days. I went to Manhattan Kansas with my wife, where she checked us in to a hotel. We sat down to have our long awaited discussion. She admitted to me that she had been cheating multiple times. I told her I expected it would be something like that. I told her that I forgave her, and that we could blame the whole experience on Panama and the U.S. Military. I told her that we should wipe the slate clean and make a new start from this moment on. She told me she still wanted a divorce. I always wondered why she confessed if she never intended to stay in the marriage. I told her I thought we should work it out, and she told me that she would not ask for alimony or any kind of support if I would just let her go without a fight. So I agreed.

This did not stop her from calling back a couple of days later and telling me that she had been talking to her friends, who told her that she was entitled and she should ask for alimony. I informed her that I would fight the divorce if she insisted on payments from me. She dropped it.

I showed up at Fort Leonard Wood on the coldest week of the year. The temperature got to about ten below, and the wind got the wind chill down to about 25 below. I did not have sufficient cold weather gear and was freezing my ass off. I managed to freeze the brakes on my car shut when I tried to blast through some drifts in order to make it easier to leave at the end of the day. The last day before Christmas break, I was out there in the freezing wind on my back in the snow with a propane torch, trying to loosen up the frozen brake calipers.

On the way home that night, I heard on the radio that the U.S. had invaded Panama. I finally felt like it was over and I was at home.

Quitting Smoking Can Kill You

2011-04-27T08:44:00.004-05:00

A friend of mine, Kurt, was a heavy smoker. I spoke to him recently, and he mentioned that he was quitting smoking, and that it sucked. He's using the patch, but he loved to smoke.

In trying to be helpful, I related what I did 16 years ago when I quit chewing. I told him that exercise is good, that it helped me. He told me that was not a great option for him, as he was in such terrible shape. I was trying to convince him that even walking would be a good enough form of exercise.

He told me he didn't really give a shit about much of anything right now, but thanks for the suggestion.

I suggested he walk in some of the worst neighborhoods of East St. Louis. I said it sounded as if he didn't care much if he lived or died. People would probably sense that and stay out of the way. I told him it would be a good way to gage his recovery from his nicotine connection. When you realize you're starting to care again, you're over the nicotine, and it's time to stop walking in the danger zone.

I'm very helpful.

Big Advertising Brother

2011-02-24T09:29:00.006-06:00

Sometimes, the fun times and the free ride abruptly comes to a halt.

I've been wondering for the last 12 years, ever since the dot com bubble, how some of these internet companies make any money. It seemed to me that they weren't really selling anything, and they weren't charging me for the use of their work, so I could not figure out how it worked. There has been a lot of really cool free websites to choose from. The same is true for podcasts. It seems crazy (but somehow right) to me that so many excellent podcasts are available for free online.

Well, we increasingly see where these companies get their money. Facebook recently incurred the anger and ... well, I was going to say wrath, but actually no one is doing anything against them. They supposedly released a great deal of private information to third party advertisers. However, the general public is posting their private photographs and inane comments on the site all day without any regard for who sees it.

Now Google has started mining the search habits of people to target advertising at them. Not just casual and average Google using web searchers, but particularly the users of gmail, their popular (and FREE! see the pattern?) email service provider. The gmail program was reading the public's emails and targeting popup ads to people based on things they mentioned in private messages. That is kind of creepy, like a stalker staring in through your curtains at night. You can opt out at http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html

There is another site called Criteo that watches where you go browsing on the web and then targets personalized ads back at you about sites you've already been to. The banner ads on the sides of the screen reveal what the person has looked at before & offer ads targeted at that, serving as constant reminders to go back to the site later. This can be disabled, once you notice it, through a site at http://www.criteo.com/us/privacy-policy

The reaction is not universally bad. Some say it's not all Big Brother but potentially something that can make web browsing more personalized. Some can easily ignore the privacy concerns. They think this is OK if the computer sorts through your web browsing habits and just show them the things they are interested in. After all, if you're going to be exposed to ads, wouldn't it be nice if it was something you were probably interested in? There was a recent Science Friday episode where this was discussed, but the supporter of the ads was in the industry themselves.

I feel strangely ambivalent to this. In one view, you could say that the death of privacy would be great if you could not be discriminated by public disclosures of private facts. There is a certain honesty and surrender to not worrying what anyone might find out about you. And knowing that you are constantly being monitored could be exactly what some people need to help behave honestly and ethically. On the other hand, it sure seems that the potential for harm when someone has the ability to look at your private activities is something that cannot be denied.

Wisconsin Machinations

2011-02-24T09:23:00.004-06:00

Suddenly, the bogeyman of the day for the newly elected and empowered state governors is PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS.

While giving away huge tax breaks to major corporations or helping with public funding to steal businesses from other states, thus insuring that their state budgets veer into the red, they are, with the other hand, waving an accusing finger at the public unions. Somehow, school teachers, that's right SCHOOL TEACHERS, who don't get paid enough for the crap they have to take on a day to day basis, and who give up any hope of making a decent living when they agree to teach (usually for the idealistic reason that they want to help the next generation to learn their way in life) are being painted as these greedy people living high on the public dime.

The real calculus here by the conservative governors is a hope that they can break the backs of the unions that usually support and vote for democratic candidates. It's pure political maneuvering. If they spent more time trying to empower teachers and making sure that they had everything they needed to do their jobs, rather than trying to get the science teachers to teach religion in the science classes or get students to drill for standardized tests rather than learn critical thinking, they might actually impress some teachers and make them more likely to treat conservative candidates as something other than a threat to their way of life.

This week, a liberal blogger spoofed big conservative political supporter and contributor, David Koch. He called Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and recorded a 20 minute long conversation with him where he got the governor to reveal his true thinking on the matter. What was discussed in an open and unguarded conversation was that the issue is not budget balancing, but union busting, pure and simple.

The conservative Koch brothers are big supporters of the Republican party in Wisconsin, and through their generous contributions, they have had a hand at dictating public policy in the state. They have a scheme that would put the most polluting public power plants up for sale to private sector, where they would be unregulated. Detractors fear that they could set up an Enron-like scheme where the power rates could be jacked up and massive profits could be had at the expense of customers that would have no choice but to pay the price being asked.

Walker is a huge supporter of the union busting efforts and is hoping it will spread to other states. There are signs that it is at work in Indiana and Ohio. If not directly supported by conservatives, these governors have been the benefactors of massive ad campaigns funded by big interests and targeting conservative governor's opponents.

Wisconsin has already limited lawsuits against big companies, meaning corporations that pollute or act against the public in some other way cannot be assessed punitive damages greater than $200,000. Another tactic is a move to try to insure that all regulations will have to be signed off by the governor before they will be enforced. I don't understand if this is a form of a line item veto, or a way that a governor can simply avoid enforcing laws he doesn't agree with without fear of penalty from the legislature.

I heard a comment from some random Tea Partier that "We need a revolution." He probably wants to take down big government and disrupt taxation, but it could just as easily ignite a backlash by people wanting to assert their rights and interests over huge corporate influence and corruption. Perhaps they should be aware what they ask for, as political machinations have a way of backfiring on you.

Arab Uprisings Background: Historical Parallels

2011-02-24T09:13:00.004-06:00

Check out the two pictures I found. I saw the first one, which is a map of where protests and uprisings are happening. The second one I searched out because of a memory of a book I read about the rise and spread of Islam. I remembered the extent of the Caliphate because I remember thinking that it was sort of a mirror image across the Meditteranean of the Roman Empire. One of the crazier comments about the uprisings was by Glen Beck, who said it was a conspiracy to start a socialist Islamic Caliphate. So maybe, as truly stupid as the comment was, it helped plant the idea of the Caliphate in my mind.

The interesting thing is that the Caliphate is the area where Islam first expanded out to. In general, Islam was spread at the point of a sword during this initial expansion. Since that time, Islam has spread to some additional areas in the world and diffused out into the rest of the world without state support, but the territory of the Caliphate remains strongly and primarily Islamic and the governments of the region are somewhere between strictly enforcing Islamic ideals to strongly supporting Islam at risk of loosing their authority if they did anything else. So this core of Islam is now a region where most nations have dictators that are strong, intolerent and repressive, and have been in power for long periods of time. It was unbelivable to me how many dictators in Arab countries have been in power for such long periods. We truly do not pay attention to whats going on in the Middle East until it erupts.

Besides the near perfect overlay of the Caliphate and the current unrest, the other correlation I noticed was that some of the best food producing areas in the region rioted the earliest and had the strongest response. They say that part of what initiated the unrest was high food prices, so you would think the food producing areas would be least prone to that problem, not most vulnerable to its effect.

There was an interesting show on Frontline about how organization and unrest spread via social media networks. The governments had been in power for so long that they were older and not technology saavy. One of the things I found amusing about some of the stories was about how they tried to shut down the internet, but the protests had grown too large by then and taken on a life of their own. By the time the figured out that the internet needed to be shut down to hold on to power, it was too late.

There has been some fear and speculation in this country that the Muslim Brotherhood was in charge of Egypt's revolution and that they were trying to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state. I knew nothing about them, so I looked them up. Apparently, they had been seen as a threat by Mubaric and suppressed years ago, but they were later allowed to exist as long as they did not get political. The reports say that they were content in this role for years. Before Mubaric, members of the Muslim Brotherhool were responsible for Sadat's assassination (bringing Mubaric into power). Apparently, the group split after that with a milder public part of the brotherhood seeking peaceful co-existence with the Egyptian authorities and another faction radicalized to the point that they supported Bin Laden. In this recent Egyptian revolution, the young organizers worked to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups from making the overthrow of Mubaric a fundamentalist Islamic uprising. They calculated that the revolution could not survive the opposition that would arise if it was only a fundamentalist Muslim movement, and they wanted to include women and non-Muslims in the uprising to maintain support for it.

The story is not over yet. We are not in a position where we understand much of what's going on, let alone could be justified in getting involved in any of the conflicts, but who knows how hard it will be for us to stay away.

To Write is to Dream

2011-02-23T02:56:00.006-06:00

I have three blogs. There's this one, which is usually pretty serious. I have another one called Animal Tales at http://wagginganimaltales.blogspot.com/ which is daily observations and attempts at humor. The third blog is called Technically Speaking at http://techequipment.blogspot.com/, which is where I make humorous comments about my work environment under the guise of an official company blog.

Why?

At least in the other two blogs family and coworkers occasionally read the entries. In this blog, to my knowledge, no one reads the material. So the question becomes, why do it if no one is reading it?

I was asked this question by a business associate. It was in the context of a situation where I had two people visiting from a company, one who had read the Technically Speaking blog, and the other who had no idea that I had any blogs. His rhetorical question was why anyone would blog at all. No answer would have satisfied this person, he was actually making a statement, not asking a question. His statement was that it was worthless to write a blog, whether anyone read it or not, but especially if no one read it.

If no one ever read my blogs, it would still be worth it to me. The act of organizing your thoughts and explaining an idea is a useful exercise because it helps to define and refine what you think and believe. It's sort of like practicing a speech before you give it, you familiarize yourself with it. Having an external listener, even if it is a theoretical or fictitious one, helps to focus the explanation to someone outside yourself that is unfamiliar with your thoughts. This is useful because you make no assumptions that anything is a given, nothing is taken for granted, everything must be explained.

Writing is not a new thing for me. I got a Diary for a gift when I was in fifth grade and found that I liked writing down what happened to me and expressing my ideas and feelings about life. When I was in Junior High School, I started keeping a Dream Journal. This was after I read an article about how your dreams work. The premise of this idea was that you have a conscious mind that is aware of itself and under your control and consists of your inner audible thoughts. However, you also have a subconscious mind, the 90% that you "don't use" that sits quietly in the background and observes everything and never speaks to you directly. This subconscious is powerful and very aware, but can only communicate through dreams. It's as if the barrier between the two halves of your mind breaks down under sleep. The subconscious mind is aware of the separation and the dream conduit, and it spends dream time trying to send your conscious mind messages. These messages are usually things that are important or interesting that your conscious mind is missing, but your subconscious mind picked up on and wants to call attention to.

The subconscious is almost like a foreigner, speaking a different language. You don't have a dream that says, "you need to ask this girl out" or "you should cook more often" or "look out for your coworker, she is undermining you to your boss." Instead, the dream makes a little story and weaves it with emotions and memories. I found that by writing all the dreams down, I found they were rich in subcontext. You aren't just trapped in a dim and dirty room in the dream, there is terror in the very fabric of the dream. You don't just walk up to a friend on the street in the dream, you walk up knowing that you haven't spoken in years and that you are finally going to confront him about something that bothers you. In a flash, there are whole background histories embedded in the dream, something that was either in the background or took a second to realize, but might take several minutes to write down in a dream journal. It's sort of like computer zip files. Tiny little packets that open up and are full of lots of information.

The point of keeping a dream journal is to discover what it is that the dreams are trying to tell you. It takes practice and familiarization, but eventually, you get pretty good at it. The point is that you have to spend time at it and learn how to make it happen.

The same is true with blogging. It is a way of practicing explaining something and hopefully, fleshing out the subject and gaining a deeper understanding.

So I have to admit that I really do enjoy writing this blog, which I consider a chance to discuss the deep thoughts and revelations that occur to me, whether they are political, emotional, or philosophical. It helps me to feel like I am figuring out big questions in life and how things work. I have always had daydreams about being that teacher that really gets people to understand things or writing editorials for a newspaper that people really find to be interesting and insightful. The only problem is that I analyze things in too much detail and do not distill messages down to their simple core. I am definitely more of a blogger and not a Twitterer. I often think that no one wants to listen to this shit. I am also writing a novel that has been kicking around in my head for a long time. I started it, and really got going on it, but then I realized that it would not have broad appeal, it would not be a best seller, probably not even get past an editor. Still, I enjoyed writing it, and should not have let the thought that it was not going to be a bestseller stop me from continuing work on it.

If no one reads it, why write? You could also ask why anyone would keep a diary, especially one that you don't intend to let anyone read. After all, a blog or a diary isn't exactly like a diet journal where you write down everything you eat each day. It isn't raw facts that don't have any deeper truth, it isn't a dull accounting of mundane events. But it does have something in common with the a diet journal. If you don't write down what you eat, you often have a complete misconception about the quantity and quality of your diet. Write it down and you can't pretend you didn't do it. With writing your thoughts, memory can't rob you of what you thought or how you felt then, at that moment. You can read it years later and think it was ridiculous, but you can't deny that you said it or thought it.

Actually, there is a much deeper reason for writing a blog. I don't find many opportunities to talk at length about what I think with a real person. I don't know many people interested in the same things as I am. So it is good to have an outlet for what's really on my mind. Also, I am 46 years older than my son, meaning that he will live a significant portion of his life after I have passed away. I don't know how old he will be when I die, but whatever that age is, the chances are that he will not fully know or understand me. And as time passes after I am gone, he will develop a whole life that will not have me in it. There will be times when he might wonder what I would think or wish he could talk with me. There will also be a time when memories of what I was like will begin to fade, and he will forget much of what I was like. But if some of what I am is written down, then I will never completely die, and I will still be able to share some thoughts with him from across time and beyond the grave. I know that sounds sad and morbid, but it feels comforting and self indulgent, like eating something deliciously bad for you and not writing it in your diet journal.

[Actually finished 4/30/11, not back in February when I jotted down the idea and saved it to be written down later.]

Nathan Bedford Forrest

2011-02-19T01:45:00.005-06:00

Sometimes it seems like it's been a long time since a movie has come out that is a truly original idea. So many "new" movies are just recycling old ideas or trying a new take on an old familiar character or story. Yet there are many stories and pieces of history that never make it to the movies.

I've always wondered why no one has made a movie about Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. On one hand, it's understandable. Even the respected and admired General Robert E. Lee does not have many big screen movies about him. There just hasn't been much call for any movies about the losing leaders in the Civil War.

Of all the characters of the Civil War, General Nathan Bedford Forrest is one of the most notorious. In fact, I would venture to say that Quantrill is the only one that surpasses him, and that is simply because he went so far overboard. But on a good day, Quantrill had half the daring that Forrest had. Forrest managed to be a scoundrel, yet still have honor and integrity. He managed to use guile and deception, but still garnered respect from his adversaries. He usually attacked from a position of weakness, yet still prevailed. He had no formal military training, and not much formal education, yet he rose from private to general, and giving him a command was proven to be justified time and time again.

His strength was in his use of perception and deception. He was a natural military leader. Without being a student of history, his performances mirrored great battles like Trasimene and Agrigentum from ancient Roman times. Many would say he was an Anti-Hero, a villain and a scourge.

Perhaps one of the main reasons no one has ever done a movie about Forrest was because he was a cruel and brutal supporter of slavery. Most high ranking Southern officers owned slaves while the average fighting man did not. Forrest bought and sold slaves, which was much worse than just owning slaves in most people's minds, even in the minds of his fellow Southerners. Forrest hated Northerners and approached war as not only the duty to defend the South, but a great game with the added benefit that you got to kill Yankees. That was his recruiting slogan "come along boys, join up, have a lick of fun and kill some Yankees". He had a dashing personality that appealed to the young Southern hotheads under his command. He could draw more people to his banner more quickly than any other Southern commander. He was always able to put together a new unit of soldiers at almost any point of the war, except near the very end.

He pulled off several exploits that endeared him to his fellow rebels. These events would make many exciting scenes in my hoped-for movie. At Fort Donaldson, when the Southern forces surrendered to Grant, Forrest called the Southern commander a coward and escaped with his soldiers before they could be surrendered. After the battle of Shiloh, Forrest was tasked to guard the rear of the defeated Confederate forces as they were retreating. His rear guard detachment met up with the pursuing Yankees at a place called Fallen Timbers. Some have called this action the Battle of Fallen Timbers, but in reality, it was a one man show. He waited until the Federals were bogged down going through an area thick with fallen trees, and he wheeled his men around and charged them. He soon found himself out in front of his men, alone. He was soon surrounded by Yankees. When they discovered this fact, one charged in and shot him in the side, point blank. Forrest, in a battle frenzy, wheeled around slashing his saber and took off to escape. On his way out of the group of Yankees, he reached down and grabbed a Federal foot soldier. He hoisted him onto the back of his saddle and made a beeline back for his lines. The Federal soldier served as a human shield for the General, and was unceremoniously knocked off the horse when Forrest got back to his own men. The action checked the pursuing Federals and secured the retreat of the Confederate forces, but Forrest had to spend a couple of months to heal from his gunshot wound after the skirmish. So the injury was bad enough to put him out of action for a few months, yet he could still reach down while riding by and pick a soldier up off the ground and put him onto his horse.

Another one of my favorite stories about Forrest was a time when he met a Union force that was much bigger than his. He asked the Union commander to come out for a parlay, where he demanded his surrender. In plain view of the conference, he had two of his big guns brought over a hill, down a road and out of sight, toward the front lines. They looked like they were being moved into place for the battle. In reality, the same guns were quietly moved out of view to around the back of the hill where they were brought around again. This was repeated several times, and the Union General, after watching this while speaking to Forrest suddenly exclaimed, "My God, General, how many guns do you have? I've seen 28 so far!" Forrest replies that this must be all that have kept up - implying there were even more. The Union General surrendered without a fight, even though he had Forrest outmanned and outgunned.

In another famous battle called Brice's Crossroads, Forrest correctly predicted the exact course of the battle some two hours before it started. He taunted a larger Union force into hot pursuit on a blisteringly hot day. The column marched too hard and too fast and was tired and blown and strung out by the time they got to Brice's Crossroads, where Forrest had a massive ambush set for them. He chewed up the head of the column, and then the rest of the Federals that fed into the battle piecemeal were eaten up as well. Once they stopped coming on, Forrest counterattacked and pursued them and routed them. His soldiers all fought hard because they trusted him, and time and time again he delivered victories against all odds.

As the war wound down, Forrest's command was one of the last left standing. They could have become a guerrilla force, dragging out the war with the Union for months. Forrest decided to lay down his arms and convinced his men to do so, too, rather than taking them to Mexico to continue the conflict for years.

He settled down after the war as something of a hero to the Southerners, but was soon tempted into an organization that would later become the KKK. He wanted to fight to protect the rights of Southerners as they were re-admitted to the union and he wanted to limit the rights of Blacks to vote and control the new Southern governments. This was not an unusual position for a defeated Confederate. The organization began to transform into one that wanted to intimidate, harass, and harm blacks, and Forrest parted company with them at that point. Yet, his reputation was tarnished for years because of his association with the KKK, which was actually outlawed and went underground for over 30 years, with members being hunted down and arrested in the period just after the war.

This showed that Forrest had limits, and some would question if he was principled. If you asked whether he was he honorable, many of the people of the time would argue both sides of that position. Did he become honorable as time passed? In a strange and tarnished way, I would say, yes he did. Many that opposed Southern Rebellion and abolitionists that hated all repression of the blacks would probably never admit that there was anything honorable about the man. Yet many of those who faced him in battle would have a hard time arguing that he was not a man to be reckoned with.

Galaxy Zoo

2011-02-19T01:43:00.003-06:00

I think I heard about Galaxy Zoo on a Science Friday broadcast about 2 months ago. I had heard about it before, but this time I logged on to http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ to see what it was all about.

The premise of the site is for astronomers tasked with classifying distant galaxies getting some help. There are something like 200 billion galaxies in the universe, which is far too many to go through all of them in a lifetime with the number of professional astronomers doing the work. They developed programs to sort out the galaxies, but found that a computer is not good at distinguishing a disk from a sphere or recognizing a disk seen from edge on. Humans are very good at this. So the images were split up by a computer and fed to a site where you can sign on to help. This is known as crowdsourcing, where you use volunteer citizen scientists to help perform a long task. Right now, there are a quarter million volunteers helping with the work. Unfortunately, that still works out to 800,000 galaxies for each volunteer to classify. The work would still not get done in our lifetime at this rate.

We have had so many exploratory space probes, generating so much data over the last 40 years. The average person probably assumes that all this data has been thoroughly analyzed by teams of diligent scientists. The reality is that the information is beyond the ability of scientists to study. It's a simple matter of time constraints. Can you thoroughly catalog all of your personal photographs? Most people probably do not take the time to do this, and that task is simple compared to analyzing the photos from a single fly-by of a satellite.

I used to watch Star Trek and wonder why they wouldn't have everything all figured out by 300 years from now? They are always flying by some red dwarf star or some nebula and stopping to explore like it's a wonderful new thing. I remember thinking, "surely they've seen this before?" It makes sense if you think about it. I have been paying attention to distance and speed in the various Star Trek series and have concluded that Warp 9 is not 9 times the speed of light. It's something much faster. There seems to be an exponential effect to warp factors, because they zip along doing 8 light years in a matter of hours. Even at these impressive rates, 300 years from now, we still have barely scratched the surface of one quadrant of the galaxy. That's just in our galaxy, which stretches for 100,000 light years across and contains 200 billion stars (give or take a hundred billion - we don't even know).

In the past, organizations like SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) have come up with ways that you can donate your computers processor to help crunch huge numbers. I believe they were analyzing huge amounts of radio spectrum looking for patterns that might be "man made". These efforts used distributed processing to run a large virtual supercomputer, but I have not heard that they have had much success in their efforts. They certainly have not found an intelligent signal, but I would also classify success as analyzing all the available data, and I'm not sure they've reached that milestone, either.

I've heard of crowdsourcing projects that search for habitable planets, supernovae remnants in nebulae, surface features on planets and satellites in our solar system, and protein structures in living organisms. There is a lot of knowledge out there to ponder. Last week, IBM put its new supercomputer called Watson on the game show Jeopardy to see if it could beat the two best Jeopardy contestants in history. It did so quickly and easily. This was seen as a huge challenge for computing, because answering the questions is not a simple database search, but an interpretation with some tricky aspects to it. Not all Jeopardy questions are straightforward, some involve word play and subtle twists. While the computer did admirably, they confessed that sometimes it would just miss the point completely. I witnessed this in the Final Jeopardy question on the second day. It was a question about airports being named after WWII battles and soldiers, and I knew it immediately (only because I stopped and read the historic plaque in O'Hare during one of several incredibly long layovers there). They said that Watson's strength is the ability to go over huge amounts of information in multiple databases, but it doesn't always make good sense of it. One of the possible applications that the IBM team said we could use Watson for was to point things out and make suggestions for a human user or team to quickly discard and sort through. They used the example of putting a patient's symptoms into the computer and having it list several possibilities. The computer could search through all the recent medical papers and all the old archives and do what amounts to an enormous amount of research very quickly. It would take a human forever to read all the medical papers and keep up to date. However, if the computer did that portion of the job for us, we could concentrate on those few possibilities that have a high probability of yielding good results, thus focusing our time and making us more efficient. We can see patterns and connections that the computer doesn't understand.

Our curiosity and need to improve our lives will always push us to learn about all the unknowns. I find it encouraging that we are still finding new ways to think and learn how to learn.

Arab Uprisings

2011-02-19T01:40:00.012-06:00

I'm currently going through a period where I am behind on the news. I don't generally know the day's news until a few days later. I see this as a mental health move, in addition to being busy with work and perpetually behind since the blizzard.

I have a coworker that does not seem to be able to let my ignorance last for too long. He asked me about the Egyptian protests one day and suggested that the Muslim Brotherhood was behind it. Suspecting that this information came from Fox News, I took to the internet to better understand the background information. I skimmed through the Wikipedia backgrounds on the Tunisian Revolution and the Muslim Brotherhood, branching out in my search to learn when and how the various countries gained independence and got their current leader, as well as what their politics and society were like. I found out that one of the most probable replacements for Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was Mohamed Elbaradei, a Nobel Prize winner who had worked to control Iran's nuclear weapons program. I also found a map of the Arab world that showed which countries were experiencing revolutions and protests. I could not believe how widespread the movements were or how quickly they came about. In two months, most of the Arab world has seen unrest that could very well topple more governments.

My initial reaction was surprise that the Arab populous had this combination of dissatisfaction and willingness to express it. I think of travelling to an Arab country, particularly the less secular ones, as something I, as a westerner, should not even consider. I would expect the governments to be intolerant and likely to nail me for a crime whether I committed it or not. If you've ever seen Midnight Express, you know what I mean there. I would expect the people of these countries to form an instant lynch mob to help insure that I would be prosecuted for some transgression, most likely one that I had no idea I was doing. I have heard reports of people getting executed for blasphemy, which can be something simple like saying Muhammad or touching the Koran. I'm not saying my fears are completely rational, or that my views are well researched and backed by solid evidence, I'm just saying that my perception of the region is of a place that I could not relate to the government or the people and would not care to visit. I didn't realize this about myself until I started contemplating that these people were in revolt. They are acting more like I expected us to behave, with a thirst for freedom and a willingness to be rebellious.

Boiled down to the simplest summary of the situation in Egypt, it is a popular uprising of people wanting freedom from a tyrannical dictator who is corrupt and oppressive. Is that not an exact match in the description of America's own revolution? The differences are there, too. Egyptians are not taking up arms, they are stopping work and taking up banners. These protesters are militarily defenseless. After the common examples of what usually happens to freedom loving protesters in oppressive dictatorships, you would expect only one outcome, a Tiananmen Square style slaughter. People rounded up and put into re-education camps if they were not executed immediately. Worst, people simply disappearing without a trace.

The fact that the revolution worked - worked in overthrowing Mubarak, not necessarily giving them the better country that they want - is a miracle. The fact that it is spreading is also a surprise. At the time of this writing, protesters have been shot and killed in Pearl Square in Bahrain, and the movement in Libya is showing signs of evolving into a civil war. Not one country in the region is not dealing with unrest.

Many people credit Facebook & Twitter for enabling these movements. Governments are forced to attempt to shut down the internet to control the uprisings, and by then it's too late. The flow of information is too difficult to stop. The media has also been taken completely by surprise by the uprisings. Al Jazeera seems to be the only media outlet with eyes on the street in many of the areas of unrest. I find it ironic that the media outlet that conservative Americans were furious about for reporting unfavorably on the Iraq War are now the one outlet defying local Arab governments and reporting on the protests.

I see parallels between the use of Facebook and Twitter to get the facts out and WikiLeaks' recent influence on world events and opinions by bringing secrets out to the public eye. I grew up during the Cold War and entered the military during the Reagan era when we trained exclusively to face off against the Soviet Union. We were raised to fear this monolithic country that maintained power by lying to and oppressing their people. We felt that fighting the Chinese Communists was not as likely as fighting the Russians, but the adversary was similarly corrupt and oppressive. Both communist behemoths maintained their grip on power by a steady diet of misinformation and by blocking the truth from getting out. This is why we had Voice of America, a U.S. government run radio network whose only goal was providing our truth to the poor slobs trapped behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. We all knew what would happen if you stood up against the government in those countries. Death, torture, or re-education were the most likely possibilities. We felt we were better because we had free elections, freedom of the press, and freedom of expression, along with economic freedoms. I find it ironic that we have evolved to the point where we have participated in torture, where the governments are more interested in staying in power than telling the truth, and where a few very powerful corporations are increasingly in control of policy if not elections. When someone rips the veil off of our government and shows some glimpses behind the scenes, you actually have citizens that are rising to the defense of our government to keep secrets and take hideous actions in the supposed best interest of our country.

Even though the protesters say they want democracy and freedom, there are those in this country that do not trust or believe it, and further, they do not trust Muslims to have these freedoms because they fear they will be used against us. I hear the stories of how some conservatives fear the rise of Islam if Arab populations are free to elect their own leaders, and there are also Glen Beck style rants that are so far into left field that you can just classify them as "the sky is falling" assertions of pure panic, and not reasoned analysis. I cannot believe that people can abandon their ideals just because they can't relate to the people that profess those same ideals.

What amazes me even more is how unprepared the U.S. was for these revolutions. Here we are again, using a page from the old play book that we never seem to learn from, which is backing oppressive leaders simply because they behave as we like them to in the global or regional political arena. The irony I find in the events is to recall some of the things that George W. Bush professed and to wonder if he was right, even if it was for all the wrong reasons? The Iraq War was started under the pretext of self defense. Later, when the weapons of mass destruction were not found, the reason transformed retroactively to "Spreading Democracy in the Middle East". I remember at the time thinking that it was so much hogwash, because you can't have someone else's revolution for them. If they don't fight for freedom themselves, it doesn't mean much, and if you occupy a country, you can't truly say that they are a self governed democracy. Bush made several speeches where he touched on his desire for the Middle East to be transformed by Democracy. Then, in the Palestinian Elections of 2006, the radical Islamic Terrorist group Hamas was elected by the Palestinians in their first really free elections. What did the freedom and democracy loving West do at that time? They immediately denounced the elections and declared that they would not deal with the new government and things have gone downhill since. So while a look at George W. Bush's opening remarks in his May 2008 speech at the World Economic Forum in Egypt provides one with an eerie foretelling of the events in the last two months, I still do not think that we were ready for the actual possibility (let alone the speed) of popular uprisings, nor are we willing to allow them to take their natural course, if that means fundamentalist Islamic governments taking power.

I do not think Iraq was a starting point for this revolution. I understand that the youth in Iraq are less religious because of the way their country was torn apart by religious violence. I think that their youth spent an inordinate time growing up on the internet, because it was too violent to go outside. I am curious to see what they do with the democratic society we are trying to establish there. It's been 8 years, and you can't say the government is stable or not corrupt. It's just not as oppressive as it was under Hussein. I keep thinking about Iran in this crisis. They already had a revolution, back in the 70's and the Islamic Fundamentalists that seized power after that uprising turned the clock back in that country to a level of progress and technology from years ago. They are facing their own uprisings, first the 2009 and 2010 ones following an election that many felt was stolen and did not reflect the will of the people, and in recent days, a continuation of that unrest inspired by the success of the uprising in Egypt.

Even the Israeli society is undergoing a transformation of sorts. There is a movement of ex-Israeli soldiers speaking out against the actions in occupied territories. The group Breaking The Silence has been collecting recordings of anonymous Israeli soldiers telling about their experiences, and mostly questioning the stories coming from and the policies of the Israeli government. It reminds me so much of what could happen in a world where there were dozens of Wikileaks and the information on what America is really doing behind the scenes came out for the consumption of the general public. While painful, I think this would be a good thing. How can we form honest opinions about our government, that we are charged to select, if we do not get to see what it is that they are really doing and why? How can we correct corruption and misdeeds if we remain blissfully ignorant of them? Why should we blindly support a government that will not share the information of what they are doing and why? Are we small children that cannot be trusted with the truth?

While my coworkers comments on the Muslim Brotherhood were a reflection of the fears that many in this country hold over the possibility of a more fundamental Middle East, I do not share these fears. Better to be dealing with a government willing to express the will of their people and hopefully have some chance of solving many of the intractable problems than to continue on as we have been. Let them elect their devout Muslim countrymen, we seem to make Christian beliefs a prerequisite for getting elected in this country, why shouldn't they make Islamic principles the basis for electing their leaders? I'm not saying I think religious people should rule any country, I think that's a disaster. I'm just asking why we are so blatantly hypocritical of the practice and unable and unwilling to see that our stance is inconsistent?

Whatever happens, the situation is fascinating. The thing about history that is constant is that things get shaken up from time to time. Sometimes, things seem to get jostled into place more firmly, the revamping of society is like an urban renewal project that cleans out the blight and sets things right. Sometimes the revolution pushes things out of control and makes us wish for better days. I think it's good to sit back and watch groups of people struggle for their freedom. If you aren't inspired by this, what side are you on?

Power Plays

2011-02-19T01:37:00.004-06:00

In my opinion, it is no question which side of the political divide exerts more sway on public opinion. The Republicans have a much more unified effort at pushing their political agenda. Through Fox News and conservative talk radio conservative talking points are continuously hammered into the public's brains. Don't give me this bull about the liberal media - conservative viewpoints dominate the media in all meaningful ways, and if you doubt me, look at advertising revenue and market share. This is a well oiled machine, this way of pushing a certain viewpoint out on the public. There are many people I know repeat the same talking points and if you ever wonder where they get these ideas, tune in to Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, or O'Reilly for a week and then listen around for how often you hear their remarks being parroted. The true brilliance of this approach is that people are walking around making smart sounding arguments and assertions about subject that they know absolutely nothing about. Hey, it sounded good on the radio or TV, no reason to research it and see what it's all about, you're armed and ready, just get out there and shoot your mouth off. It's the great American pastime.

I heard about the Wisconsin Representative walkout and efforts by the Governor to end collective bargaining by government employees. I saw the initial reports that were shaping it up to be a union breaking effort by a heartless Republican on one side of the argument and a reining in of overpaid and over-privileged fat cat government workers on one had. I did a little research and found that the salary comparisons were said to be unfair, as you are looking at a mostly degreed, well educated and professional government service population being compared to everyone from CEOs to minimum wage workers in the private sector. Apparently, the government does very little blue collar work, and what labor intensive functions they do have, they take care of with private sector contractors. One report said that the Wisconsin legislature just passed a package of tax breaks for large corporations in the state that exceeds the budget shortfall. They then pointed to the budget shortfall, conjured up a government employee boogie man and had all the justification they needed to try to do something they really wanted to do anyway, which is to pull the teeth of the unions.

I'm not a huge fan of unions, as they are strong on protecting their rights and benefits and short on holding their membership accountable or enforcing the need for standards and continued education. I get tired of the thought that seniority is everything and exceptional performance is not being rewarded in union controlled labor sectors. I find this to be a fatal flaw of unions, because it kills the possibility of continual improvement and exceptionalism.

I do see some merit in the charge that the budget crisis was created in order to limit the power of the unions and thus permanently tilt the balance of power in favor of the Republicans. I might be open to the possibility that this was not their intent, but it is certainly the effect. And it's hard for me to believe that the Republicans would not want to take credit for this accomplishment if they can pull it off.

State Legislatures do not have filibusters and there is no way to prevent a vote or force those that want a vote to be in the supermajority if they want to proceed. The action of fleeing the assembly does not strike me as cowardice as much as desperation. Running away is not a sustainable tactic in the long run. As politics go, the only way that this tactic works is if you can get strikes and protests to turn up the volume while you delay the vote. If the pressure rises during the delay, it might cause some of the Republicans to retreat or reverse their positions. I doubt the Democratic opposition is well enough organized to pull that off. It's not as if the public is going to rally behind the government workers, either.

What I can't believe happens in these debates and in some elections is how teachers are vilified by conservatives just because they are in unions. It's like wanting to hit your mother. I can't see tearing down the people that teach our children, and I don't understand why anyone supports those that do. I've yet to hear a convincing argument that teachers are harming our children.

This reminds me of the great Texas Redistricting Fiasco of 2003. The Republicans in the state finally took control from Democrats and immediately sought to redistrict the state to form more favorable conditions for Republicans. The Democratic legislators fled the state and Texas actually called on Homeland Security to try to track them down. The Democrats failed and the Republicans solidified and gained stronger control of the Texas election system. Some analysts assert that the Republican efforts have permanently tilted the balance of power in the state.

It's not hard for me to believe that political operatives look for opportunities like this and are quick to implement power grabbing plans when they come up. We've also seen it in textbook review boards that are trying to force textbook publishers to rewrite history more favorably to the conservative cause and Republican point of view. In Kansas, the state board of education is notorious for being taken over by conservatives every other election with the result being that they immediately try to get evolution out of the science classes and creation inserted, sometimes under the guise of Intelligent Design.

I see a system that is being continually gamed to the advantage of whoever can successfully peddle their influence. If they can't get to the people in power, they try to put people in power that they can control. We live in a system where the rich get obscenely richer and the poor and middle class just slide a little further down the socioeconomic scale every year, losing ground, losing influence, and losing power. In cycles in the past in this country, money has exerted its power until the conditions reach the breaking point for the masses and they push back. Some of the conservative propaganda you hear, the constant talking points that are parroted endlessly, are centered on how the Europeans are "Socialists". People that parrot this phrase do not truly understand what Socialism is. Socialism is not taking over industry in Europe. You do not have governments controlling the production of goods. You have government providing a broad and extensive safety net in the way of retirement pensions and medical care, but this has not resulted in a massive bureaucracy or horrible health outcomes. What Americans fail to understand is that Europeans are getting the type of system they want. They are electing officials that support these systems and demanding that they be continued. They cannot understand our system that allows the people at the bottom of the economic spectrum to be neglected. It's a little like the elementary school boy that is being teased by his friends for liking a girl. In this case, the little boy is looking at his tormentors and going, "yes, I like her. Why is this a problem for you?" The barbs and the insults are not considered derogatory to the target, so they do not have the power to sting or influence them.

Is the U.S. system of large corporations and political parties pulling power plays on the rest of society a good thing? Are we more productive and prosperous because we have this way of doing things built in to our society? Are there less European multibillionaires than there are in the U.S.? Does the European system have more immunity to the few powerful people purchasing influence and trying to reshape the world in their image? Is it true that the average American is not in favor of limiting the power or advantages of the rich because they hope and expect to be rich some day?

Americans are not a timid people. The same rebelliousness that caused us to seek independence still thrives in the hearts of our supercapitalists that want to do business as they see fit with no interference from the government or the people. The problem is that the people come from the same stock, and when you ride over them for long enough, they will start pushing back. In the end, our competitive and rebellious nature will force us into confrontations and conflicts. We haven't evolved to the point where we can have empathy for our opponents and seek solutions that provide the best outcomes for both sides. We run our Power Plays and hope for the best.

Deficit Mania

2011-02-19T01:35:00.002-06:00

The 2010 election spawned the whole political movement of the Tea Party and now the interpretation is that these are strict constitutionalists with a strong aversion to big government and a desire to drastically cut spending.

In fact, the main stream Republicans can talk about little else than the deficit. I consider the Tea Party to be a radical subset of the Republicans, more conservative, more militant and insistent in their beliefs.

The Republican Political Playbook has for years used the phrase "Tax and Spend" as a way of tarring and feathering their opposition. Some within the Republican ranks will tell you that cutting taxes puts more money into the hands of people and makes them spend more and therefore stimulates the economy. This lately has translated into a full blown concern for the deficit, which is a different thing. Democrats may argue that money should be spent by government to stimulate the economy, and really they are doing just the same thing as Republicans. The only difference is that they are unbalancing the budget by adding debits while the Republicans are unbalancing the budget by reducing credits. Both are poor accountants.

The Republicans felt that deficit spending was justified to fight a war in Iraq (which some said was not justified in and of itself, much less not justified to spend that much money). The Democrats are willing to run deficits to pump money into the economy in order to shore up the unemployed or stimulate the economy. No one has ever been willing to actually address the deficit in a truly decisive manner. In the 1990s we had a surplus, partly because the end of the Cold War freed up a lot of money we had been pouring into the military, but also because the economy was cranking along nicely and energy prices were low. What did our friends in Congress argue about when there was a surplus? True to form, the Republicans argued about cutting taxes and the Democrats argued about increasing spending.

No one tried to pay down the debt. No one tried to adjust entitlements, which is best to do when times are robust than when times are lean.

Politicians are not fiscally responsible and they are not serious about wanting to be fiscally responsible. You don't diet by eating whatever you want and trying to exercise all day and you don't believe that a healthy way to lose weight is to starve yourself and never exert yourself. This doesn't make sense. You work on both ends of the equation in order to keep yourself healthy and on the right track.

It's the same way with the federal budget. We need modest tax increases coupled with modest spending cutbacks to meet in the middle in the least painful way. We need to do simple things to balance the books on entitlements, which means looking at each system and making them balanced. Social Security is easy to fix, you float the retirement age to the neutral revenue point. This would mean raising it up a few years now, but then letting it float so the change would be gradual. Eventually, the age would come back down when the baby boomers started to exit the system at the other end of retirement (how's that for a nice way to say it?).

I've heard many people argue that big government programs and federal spending were working to reverse the Great Depression and one year FDR went along with the deficit hawks and cut spending and the depression started to come back. People argue that WWII got us out of the depression and I have to ask, how is that not a program of unprecedented government spending, as well as high taxes? The Keynesian Economists swear that you need a lot of government spending to reverse economic downturns. While it's impossible to know if the bailouts and stimulus bills staved off utter collapse of the economy, it's hard to argue that they didn't work to improve things. People have largely forgotten that the bailout/stimulus spending began under a Republican administration and was widely supported by both sides initially. Now the Democrats are left holding the blame for rising the deficit and debt, but get no credit for saving the economy.

Many people believe that one role that big government does well is to fund basic research and development. Many assert that this spending is like an investment with very high payoffs in the future, which I believe, but find hard to prove. Some people think that private industry should be doing the research and development, but Corporate America is less and less willing to spend money on the future in this way any more. If big government really wants to put their thumb on one side of the scale to help tilt this, I wouldn't mind if we tied tax incentives for big corporations to the amount they pour into R&D (or hiring people and creating new jobs for that matter). If you're going to burden the taxpayers with an expense, at least pick something that will work like an investment and earn you something down the road.

I do not believe that the general public or our elected officials have a good idea of how to manage government spending and I see nothing on the horizon that will change that.

The Value of Voting

2011-01-26T13:48:00.002-06:00

During a recent Freakonomics Podcast, which I listened to on 1/26/11, the host stated that you should not feel bad about skipping voting because it does you no good. I wrote the following letter to them:

"Ignoring my visceral response to your comment that it is a waste of time to vote, it doesn't ring true to me. If the premise of the question is whether or not your individual single vote makes any difference, I can understand the answer. Voting is not an individual act, but a collective one. Choosing not to vote as an individual may have little impact, but encouraging individuals not to vote (I should say dissuading people from voting) has a large collective impact. Further, failure to research issues prior to going into the voting booth to cast a vote, I believe already has an adverse collective impact, as seen by the government we get. A self-serving (or special interest serving) group of elected officials with a 98% incumbency re-election rate is a disservice to our country and a danger to any true progress or problem solving.

"To test the validity of the premise that voting makes no difference, please substitute other activities for voting, such as polluting. Those who grew up in the 60's and 70's, like me, probably remember the polluted lakes and streams and the roadsides littered with garbage. Your individual effort of throwing trash out of your car window or picking up trash a single piece of trash alongside the road might be meaningless, but the collective efforts of the nation to change our behavior has made for a cleaner and better world. The same would be true for voting if we took it more seriously and did it more consistently and with more care.

"I realize your intent was to analyze a particular question without any moral bias, but I couldn't help but hope as I heard you tell people that their votes did not make any difference that this would not influence people to give up their right to vote.

"Could you please re-address the original question with the thought in mind of the results of collective actions? Your coverage of the savings account lottery is another example of collective behavior making a difference when individual behavior seems insignificant. Without all the investors, there is no prize in the savings account lottery."

But I have to say, voting today is a lot more like cleaning up stinky garbage. I might argue that it's worthless to vote because it doesn't ever seem to change anything or fix any of our problems, but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

The History of Torture

2011-01-16T10:19:00.004-06:00

I honestly do not remember why I put the search term torture in the search bar that day. I was in my public library's catalog, where I get most of the books I read, and something in the news or some minor thing that came to mind made me put the term in. It came up with The History of Torture by Brian Innes at the first hit. There were two other books in the search that I will discuss further on, but first, an overview of the title book.

This book was written in 1998, before the recent Bush era forays into torture by the United States came up.

I personally have had many arguments about torture with people. The gist of the argument always seems to me to be that if we are doing it, it isn't torture, or these people that were rounded up are guilty, or it's not that bad, you could hardly call it torture.

While our efforts against radical fundamentalist terrorist do bring up unique challenges, they do not justify torture in my mind. The problem with declaring a war on terror is that there is no President, Prime Minister, Emperor, or Fuhrer to surrender, thus winning the whole contest. Each hostile enemy individual is his own war effort, in effect his own country. He's certainly not taking orders from any country recognized by the U.N. and would not surrender unless individually captured. For this reason, declaring war seems to me to be inappropriate. This is individual people not acting under any government direction, so it is criminal activity. You never stop fighting crime, but wars are costly, require a lot of people and effort, and you want to be able to end them at some point. A guerrilla war is similar, although in that case, fighting groups may be supplied and may take direction from a government group.

I was trained by the U.S. Army in the Geneva Convention. We were taught that nothing justified mistreatment of a prisoner. It didn't matter if their side mistreated our guys or if an attack was imminent, or if we caught someone in the act of some war crime, you can never abuse a prisoner. Once captured, he is no longer a factor in the armed struggle. At that point, you may interrogate him, but it never seemed to me that there would be much information of any use that they would offer freely or give up under simple questioning. Often, during the Civil War, captured prisoners would reveal much, but only accidentally, after being tricked, and usually because both sides had a common culture and could goad or enrage prisoners into talking. I always believed that torture was wrong, and often worried about how I would stand up to it if I was ever captured in a conflict. I have always assumed that I would be singing like a canary in a very short time. To me, avoiding being a torturer was necessary in order to keep up the edge we had for decades of being the honorable opponent. In a close situation, soldiers will sometimes surrender rather than fight on if they know they will be treated well, so it was always better to foster that way of thinking in the enemy. Plus, we always talked about how much better and how much more moral we were than then. This is what steeled many people of my generation for the decades of the cold war. We deserved to win because we cared about people and were better human beings.

One of the things I learned along the way was that torture never works. Under a painful interrogation, the prisoner will quickly decide that the pain must end and therefore, the people asking the questions should be told what they want to hear. It's the only reason they'll stop asking questions, when they believe they have the answers. I've always known that I would tell someone whatever they wanted to hear if I was being hurt in a terrible way. The information gained from torture is always suspect. You cannot assume that any of it is true.

The History of Torture talked about how the ancients used torture and brought that forward to the Middle Ages. Just as the Romans occasionally tortured a Christian (before The Roman Empire was a christian empire), the Christians didn't take long to adopt as an instrument of state during the middle ages. A depressingly large swath of the middle of the book is about the inquisitions. I did not realize there were more than one, or that they were started over such trivial matters. Does God interfere in day to day events or has he kept his hands off since shortly after creation? This question was responsible for kicking off the inquisition. I'm guessing that many churches today have people that believe both ways in the same congregation. Can you imagine being accused of something as trivial as this and being disfigured under the hands of torture until you gave over the names of others that were thinking or doing as you did?

It kept striking me throughout the middle of the book that elaborate and widespread torture was mostly religiously motivated and taken out by members of the church or their agents. Religion has been responsible for more torture than anything else over the years. How do you believe? Be careful, the wrong answer could give you a trip to the rack.

I thought that by reading the book, I would become numb to the thought of torture, and I must say that this was the case. After hearing dozens of details of pain inflicted on individuals in order to change their beliefs, I found myself unimpressed by the procedures. I never did lose my sense of unfairness at all the poor people that were unjustly accused, who later confessed to belief or acts which they did not hold or did not commit.

The next book I checked out was Barry Eisler's Inside Out. Mr. Eisler was an actual ex-CIA covert agent. He only did it for 3 years, but even so, you get the feeling that you're hearing things you're not supposed to know. He had fictional government agents that used to torture and now were trying to bring down the government by revealing the extent of their torture. Mr. Eisler had a character in his book state something that I believe he believed himself. He said that people don't use torture because they think it works, they use it because they want to hurt people.

The last book I checked out was The Torture Memos by David Cole. It went over the legal justifications for torture during the Bush administration. The book had a description of an interrogation of a terror suspect, and it did not look easy to endure. It amazes me that there was no one prosecuted over the affair.

Also mentioned in The History of Torture is another older book not available through the library, called: A History of Torture by George Riley Scott. I have not yet checked out or purchased this book (they did not have it at the bookstore), and I may not. It seems to me that everything that needs to be said on torture already has.

Guns, Germs, and Steel

2011-01-09T05:38:00.004-06:00

I must have originally heard about the Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond on the radio or in a podcast, I can't remember. It was published in 1997 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

This is a book about how humans colonized the planet, with particular emphasis on discoveries and inventions - how we developed.

There are many aspects of the book which I was already familiar with, in the broad strokes. I knew roughly how we came out of Africa and swept across Europe and Asia, and how we domesticated plants and animals and settled into more and more civilized cities with more and more specialized technology and pursuits.

So you might wonder how much more you can learn from 440 pages of heavily footnoted text. The short answer is not a lot of basic broad historical strokes, but a lot of nuance. Some surprises on human migration, like the colonization of Madagascar from southeast Asia were completely unexpected and fun to learn. The isolation of Australia after it's initial colonization and the self-enforced isolation of China were two things that I had never heard about before, and were fascinating.

There were some very interesting broad concepts, like the wide stretch over the same lattitude of Eurasia being the perfect developing ground for the spread of domesticated plants, while the north south axis of the Americas were a hinderance to spreading of advances.

It was interesting to see how scholars and scientists have shed light on the spread of humanity by analyzing language similarities and by tracking genetic studies of populations. While these were not particularly surprising methods, it was fascinating to see how some details they illuminated were unexpected. For example, we think of Africa as this melting pot where humanity emerged and then changed as they spread out, but Africa used to have more diversity, and studies have shown that other groups of humans with other cultures and languages had been subjugated and absorbed in some migration that occurred after humans had already spread out of Africa.

Since reading the book, I have heard the results of some recent studies that touch on the same subjects that Jared Diamond touched on in his book. He stated that he thought that the megafauna extinctions, particularly of Australia, but of North and South America, too, were the result of overhunting by humans. The megafauna were large mammals that existed on those continents up to the time man migrated in, and then were extinct shortly after the appearance of man. Many people are familiar with the woolly mammoth and the saber toothed tiger, but there were all kinds of other large mammals that used to exist that became extinct right around the time man showed up. Recent studies have drawn the opposite conclusion, stating that the extinctions had climatic or other reasons, but could not have been by overhunting given the time frame that they occurred. Scientists currently disagree on this point.

The other theory that I have heard was that the migrations of humans out of Africa did not originate from the area around Kenya, but from North Africa. The Sahara Desert was a jungle not too long ago, and humans inhabited it. There is evidence that suggests that these are the groups that first migrated off the continent into what is now the area around Israel. Each year brings on new discoveries to flesh out our understanding of this time period.

The main question he is addressing in the book is why some bands of humans were able to out-compete others. The main answer is right in his title. They had guns (superior warfare tactics), they had diseases which they were more resistant to, and they had steel (better developed technology).

The interesting thing that came out of my version of the book, which has an afterword added some years after the original book was released, was that many large corporations were looking at the book and seeing if it applied to corporations and companies. What makes one company out-compete another.

While dense with information and difficult to plow through, the book is also rich with interesting details and well worth the time to work through it.

Privacy

2010-12-30T11:45:00.004-06:00

The recent Wikileaks controvercy had me thinking about privacy and how it is applied to certain groups.

When the accessibility of the internet grew, several phenomena grew with it. We have the explosion of social media and the ability of simple online searches to expose a lot of your personal information to anyone with an internet connection. Law enforcement agencies started putting cameras on police cars, and sometimes drove with camera crews - like the show Cops. They put surveillance cameras more and more in public places and then started thinking about putting them on roadways as speed traps or red light enforcers. When 9/11 hit, government officials started to devise ways to improve security. Some of these ways involved not just more intrusive searches on people at airports, but the possibility that your email might be read by someone in the government. Some people see no problem with this increased scrutiny. You will often hear proponents of increased government power of surveillance of individuals saying that we live in a different world and you shouldn't expect as much individual privacy today.

If this is such a good idea for individual people, why is it not a good idea for governments or large corporations? What's fair is fair, right? After all, if you're not doing anything bad, you have nothing to hide? That's what I'm being told as a justification for losing my privacy, so shouldn't that apply to government and industry too?

We are expected to vote for people and then re-evaluate their performance during the next election and decide whether to re-elect them or not. It's like a performance review for a job. If we don't know what they are doing or how they are doing it because they get to classify their actions and hide their activities behind a veil of security, then we really can't judge the job they are doing and cannot in good conscience decide whether to vote for them or not. I'm not talking about exposing CIA operatives, and endangering secret agents. I figure that the best kept secrets like that are already better protected and will be the last secrets to be exposed anyway. The exception was the Valerie Plame affair, and that was done from the inside. What I am talking about exposing is why we go to war, what corporations are pulling government strings, and why decisions are being made. I don't need to know the name of or get a picture of a field agent doing his job, but I want to know if the government sent him out to perform assassinations or subvert governments or abduct people for interrogations.

Secrecy allows you to torture people, imprison them without cause, assassinate inconvenient rivals, start wars, and ignore festering problems. Secrecy allows you to conspire to fix prices, put unsafe products into the public's hands, continue to practice unsafe procedures in the workplace, and pollute without any control. The worst an individual could do with secrecy might be to defraud someone, injure an individual, or do drugs. The harm anyone as an individual can do is so much less than governments and corporations can do, yet why are people arguing that my secrecy must be sacrificed to protect the rest of the public and they aren't arguing that the big players that have much more impact and can do much more harm need greater protections from public scrutiny?

Some have expressed disappointment in President Obama, feeling that he has not lived up to his campaign promises (obviously, his opponents express disappointment just that he's in office). I have heard a defense of Obama that speculated that if you knew what he knows, if you saw all the inside information that he now has access to since he went into office, you'd understand why he is acting the way he is. This justification is not acceptible. If every new elected official gets to go to Washington and disappear behind a veil of secrecy and ignore what they were sent to office to do, their campaign promises mean nothing. If we can't expect anyone we elect to do the things they say they are going to do, then it doesn't do any good to vote for anyone. We as voters are responsible for our leaders actions, and how can we evaluate how they make decisions if we can't even see what they see?

There were serious misuses of privacy in the previous administration, and the hope in electing Obama was that things would roll back and revert to times when government was more accessible. Vice President Cheney in particular used to claim executive privelige in order to do his job unencumbered, unquestioned, and without interference from the public. That started with his work with energy corporations in drafting policy in his energy task force. The particulars of those meetings never did see the light of day. In the absense of hard evidence, I assume that energy corporations were given the ability to effect legislation and enforcement in ways that circumvented restrictions and benefited the bottom line of the company at the expense of the general public. The result was an unneccesary war in Iraq and $4 per gallon gasoline. The other assertion that Cheney used to make was that our security measures had prevented many terrorist attacks. When asked for specifics, he couldn't tell us about them for "security" reasons. This supposedly justified torture, detainment, rendition, and the erosion of individual privacy. If you were able to rip away this veil of secrecy and found that there were no attacks repelled and the questionable actions made no difference in our security, you would have a clear case to remove the perpetrators from office. But since they got to say what it was we got to see, it was easy for them to simply restict this information, which gave them more freedom to do whatever they wanted.

I say we should open up the files and look at the information. People in government and industry should always act in a way that they will not be ashamed of when it comes to light in the public. What they do has a broader effect and they expect no less from us.

Lame Duck Session

2010-12-30T11:44:00.003-06:00

I was listening to an interesting exchange on the Slate Political Gabfest about the lame duck session of Congress.

Emily Bazelon explained that some people were so incensed about lame duck sessions that they were thinking of making them illegal, and at least the laws that came out of them had the feeling of something that was unconstitutional, because these people had just been voted out. She commented that this time the lame duck session might be a good thing because cooler heads could prevail and decisions could be made without regard for re-election prospects.

In repeating the other's complaints, she described the session as an undemocratic time, but I believe we are seeing a political calculation-free zone. Our elected officials are, during these interludes, able to make decisions divorced from political machinations. For a while, the motivation can be what's good for the country and not their next election. Instead of paying back their small group of core campaign contributors they can do what’s right for the majority. The irony is that more campaign promises that usually amount to nothing more than rhetoric seem to be fulfilled during the lame duck session than during the regular session. Actions that are for the greater good of the country can be openly considered in this brief period where there are no glaring klieg lights of politics that do not allow for any political cover.

This tells us that politics and the things politicians do to get re-elected are distorting the way they govern. Additionally, the political calculations did not work for the Democrats. All the issues that they would not make a stand on before the election were avoided because they felt it would make them un-electable. These were exactly the issues that their core supporters expected them to address all along. The irony is that their political second guessing and maneuvering was counterproductive. If they had worked toward some of the legislation they've been free to approach during the Lame Duck Session, I believe they would have had better chances at being re-elected. Showing some backbone and tackling issues that the right painted as completely unacceptible would have energized their base.

The independent swing voters who turned to the Democrats in hopes that they would be anti-Republicans were sorely disappointed by their behavior since the 2008 election. The gutless way that Democrats wouldn't even consider legislation and make their agenda happen during a sweeping supermajority is what hurt them and caused the enthusiam gap among those swing voters. The behavior of the Democrats during this lame duck session proves that they had the ability to get some things that needed to be done completed despite Republican blustering. If they had exhibited some courage over the last 2 years, I believe the election would not have been as successful for the Republicans.

Prior to the election, the Republicans were taking advantage of a situation where obstructionism and not cooperating meant they were not working for the good of the country, and yet this put them back in a position of power. They were rewarded for bad behavior. The lame duck lesson that should be transmitted to the regular session is to do what’s right, not what you think you should do because of election politics.

The Road

2010-12-21T14:18:00.011-06:00

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel that is now a movie staring Viggo Mortensen. The movie came out last summer and I heard a review on the podcast Seen/Unseen Movie Reviews. The host said that he loved the book and was fearful that the movie would screw it up. There was something about his passionate description of the book that stuck in my mind, and made me decide that I had to read it. I purchased the book some time back, and I have a paperback that came out since the movie, so it has a picture of Viggo Mortensen and the actor who plays the boy, Kodi Smit-McPhee, on the cover. I used to be a read the book first purist, but I've relaxed on that account somewhat. I realized that in this case, it was too late, just seeing the movie trailers would have been enough to put Viggo Mortensen's face on the man when I read the book. I do like that pure book experience where you have these vague, fantasy-like visions of the characters in your mind. I'm always afraid that putting an actual face on the character distracts you from accepting the character as a pure person, whom you can relate to and understand their motivations and desires. When the movie arrived in the mail from NetFlix, I realized I had to get off my butt and read the book.

That was three days ago, and I finished the book last night. It's that good. You sit down and read it from front to back. In contrast, I've been plugging away at Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond for 2 years (with long gaps where I put it aside), but can never seem to read more than about 10 pages in a sitting (after which, I fall asleep).

The book reminds me of the perfect subject for a high school essay. The themes are numerous, and the old thesis style of finding the hidden meanings in the book is a perfect way to view the novel.

The style is almost more poetry than prose. It follows a simple pattern alternating stream of consciousness with simple dialog and spare descriptions.

I had no idea where it was going. There are a few things that you realize they have left out of the novel. They never say what part of the world the characters are in. I kept thinking they were in California, but it could just as easily been parts of Georgia. The point is that it's not important because the world has been so radically changed that nothing is recognizable anymore. The cause of the end of the world or the downfall of civilization is not clear, but I suspect it was meant to be nuclear war and the ensuing nuclear winter. However, why were there not more references to radiation? I suppose it could have been a comet or asteroid strike.

They never say the boy's name or the man's name, and it doesn't matter. He's "the man" and his son is "the boy".

The novel sets up a good versus evil theme. This is not some underlying message you have to guess at, the boy is often questioning the man about whether people they encounter are good people. Unfortunately, they do not encounter any good people, only victims and predators. The struggle between the boy and the man is to remain good and survive. The boy's watchfulness keeps the man from devolving into savagery and the man's example gives the boy a clear idea of good and evil.

You find yourself asking why they keep going on. You wonder what it is that they are hopeful for. Is there some unscarred territory where people are still normal and life is going on with something resembling order?

You get the sense that the desolation following the original conflagration went in stages. This is what makes the novel interesting. There are no explicit narrative explanations, just bits and pieces that you pick up along the way. You begin to understand that the survivors have swept over the landscape in waves, with each successive wave being diminished. At some point, people began to turn on each other, and when we see the boy and the man on their journey, they have reached the point where they can't trust anyone. They will either be attacked or robbed by anyone they meet, and some bands will slaughter them for food if they can.

You get the sense that the man was once a police officer or a soldier, but he was also well read and intelligent, so there's no telling what he might have been. One thing is clear, he's been very lucky. He was lucky to have survived the initial collapse, and then lucky to have been able to raise the boy, who it appears was born after the disaster. He was lucky to have had someone to be with him and help him survive, and he was lucky to always be able to find food or shelter or evade attackers when they came after him.

At one point in the book, they encounter an old man who is so defenseless and impoverished that he poses no threat. He turns out to be somewhat blind, and you wonder how in the world he survived for as long as he did. At the boy's insistence, they give him some of their food, even though they don't really have the food to spare. It is interesting how the man defers to the boy on these matters. He actually lets him make the decisions. In some ways, it seems that the man is realizing that many of the decisions they might make are random and there is no way to foresee where they will lead, so he might as well let the boy decide. In another view, you might say that he is using the boy as a moral compass. The old man asks about the boy and the man says that the boy is a god. When I read this, I thought that the man was being a smart ass, but then I thought that even if he was, it was a telling remark. What if the boy was somewhat of a god. What if the whole point was that the boy had to survive because some day he would be instrumental in rebuilding civilization? Or maybe the boy was a god in the sense that you don't question why you believe in him, you just do.

After a while, I began to realize why the book was resonating with me so much. I was identifying with the man. His way of consulting and deferring to the boy reminds me of the way I approach my son. I often let him do or try things when it doesn't really matter one way or the other. I figure he's going to learn to be an independent and thoughtful adult quicker if he is allowed to work things out himself. The man also has a curious way of trying to tell the truth and not sugar coat bleak realities, while at the same time explaining why that's not necessarily bad to face reality, it helps to deal with reality if you are fully aware of it. Yet the man wants to give a hopeful view to his son, so he is more ready to tell him when he doesn't know what the truth and reality of the situation is, but what he hopes it is. The boy responds to the honesty and openness by accepting the bad things in life, but not being absorbed by them. They say something to the effect that once you see something, you can't unsee it, you can't make it go away. Once you let it in, it stays in. And yet they come to understand that this is better than not seeing the bad things. They see to have been able to be exposed but not tainted by all the bad things they see. Perhaps this is part of their survival. By understanding what forms of evil they will be confronting, they are able to avoid them.

Despite the fact that the story had no hope, that the world was irreparably damaged and there did not seem to be anywhere to go to get away from the cruel fate that the changed world imposed on them, you found yourself having hope for the boy and the man, wishing them well and wanting them to make it to safety.

Upon further reflection of the book, I have decided that I really relate to the man because of the way he would lose sleep worrying about and protecting the boy. He would listen late at night and his own health probably suffered in order to stay vigilant and protect his son. It was interesting how the transition to a post-apocalyptic setting changes how you raise your son. While he still spent time teaching him to read (not in the time of the novel, but there were flashback references to the fact that he had been teaching him even while they struggled to survive), he had long since come to grips with the fact that he could not shelter and protect him from the realities of life. They had a saying about how once you see something, it's in your mind. They were seeing some fearsome and gruesome things, from the overall destruction of the world to the painful and cruel ways that people suffered and died. The man decided to let the boy see these things, and then talk about them and understand them for what they were. These things were horrible, but they were reality, and should be faced if a person was going to be better able to survive.

The result was that the boy was often struggling with accepting the horrible things in life, but never accepting that these things were right. He had a keen sense of right and wrong, and in his moral universe eating other people or even just hurting or taking from them to get ahead or survive was always wrong. He lit his father know this in many ways, subtle and overt. The man refers to him as a God to one old decrepit traveller that they shared food with. I think this was a telling moment in the book because the man did use the boy as a God in the sense that he was a being that the man had to live up to, he had to please the boy that he was a one of the good people, much the way religious people seek to do good to be in the favor of God and gain entry to Heaven. In the end, I think the man made it to Heaven with plenty of room to spare. His last parting gift to his son was to give them hope, "you've always been lucky - you will find some good people to be with" was his last message to the boy before he died. This depressing novel ended with a strangely bittersweet assurance that the boy would be OK when the good people found him as he stood vigil over his dead father, wondering what to do next. It was a strange emotional mixture that I have rarely seen in a writing, where the sadness of the loss of the man is tempered with the relief that the boy would be safe and would still have a chance to hopefully find something good in life. You kept wondering if there was an untouched place out there with good people in it, shelter and a lack of hunger, and you hoped they would find it. Someone has to carry on the human race.

Another less emotionally satisfying aspect of the book was the parallels this charred and wrecked world has with our relatively pristine world. I kept thinking about the way that the people that they encountered had no problem getting ahead (or staying alive) at the expense of the boy and the man. Their entire journey was one of not letting the others capture or harm them, or at least steal their meager possessions that they owed their life to. I realized that this is how nations act toward each other, this is how governments look at other nations. How do I get on top? What does that other group have that I need? This is in some ways the essence of how capitalism works. Stick it to the other guy and get ahead. This type of gain at the expense of others is shown in stark relief in the world of The Road, but really, it's present in the world around us today. Sure, we're well fed and dry and warm in the cold winter, but we still claw to the top of the pack standing on the backs of others. I've always felt that this was not right, in some way. I'm not a communist, one who thinks that all things go into a big community pot and then everyone pulls back out from it equally. I just believe that a higher form of success would be possible if we thought about ways to get ahead that pulled those around us or those we are dealing with up with us. Why can we not find mutually beneficial solutions to the problems we all face? Why must my success come at your expense? Why would I deserve to succeed if I knew it was hurting you? While The Road shows this in stark relief, I believe that in life, this is the road we are all travelling.

The Real Da Vinci Code

2010-11-30T23:07:00.005-06:00

While visiting my in-laws in Des Moines recently, we were told about an exhibition on Leonardo Da Vinci at the Science Center of Iowa.

You would not think that Des Moines would have much to offer when it comes to museums, but this exhibit was pretty decent. Snaking through the tour, we saw many models and mock-ups of inventions that Da Vinci came up with.

People don't realize that many inventors (what we might call scientists today) were in those times usually employed by royalty and usually valuable if they could add to the military advantage of their king. It's not clear to me how much of Leonardo's work was done as under patronage, but he had a lot of inventions that were for military use.

One thing that struck me was that most ideas cannot come from nowhere, they are usually an accumulation of previous ideas. I was surprised how many of da Vinci's ideas had earlier sources, as many were taken from earlier Greek philosophers. His strength was understanding the underlying principles inherent in the things he studied. He was able to figure out many complex system by understanding what drove them. For example, there was a self supporting bridge that he developed that allowed soldiers to quickly put together a way over a stream given a pile of tree trunks. He was able to see the forces each piece would exert on the adjacent pieces and devise a way that the result was a self-supporting span. It was ingenious in its simplicity.

Part of the reason that he was in touch with all these underlying principles was because he took the time to observe and study things from scratch. He was interested in flight and spent a lot of time studying birds. His most famous set of observations were anatomical. He was a meticulous and obsessive chronicler and his volumes of notebooks contained beautiful sketches of the human body, among other interests. Of course, being an artist helped make the sketches easily readable and an amazing aid to comprehension of the systems he was exploring, describing, and explaining.

His art was also dissected in great detail in the exhibit. Everyone is familiar with his last supper and all the speculations about Mary Magdalene and Judas, but the picture is also diagrammed showing the way all lines in the drawing point to Christ's head. The big focus of the exhibit was the Mona Lisa. That drawing has been analyzed to a degree that I find unbelievable. They showed colorized versions of it and all kinds of different versions with various methods of analysis showing various aspects of the painting or construction. She used to have eyebrows and eyelashes that have since faded. One thing I did not notice was the speculation that it was actually a self-portrait, feminized.

The amazing thing about an exhibit like this was that you go through it and feel overwhelmed by the breadth of his work, and you realize that this is just a little taste of the whole amount of works that he has done. They call him a Renaissance Man because of his variety of interests, but he was also a river that ran deep as well as broad.

Government Balance

2010-11-29T23:14:00.009-06:00

I wrote an entry back on 10/25/10 entitled Negativity Cascade. It described how a small tilt or lean in one direction can often cause an enormous shift to start.

I was watching a recent Daily Show episode with Philip K. Howard, the founder of a group called Common Good. He is a lawyer that believes government needs reform. He discussed how our government is being hamstrung by our political parties to the point where it is unable to react quickly or decisively. His point was that our government is rendered ineffective by the weight of the bureaucratic system as well as the inertia to continue to do things the way they always have and is in need of reform. He talked about how our politicians often argue about things that are not relevant and how they get tied up in distractions and don't get things done.

When I talked with my wife about the Negativity Cascade effect, she did not see the point of the mental construct. I tried to convince her that knowing this balance and cascade effect was there could be useful. In government, if a leader could always work to tilt the field their way, he might be able to do what is needed to fix our problems. In other words, create a cascade that pushes things their way.

One of the problems with America right now is that there are two main factions that each believe that the other side is actively trying to ruin the country. At the same time, both sides are not at all concerned that their own actions might actually harm individual members in their opposition. Rather than thinking and believing that any gains we can make would come primarily by defeating the other side, we should realize that we are all Americans and that the best course of action should benefit everyone, not a small group of citizens.

On the business side, Dan Carlin was talking about instituting a new entrepreneurial concept to teach people capitalize on their ideas. Capitalism, or I should say capitalistic ideals seem to concentrate on competition and defeating others involved in the same industry It does not teach any of the benefits that come from competition. In reality, competition is good and we benefit from having strong competitors. The goal should not be to crush competitors, but to divide your market with customers that fit your style of doing business and leave the rest to your competitors. Another benefit of competition is that it spurs innovation, ratcheting up the development of new technology and efficiency in production. We must learn to compete in a way that allows for multiple winners. We need to learn to see that we are not threatened by others earning success in a similar way, but allowed to carve out areas of strength within a competitive arena.

I've had some interesting discussions with colleagues lately about competition and globalization. We've seen examples of U.S. companies protecting their ideas and then having Chinese companies steal them and copy them. Sometimes this occurs before the U.S. companies can even fully develop and deploy technologies, sometimes it happens with mature technologies, where plans are stolen, or equipment is procured and copied.

We talked about the entrepreneurial spirit that takes ideas to a successful business model and whether or not we could assist innovators to be good businessmen, too. Although there are a few people that are excellent entrepreneurs, few people with big ideas are also the type that could make those ideas work. One opinion was that this kind of successful formula could not be taught. Many big successes were mostly luck. It was the general consensus that Chinese competition comes from a massive labor force, not from innovation. We've seen few examples of great ideas originating in China. Perhaps this is healthy for the world as a whole, but it's a major disincentive for innovators and inventors to develop the next big idea if it's just going to be ripped off and make someone else wealthy.

One thing is certain, recent events have everything going China's way. So the cascade effect is favoring them at this point. However, with a little bit of wisdom and finesse, we can be ready to ride this tide when it flows back out in the other direction.

Cooking for Geeks

2010-11-27T12:31:00.005-06:00

I just listened to a great Science Friday show from back in September. It was a new book author interview, Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks. The book is about the science behind the cooking. Potter is a computer science type that interviewed well. It wasn't as if he was a typical geek that might be uncomfortable with people. He approached cooking the way a scientist would approach it, and found that few people had really studied it to understand many aspects of it.

One of the firt things he did was get an IR (infrared) thermometer. I've seen these in industrial settings and always assumed that they were horribly expensive. They often look like a little gun, you point it at what you want to measure and press a button and get a digital readout. Using this tool, Potter could actually learn what temperature things happen at. I remember him discussing carmelization or browning happening at 130 degrees, but I'm sure there are other things to know, like the boiling and melting point of major ingredients.

He said that he would take a recipe and remake it several times in a row, changing one variable each time and learning what the result were for each change. From this description, you can see that he was approaching cooking like it was pure scientific experimentation. I could really relate to this myself.

The most fun story that he told was about the way he discovered that the cleaning cycle for his oven would take it up to 900 degrees. He figured out how to disable the safety switch in the door so he could have it on and open the door. He learned that you can cook pizza in this was in about 45 seconds and it is delicious. The problem was that he shattered the glass in the oven door. He got on Craigslist and ordered a piece of special quartz material to replace his oven window. He said that this material was developed and used for the nosecones of rockets going into space. You can buy anything online, was his comment.

I bought the book, but I haven't read it or started using it yet. And still, I highly recommend it.

Robotics Laws

2010-11-27T12:30:00.004-06:00

Anyone who has seen a Terminator movie or knows the old Battlestar Galactica story line knows that there is a fear of our own technology taking over or trying to destroy humanity. It's a common theme and makes for a great story line. Dune is another story that fits this bill. The original stories were in a future over 12,000 years from now, where the government was feudal and the technology was advanced in some respects and stagnant in others. The Dune story line was extended backwards after Frank Herbert died by his son. They took it back to the often mentioned Butlerian Jihad, where computers were banned. Underneath this over 30 year old novel was a baseline story about humanity after surviving a war with machines. If you continue to read the saga as it ran forward in time from the original story, you also see that the war was never really ended, just delayed for millenia.

Isaac Asimov, arguably the most prolific science fiction writer of all time, started writing short stories about robots in the 1940's and accumulated them into his classic novel in 1950. This was before computers that he was speculating that eventually we would develop autonomous machines that were self-aware. He wasn't the first. A Czech playwriter had coined the word about 20 years previously, from a root Slavic word for worker or serf, although the story you commonly hear is that the root word is slave. When Asimov attempts to flesh out the idea, he thinks it through very thoroughly, as only he could do. What if we build these thinking machines and we lose control of them? We could certainly make them more powerful or faster than a human, so how would we ever regain control once we lost it? He speculated that the human designers, in order to build in features that would prevent the loss control, would develop laws that would be hard wired into robots to prevent them from harming humans. These laws of robotics are well known to most Sci-Fi geeks and Tech-Heads. They are:

1.A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2.A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3.A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This would seem to insure that Robots stay "in their place", as willing and pliant servants of humans. I always thought that this was a little naive. What do you do about the rogue designer that decided that these rules were not good and didn't want to use them?

Well, it seems that more and more, that time is approaching. The use of drones in combat has increased markedly in the last 7 years since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the beginning, these were remotely piloted vehicles that would simply remove the operator from the airplane, but still have a person in control. As time has passed, more and more of the functions of these drones have been getting automated. Exactly how autonomous they are is a military secret, so the question is whether or not we are already at the point of having autonomous machines, probably not self-aware, but capable of action independent of human control. We know the drones were originally going to be used only for surveillance and now carry weapons. We see the use of other "robots" on the battlefield, machines used for surveillance or bomb handling. These machines are probably more primitive in the way of computer intelligence and control, but early stages of work toward mechanizing the battlefield.

With the prospect of human deaths being less and less acceptable to the public, we see more moves to put machines in harms way in lieu of humans. There are already attempts to build personal vehicles that are little more than mechanical assists for a human form. That easily develops into a robot body, which you might have a person inside of, or you might control remotely. Given manpower shortages for just about any task you could conceive on a battlefield, how long before you provide these robots with weapons system and computer controls and allow them to operate independently. Of course, their job would be to kill people, so the Laws of Robotics as Asimov envisioned them would be the farthest thing from the designer's mind.

I recently hear John Hodgeson make a comment about the inevitable robot uprising. While he mentioned it humorously, the matter of fact way he slipped it into the conversation as if it was inevitable is disturbing, if you think about it. Most religions have a future end-time built into their narrative. The devout and faithful often believe that things will end badly for humankind, they just don't know when. I've always felt that thinking like this was in some ways wishful thinking, and in other ways a guarantee of self-fulfilling prophecy. It doesn't matter if you don't want it to happen if you believe it will happen. Most likely, your actions once you believe in something will make it more likely to occur.

The actions of our government if they pursue combat robots virtually insures that we are heading in that direction. You would tend to build a strong self-preservation instinct into your combat robot, or else it wouldn't be much of a fighter. People would naturally try to hack into the controlling program to shut down the robot, that's a natural response to the threat. The defense would be to harder a robot's ability to resist being shut down or averted from their mission - a recipe for loss of control. If one nation developed combat robots, it would virtually insure that their enemies would try to develop them. In order to be competitive in some future theater where one country is sending its combat robots against another country with the same kind of robots, designers would tend to make the robots tougher and more brutal than their enemy's forces. Again, a perfect recipe for disaster.

Do I sound like a technological armageddonist? Well, I don't think I am, because I don't think this will happen. I believe that we usually error on the side of sanity, and societal checks and balances tend to be employed before most situations get out of hand. But the first step in creating a check or balance to an unstable situation is to realize how that situation could go out of control. Murphy was an engineer, after all. So our challenge here is to realize the worst consequences of our actions and provide regulation and oversight for groups working on this kind of technology. Also, it doesn't hurt to develop a strong defense. Anyone seen the EMP device in the Matrix series?

Savings Account Lotto

2010-11-27T12:28:00.005-06:00

I heard a great idea in a podcast called Freakonomics. It was about a new way of gambling called a Prize Linked Savings Account (PLS). Technically, it's a lottery, but the way it works is that you put money in a savings account that has a "save to win" feature. The interest from the entire pool of these savings accounts goes to a lottery pool. Individuals get no interest from the account, but as long as they are in the pool by saving some money in their savings account, they are eligible for the monthly rewards which are the interest generated by the sum of the accounts. You can take your money back out at any time. So you save money, but while you keep it in the account, you are also eligible for winning a great deal more money. This provides an incentive and encourages people to save. It also provides an irrational hope that someone will win big, changing their life.

The problem is that it is illegal in most places. In the U.S., states run lotteries under a state law which also makes them a lottery monopoly. States make a huge amount of money on their lotteries, and the profit margin is huge. These states won't allow this good idea which is a win-win for the consumer, because they do not want the competition with these prize winning savings plans.

People don't get up-in-arms about this kind of thing because most people don't pay much attention to situations like this. The State Monopoly on lotteries is similar to the way that political parties do not allow good ideas because it threatens their special interests. I believe this is a form of corruption. Some good laws will never be enacted because it spoils the control exerted by their campaign contributors, that are often big corporations hoping that their contributions will keep the laws that favor them and insure that any new laws written will will provide them a benefit or at least not harm them.

You've seen examples of this. The trial lawyers always fight off tort reform. The unions work to insure that people do not have the choice to work for non-union companies in some areas. Large corporations are notorious for protecting their interests. Energy producing companies do not like price control or pollution restrictions or even conservation measures to be enacted into law.

This reminds me of the way that America became a big textile power. Around the time that the industrial revolution was kicking into gear, the textile trade in England was set up as a series of protected trades, where each step in making animal furs or plant fibers into cloth and finished clothing goods was controlled by a separate very powerful trade. Any attempt to make textiles in a new or innovative way was not allowed by law, because these powerful trades lobbied their parliamentary representatives to prevent any change in the way things were done.

In New England, innovators determined how to make textiles in a single big factory driven by water power. These new textile mills ran circles around the English industry and practically broke them. This is a perfect example of people stubbornly standing for keeping things the same while the world changes around them and almost crushes them. Sometimes it's very difficult to change the system without practically breaking it.

Freezing Towers

2010-11-27T12:26:00.004-06:00

I was driving down the highway with my wife on the way to our in-laws' house a short time back and we passed a water tower. It was a cold day, below freezing, and I wondered for the first time why water towers do not freeze in the winter. It sure seems like a problem of exposed pipes to me, and they always freeze in your house if they are exposed to the outside in the winter.

I had no idea what the answer to that question was, but Andrea wanted to know why we even have a need for water towers in the first place. I knew the answer to that question, the water tower supplies what is called "head pressure" to the system (that system being the pipes going out to all the houses). You have a pump that is continually pumping water up to the tower. This pump is rated for just over the maximum average daily rate of water going out of the tank. People use water in surges during the day, just as they do electricity. Electricity is obvious, when it gets dark and everyone turns their lights on, the need for electricity increases. I was told by a power plant engineer once that in the winter right before Christmas when the sun goes down the electrical demand peaks, and it's all due to people turning on their Christmas lights. When it's really hot out, at mid-day when the temperature is the highest, all the Air Conditioners are cranked on full blast and electricity demand skyrockets.

For water, it's similar. Everyone gets up and takes a shower, people run their dishwashers around the same time of day and cook in the kitchen around the same time in the evening. People bathe their children in the evening around the same time. So there are these two spikes of usage with relative minimums of usage around them. The pump that feeds the water tower just cranks along at it's relatively low rate, just a fraction of the peak demand rate. The tower fills through the night and in the middle of the day and flushes out by gravity during peak demand times. The other reason to use water towers is to get higher pressure in your water pipes. If you've ever dived underwater, you've seen how the pressure on your ears gets greater as you go farther underwater. This is pressure head. The water in your pipes is at the same pressure (less friction losses in the pipeline) that you would be if you were underwater by that amount. The water level in the water tower minus your elevation is how far underwater you would have to dive to have the equivalent pressure on you. If you didn't have water towers, and expected to use a pump to create the peak demand flow at the pressures we get out of our facets now, it would be enormous. We save money and energy by doing it this way.

That explains why we have water towers and the pressure they create, now, why do they not freeze in the winter.

The answer to that is that the water is turned over too often in the tower. In the winter, they run the towers at lower levels, and the water going into the tower will be at ground temperature (usually about 55°F). This warmer water keeps the water tower from freezing. There is not as much demand in the winter, as people are not watering their yards or fields and gardens. Apparently, the water in the tank will freeze on top, like a pond. They prevent this from being a problem by cycling the level up and down in the tank. However, this is not as critical any more, because in our area we rarely have extended cold spells any more. The temperature might stay below freezing for a week or two, but then it would get above freezing, helping the tank to clear whatever ice is trying to build up. Farther north, they put mixers in the tanks to turn the water over and prevent the surface from freezing. The other exposed part that you have to be concerned with is the pipes going up and down from the tank. These are usually insulated so they will retain their internal heat, but sometimes they are heat traced or the space they are in is heated, but this is rare.

When you think about it, there are so many other things that work without us thinking about it or understanding. We take for granted electricity generation and transmission, water purification and distribution, and sewage treatment without even thinking about it.

It's not just big utilities that the average person is completely ignorant about, it's most of the things around your house. Obviously, the range of expertise about technology varies greatly from person to person. There are people out there that could probably fix anything and everything in their house. There are people that would be a wiz at doing their own plumbing, but would never touch anything electrical. Then there are those people that don't know what to do when their toilet keeps running or couldn't change a light bulb if they had to. I do wonder about some homeowners. If you don't know how anything in your home works, should you really be owning a house? If you have an endless supply of money, it's not a big thing, you can hire people to do the things you don't understand. But if you have a huge pile of money, you must have something going on upstairs, so home ownership can't be that much of a mystery. The thing that I don't get is someone that has a simple job, not making much and is challenged by most things technical. How do you justify buying a house? That's when you rent an apartment.

The same can be said for feeding yourself. If there weren't any grocery stores, could you figure out how to grow your own food or hunt and kill game to survive? We are so comfortably entrenched in civilization that we rarely realize how vulnerable we would be without it. The sudden reversal of civilization and rise of chaos and disorder is a common theme in science fiction stories. It's as if we've built a combination of a glass house and an ivory tower. Our glass tower, if you will. Shattering like an ice sculpture under a sharp blow.

Radial Tires

2010-11-27T12:24:00.003-06:00

I had a slow leak in the driver's side rear tire on my car. I've had a new car for a little over a year, after having my last car for almost 15 years. I was not yet used to all the new technology since my last car was built, and since I waited so long between cars, it was as if I had skipped forward, like some kind of time traveller experiencing a mild case of future shock. There was a little orange warning light coming on intermittently on the dash, a circle with a smooshed flat bottom and an exclamation point in the middle. I had to look it up in the manual to learn that it was a low tire pressure warning light. I didn't know such a thing was possible. How do you put a sensor inside a rotating tire? How does it not get broken from the bumpy roads and all the spinning around and how does it send it's signal of collected data to the console? I still can't figure it out, but I trust that it is true, because I took the tire in and they found a screw or a nail embedded in the tire, patched it up and the light has gone away.

I was thinking about the fact that tire technology has certainly leapt forward in the last several years. I remember when you used to get real flat tires, where you would suddenly be struggling to keep control of the car and the tire was flopping around uselessly in the wheel well. Often, but the time you got pulled over to the side of the road, the tire was shredded to pieces. Now, you just get slow leaks. You often notice the tire is getting low by looking at it when you walk up to the car before you ever feel any difference in the handling of the car. I was thinking that we have radial tires, but I'm not sure why they are called that.

I found out that the radial tire was invented in 1946, but was not put into widespread use in cars until the 1960s. Before that there had been a time when tires were solid rubber, and there was a time when there was an inflatable inner tube in the tire. I knew that the pneumatic (air-filled) tire provided a great deal of shock absorbing. Even though the tire feels very hard and tough when you push on it when it's fully inflated, I have seen stop action photographs of a tire going over a curb or pothole and squeezing down almost to the point of touching the rim at the point of impact. I couldn't figure out what we called tires before they were radial tires, but found that there was a type of tire called a bias ply that was similar in construction to the radial, only didn't last as long or get as good gas mileage ratings. When I was little, I remember tire advertisements prominently mentioning that their tires were radial tires, expecting you to understand that you had the best tire money could buy. I remember feeling that the radial tire was a new thing, and an improvement over what we used before. Then I promptly forgot all about tires.

Technology is like that. You're busy with your life and not paying any attention, and then later you realize that some things changed, some new ideas were implemented, and you didn't even notice it happening. You don't notice it at the time, but over the years the changes pile up.

Dan Carlin's had an interesting idea in his recent Common Sense podcast of making great ideas happen by teaming up creative dreamers with no business sense with business savvy people without any spark of innovative ideas, or maybe even little understanding of science and engineering in general. His premise was that there would be a lot more innovation if nerds could dream and be creative, and money men would selflessly them realize their potential. It's a great idea in theory. I've always been a big fan of corporate and government sponsored R&D, because in my mind, there are almost limitless possibilities of new technologies waiting to be developed.

The problem that we face as a nation is that many of investors with large amounts of money are risk averse when it comes to technology. They also often show little understanding of how the technology could be used or its value to society. As with most investor and finance driven people they are rarely patient enough to spend the time necessary to develop a technology to maturity. That said, we as Americans do some of the best work in developing technology in the world. I just think we could do better. It's best to stay in front of this trend, like a surfer stays in front of a wave and it carries him along. If you don't, you get swamped.

VFD

2010-11-27T12:20:00.005-06:00

I sell equipment, and often the equipment has a motor that needs a speed controller. We always refer to these speed controllers, whose technical name is a Varible Frequency Drive as a VFD. I was driving around the other day, frustrated with the performance of someone in a minivan, and I realized he was a Varible Frequency Driver.

I know it's cliche, I think of myself as this excellent driver and a lot of the other guys out there are morons. There are some very specific behaviors that do drive me nuts. Probably at the top of the list is drivers that speed up and slow down. Of course, they can't get you to do this too if you are on a 4 lane road, you just pass them. Inevitably, you get on a highway and someone is going at or below the speed limit in the left lane. I pass these people on the right. It's not illegal, and usually not at all risky, and it solves the problem rather than creating a new one. I've never understood the people that have an open right lane and get on someone's rear bumper, possibly honking their horn or flashing their brights. Sure, that guy should know better than to dawdle in the left lane, but I've got a news flash for you, Mr. Road Rage: You Can't Educate The World. Especially with confrontation and intimidation tactics. Do you really think that person is thinking, "Oh my, that person behind me seems most upset. I wonder why? Oh, I seem to be travelling too slowly in the passing lane. I will rectify that immediately and must remember not to do that again in the future. Lesson learned!" No, that's not what he's thinking. He's either not thinking because he's distracted, the closest thought being, "I like pie", or he's looking at you and thinking, "What an Asshole!" And he's right, by the way. Get over into the right lane and get around him. That way, if he's a problem, he's someone else's problem in your rear view mirror. Do you have a pregnant woman in labor in your car? Then you have no justification for being in that big of a hurry.

What really pisses me off when I'm in a hurry (no pregnant lady, just want to get where I'm going with no real justification for rushing - just a lifestyle choice) is what I call the rolling blockade. This is when two morons who must have just watched Top Gun or seen the Thunderbirds at an airshow, practice being some random SUV's wing man. That would be cool if they did a barrel roll and opened up on some bogeys, but usually this is accompanied by a matching of speed and an accumulation of admirers growing in their rear view mirrors. I think that this is something akin to not having or wanting to use cruise control and relying mindlessly on some random stranger to regulate your speed. This is dangerous if you overlap the car slightly and match their speed for a long time because YOU ARE IN THEIR BLIND SPOT. If they decide to change lanes rapidly (admittedly, a low probability, as these clowns rarely do anything quickly), or more likely, if a squirrel dashes out in front of them and they have to swerve to avoid little Sammy, you are in the danger zone. This is not the Tom Cruise Top Gun theme music by Kenny Loggins (why anyone thought Kenny knows anything about danger - other than fashion mistakes - is beyond me. This is the Danger Zone where you and your driving partner really get to get acquainted while you wait for the ambulance to arrive.

The biggest complaint I have about drivers is that they are much more inattentive than they used to be. We have all these safety features in cars from safety glass in the windows and seat belts in the old days to air bags and crumple zones in the newer cars. So it's getting harder to get injured in a car wreck. We've also made lanes wider, paved rumble strips into shoulders, and widened out medians and roadsides for less things to impact if you go off the road. I think some of the things that make us more safe could also lull us into a false sense of security and lower our watchfulness and caution. However, that is not what I think the main culprit is, it's cell phones. Specifically, the most dangerous thing you can do is texting while driving. It's impossible to pay attention to the road when you're staring at a little screen and hunting and pecking buttons. They say that anything that distracts or divides are attention makes us a worse driver. You could include iPods, car stereos, or even passengers as distractions, which means each of those factors makes you that much more dangerous behind the wheel. We don't even have to get into reading the newspaper or putting on makeup while you drive, the extreme versions of distraction. I've been running and walking along the country road I live on for years now, and I can testify that 10 years ago and back further in time, no one ever came close to hitting me. Now, they paved the shoulders (when they were gravel, I think people respected lane markings more) and people often point their cars right at me and don't figure it out until they are only a few seconds from hitting me. I've stepped off into the grass a few times, but more often, if I see the trend from a long way off, I step out into the road. This really snaps people to attention and they sometimes even overcorrect into the other lane. I am always safely back on the far side of the shoulder by the time they get closer, but it seems to make the point.

The science shows I listen to have been talking about robotic cars lately. The technology is slowly working its way to hands free driving. Right now we have automatic lane tending, collision avoidance warnings, and adaptive cruise control, and it can't be that hard to mate up the current GPSs that map out an exact route with some kind of navigation system. The technology will slowly increase to the point where you can get in a car and sit back and read the paper and not even look at the traffic. When I used to imagine computer controlled or autopiloted cars, for some reason it seemed like something that you would transition from fully manual to fully automatic in one big leap. Now I see that the transition will be gradual, in stages. I remember when cruise control came out. Some of the early versions would let the speed fluctuation quite a bit. Now they do a fairly good job of keeping you at constant speed. When it was first invented, it was an expensive extra and rare. Now it seems weird if a car does not have it.

I think things that make driving more automatic and less human-controlled will be sold to the public as way to make a drive safer and more leisurely. People used to balk at the idea of being in a car and not driving it, objecting to the loss of control and to the lack of fun. I think as these things get nearer to reality, people get enthusiastic about them and demand skyrockets if the innovations are seen as cool. Another benefit to automated driving is the thought that this may make clogged city drives less congested. Studies of traffic jams have concluded that they are started by small numbers of individuals and aggravated by the way most drivers react to the problem. If cars were automated and could communicate through a transportation network, they could coordinate their speeds and following distances in order to keep traffic moving smoothly. At best they could prevent accidents, which is the main thing that will snarl a commute into a standstill.

Overall, manual control will never go away completely, and I would have to say that I have evolved to the point where I am looking forward to it. I would love to nap during a long trip or read the paper during a busy commute. As driving is currently off limits to the very young and the aged and infirm, computer controlled cars will open up travel possibilities for people that are currently locked out of the driving arena.

NPR Shutdown

2010-11-21T14:59:00.003-06:00

In the news in the last few weeks has been the non-story about Juan Williams being fired from NPR for saying on Fox News that he can't help but be afraid of Muslims when he sees them in their headgear on an airplane.

I wondered how he would have felt if someone said that every time they see a black man in public, they clutch their purse a little tighter or keep an eye on them because they figure they are going to rob them.

Sure, there are Muslim terrorists, and sure there are black criminals, but we generally shouldn't suspect an entire group based on the actions of a few. When we do, we are sure to experience misunderstandings.

The incident has Fox News viewers crowing in mock indignation at the unjust and biased, overly politically correct NPR operating with a heavy hand. My first thought was that if Juan Williams wants to go on Fox News and stir up fear or hatred of Muslims, he's perfect for Fox News and he should go over there permanently. Make no mistake, stating that you are afraid of Muslims has the effect of making it all the more OK for others to express this way of thinking. Being part of a team with an agenda that attacks all things Muslim is no different that campaigning against them, trying to encourage fear and mistrust of all Muslims.

After the Republican victory at the polls, they tried to pass a bill to cut off funding for NPR. This was in direct response to Juan William's firing. I believe that the firing was not done well. You don't always immediately fire someone just for speaking their mind. Helen Thomas was made to retire abruptly when she made anti-Semitic remarks. There are times when an organization has to consider what an individual is saying and if those ideas contradict the official policy of the company, they have to decide what to do. Sometimes, a bargain is struck where the person is allowed to stay if they retract the statement or apologize for saying it. Given Fox News' belligerent stance toward anything they deem "liberal media", Juan Williams' act of going on Fox News and making anti-Muslim statements was a direct attack on NPR's reputation. I can see them deciding that someone with a stated prejudice against an entire religion might be someone to consider limiting access to your airwaves. NPR didn't try to tell him he couldn't express himself, they just said he needed to do it apart from NPR.

Of course, Fox News snatched him right up and put him to work. This proves in my mind that he didn't have any journalistic integrity in the first place. I wonder if he'll have much of a problem getting the talking points memo every morning and figuring out how to work his corporate overlord's propaganda into whatever segment or segments he delivers that day. Talk about the opposite of being able to say what you believe, Fox News reminds me of Communist Party members back in the old Soviet days. You have to tote that party line.

The Republican response to shut down NPR seems just like too much totalitarian mind control from the very people screaming that big government is to be feared. What about big brother? They don't like being told what to say and yet that's exactly what they want to do with NPR. They feel the intense need to suppress any opinion that is not their own. What's next? burning books?

What makes me sad about this incident is that NPR is the only objective news source left. The big networks have long since sold out to corporate interests and dumbed us down to watch the equivalent of a reality show or America's Funniest Home Videos. The other networks have adopted formats similar to Fox News in order to try to compete with their ratings. They have less people doing actual investigative reporting and foreign correspondence than they need to do an adequate job. They have spent 8 years under George W. Bush being cowed into submission under the false accusation that questioning the government is equal to treason. What if our government was out of control and corrupt? How would we even know it? It's not like the news media are out there uncovering real scandals and digging up inside stories on the great struggles of the day.

The other thing that I would truly miss if NPR were taken off the air is that they are the only program that takes time to go into depth on most subjects. They try to have reporters and correspondents everywhere, so you often get a first hand view of most major national and international events. NPR correspondents and announcers don't scream and yell at you. They treat you as if they assume you have some intelligence. They check their facts. They do not peddle fear.

Juan Williams was fired because he went onto Fox News and started acting like someone from Fox News. FEAR THE MUSLIMS! I DO! Is that news? How can we solve any problem by dividing up America and taking sides? This is the tactic of Fox News taken from their political affiliation with the Republican Party. The tactic of changing the subject or throwing out divisive issues to distract the public has been going on for a long time. Most recently, it's been the mosque at ground zero and NPR's liberal bias, but it has also been Immigration, Gay Marriage, Gays in the Military, and an endless stream of unimportant distractions.

When you compare and contrast Fox News and NPR, it is amazing. It's scary how often Fox News can't even get their facts right, as evidenced by the recent criticism of the cost of Obama's trip overseas. They overestimated the trip's cost by a factor of 100 and then harped it on every program that day. An organization as big as Fox News with as many people as they have hired can't even check a fact as easily verifiable as the cost of a Presidential trip? That's bad enough, but what is really irritating is that the average Fox News viewer can't quickly distinguish that it doesn't even pass the simplest sniff test for veracity?

If you listen to the Conservatives since they have been in the minority in Washington for the last two years, you will hear them shouting about how Big Government is bad. But give them half a chance and they would love to use the heavy hand of Big Government to close NPR and silence the voices of reason that contradict their increasingly imaginative take on reality.

Doubting Existence

2010-11-11T10:57:00.004-06:00

Watching the long lingering fall colors this year was particularly rewarding. November stretched on without a hard freeze and the leaves hung onto the trees much longer than they normally did. Trees like the Bradford Pear developed deep purple colors that I had never seen before, and that's just one example. I learned a long time ago that many of the colors of fall are there in the tree all the time, but are masked by the green colors produced in the summer. So Fall just unmasks what was always there.

This made me think of the many things in life that are masked or drowned out, and therefore always with us, but invisible. It's as if you could turn down the ever present background noise and the other sounds would suddenly be audible. It's as if reality is hidden from us on a daily basis.

For some reason, this thought brought to mind the privacy of people. At the time I thought of this, I was driving home from work, in a fine mood, enjoying the fall colors and feeling philosophical. I had just seen some pictures of a coworker's children that she used for a screen saver. Her computer acts as a printer server in the office, so it is often left on for long periods when no one is there to watch the pictures. It reminded me of the old question, "If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make any sound?" If no one is looking at the pictures, do they remain unappreciated? It's as if they are crying out their expression to nothing. "I'm here!" Silence. Does the space somehow gain something by the people being shown there? Sometimes when I am alone in the office and see the pictures, I feel like I am somehow violating their privacy.

This is kind of what's happening to personal privacy as we use social media more and more. These people all around us have personal lives and private thoughts that are not visible to people that work next to them for years. Some employers proudly profess to looking people up on Facebook when they consider hiring them. Forget crafting a carefully worded resume, your spring break in college when you were involved in the taking jello shots off of a bare belly will limit your future chances for employment, regardless of how qualified you are. We shove our personal lives online in other people's faces. We trust that most people will never read what is written or look at the photos that are posted, and mostly, we are right. People are busy, and mostly self-centered, but usually will very short and poorly focused attention spans.

I've often felt quite safe writing whatever I thought or felt in this blog and the other blogs that I maintain, because for the most part, no one is listening. The one person that could possibly see some of the blog entries and care doesn't use a computer or understand exactly what blogs are. It's strange, I've felt safe in anonymity and obscurity from posting things online that are accessible to anyone that cares to read them. Yet, many of the things I post here I would not say to relatives or business associates, because it would start an unnecessary fight. I admit that part of the thrill of expressing myself in a blog is that this is MY space and I get to say whatever I want and no one can interrupt me or disagree with me (although people could beg to differ in the comments, but since no one reads it, no one comments, as you can see by the history of comments in the blog). It's as if I am invisible in plain sight.

Getting back to the theme of things that are always there, yet hidden, I've been hearing a lot of genetic studies lately that focus on genetics. For a long time, science toyed with inheritance, then it was genes and DNA, and now we look more and more to how genes function. The study of Epigenetics has been focusing lately on what environmental conditions cause the expression of genes. Some are focusing on how your genes are expressing and if this can be controlled to increase your lifespan and health. This is the modern hard core science version of New Age Medicine, where they were always trying to do things to improve your health (which always seemed so absurd to me). However, the goals are alike, and some of the conditions that cause the expression of certain genes lead me to believe that it is just like the practices of some of the New Age healers and practitioners. Perhaps it's something which was always there and unproven, hidden in plain sight. Now science might be shining its light on what used to seem like fairy tails and hocus-pocus.

Other forms of science besides genetics have the possibility to uncover beneficial results from old rituals and practices. One particular art that this brings to mind is Tai Chi. The Chinese have done this for health for hundreds of years, but it is unquantifiable. You believe in Tai Chi like you believe in a religion, you have faith without proof. I have often thought that this exercise serves to provide pumping action for the lymphatic system. The lymph vessels do not have a heart, like the blood system, so it does not actively move it's lymphatic fluids around. We know that this system is important in the body's response to infection and injury, but I'm not sure anyone has studied it much. There are certainly no regular practices for patients that are for exercising the lymphatic system. This seems odd, since this system clears away toxins and sends out an immune response throughout the body, yet the only thing we have to help it is a centuries old Chinese folk remedy. Perhaps the healing benefits of Tai Chi were there all along, only waiting to be discovered by science.

I have one irrational belief that has not been proven by science. I have always felt that ESP might have something behind it. However, like clairvoyance and speaking to the dead, the practice has often had its shady practitioners. Claiming to be telepathic is not proof that you actually are telepathic. I can think of dozens of ways that stage magicians could fool an audience into thinking they could read minds. Yet, it stands to reason that the electrical impulses that make up thought are somehow being transmitted in some form of energy out from the brain. And if you were going to fashion a receiver for these signals, what better device to use than another brain? It's just a matter of cranking up the intensity of the signal and learning to interpret what you are "hearing". I've heard speculation that people are born somewhat telepathic, and learning to speak makes the telepathy atrophy and go away. I remember an argument that said basically that language would certainly confound telepathy because most of what we say is not what we really think. We learn to lie convincingly from an early age. I don't mean that we are all deceitful, I mean that we often suppress irritation, swallow complaints, and say what we think people want us to say, not what we really think. If you could read the people's minds around you, you would probably be depressed and amazed at how different it is from what they are saying.

In the future where personal privacy is completely non-existent, it might be akin to hearing people's thoughts, regardless of how unflattering or unkind.

The Politics of Party

2010-11-10T09:41:00.005-06:00

I listen to a podcast called My History Can Beat Up Your Politics by Bruce Carlson. He had a recent episode titled Cameral Midterm Thoughts. In that episode, he contended that there was no discernible pattern in each party's control of Congress.

While I agree that the multitude of variables make any pattern hard to parse, there is one common ingredient in elections. Partisans believe that their party must win at all costs and by the largest margin possible, and anything they do that is unethical is acceptable, while anything the other side does that is unethical is reprehensible.

If you are familiar with Nebraska Cornhusker football fans, you will know that they are not satisfied until there is a huge rout and their team wins by a large margin. In politics, it usually requires only a bare majority, a won election that puts their forces in control, before a voter feels that things are going in the right direction. While the recent resurgence of the fillibuster is contrary to that sentiment and all it takes is 1/3 of the senate to spoil spoil the work of the majority, we still behave as if a party is in power when it gets a majority. Most individual voters will stop their efforts to influence an election once their party is in power.

When your party is out of power, you are more likely to be alert, aware, and unhappy about the direction of the government. So people of that persuasion get stirred up and vote in larger numbers.

I think this ties into a general fear of what your own party or government in general will do with too much power. So in some ways, we as a society use voting as a moderating influence on our government. I personally am not pleased with the results, but I think it is following a natural system with a dampening effect to keep the system balanced rather than out of whack. The question from this standpoint about the 40 years of Democratic control of the House is whether this resulted in any particular shift to Democratic policies and actions of the Government as a whole. If one segment of the system trends toward one ideology or the other, it doesn't matter if the other parts of the system are there to balance or nullify that effect.

This also keeps our system fickle and unfocused, making it nearly impossible to tackle long term problems until they become problematic or a crisis arises. This is the most damaging aspect of our system in particular and a democracy in general. True leadership and guidance of a society into a better future sometimes involves making decisions that amount to sacrifices or unpopular situation in the short run, but have a major benefit in the long run, which brings up the whole separate issue of individual rights versus collective benefits for the society at large.

One thing for certain, party politics is not about doing what is right and best for the country, it's about doing what is right and best for the party. If that sounds a little chilling because it is reminiscent of soviet era descriptions of government, it should be. These people are supposed to swear an oath to the constitution, which means the country, and not their party or their supporters or contributors. That's putting the interest of your side over the interests of the whole, and it's not sustainable in the long run.

Expert Market Forces

2010-11-07T21:39:00.004-06:00

When I think about the problems facing our country and our planet today, I wonder how we are going to solve them. One thing that makes me less sure of our ability to react is the corrupting influence of capitalism on common sense.

America is in love with capitalism. You often hear people talk about letting market forces sort out how things should be. However, I believe that market forces often lead us down the wrong path. While we have never had a society controlled strictly by market forces, there is a widespread belief that we have, and many people act as if this would be the ideal situation. There have always been tariffs, taxes, incentives, shelters, and other government programs that have tainted the purity of the market, and government has often hinged on which levers to pull and which buttons to push to shape and direct markets.

There are many things that market forces cannot do. From public infrastructure like roads and bridges to public institutions like libraries, there are no market forces that drive the investment by government in making a better society. Yet it would be hard to argue that American businesses would be anywhere near as successful if it were not for the vast transportation and communications networks that have served it over time and that were often built with pubic money. Can you imagine using market forces to defend our nation? There were societies in the past that hired mercenaries whenever they were threatened, but did not keep a professional or standing army around during times of peace when they did not feel threatened. Those states are gone now, wiped out by states or empires that understand the need for armed forces funded at the expense of the central government (which in turn was supported by taxes or plunder of the states they overran).

Some things are not driven by market forces. Things like military intelligence and scientific research into subjects like climate change will never be funded by private corporations. If you argue that only the market forces are necessary to direct our efforts and drive our country into the future, my question is what happens when profits for a few conflict with the well-being of the majority or the long term survival of the planet.

In a recent Common Sense podcast by Dan Carlin, he talked about the way that we do not guarantee a degree of expertise by electing officials. Often, the people that get elected are serving market forces at the expense of the greater good of the public and without a thought towards a long term sustainable course for the country and the world.

One disturbing trend in our government is the tendency to treat corporations as if they are individuals and extend rights to them to protect them over the individual rights of private citizens. Since when does an enormous corporation need protection from individuals? The most galling of these rights is the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on politicians in the form of campaign contributions. These contributions were deemed a form of speech and the corporations were extended the right to free speech that an individual has, and voila! unlimited campaign contributions from corporations. How is this good for society? It is not. This is simply a matter of market forces, in this case the need of corporations to influence government in a way to make it easier to make profits free from interference by government. Market forces may have won this round, but surely this is not good for the direction of the country. If we are to ever get control of our elections elections again, we will have to reverse the control of elections by corporate money.

Our democracy has been co-opted by market forces.

Secrecy Corruption Partisanship

2010-10-26T00:24:00.003-05:00

I was listening to Dan Carlin's July 19th Common Sense podcast when he said something I've often thought about. The podcast was entitled The Inflexible Mind, and he talked about how some people are incapable of changing what they believe in. These are people that will not concede any points to someone that does not already agree with them. New facts or contradictory information is not even allowed into their minds. They have staked out an ideology and cannot be budged from it in the face of a reality that changes. I have often thought that this mental rigidity is similar to football fan mentality. Often when people watch their favorite team, every call by the referee is an affront to their team. When their own team members commit some blatant personal foul, they are silent, and seemed to not even notice.

The problem we have now in our political leadership is an insidious form of corruption that stems from the influence inherent in campaign contribution money in politics. Politicians care only about how to win the next election and will do anything to help their corporate interests that contribute to their campaigns. These same corporate interests are usually interested only in the next quarter's profits and are unable to look at their company should be run in the long term. Often, decisions are made that make this quarter or this year look good so corporate executives can get their bonus, but the decisions prove to be limiting or harmful to the company's long term interests. The question is how to get politicians and the people that elect them to look at what is best for the long term.

Often, we in the public that are electing these government officials are not even aware of everything that they are doing. It's easier to govern if you're not being second guessed by the public, and since you can decide what's public and what's classified, you can just classify anything that is potentially embarrassing or controversial. Secrecy is often used as cover for bad decisions. We are just now unclassifying some of the hidden events that got us into the Viet Nam War. The secrets coming out now are instructive, but they are too late to do us any good. We could have avoided the war in the first place, or gotten out of it sooner if we had only know the truth about what was going on. How can we, the voting public, make decisions on who to elect and what to do about our elected officials' actions unless we know what is really happening?

Unfortunately, it's not always as simple as that. In the run up to the Iraq War in 2003 there were clear indications that the war was not necessary, yet a large portion of the public was all for it, nonetheless. We knew there were no weapons in the country since the weapons inspectors had been all over the country for almost 10years. People that supported George W. Bush could not believe anything that contradicted their original premise that this was a good man that they had to support and that anyone that did not support the President hated the country. This colored everything the saw and knew from that point on. I remember going to a customer's office and hearing from him that he heard on Fox News that we had found an entire city full of weapons of mass destruction. I thought at the time, "that can't be right" and by the time I got home to look at the news myself, realized that it wasn't even being reported anymore, much less refuted.

How do you bring self-deluded people back to reality? The sad fact is that you can't change a person's minds when they are firmly entrenched in their beliefs. They are inflexible. That would be fine, I would be willing to leave it be and forget about it if it was some crazy person in the corner mumbling to themselves, but these deluded masses are not inert and non-influential isolated incidences. These masses of willfully ignorant people vote. They vote in political elections and they vote with their pocketbooks and they frequent the institutions that perpetuate their ignorance. It's become a symbiotic relationship. "Delude us!" they almost shout to their favorite media outlets, "confirm what we already think and tell us how good and patriotic we are for believing!" Fox News could not exist if the people that watch it did not demand that it behave exactly as it has.

I listened to another demoralizing podcast featuring a climatologist describing how they go about doing climate studies today. They now have to spend time studying sociology and psychology to understand why people deny the truth about what's going on and what can be done to get through to them. The scientist was demoralized because they were finding that people with extreme beliefs are incapable of changing or learning or understanding. Once an idea is rooted in a person's mind, it is almost impossible to dislodge it with facts.

And yet, it the case of Obama approval ratings within his own base, you do have a group of people who changed their minds and were disillusioned. This might have something to do with campaign promises raising expectations and the difference between campaigning Obama versus ruling Obama. I think the question many who voted for him are asking is why is he not changing things once he got into office? He was supposed to stop the wars, shut down Guantanamo, stop illegal wiretapping and roll back the loss of civil liberties, reverse don't ask don't tell, and make government more transparent. An ardent Obama supporter once pointed out to me that once you got into office, you would have access to more secret and classified information and you would be forced to decide to do many of the things the same way your predecessor had. My response to that is to ask what chance is there for us to ever elect new people and actually get change? If anyone we elect will disappear behind a veil of secrecy and make the same harmful short-termed and wrongful decisions that the last person made, then this is not a democracy and we do not have control of our country.

I believe we should strip the barriers of secrecy away from our government and our corporations and see and understand exactly how things actually work. At least then we would learn to deal with truth and facts and be able to actually think about how to fix the problems we are dealing with and learn to chart a course for the long term. It's our only hope, because the way we are doing it now is not working.

Foreclosure Crisis

2010-10-26T00:19:00.002-05:00

One of the common phrases of the day is "the housing bubble". Perhaps if this is read in just a few years, some of this will have faded from the common memory, so for our future readers, here is a short summary.

A bubble is, obviously, anything that increases in value at an unsustainable rate, and then experiences a reduction in value, which feels like a collapse. The image of the bubble could be considered somewhat of a bad metaphor, because when a bubble collapses, it ceases to exist. During many collapses like this, the values eventually recover, but it tends to financially destroy some people in the process.

We had the so-called "dot com bubble" in the late 90s when several people were making new internet based businesses whose value was wildly overestimated and eventually collapsed. In that case, these new entities, internet based businesses were in some cases never worth anything. They were not what they now call fully monetizable. Sure, there were some great ideas and many of them were fun to use, but they were free to the users and didn't generate any revenue, while the cost of staffing them and having servers to support them could quickly outstrip their operating revenues. The search engine Google is a prime example of a company that dodged this dot com collapse and learned to become a huge money-maker.

The real estate market became a refuge for money when the stock market had a severe reversal. You had to have somewhere to put your money that was safe, and the conventional wisdom was that Real Estate Values Will Never Go Down. That prompted the financial markets geniuses to migrate over to the real estate domain and turn it into a crappy thing. Revisionist history is now reworking the story, saying that big bad government was forcing these traditional, conservative, careful banks and mortgage companies to loan money to risky, often minority people that normally would not qualify for these loans. I have yet to find any reasonable proof that this was the case. What I have heard about that makes sense to me was that the financial geniuses came up with risky investment portfolios called mortgage backed derivatives. Investors were hungry for these and the pressure to come up with them was enormous. Loan companies like Countrywide and Wells Fargo were busy looking for any warm body to sign mortgages which they could then bundle and sell off to investors. Regulatory agencies were asleep at the wheel, and no one was questioning why shortcuts in approving loans were so widespread, and certainly no one was telling any mortgage company that they could not make these risky loans (in my version of recent history, no one had to tell them or force them to make the loans, they had plenty of profit incentive to keep doing this, as well as no one stopping them). Finally, the market started waking up to the fact that there was a much higher than normal default rate on the loans, and there were less and less buyers standing in line willing to pay whatever crazy "market rate" (meaning huge increase in home value from just a couple of years before - vastly outpacing the rate of inflation) was asked for.

Oops. We had stopped treating homes as investments that you primarily bought to live in, and started treating them as vehicles for fast profits. These investments only paid off when they changed hands, so you had to buy and sell constantly. If (when) the market hit a point of overvaluation where no one wanted to pay the ridiculous price you were asking, suddenly your sure thing investment is a loss.

You could have seen it coming and many people did. I remember watching the house next door turn into a house flipper's plaything. It went from $250,000 in the mid 90's to $500,000 and hard to sell in 2003, to $1.2 million and impossible to sell in 2008. Not only did this house next door lose value because of the market reversal, it lost money because no one was living in it and taking care of it. The basement flooded twice, and flippers infatuated with shows like This Old House and other home makeover themes kept tearing it apart and rebuilding it according to their latest fad or dream. This diluted the turnover profit in any case, but really went haywire when they sunk a lot of money into the house and then it dropped in value.

Meanwhile, some people were buying and reselling homes to themselves fraudulently. These people have not been caught or prosecuted in very large numbers yet, but he scheme was to resell the house to themselves at successively larger numbers, pocketing the profit each time, and eventually defaulting on the loan, sticking the bank with the house, which was not worth anything near the value of the loan out on the house. This is a complex web of deception, but simple at its root. It relied on people willing to dummy up home value assessments and mortgage companies willing to sell to anybody and everybody. It was like the accelerator was stuck on the market and the driver, rather than being horrified at the prospect of being flung off the road, was sticking his head out the window and screaming in delight.

Now we have reached a phase, after a sufficient pause where there was not much new loan activity where banks started rushing to foreclose on homes. In many cases, the houses were purchased at inflated prices and the owners were walking away from the investments, but there were also many people that were recently unemployed homeowners that simply could not make the payments.

When the houses were being flipped and people were walking away with profits from the inflated sales, you could be sympathetic to the banks, as they would be the ones stuck with the overvalued houses. You realized that these homes would have to be sold at a greatly reduced price and the banks would have to take a loss on the house. If only someone would agree to live in the house and make payments, it wouldn't be so bad on the banks. Now they have those people already in place and they want to kick them out. It seems like the banks should be able to allow an unemployed person to continue to live in the house, and work the mortgage like a reverse mortgage for a few years. I'm not suggesting that the bank pay the people to live in the house, but they could charge them interest and maybe some slight penalties for skipping payments, and when they got their jobs back and resume payments, they owe a little bit more on the house. The bank, rather than losing the difference in what is owed on the house, gets to resume a healthy loan. However, the best home to repossess is one that was purchased back before the market raced upward. In other words, a house that is actually worth more than what is left on the loan. This is sort of like recouping losses on their crazy loans with the exact kind of people you want buying homes, namely people that will stay in the house, take care of it, and make their payments over the long haul. It is also possible that the banks have finally determined that the market has bottomed out and it has nowhere to go but up from here. That was the assumption that got us into this mess in the first place, wasn't it?

In an unrelated story, there was a serviceman in Iraq who had his home sold out from under him on the courthouse steps because his wife, depressed at her husband's long absence, was failing to pay the bills. The home was already paid for, and the bill that was overdue was the homeowner's association fees. Texas has some laws that were written favorably for Homeowner's Associations. This gives them the ability to foreclosure for overdue fees. The homeowner has to pay the lawyer's fees in this case, so it doesn't even cost homeowner's associations anything to go after the homes. Groups of lawyers figured out that this was a ripe opportunity to make some serious money. Not just the fees that they were charging to foreclose, but also in arranging buyers to snag the houses for a fraction of their true value, resell them quickly, and make some serious money off of them. The serviceman's house was returned to him when national attention was brought to bear on the case, but who knows how many other people have lost their homes in this legally sanctioned scam. Just another reason to avoid Texas. I've always felt that the deck is stacked in favor of the wealthy and powerful in that state.

The theme is the same here. Rich, intelligent people with no moral or ethics are looking at life as a game of winners and losers and trying to game the system for their own benefit. They do not care who gets hurt or whether it is fair, and in some cases, they don't care if it's legal. Anyone suggesting that the rules be strengthened or the enforcement be (applied!) increased is labelled as someone in love with big government and an enemy of the free market.

Democracy and capitalism in action? More like a system out of control and ready to run over anyone that gets in its way. Do I admire the people at the top of the heap that make more and more money? Not if it comes from the misery of the people at the bottom. We need to find a way to put the heart back in capitalism, or it will not survive.

College Degree Snobbery

2010-10-26T00:12:00.009-05:00

I was driving in western Kansas recently and saw a Ft. Hays State University front vanity license plate. Hays is about 5 hours west of us, so you don't see that often around the Kansas City area. I realized that my initial reaction was to wonder why anyone would display and brag about this, as I didn't know much or think much of the university. Of course, I was in their back yard, so of course they were proud of their university. My reaction was snobbish, I was surprised to find. I should be happy that this person wanted to go to a university and learn something and better themselves. Why the automatic dismissal because I went to a bigger university?

As an aside, I did some quick research just now and discovered that Ft. Hays State's enrollment is 11,200 - if you count the 6,000 online students from China. Really? That's amazing. How did so many Chinese find out about this relatively obscure
American University? Are there a lot of Chinese Professors at Ft. Hays State? What a strange fact to uncover. This leaves 5,200 graduate and undergraduate students at Ft. Hays State, so the online students outnumber the warm bodies in seats.

However, my university isn't really that much more prestigious in the great scheme of things, in the bigger national pecking order. It does have about 23,000 enrollment (I think that's bodies in seats, but it doesn't say). So it's bigger than Ft. Hays State. I'm not sure it's known as an engineering or technical giant, though. I know if you want to really impress people with your engineering degree, it should be from Berkley or MIT (graduateshot.com puts Stanford over Berkley and my alma mater is not ranked in the top 55). So just as you would not move to some big city and put a Ft. Hays State bumper sticker on your car, you would probably not put a Kansas State logo on your car, either.

The Ivy League and most big east coast schools' alumni display some well deserved superiority complexes. There is much evidence to back up their pride. The Ivy League produces many Presidents all of the current Supreme Court Justices and a great deal of the leaders in business and medicine. MIT is unequalled in engineering. There is little subjective evidence that these schools are not the best (except in sports - which proves my point, I think).

Do these universities admit only the best students, or do only the only the best strive to attend such good universities? I think it's a combination of both. Only an intense desire would drive you to attend such a place. If someone is the type to to aim for an Ivy League education, then to prepare for years, and then to go through the grueling application process, they start out already on a course to higher purpose and stronger ambition. The perception of a higher quality of degree from some schools is self fulfilling.

This is not to say that this kind of education is the only way to get to the top. There are countless examples of self made millionaires that don't even go to college. Sometimes success comes from hard work or common sense, not from what is learned at college. However, within the system, whether it be corporate or political, the source of the college degree is the key that opens doors and showers opportunities on people.

My college days were nothing special, I know now, with experience and the perspective of time. I partied, chased women, and did enough to get by many semesters. I did not understand what I was studying in the broader context, and frankly, I did not live up to my potential. I recently had a dream with an old house in it. The house was dilapidated and falling apart. This was a little like my fraternity experience at college. It was not squalid, but not luxurious either. My brother did live in a house that was literally falling apart when he was in college. I would have to say that sometimes having nothing can make you hungry for more. It can force you to try harder. Other times it just drives you down. I know I thought college was great at the time when I went, but looking back now, it just seems average now. Certainly nothing to look down my nose at a smaller university over.

Pleasure Effect

2010-10-26T00:05:00.004-05:00

A long time ago, I read a novel called Ringworld by Larry Niven. In it, I vaguely remember that there was this two headed creature that looked a lot like an ostrich. I don’t remember exactly who did what to whom, but there was a scene in the book where there was an attempt to influence the creature by beaming pleasure at it. Every time it looked at this person, they had the mental ability to induce pleasure directly into the creature’s brain, and the person turned this up whenever the creature did something associated with the person. Very quickly, the person had complete control of the creature because they controlled its pleasure center.

I remember at the time thinking, how is this different than an addictive drug? It sure seems like a perfect description of addiction. When it gets down to it, turning pleasure on or off in a person would be the ultimate control. Besides taking drugs, or the other less chemically induced ways we produce pleasure, we already do this in a huge variety of ways. What I’m describing is no different than the effect a pretty woman sometimes has on the men around her. She throws some positive attention around and men on the receiving end will stumble all over themselves in order to experience some of it. I used to fantasize about having this kind of power when I was young. I had heard about the concept of a love potion or a spell, and thought that would be great to have that kind of power.

Wouldn't this also be an excellent way to retrain a person, or help them learn. The obvious use of the power would be to simply seduce someone, but think about what else could be done with such a power over other people. Of course, this kind of thing is used in less direct and more subtle ways all the time. People are always seeking to persuade people or sway the crowd.

I flipped the concept on its head and was thinking, which is better? to use this power on someone or have it used on you? If someone cast a spell on you to make you happy or in love - why would this necessarily be bad? It's looked upon as scary because you lose control, but if you're truly happy, what does it matter what the source is? If you can overlook the subversion of your free will, the result is pretty good. You may or may not have reached the state of loving or craving the other person without the spell, but my point is, maybe you would have eventually reached that state anyway. I suppose the true limit you would put on this fictional power is something akin to what I had heard about hypnosis. I heard that you could not be made to do something under hypnosis that you would not have done anyway. The hypnosis just lowers your inhibitions and removes your embarrassment so that you will do the things that you were already capable of in front of a crowd without embarrassment. I suppose it is similar when it comes to succumbing to your desires.

The obvious place people usually take the fantasy of complete control is to see someone enslaved by this pleasure control. Such a strange concept. On one hand, you are enslaved, with all the negative connotations of that word. You are not in control of yourself, you do not call the shots, you have to do what someone else tells you to do. On the other hand, you’re happy, so what difference does it make?

In normal circumstances, the pleasure is dampened and self-limited if the negative consequences to succumbing to the lure are larger than the pleasure you get from it. Of course, this is the downside of drug abuse and the nearly impossible condition to protect people from. The DARE program, which is designed to keep young people away from drugs, along with all the other anti-drug programs (as well as abstinence programs, for that matter) always seemed so fake to me. They fail to tell you the truth about sex and drugs or alcohol. The truth is that if you try this, you might love it so much that it will soon be the only thing you want to do. You can lose control of your own free will through your love or irresistible appeal of your addiction. No doubt most people reading this are thinking about the possibly fictional story about the lab rats that were given a bar they could depress in their cage that would deliver cocaine to them. The story goes that the rats would sit there and press the bar continuously until they died. They would not eat or sleep or groom themselves, they just took cocaine until it killed them.

We as a species, in fact, all life probably to some degree, are prone to this. Knowing this, it is probably best to avoid the things in life that you know you will not be able to resist unless they help you. If you could find a way to become addicted to exercise or eating right or reading and learning, wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? I suppose it wouldn’t be too much to ask to open yourself to enjoy the pleasures of experiencing and getting to know someone. To have the attitude that each person is there to be appreciated so they can enrich your life would be an accomplishment that would surely lead straight to a mostly happy life.

I’ve often thought it would be great to be the person standing up in front of a classroom making the young minds in your charge feel pleasure in and find an addiction to learning things.

We’re subject to this pleasure effect, we might as well be aware of it and filter the effect to let in the positive addictions and resist the negative ones.

Negativity Cascade

2010-10-25T23:59:00.004-05:00

I had a complete idea, a full blown concept that came to me one night in that strange state between dreaming and waking. The seed of the thought was that a slight change sometimes makes a major effect. This is not always a domino effect, where a small initial change trips a continuous line of events, cumulating in a long series of results, although that is one example. I’m talking about how a small impetus results in an out of proportion effect.

I had recently had a few examples of cascades described to me. The first were studies that revealed historical major shifts in climate. Sometimes these shift would be towards an ice age, other times toward a warming trend. Scientists often could not tell which direction a massive shift would go toward due to a particular stimulus. For years, scientists tried to create climate models that simulated the temperature trends. Small assumptions or tiny changes would cause wildly fluctuating results. At first, they assumed these models were not correct. When the models got much better, they realized that climate changes can sometimes happen catastrophically. This was unexpected, as climatologists and early theorists had always assumed that the climate was mostly stable. They believed that when there were climate changes, they were like lumbering giants that took a long time to turn around or change direction.

There is a similar small impetus/large effect seen in the expression of genes. Sometimes a master gene can be switched on, and a whole series of processes are turned on at once. In genetics, this is often referred to as a cascade effect and is brought on by the action of some master gene. For example, there have been many reports recently about a gene called FOXP2 that is said to be a language master gene, able to start several other genetic processes when it is switched on.

This cause and effect phenomenon could also be visualized as being like an avalanche. While an avalanche is a catastrophic effect, it is a perfect example of a small originating event with a large result. Obviously, if the small action is intended and the big result is the goal, then the phenomenon is not catastrophic. The situation is not necessarily detrimental, unless deliberately unleashed on someone with that intent. Examples of this would be winning a sporting event by throwing your opponent off their game, or winning a battle by getting momentum over your opponent and overrunning them. Nathan Bedford Forrest called this “getting the skeer (scare) up” when used in battle, and he was a master of orchestrating devastating defeats over foes that outmanned and outgunned him. With equal measures of deception, bravado, and quick and decisive blows that were landed and continued while an opponent was off-balance, he was usually able to cause his enemies to collapse or flee a battle.

These examples are about a single cause and effect, or a concerted effort and the results. The cascade concept also applies to the balance of a system and what it produces. When a system tries to operate in a slight imbalance, it can deliver consistent poor results or quickly spiral out of control. When a system, process, or organization is tilted in one direction, it is very difficult to make it run in the other direction, or even straight. If you’ve ever had a car with the steering out of alignment, or driven on a freeway in a strong cross wind, you know what I’m talking about. You have to continually correct the steering in order to just go straight.

Originally, I was thinking about the imbalance being in a individual’s personal attitude. There are people out there that are negative, but only because of a slight tilt, a slight skew or leaning toward the darker side of things. Saturday Night Live makes fun of this type of person by creating an extreme version of it in the character of Debbie Downer. This character is the type of person that can suck the joy out of any and every situation. There are many average people that tilt this way slightly. I was recently scanning an article in a self-improvement magazine that was one of those advice pieces about how you should get all the negative people out of your life so they don’t drag you down. At the time, I thought about how heartless this is, as many people will go through occasional hard times, and when they do, the worst thing that can happen to them is that their shallow friends bail out on them during their time of need. I think a reasonable person that read the article would not start sorting their friends by this criteria, and weeding them out if they weren’t always perky all the time. A reasonable person would interpret it as saying that when you choose someone as a friend, do not pick those that are always down all the time. I’m sure other people's negative or positive tilt can impact your attitude, but I was thinking it is much better to be aware of these leanings and seek to be the kind of person that can re-adjust those around you to a more positive tilt. Whether raising people’s moods with humor or just listening to a friend when they are depressed, the goal should be to help your friends feel better without letting them bum you out, too. I wonder if this is naïve. Does it work to just listen to someone, and thus improve their mental balance?

I remember a very depressing time in my life when I was young and married, overseas in the Army. My (then) wife seemed determined to be in a foul mood all the time. One day, I realized what was going on and told myself that I was not going to let her drag me down into her depression. I went home determined not to react as I normally did, not to let her depression infect me. I had to do this by attempting to mostly ignore her. She noticed that something was different and that I was not reacting normally, matching her gloomy mood. By the end of the evening, this cumulated in her shaking me and screaming in my face, "I'm miserable and I'm taking you with me!" That may be one extreme of the situation, but the question is how to teach people to notice that no one wants to be around you, and realized it's because you bum them out.

I was listening to a podcast about an early psychologist that had a bad upbringing and a family history of what would probably be diagnosed as psychiatric problems. This person studied the human condition and came up with the idea that you can self-correct any mental defect by force of will and habit. It seems to me that he might be right. My wife said it was the definition of cognitive therapy. I was thinking efforts to balance yourself and become more positive would also come from practicing meditation. I’ve often wondered if meditation can really help you (in a provable and repeatable way – something that could be studied and measured scientifically). In one respect, achieving balance through meditation would be nothing more than leveling out one’s mental field, correcting an imbalance, and staving off any future cascade.

What about permanently gloomy people? Do they exist? People that would be called incurables? What about permanently happy people? I remembered the Friends episode where a dull party was going on and they called in someone they knew, but didn’t hang out with. He was called Happy Sam or something like that. The point of this story was that they were calling on this guy to tilt the perspective of the entire group, and he just happened to be really depressed, so it was the worst thing to add to the mix.

There is a saying, attributed to Louis Pasteur who made some of the most important breakthroughs on germ theory. He is credited with the quote, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” In other words, luck comes to those who are looking for it, recognize it when they see it, and seize the opportunity to exploit or benefit from it. This is why I was thinking about the cascade effect or the slight imbalance effect. It seems to me to be one of those things that awareness of can allow you to capitalize on.

Wall Street Crybabies

2010-10-25T23:52:00.006-05:00

I didn’t need to hear the This American Life story to get steamed about the subject of the bailout, but it did add fuel to the fire. This American Life is a public radio program out of Chicago Public Radio that does stories on a huge variety of subjects. My wife has pointed out that most of them are either dark or depressing, which is a concept I resisted for a while. Now, while I can’t really argue with her, I have concluded that my tolerance for dark subjects is much stronger than hers.

This particular episode that I listened to recently was about crybabies, people that whine about their lot in life, often without justification. It had a section on these Wall Street types that just got bailed out and had their jobs and industry saved, yet are vocally bitching about government interference. The reporter went to several bars near Wall Street and tried to find someone from an industry that got bailed out and was thankful. Far from being thankful for having their jobs and livelihoods protected and preserved, they were scornful of the government and convinced that it was interfering with their industry and actively harming them. These workers that had been saved by the bailout kept saying that government didn't help them, they kept their jobs through their own value and intelligence. They kept professing how the people on Wall Street were the most intelligent people in the country. I kept thinking, when I heard this, that the only form of intelligence they displayed was the ability to outsmart people by deceiving them It shows that, for the most part, the Wall Street bailout has benefited people that don't appreciate or acknowledge it. Financial firms have record profits this year, exorbitant bonuses, and a healthy financial environment (for a financial investment firm – not for the rest of the country) yet they can't do anything but bitch about government interference.

I had earlier heard about a scheme by a major firm (I believe it was Citibank) where they are now being investigated for fraud. In this scheme, they put together an investment package that was designed to fail. They deliberately selected things that they were sure were bad bets, investments that were certain to lose value. They put these investments into packages and pushed them on anyone that they could sucker into buying them. At the same time, they put down a huge investment on shorting these packages. That means they placed a bet that the investment would fail. They knew this bet would win, because they designed the investment specifically to fail. Somehow, they found individuals with either no morals or no intelligence to go out and push these faulty investments, and they sat back to make a fortune off the manufactured misfortune of their customers.

I got into an interesting conversation with a retired stockbroker about this situation. This is an individual that I had a great deal of respect for, that I trusted, who I thought was above reproach. His response to my query of what his opinion was about the story was that stocks have always been a buyer beware vehicle for your money. He had no sympathy about the people that bought the toxic assets, he felt they should have read the prospectus. He said that every investment has a description in the prospectus that is supposed to clearly state what the investment’s risks are. I found this to be an incredulous statement. I asked him if he believed that the prospectus had a line in it that said, “this is designed to fail”.

He equated these bad investments with an auto company that produces a car with brake problems, I countered that those companies did not deliberately make a car with a defect, and that they immediately had fixed the problem. I told him that engineered products had to work or the company that sells them could go out of business, but that these protections did not seem to apply to the financial district. He claimed that the people on Wall Street are the smartest people in the USA. My reaction is that they aren't smart, they are crafty. They certainly are trying to outsmart people rather than earn money for their stockholders.

The truth about earning money and multiplying it by investing it is that people generate money by transferring wealth. The best way to guarantee that the society as a whole is wealthy is that the money is being spent and invested in vehicles that actually make something or do something like provide some service. We have for a long time expected that simply by amassing a large amount of money that you will generate a healthy interest income. The question I have is why should income be guaranteed by wealth if the only thing you do with it is by stocks that you don’t demand be accountable.

Climate Controlled Environment

2010-10-25T23:30:00.006-05:00

Will humankind be controlled by the climate or will we control the climate?

Science Fiction aficionados have probably contemplated this question before. I noticed an old Star Trek episode that directly referenced a world with a planetary climate control, and I remember other episodes that showed the characters trying to correct various climatological and even geological problems of planets in peril. I've always wondered if this capability was far off for man. I remember a science magazine article that turned my perceptions of climate around when it discussed what it would take to transform Mars into a world where people could survive comfortably. They estimated that it would take 250 years of serious effort. That has always impressed me as a striking contrast to the time it takes planets to change their climate naturally, hundreds of millions of years, usually.

I just finished the book The Discovery of Global by Spencer Weart. In this work, Spencer Weart reviews the history of the scientists and their work for the last 150 years creating the science of Climatology and unravelling the mystery of what our Earth has in store for it.

I have never had much problem comprehending this subject before I read the book, I may not have had an in-depth knowledge of the background of the research, but the science behind what is happening and the conclusions that were drawn were never in any doubt in my mind. What I have trouble comprehending is how so many people, some intelligent and well-educated, can even begin to doubt that humans are impacting our environment. I grew up in the era of awareness and awakening to man-made pollution. I got to see a full cycle of some of the problems being identified and successfully coped with through laws and social awareness. People not much younger than me can probably not remember a time when garbage was piled up alongside most roads and highways. I do. I remember polluted streams and acid rain, and the discovery of the holes in the ozone layer. I remember when gasoline had lead in it and you saw lingering clouds of exhaust coming out of every car driving down the road. I also remember all the work that was done to correct these problems, from catalytic converters to the clean water and clean air act. I remember the bans of CFCs in aerosol cans, and the changeout of the old refrigerants to more environmentally friendly ones.

I also remember ice skating on ponds here in Kansas City when I was younger. I remember how each winter would freeze the ponds, lakes, and streams hard enough to walk on. I remember how that happened some time in December or January and lasted into March. I remember months with snow covering the ground, rather than occasional snow storms that usually melt before the next storm comes around. I don't remember ever seeing a 60 degree day in January when I was little, but I notice that most Januaries have a few of those days in the last few years.

I remember enough that Global Warming seems real and is believable on a simple, non-scientific basis. I realize that the world has had ice ages in the past, but I would not expect to notice a shift in my lifetime of a natural cycle. I understood that the ice ages lasted for tens of thousands of years at a time, and never expected that these events switched on and off quickly.

When scientists started pondering these issues, it was not necessarily with a question of how quick they changed, if they were currently changing, or if man was having an impact. Many of the early studies were simply trying to chronicle the past ages and understand what causes the shifts between temperate and icy world climates. It was thought for many years that the transition into or out of an ice age would be a matter of thousands of years. Some scientist proposed that this could change quickly and they were soundly criticized by the rest of the scientific community. Then more scientists began to see that rapid change was possible. The other debate that moved back and forth was whether we were headed into a cooling or warming trend. This debate had two sides, the naturally occurring cycles, and what the human changes were pushing the planet to. Up to the 1970s, you still had reputable scientists that believed that global cooling was in effect as a result of human pollution. I say reputable scientists because these people were not under the pay of big oil or any other polluting or energy producing company, but I suppose some of their colleagues would not call them reputable, when you look at the shellacking they took from the rest of the scientific community. The peer review process is only rarely contentious for long. Most issues resolve into a clear consensus within a very few years, and the announcement that man was causing global cooling was quickly dismissed. What was agreed was that the balance of whether there would be a shift in climate was more precarious and could change more rapidly than the scientists had believed for years. New information made them realize that things could change very quickly.

In the 50s we started understanding that man could effect weather. The nuclear tests were the first concrete example that man could have a large impact on nature, and it got people thinking. Then someone noticed that airplane contrails actually resolved into cloud systems. While some scientists were studying urban pollutants and trying to figure out what their effect was, other scientists were deliberately trying to have an effect on the weather by testing the theory of cloud seeding. Cloud seeding never proved to be a reliable way to produce rain, but it did teach the scientists that there would be legal and regulatory consequences to man made climate changes. There were lawsuits against people seeding clouds when the people downwind claimed that they were stealing rain that would have fallen on them. Those suits were not widespread. I imagine it was difficult to prove that it would have rained if there had not been cloud seeding. Meanwhile, the aerosol people were looking at the effect that pollution was having on climate. Some started with the idea that particulates in the air would block the sun from coming through and have a net cooling effect. Others argued that it would trap heat in and cause a warming effect. Studies were coming in that gave different answers for different gasses and aerosols. As you can imagine, this was very difficult to measure, and even more difficult to isolate the effect of a single component in an atmospheric stew of chemicals and particles.

People became concerned about the more visible forms of pollution and started working to reduce man made atmospheric contaminant. These efforts were largely successful, but targeted mostly the visible or more readily apparent problems. Methane and Carbon Dioxide remained invisible and unregulated. As a result, what the scientists were studying was changing. They eventually saw the carbon dioxide, and to a lesser extent, the methane as the two emissions having the biggest impact, and that impact was to make the climate warmer as they worked as greenhouse gasses and trapped the sun's energy in the atmosphere. This really only started becoming abundantly apparent in the 80s and 90s. This is why many people today still throw up objections to global warming by saying that a short time ago, scientists thought there was global cooling. It would be more fair to say that a short time ago, scientists did not have a good handle on the extent and speed of global warming.

Many suggestions to fixing the mess we are in have been proposed. On the extreme ends of the argument, some are saying we need to drill for more oil and that the Earth cannot be harmed while others are saying we need to abandon fossil fuels as soon as possible. The rational science based response is that we need to shift our energy consumption away from fossil fuels and into renewable fuels. The energy companies make huge profits from delivering fossil fuel based energy and use a portion of these profits to buy "scientists" to put out reports supporting their position that we should do nothing because there is no harm being done (does that not sound exactly like big tobacco?) and funding politicians that will try to block any move away from fossil fuels and any effort to regulate fossil fuel emissions. They have also found friends in the media and talk radio, raising fears that the only answer people concerned about the environment have is to destroy our economy and way of life. In reality, the decision is being made for us, we will quickly reach a time when we have no choice. When you consider the security that will come from producing our own energy, it is amazing to me that the conservatives and denialists are getting anywhere with their obstructionism. When you see the number of companies out there sinking money into research and development of alternative energy, not to mention the fact that retooling our power infrastructure for homegrown energy will put a lot of people to work and reap huge profits for the companies with foresight to get their solutions online and up and running first, it is amazing to me that anyone is fighting alternate energy or supporting the enormous power industries that aren't even trying to be part of the solution. It seems to me that the big energy companies are in the best position to benefit from the movement to local and sustainable homegrown renewable energy. They have the infrastructure and the financing to make these things happen, they clearly love controlling the energy markets and reaping huge profits from it. Why on earth are they not the first ones out the door to rush to jump into new energy production?

Getting back to climate changes, I have been daydreaming for years about humans taking control of the environment and making it do what they want it to do. One of my fondest dreams is to transform the Sahara into a lush landscape. Obviously, this would entail changing the way the weather generates and deposits rain in this region of the world, a project beyond the scope of people at this time. However, if this could be accomplished, it would be fantastic. This region of Africa was a lush forest not that long ago, and could be again. That much more green space on the planet would serve not only as a carbon sink and a generator of oxygen, but it would undoubtedly have a cooling effect on the globe. Not to mention that a growing population will need more space to live in and more arable land. This huge chunk of real estate is being wasted in the form it is in now. Yet, for every great idea, there is always a scary host of catastrophic unintended effects. Who knows what problems would crop us elsewhere if the Sahara Dessert were changed into the Sahara Rain Forest. Would the effect be self sustaining at some point? Anyone who has read Dune by Frank Herbert, which involved the dream of transforming a desert planet into a lush water Eden, has surely thought of this idea at some time.

One idea that came to my mind when I read the book was that perhaps we could change the way aerosols and particulates effect the sun by changing molecular alignment of molecules in air. Like sunscreen, which works by having tiny particles that act as sunshades or perhaps more like the way a venetian blind blocks the sun, we might be able to make Carbon Dioxide more transparent to sun trying to escape back into space or more opaque to the sun energy as it enters the atmosphere. Assuming that you could ionize, polarize, or maybe magnetize gasses in the atmosphere to align in such a way that they no longer perform randomly to pass or block heat, but act as we choose, this could be an important tool for man to actually control the climate. Need Cooling? you align gasses in the atmosphere to block and reflect heat and solar radiation. Need Heating? Align the gasses to allow heat through or to traps heat in and blanket the atmosphere. We would need a field mechanism on a large scale, a way to induce molecular alignment with remote fields. I'm envisioning some kind of spaced based emitters that would train on portions of the atmosphere and change the way they treat heat energy. Of course this is future technology, not even really conceived of at this time, but I tend to believe that with enough time and effort, man can achieve anything. I just want it to be something that helps us that we intended to do, not something that destroys it that we did not intend to do.

Bristlecone Crisis

2010-10-25T23:29:00.005-05:00

Some of the oldest living things on the Earth are Bristlecone pines. Many that are alive today were alive during the time of Christ. This is hard to imagine. There are some animals that live 150 years, but that's a long time for a tree. So there must be something unique and special about these trees, but above all, they should be preserved.

I recently heard the same story described in two totally different contexts. Apparently, the oldest tree on Earth was discovered when a researcher studying Bristlecone pines was using a drill to extract a little core sample on one. The drill broke off inside the tree. The drill was valuable, so he cut the tree down to extract it. Later, when they got the tree sample back to the laboratory, they counted the rings and found it to be about 4,900 years old. It was a record by about 300 years.

Now reports are coming out that the trees are being attacked by insect, and many populations of the trees are in jeopardy. The trees exist mainly in mountainous regions, and there are populations in California and Colorado. They tend to exist in little groves in high, dry rugged areas. The ones in California live longer, and are genetically different than the ones in Colorado, but they are essentially the same kind of tree.

200 years ago, there was an beetle introduced into the eastern United States from Europe. Since that time, it has been slowly sweeping west. That, in addition to a fungus called the pine blister rust, has reached Colorado and is starting to effect Bristlecones in the state.

I listened to this report in a Science podcast. They were discussing the fact that the Bristlecones are being studied by scientists to find out why they live so long. They noted that these trees survive mainly in harsher environments. Little water, winds, high altitude which results in more sun exposure. This rougher life, this harsher existence equals a longer life. This is similar to what you hear about in humans. Recent studies have revealed that strict caloric reductions result in longer life. That which doesn't kill you makes you strong?

Our science is almost to the point where we can decode genetics and determine how the Bristlecone is able to live so long. Those genes might be useful to enhance other species to help them survive. We are also almost to the point where we could put together a defense for the Bristlecones. I suppose that's optimistic. It's one thing to be able to do something, it's another thing entirely to have the resources to make it happen.

Stem Cell Hypocrisy

2010-10-25T22:51:00.012-05:00

I cannot be unbiased on stem cells.

I believe they hold tremendous promise to alleviate suffering, extend useful human life spans, give hope and productivity back to millions, and lower health care expenditures. The downside of stem cell technology is that I fear pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to produce a one-time cure when it is so much more profitable to develop drugs that treat the symptoms and leave the underlying chronic condition intact. My fears surround the as yet unknown horrors that people may one day develop with the technology. I believe that the thorny question of human cloning is really not much different from stem cell therapies, and holds the potential for abuse. I also believe that the potential to "upgrade" humans through stem cell technology will bring about many ethical and legal questions in the future.

For now, the days of seeing the impact of a fully matured technology, with well proven techniques lie somewhere in the future. Stem cell research has been equated with abortion, and therefore vilified and suppressed. We lost 8 years of potential progress, which would have been two or three generations of scientific development and advancement in the last 9 years.

The premise by opponents is that embryonic stem cell research kills a human being. The basis of this assertion begins with the belief that a fertilized egg is a human being. I don't happen to agree with this, as I define this as a potential human being. It cannot survive outside of a human host - its mother or surrogate mother. If you looked at embryonic stem cells under a microscope, at this stage, it would not even resemble a human. Countless millions of fertilized eggs occur naturally each month that never implant on a uterine wall. Nature, for whatever reason, just doesn't catch them and turn them into life. They are flushed away, often unknown to the women that would have been their mothers if fate had not worked out as it did. In nature, these occurances are not seen as abhorrent, they are a regular occurance. Who knows how common this is, but you don't see anyone forming action groups around preventing it. These "spontaneous abortions" are not a conscious decision, so the situation is not entirely equal, and not a serious comparison.

An excess of fertilized embryos occurs because when couples use in-vitro fertilization techniques when trying to conceive. Several fertilized eggs are made, some are used to attempt implantation, and the rest are frozen in case the first attempts fail. After a successful implantation is taken to term and produces a baby, the other embryos are not needed. These embryos are not destroyed immediately, but often kept frozen indefinitely. I'm not sure how many are kept in storage like this, but certainly, many of the excess embryos are eventually destroyed. I believe this is the main source of embryonic stem cells, although I had also heard that umbilical cord blood was rich in these stem cells. I assume this is not an often used source, as there would be no controversy to harvest them, but perhaps I am wrong and this source is being denied, too, in a misunderstanding of the situation.

In light of the recently awarded Nobel Prize for the development of the in-vitro fertilization technique, I find myself questioning the entire practice of assisted procreation. There are too many people in the world already, I cannot see why it is necessary to develop techniques to help us make more. Planetary overpopulation threatens people more than any other problem, as it is the root cause to so many other problems. We have no natural check on our population, and if we were a game species, there would be a movement to have a hunting season for us humans with the justification that something has to be done to "thin the herd". Yet instead, we develop an expensive and complicated procedure to produce children that is artificially and unnatural. Nature had created this infertility, perhaps there is a reason for that. Perhaps this is nature's way of "thinning the herd". Even if it is not, these people are genetically incapable of having children. What makes people that use in-vitro fertilation techniques think that their grandchildren will be conceived naturally? Does anyone think of that in their single-minded quest to procreate?

Where is the outrage over assisted procreation? This process creates the excess embryos which will not be brought to term. The irony of the procedure is that the parents are desperately seeking to create life, and in doing so, require that some of the life they create will be destroyed. In light of that fact, fertility treatments should be an outrage to anti-abortion people. If they are going to oppose stem cell research because it kills humans (which will be killed anyway - with no benefit to society), where is their outrage over the excess embryos that will be killed?

What I have a hard time understanding is why greater value is not placed on those already alive. Many of the people opposed to abortion and stem cell research because they see it as abortion are conservatives. In general, conservatives are more pro-war than others in society. They see no problem with sacrificing lives of full grown soldiers in war. They often see no problem with cutting off benefits to adults that they deem as deadbeat or unproductive. They have no problem complaining that unfortunate living adults (and to be fair, children, too) should not be supported by the state with food, shelter, or medical care. They are often callous about the suffering of grown people, perceiving that the got themselves into this mess. Yet an unborn embryo requires a massive effort to preserve. I see this as inconsistent. Either life is precious, and all life is precious, or life is cheap and no life is precious. I realize that the way people think is that the embryos are defenseless and need protectors and the adults could simply straighten their lives out of their own free will and take care of themselves.

I have mixed feelings about in-vitro fertilation techniques. It is an awesome scientific achievement, a technical triumph. However, I also feel it is a misuse of science. Why do we assist people who can't have children? They might be that way because their genes governing their own reproductive viability are not functioning correctly. In nature, this is the ultimate sign that that particular animal should not be allowed to continue - they can't reproduce, so they end right there. If nature were allowed to take its course, faulty reproductive genes would not survive one generation. I tried to determine what the fertility rate of people produced by in-vitro versus the general public, expecting to see a much lower rate. I could not find any serious studies, just quackery without any scientific or statistical support.

Science should be used to solve problems, not create them, and making humans more fertile in an overpopulated world is unnecessary. I realize that the desire to procreate is an emotional subject. It is hard to hear that you cannot conceive a child for those wanting children. In vitro ferilization provides a way to cheat nature out of a verdict you cannot accept, but it also kicks the can down the road for your children to be faced with the same decision. I believe couples that want children and can't naturally conceive their own should adopt. There is no shortage of "unwanted" children needing a good home. Shifting children from the "unwanted" column to the "wanted" column by welcoming them into a new adoptive family is the best solution to the problems. We need to encourage this to make the world move closer to one where all children are wanted.

They just announced the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Robert Edwards, one of the scientists that developed in-vitro fertilization.

Scientifically, in-vitro would be a useful procedure to keep or bring back endangered or extinct species. Also, the technique could be crucial in colonizing space station colonies or moon/mars bases. It's much cheaper to ship embryos than whole animals. Spin-offs from the technology will no doubt be incorporated into Stem Cell therapies in the future. So while I applaud the scientists for developing the procedure, I believe it is being misused to promote human fertility.

Weather Control

2010-10-19T22:35:00.007-05:00

I live in a house with lots of big old trees. There are 60 to 80 year old walnuts, oaks and elms, which tower over our house. On a hot summer day, there is plenty of shade in the yard. In fact, there is little sunlight, as there is no good place to put a garden. I've always thought that the yard feels a good 10 to 15 degrees cooler than the sunnier area outside of the shade trees.

I've often wondered if it really is cooler under the trees. I've heard many advertisements and advice pieces that say that you can lower your air conditioning bills by planting trees around your house. This begs the obvious question: Do trees cause actual cooling?

Being a Mechanical Engineer who studied Thermodynamics in college, I tried to reason this out. I remember that Skylab's failed solar panels left inadequate power to cool the space station, and the problem was solved by putting a high tech beach umbrella on the station, putting it in the shade and immediately dropping the temperature to a reasonable level. The difference between that and any situation on the surface of the planet is that we have air. There are three ways heat can move or flow 1) conduction (through a solid) 2) convection (through a fluid: air or water, for example) or 3) radiation (directly out of the body independent of what kind of surroundings the body is in). In space, it's easy. The sun hits the umbrella, and radiates back out. If you make the umbrella silvery on one side or if it has very little mass, you insure that most of the heat striking the shade does not get into the thing it is shading. On a planet, objects heat up in the sunlight (receiving the energy via radiation) then re-radiate it as well as having it leave by convection and sometimes conduction. So a leaf on a tree that is struck by the sun then re-radiates the heat into the surrounding air, as well as having some of it taken away by the breezes.

I heard about an Americorps project in the Bronx where people painted rooftops of buildings white. The theory is that a white roof will re-radiate a significant amount of heat rather than absorbing it. I heard that there was a scientist that calculated that if we painted all the roofs of all the houses in the world white, that we would re-radiate enough heat into space that it would offset what we are doing that is causing global warming.

If you imagine an invisible dome over your yard, that would be what we call a "control volume". This just means an invisible boundry that you consider when analyzing something. What we know about a control volume is that if it is in equilibrium, meaning that the temperature is not rising in the volume, that the amount of heat going in equals the amount leaving. If the temperature is changing, that means that the heat is flowing toward the rising temperature zone and away from the lowering temperature zone. So you look at the cool yard and the hot open field down the street and you observe that the same amount of heat hits both areas, but you feel hotter in the direct sunlight. Even if you have a little sunshade directly over just you, you are going to be hotter in the open field.

It's pretty clear that what is happening is that you are picking up heat that is re-radiating from the ground around you when you are out in the open. In the shaded yard, a portion of the heat that would have hit your or the ground surrounding you is being re-radiated upward into space. From a convection standpoint, the leaves are being cooled by whatever breeze is coming by, and I have to assume that there are layers of air, and the air at the ground does not mix thoroughly with the air above, so there is a blanket of hotter air above you, and the air near the ground stays cooler. In the absense of a breeze, the air makes its own currents. The heated air expands and rises, moving away from the ground.

The part of the equation we moved away from is conduction. When I was attending Heat Transfer classes at K-State, it was 1984. That is still close in time to the oil embargo and the energy crisis of the late 70's. Laws had been put in place that gave builders incentives to construct energy efficient homes. You got a tax credit for installing solar panels. Back then, they were not very often panels that generated electricity, but mostly black panels that you ran water through and got free hot water out of. We learned how to design what was called passive solar buildings. These buildings blocked the sun in the summer with wide eaves, then in the winter, when the sun was lower in the sky, the south facing side of the house was able to get direct sunlight under the eaves. The best way to take advantage of this was to put a lot of glass on that wall, and put massive objects like stone, concrete, or water tanks just inside the glass (say a hallway's width away. You make the glass well insulated from convection, air tight as possible, and at best, you put a double pane glass with an evacuated space in between to prevent heat from conducting through the air and glass to escape the house. The radiant heat from the sun goes through the glass, then strikes the massive objects, which conduct heat into their centers and store it, to later be re-radiated back into the house at night. Ideally, you would have shades that you would draw after the sun goes down, preventing radiant heat loss and further insulating your windows from convection and conduction loss.

So there's no doubt that a tree conducts some of the heat into itself, but it should re-radiate this heat, making it neutral over the course of a day.

There is one difference. The sunlight that hits the tree gets used. The tree isn't just a series of canvas umbrellas, it's a living thing with cells that are using the sunlight through photosynthesis to make hydrocarbons. Some of it is sugar, some cellulose, some proteins, but the energy from the sun gets bound up in chemical bonds in the tree.

My question is: does a tree capture and use enough energy to lower the temperature? In some quick google based research, I have not yet found the answer. I'm sure they use energy, but is it like an air conditioner where they are sucking in so much solar energy that the temperature of the air drops? It certainly goes up when you release that energy by burning the logs the tree makes.

If you were a scientist with a nice research budget, you could probably model a tree as a static series of little shades, a close copy of a real tree, except yours is not alive, and you could probably measure the temperature around the real and fake tree and compare the readings, determining if there is absorption of substantial energy by the tree.

Since the method that the tree converts sunlight into sugar or cellulose is a chemical equation, you could probably calculate energy rate theoretically. Assuming sugar production has a fixed caloric rate, that might have a thermal equivalent. I believe that the work has been done before, I just haven't found it.

Anglo Saxon Times

2010-09-25T19:29:00.007-05:00

I like history, and find that the more I learn about it, the bigger the gaps of the periods and events that I know nothing about seems. I also love audiobooks, because it turns wasted driving time into wonderful learning time, and when downloaded onto an iPod, can be done while exercising or working around the house and yard. It didn't take much to get my interest when David Plotz of Slate mentioned an audiobook on his Gabfest Podcast. He recommended Anglo Saxon Times.

I had purchased a book about the era some years back when I realized that this time during the dark ages was mostly a mystery to me. The book was slow and plodding, and I could never make much headway in it. So the audiobook suggestion was perfect.

This book is actually a Modern Scholar series, college level classes in audiobook form. It was delivered by Professor Michael Drout. He teaches at Wheaton and has degrees from Loyola, the University of Missouri, and Stanford. He has done extensive studies of Beowulf and believe it or not the learned Anglo Saxon scholar J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy). The best part about the book is that Professor Drout is fluent in Old English (aka Anglo Saxon) and opens each lecture with a reading in Old English of some poetry, history, or saga in Anglo Saxon lore. His Wikipedia entry does not mention this Modern Scholar audiobook.

"Anglo Saxon" covers the gap in time between the fall of Roman control of England (in the 400s) to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. England had always been a frontier under the Romans with border skirmishes and battles. There were various walls built by the Romans to keep the "barbarians" out. The most famous of these is Hadrian's Wall, but lesser known and farther north was the Antonine Wall. The Romans managed to maintain trade with the Empire on the continent and build a high level of civilization in southern Britain for centuries.

Soon after the Romans left, the invasions began. Areas were repeatedly conquered back and forth between various invaders. What at first was a series of hit and run raids, later became invasion, conquering, and settlement. English lands were considered rich, so many invaders discovered a place worth staying. Even the modern Scots are mainly the settlement of invading Irish, believe it or not. I kept thinking that this explained the eventual development of the British Empire. What else are you going to do when your bloodlines run so thick with the best of the barbarian conquerors of Northern Europe?

The reason little is know of Anglo Saxon times is because little written history survives the era. This is partly because most people didn't read, and partly because most civilized places, including libraries and other repositories of books were constantly being destroyed by invaders. This is not to say that no one read, or that there were no records. There were a couple of great leaders that not only encouraged learning (by then, little remained of Roman era records), but even encouraged translating the bible into Anglo Saxon and conducting church services in the native language. This was not enough for any kind of continuous record to survive, so there are broad gaps in the history of the era. The result is a shadowy and mythical feel to the era, where such stories as King Arthur have a strange stature of semi-believed legend.

One thing I realized when contemplating what it would be like for the people of Anglo Saxon Britain is the irony of their status. The people were "free" of Roman control and taxation, but also free from Roman protection. Sure they had the rule of law and they weren't allowed to do anything they wanted during Roman times, but in exchange, they were not subject to constant predation and invasion by every little tribe seeking booty. It has its parallels in modern times where people are clamoring for less regulation and smaller government. People have always wanted what they perceive to be oppressive authorities off their backs, and it is usually too late when they realize that their government was also covering their backs. I think the ideal balance lies somewhere in between. A good government is one that is heavy enough for you to feel the weight of, but protective enough to allow you room to thrive and grow.

Inception

2010-08-15T15:23:00.004-05:00

My wife and I for the first time since our son was born went last night to see a movie. We settled on the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Inception.

The movie was about a group of agents that get into people's dreams and steal information. The special plot of the movie was that they were going to try to get into a person's mind and rather than mind it for data, they wanted to plant a new idea in it.

At one point, the lead dream agent is talking about how ideas work. He said that once an idea takes root in a person's mind it is nearly impossible it is to unseat that idea. Once it has taken hold it is hard to counter it.

In this case, the movie was describing an idea as coming from outside and being planted in a person as opposed to something that a person thinks up himself.

Is this how our minds work? Do we sit around like empty vessels while others pour ideas into our head? I think sometimes that is the case, but often it is more complicated. An idea has to either fit into your preconceived notion of the universe, or you have to rearrange your mental contents to accommodate the new information. Maybe some people can jam discordant pieces of information in a jumble in their heads, but it seems to be a difficult proposition at best. Maybe that's why contradictions are sometimes so interesting. I pessimistically believe that most people with a head packed full of wrong information, will jealously guard the integrity of their own reality against assault and reject incoming information that conflicts with their own previously held beliefs. There are too many examples of willful ignorance for this to be a rare or casual observation. New ideas, even when truthful, correct, and useful, are often challenged and resisted.

I can understand why this is. If the mind is like a building, put together brick by brick, there are times when accepting a new concept is like asking someone to tear down a wall of their house and rebuild it from scratch from the bottom up.

An obvious example is religion versus science. If a person believes that Earth is 6,000 years old and was whisked into existence all at once by a supreme being, what are they to make of dinosaur fossils, geological records, astronomical observations, and a raft of other sciences that point to a much older world? The reactions fall into many categories. Some completely and vehemently reject all new information that conflicts with their previously held beliefs. Others simply ignore the new information, adopting a posture of deliberate ignorance or disinterest in the conflicting concepts - sometimes not even grasping the point of the new input sufficiently to see that there is a conflict. Others recognize and understand that there is a disagreement, but maintain a serene acceptance of their own beliefs and a faith that this additional information will be reorganized and resubmitted later more in accordance to what they already know to be true. Some people embrace contradictions. They might accept that two opposing things can both be simultaneously true, and enjoy the challenge of maintaining the logic of the two separate ideas without letting them actually fight it out to the death in their mental arena. A small amount of people will see conflicts and take the time to sort them out, with equal weight to the ideas that got to their head first and the new ones that came later. Knowing that you could be wrong in what you believe and being willing to tear into your memories, dredge them up and discard the rotten or unsound fragments embedded in your head is not always an easy task, especially if done properly. There are some individuals out there that are gullible, seem to have no convictions and simply believe the last thing that was told to them, but those people are rare.

There are many examples of organizations that are excellent at implanting ideas. While the obvious first example is a school, you have to realize that their task is not so difficult. They are taking blank canvases and painting fresh scenes on them. I was thinking first of talk radio. In many ways it is extremely successful at implanting ideas in people's minds, regardless of whether those ideas make any sense or not. While propaganda is simply biased misinformation, the adept use of propaganda to sway groups of people is a skill sometimes employed as a high art form. "A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth." People attribute this quote to Lenin, and it has been used as an example of the how Communism subverts truth for its own ends. This is just a form of trying to insert ideas into masses of people and can truly be called brainwashing. It's another logical fallacy called proof by assertion, where you repeat something often enough until all challenges to it dry up and it is accepted as fact. It's an interesting Wikipedia entry, talking about how modern political parties use this in the form of talking points to hijack the national debate.

In any case, once an idea has taken root in a person's mind, it is difficult to displace, and really can only successfully be countered with the help of the person from within.

A Stitch in Time

2010-08-15T15:20:00.004-05:00

Memory is subjective.

It's easy to see in other people, when they seem to forget things or remember them differently than you do. When confronted with an individual with a different version of a shared piece of reality, most people have a reaction somewhere between irritation and rage. You may have experienced the kind of individual that seems to revise your personal shared history to their liking. The kind of incident where you're asked the equivalent of "Remember when you admitted what an idiot you were about...." First, you experience confusion because you don't know what they are talking about. Then you may react with indignant denial because you don't like the way it sounds and you can't imagine you would have ever behaved that way. Later, you may wonder if something like what you were told actually happened.

I recently heard a report about memory that seems to confirm some of this. We tend to "rework" memories in our heads, equivalent to the way you retell a story, inserting details that make you more honorable and intelligent and less petty or selfish. With enough mental retelling of the story, there tends to be an "adjustment" to a version more to your liking. People tend to try to forget their own stupidities and mistakes and amplify the slights of others into outrages. I think most people are guilty of this revisionist history, and it's very hard to catch yourself at it.

There is another type of memory that I've recently realized is unreliable. I'm currently listening to The Civil War, A Narrative by Shelby Foote for about the 4th or 5th time. I do it about every three years. It's such a dense and rich broth of information that I find myself dipping into it again and again. Each time I listen to it (you have to love audiobooks) I hear something new, or find that there is fresh enjoyment even in the parts I remember the broad outline of. There are many parts of the story that seem new and I wonder if I've forgotten or didn't pay attention to the narrative the other times I listened.

I find it interesting to listen when I know how the story is going to end. I do remember many of the events that occur along the way in detail. However, some parts I don't seem to remember at all and others have many of the key details blurry or missing. I seldom hear something that is the exact opposite from what I remember, so that gives me hope that I have the story correct, just incomplete in my memory.

I described this sensation of fresh discovery of familiar material to my wife. Groping for an appropriate metaphor, I said it was as if the information is a series of stitches, where you see the general track and some of the pieces, but the rest are hidden below the surface.

I like the imagery of the metaphor, because we are in fact following the thread of information, and it is in fact sporadic and sketchy in its details.

This is the way most memories are. I sometimes find myself comparing personal history with my brothers, and I find that their recollections sometimes include things that I cannot recall at all, while other times the details vary from what I remember. There are many things that we agree on perfectly, but I tend to think that these incidents are often the more iconic or outstanding events that we have discussed over and over since the original occurrence.

I don't believe that what I am describing is necessarily faulty memory, I think this is simply how memory works. You experience shared events differently because of the physical, intellectual, and emotional state you are in when they are going on. Some of this is perception bias, and some is distraction and inattention.

How often have you been listening to a person tell a story, and you realize that you lost the thread of the story right in the middle of the telling? Some times, when this happens to me, I realize that the cause is that something that was said made me think of a related or tangent subject that my mind immediately and automatically followed. Since true multitasking is virtually impossible, this is the point where you stop paying attention to the narrative, and follow your own internal one. The speaker might as well be saying "blah blah blah". Sometimes, I can snap myself out of distractions and "play back" the last few seconds and recover what was said. It's like I have a short term audible memory loop in my head. Try it sometime, maybe it's a natural part of the human mind. I can't be the only one that can do this.

It does make me wonder how we ever get through learning in a classroom situation. Really, a teacher has to be fresh and compelling all the time in order to prevent the naturally wandering attentions of a room full of students. It truly is like herding cats, all those minds skittering in all directions.

It's a wonder we get anything done. But it's also wonderful that these distractions may have some true value in them. In another context, we would call these mental wanderings inspiration.

Touchstone of Knowledge

2010-08-15T15:11:00.004-05:00

I think about teaching sometimes. I think about being lucky to have had some good teachers that helped me understand the world and sparked my thirst for knowledge. I've often wondered what makes some people better teachers than others, and I've often considered teaching. My teaching fantasies are just that, scenes where you transform young minds and catch them on fire with a yearning to learn.

I was thinking that the idea of teaching children in a classroom was similar to the teacher pouring knowledge from a container into the smaller containers of the children. I envisioned the teacher with a big urn of liquid and the children each with their little cups, the teacher walking around pouring the knowledge into the children's containers. The more I thought about this, them more I realized that it is a bad analogy. This makes knowledge to be a finite resource and students to be passive vessels. It breaks down when you consider that the teacher is not expending or giving away their knowledge, but sharing and multiplying it.

A better analogy would be to visualize a teacher with a glowing stone and when it touches student's dark stones, they light up. I like the magical flavor of the image. This is more like an ignition of knowledge inside children's minds, where they always had the potential for this knowledge. In this case, knowledge multiplies through education. It spreads out and takes root in a broader audience. In many ways this is what makes us human. When we look at animals, we marvel that they know how to hunt or care for their young through instinct. A certain amount of skills are probably a result of having a body and being hungry and following its natural urges. Culture and other useful skills are taught to the younger members of the species. For humans, this includes written language and such intangibles as ideas, which may not have a direct physical representation in the world.

I also thought of another analogy of the spreading of human knowledge. It is kind of like a brush fire spreading, as ideas ignite and spread. The direct example of this is how early man learned about making fire and taught this skill to other men. This wildfire analogy has an interesting contradiction in it, because fire is destructive and we think of knowledge as constructive. Fire used by man made life easier and gave them control over their environment.

In any case, knowledge should spread like wildfire, but care must be taken that it does not burn us.