Japanese Princess falls to the moon

This is a cool video of the Japanese Spacecraft hitting the moon.

Consumption

I've often thought about overpopulation, since I was little. That was during the time of the first energy crisis and people were seriously concerned about whether we would be able to feed and provide energy for everyone. Part of the equation, besides the fact that there is this much oil reserves and this many tons of coal mined annually, and this many kilowatts used every year, is that there are x number of people in the world doing this consumption. On top of all projections was a factor of increased use due to an increasing number of people using. That is sometimes multiplied by the fact that each person uses more than their parents do, in fact more than they themselves did earlier in their life.

The projections showed that this was not sustainable. Those projections that I remember were centered around energy use, but they could have been food used or trash produced.

The problem is that people have a certain degree of greed, selfishness, gluttony, and entitlement. They want, they want for themselves, they want a lot, and they feel that no one can tell them no.

Conservation is never discussed when we talk about energy use. Over consumption is not regulated at all. You have the right to use as much as you want to.

Energy is not the only commodity that is overused. People habitually eat more food, smoke more cigarettes, drink more alcohol, or take more drugs than what is good for you, and they don't want to be told by anyone to stop. Thing about if you lived on a space station and you got a kick out of venting the atmosphere a little bit at a time through an interesting device out into space. You're on the station with other astronauts and they all agree that this is a bad thing and that the space station is going to be in deep trouble if you continue to do this, but they have no right to tell you not to. Since you are too short sighted to realize that you have to forego the pleasure you get from venting the atmosphere in order to survive indefinitely, you will quickly vent enough atmosphere to start hurting or killing the people on the space station. Can you imagine a situation where the other people in the space station would not stop the idiot from venting their air?

We often talk about the fact that a new health care plan would not be truly useful in cutting costs without a preventative component that would encourage and monitor people to lose weight, stop smoking, and reduce their consumption of drugs and alcohol. People would scream about the violation of their basic rights, and I must admit that I feel that way, too. However, if you could successfully limit people's self destructive behavior, there would be great savings in the amount of car you would have to provide for people. Consume less vices and you could manage to consume less resources in providing health care for all.

This over consumption is mainly noticed in things like oil, minerals and metals, plastics, wood, and other natural resources. Many things, some simple things, like glass, could easily be recycled at a fraction of the price it takes to mine new materials and create them from scratch. On a global scale on a long enough time scale, everything is recycled. It makes sense to think of the things that we use as needing to be recycled and reused. We should not be using land for landfills, ever. The thought of locking things up under the earth in order to dispose of them makes no sense in the long run. I like the way they do it in Star Trek Next Generation where everything is ran through a replicator, which is basically no different than a transporter that rearranges the molecules as it reconstructs them.

We even consume information at an all time high rate, although I would argue that we consume more worthless information than useful information. Look at the media frenzy surrounding Michael Jackson. Before that it was OJ Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith, Jean Benet Ramsey, the college student that disappeared while in Aruba for spring break, or the arrest of a black college professor by a white cop. None of these circus events matter in the long run to society, but we suck up precious air time and people's short attentions and scarce personal time absorbed in these non-events.

I think that if you want to consume something without limits, you should consume knowledge. We should encourage people to go to their public libraries and read as many books as they want. We should encourage people to utilize their public parks. They can go out and run or walk as much as they want. It's an unrealistic dream, but who knows, maybe people will come around, eventually.

Sliding Out

Watching the news lately, I am developing even less respect for former Bush administration officials, but most of all for former Vice President Cheney.

All during the previous administration, he did nothing but hide information from the public. From the energy task force, WMD searches in Iraq and the outing of Valerie Plame, memos on torture, to the firing of attorneys for political reasons, the administration had an impenetrable wall that they tried to erect to keep information from leaking out.

Now that they are out of power, many would love to see them prosecuted for their crimes, or at least have their actions and misdeeds exposed to the public. While these former officials wouldn't dare want to go through the ordeal of an actual trial, they are more than eager for a trial of opinion on their doings during the Bush Era. Hardly a new cycle goes by where we don't have to listen to them spinning their actions and trying to politicize the decisions of the current administration. Their cowardly approach means that they don't have to be questioned officially or present actual evidence proving their assertions, they just have to cast doubt in the public's mind.

I have no respect for this approach. I would say to them to submit themselves to a real trial if they really want to be validated by history. Since I believe they are criminals, I don't expect them to ever actually take this course.

Irrational Decisions

There was a story I was listening to about how people do not usually make decisions with a rational process. They specifically sited that people often put a great deal of emphasis on very rare events. This sensitivity toward uncommon occurrences can be seen in everything from the response to 9/11 to the fact that many parents do not want to inoculate their children because they think it could cause autism. The problem with human decision making is that we often choose based on erroneous perceptions and exaggerated concerns. We often make decisions that are not rational.

It is easy to see this behavior in others, but not so easy to recognize it in ourselves. While they were talking about financial decisions effecting retirement and diet decisions effecting your health and weight, the decisions we make run the gambit from trivial to vital. We are often not aware of this short-circuit in our decision making process, meaning that it can go unchecked and can quickly get out of control. The effect they were describing almost made me think that you could say that people are not even able to exercise free will in making their own choices.

Sometimes, when I listen to the debates about health care in this country, I think about how free will sometimes leads to individual and societal excesses and self-destructive behavior. How do you balance a desire to exercise the right of free will versus trying to make people do what you know is "right" or better for their long term health and happiness.

Can you even imagine a life where you made all the right decisions? Always ate exactly what your body needed, only spent money in a way that was not wasteful and maximized your future gains? Never hooked up with the wrong person or treated the right person in a way to drive them away? Took every route when driving that avoided accidents and delays? Stayed home instead of going out and getting into trouble? It's so strange, because I think the average person would like the benefit of having made every decision correctly, but not the boredom of having to be so disciplined. Spontaneity and impulsiveness are treasured by us, even when they lead to missteps, antics, or tragedies.

Around Father's Day I thought about and how you try to keep your children safe and healthy by restricting their impulses and protecting them from an incompletely formed decision making process. I was thinking about how much older I am than the usual father, and the probability that I would not live long enough to see my son get very old. I wonder what my son's feelings would be if he ever considers that I might die early. Would he think that it was his job to keep me healthy? Why not? I remember thinking that I should try to get my parents to quit smoking. Maybe we could form some kind of mutual pact to stay in good health. He needs to learn to hike and run and exercise, and I need to learn to eat right and do the same so I can stay healthy.

Easy to declare such things. Hard to decide to actually do it on a day to day basis.

Cleaning Yourself Out

I was listening to a Naked Scientist Podcast where they were doing an demonstration about bilirubin. This is a compound that the body makes when it breaks down old red blood cells. Normally, this compound is fat soluble, and your body produces and enzyme that makes it water soluble so that you can get rid of it by excreting it through your urine. Newborns never had to do this before, it was taken care of in the womb by the mother. So sometimes it's a problem for newborns, who build up bilirubin and turn yellow, or jaundiced. A nurse serving in a maternity ward found out years ago that exposing babies to sunlight cures this problem. The sunlight makes the molecule flip around into a different configuration, a water soluble one, just like what the enzyme does. The naked scientists did an experiment where they showed how the yellow bilirubin got converted and could be expelled with a transparent baby doll with the liquids inside.

This made me think about how these kinds of problems would be handled by future space travellers. What if the men on the first Mars or Lunar colonies get contaminated by the mining operations they will be working on? How would they get lead or other contaminants out of the bodies of astronauts. I thought about the line in Black Sabbath/Ozzy Osborne's Iron Man. I guess he was turned to steel and only had boots of lead, but you can see that they are clearly referring to an industrial accident that caused contamination. Will we learn tricks similar to the sunlight trick where toxic chemicals like lead and mercury will bind to something and be expelled from the body?

Scientists have a name for the process, it's called kelation, also spelled chelation. This is defined as the process where a molecule binds to and surrounds a metal to remove it from tissue. We currently already use this therapy on earth for mercury, lead, and arsenic. This is different from the use of activated charcoal to remove poisons, those are adsorbed by the charcoal, not chemically bound to it.

In another podcast I was listening to, they were studying a cinnamon tea that a native tribe had used for centuries to relieve back pain. The scientists examining the tea were initially mystified, because they found that the cinnamon had toxins in it that should be poisoning the natives. They discovered that it was converted to a non-toxic form by the gentle heating used in brewing it into a tea. In fact, the non-toxic form had medicinal properties that the tribe had stumbled onto years ago.

How much of the technology to cure, treat, or maintain the health of people will come from ancient practices and how many treatments will have to come from future developments?

Baseline Creep

It occurred to me while listening to people argue about climate change that the basic assumptions accepted by people can change over time.

Everyone has heard the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants." I always understood it to mean that our scientists can make great discoveries because they build on the discoveries of the scientists that come before them.

In thinking about politics, societal rules, infrastructure, culture, and science recently, it occurred to me that this baseline of knowledge, rules, and expectations is not fixed, but moves with time. You could call it baseline creep.

When I was a kid, the air and water were so polluted that people finally got fed up with it and started cleaning it up and limiting what you could dump into nature. I remember the foamy streams, littered roadsides, and smokey skies. I remember the tailpipes and the smokestacks belching out smoke, the acrid smell, and the constant warnings not to swim in lakes and streams and certainly not to eat the fish caught there. In those days, it was expected that you could pollute without cost or penalties. Now, the expectation is that you can do whatever you want as long as you don't cause pollution.

Leadership and power have a same way of creeping. Look at the U.S. Congress and the corrupting power of lobbyists. This is something that slowly became institutionalized because politicians that accepted the donations of large interests had the money to get re-elected and those that refused them did not. Now it's entrenched.

This baseline creep is not always a moving of standards, but sometimes a moving of conditions. Take population, for example. When I was born, there were around 3 billion people on the planet. Now there is over 6 billion. There were large tracts of land just outside of the city that were fields and pastures, possibly farmed or grazed, but otherwise sparsely inhabited. Today, land is seen as a commodity to be divided up and built on. The thought of leaving some of it in agriculture or unused doesn't seem to occur to anyone anymore.

The amount of energy an individual uses is a baseline that has quickly crept into an unsustainable region. We cannot expect that the burgoining population will be able to waste energy at the same rate, this is reaching the point where that is no longer sustainable.

It begs the question of what happens when the baseline has moved too far. If you're born with the baseline in a certain place, you don't expect to retreat from that point. It's very difficult to tell people that they have to lower their standard of living and use less energy in the future.

Some baselines creep in the wrong direction. Look at species extinction. The rate of extinction is so high right now that they are calling it the 6th great extinction. The other extinctions happened because of catastrophic events like meteor impacts, supervolcano eruptions, or massive climate changes. We're managing to make this one happen just from the way we go about our normal lives. The baseline has definitely shifted out from under us, and it was shifted by us. It's as if we climbed out on a limb and turned around and started sawing away at it.

I've always wondered how many generations of modern men, taken at birth and put on a desert island without any knowledge of the outside world, would it take to get language or writing or any kind of a society.

Many of the fundamental changes in human development took centuries. Now these changes take months. As we work diligently to change the baseline of the world we live in, it would do us well to question why that baseline is where it is and where it really should be.

Only then do we have any hope of stabilizing the situation and controlling what direction our baseline creeps. Hopefully, we can take control and point ourselves toward progress rather than self-annihilation.

The Early Years

I've always found it so bizzare that we forget the first 3 or 4 years of our lives. When you ask people what their earliest memory was, it's either some vague thing like the pattern of the carpet or drapes from when they are really little, or some very exciting event.

Personnally, I remember when my father caught a snapping turtle on the front porch of my grandparent's duplex by having it bite the end of a broom handle, then walked off to a pond to release it. That snapper must have been as big as I was. I might have been 3. I also remember this beige and maroon carpet, possibly because I was in a high chair staring at it for hours. As far as I know, I'm not even remembering the snapping turtle event firsthand. Maybe I'm remembering the retelling of the story with a picture supplied by imagination, not the actual event. I have to admit, my picture of the incident in my head is not very clear.

I've often thought that it's possible that you don't think like an adult human when you're little. Maybe we train people to remember things and think in words, but without that training, you're kind of a different animal. Maybe language is not only learned, but it displaces some other more primative form of thinking. I've heard specualation that humans may have an inherent form of ESP that you unlearn as you grow. That language interferes with the thoughts you are hearing directly from people. I remember one person explaining that often you will speak soothing words to a baby, while inside you're fuming and wondering if it will ever stop crying! If you could read minds, you would be confused with the mixed message, and eventually, when you learned language, you would stop listening to the telepathic stream.

What would happen if you didn't forget those first few years? You wonder how much of early life is simply filled with terror and the confusion of early self-awareness. What if you remembered what it was like to not understand everyone around you and to be powerless because you were tiny and weak?

How would remembering your early infancy affect your beliefs and understanding of the world? Maybe sudden awareness would lead to a completely different form of religion.

I wrote about a physical phenomenon effecting sand dunes and large storms, where impact with a larger object causes the smaller object to be absorbed and later re-emerge intact, but different. This is kind of what happens to little minds. They have their own structure, which impacts with the real world, gets absorbed, and emerges out the other side, something new. Like rebirth.

The Good Book

David Plotz of Slate recently wrote and published the book: Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible.

I got the book for free because I listen to the Slate Political Gabfest podcast, and they had a one week trial period where they were trying to get you to try their sponsor Audible.com's audiobook downloading service (for a fee). If you jumped on right away, and filled out all your personal information, you got David Plotz audiobook free. Which I did.

By the way, when you go to the library and check out audiobooks on CD, then download them for listening on your iPod, you typically see 3 to 5 minute long files. So a book might consist of 150 to 200 individual files. If you loose your place or accidentally allow your iPod to continue playing while you're not listening, you can fast forward through the various individual clips until you are close, then fast forward through a 3 to 5 minute clip to find your place. Plotz's book through Audible was 2 huge files which were over 4 hours each. I lost my place every time I plugged the iPod in to recharge, and had to forward through the whole file several times. It was a minor annoyance.

The book itself was about as far from minor annoyance as you could get.

The premise is that Plotz was a casual Jew, one who observed the Jewish holidays and went to temple only occasionally. He was at his cousin's bat mitzvah and was bored, so he picked up the torah and opened it at random and read a story he did not remember ever hearing before. In the story, the jews trick their rivals and slaughter them after one of them raped a daughter. They tricked them into thinking that they would be forgiven if they converted and that they needed to be circumcised to convert. While the men were all incapacitated from the procedure, they attacked and killed them all, selling the women and children into slavery.

He was amazed that there was this fascinating and grisley story right there in the bible that he had never heard of before. He decided to read the bible in it's entirety and write about what he read.

Most of the bible was new to him. He remarks that people of both Jewish and Christian faiths often profess strong belief in their faiths, but rarely actually read their bibles.

He said that he went into the project as a hopeful agnostic, hoping to find a deeper faith and meaning in the teachings of the bible. He went away from it confused and a little angry at what he found to be an arbitrary and vindictive god. He commented that he hoped that god was not really like that, as he did not want to believe in a god that could be so petty and punitive.

The book made me think a lot about faith in America. I seem to always get into discussions with hard core Christians that are completely convinced that the Earth is 6000 years old and Evolution is a lie being pushed by the devil. They often profess to believe every word in the bible and unashamedly admit that they've never read it. This puts them in the position of complete trust in religious authorities that vascillate between misinformed and willfully deceptive. Plotz talked about biblical illiteracy today, compared to years past when many people were well read on their faith. As an aside, the fracturing of the Catholic church into the myriad of Protestant faiths was a direct result of people actually being able to read the bible themselves and no longer having to trust and rely on religious leaders that were spoonfeeding an incomplete version of their own faith to them.

I had in depth discussions with my nephew and my brother about the book, and how surprised I was about learning that God's first instructions to man were about how they should treat their slaves. It makes you understand better how the Civil War had people on both sides saying that they were supported in their actions by god. I used to hear that and wonder how slaveholders could ever have the impression that god supported their despicable actions. That was because I didn't know what was in the bible.

My nephew is interested in reading the book now, as he is very distressed in growing up and learning that there are huge portions of the population that are perfectly happy discounting science and following in blind faith their religions. I told him that I can't understand why people cannot see the bible as a document written and passed down by men with all their flaws and agendas. If it did actually start out as the word of god, how can we expect that it was not watered down and explained to early man in a manner that he could understand. Perhaps if the stories were passed down accurately and intact, they are still not meant to be interpreted literally.

I personally believe that the stories in the bible emerged around the same time that man was becoming civilized. He was just starting to form cities and write down his history. Of course this seems like the beginning of man, because it is in one sense. It is the beginning of the record of man, of man being remembered accurately rather than stories drifting in meaning and detail over time.

By the same token, people of faith often believe in an end of times. While I have told many faithful individuals in my life that I believe end-timers need to stay out of politics because they have no incentive to plan for the long haul, I think that there is another aspect of end-timers that could be a self-evident truth. What happens if people begin to reject Christianity in large numbers? Everyone used to believe in the Greek and Roman gods and now everyone thinks that is ridiculous. What if the end times are the end of religion?

My Trends

I was recently thinking about the fads and trends there have been during my lifetime.

Here is a list of some that I remember:

Color TV
Moonshot Mania
Antiwar Music of the 60s
Marijuana (60s & 70s)
Cocaine
Yard Darts, Clackers, slinkies, rock 'em sock 'em robots.
CDs replacing vinyl records
Hair: long, short, and then long again
Skirts: shorter and shorter, longer again, and now almost non-existent
Environmentalism and conservation: peaked in the 70s, died, re-emerged around 2005
Rubik's Cube
Politics: conservative, antiwar, fix the economy, conservative, anti-government, conservative, fix the economy, conservative, and fix the economy. In general, the politics of vilification
Cable TV
1993 country music
The rise and persistence of Rush Limbaugh (mid 90s to today)
Clinton Bashing (from the time right before he took office to today)
News Obsessions including: Jean Benett Ramsey, OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith, Aruba girl disappearance, and dozens of others that have no real impact on our history.
The internet: 1990s when NPR started talking about it all the time, until about 2000 when most people were on it.
The rise of the SUV
The sad rise of the Minivan
Email, which peaked sometime around 2006
Online chat
Online dating
Text Messaging (a generational gap if there ever was one)
Video Games and the fixation with them
The rise of Reality TV and the subsequent decline of good writing and good programming
The rapid decline of public smoking
The decline of radio as a way to stay up with current music
Constantly released new music
Universality of cell phones
Decline of TV news
Decline of newspapers
HD TV
Widespread use of iPods

What do these trends mean? One thing is certain. Things are constantly changing. What was sleek and trendy one year, looks stupid 3 or 4 years later. What is useful explodes into use. Sometimes good things are left behind. People do not have the attention span to study things in depth as much any more. There are too many distractions.

Life goes on.

Little Red Spot

I did an earlier post on the behavior of sand dunes. see: At Resonance Frequency: Liquid Dunes

In this entry, I was looking at how a small sand dune can strike a larger dune and actually emerge from the other side of the big dune. The explanation from wikipedia about how these small dunes can emerge from larger dunes follows:
"As barchan dunes migrate, smaller dunes outpace larger dunes, bumping into the rear of the larger dune and eventually appear to punch through the large dune to appear on the other side. The process seems to be similar to waves of light, sound or water that pass directly through each other; the detailed mechanism is, however, very different, being nonlinear. These are known as solitons.

"The dunes emulate soliton behavior but unlike solitons, the sand particles do not pass through each other. When the smaller dune rear-ends the larger dune, the winds begin to deposit sand on the rear dune while blowing sand off the front dune without replenishing it. Eventually, the rear dune has assumed dimensions similar to the former front dune which has now become a smaller, faster moving dune that pulls away with the wind. (Schwämmle & Herrmann, 2003)"

This is just like the recent phenomenon on Jupiter. The great red spot of Jupiter is an enormous, and somewhat permanent storm that has been present since man has been watching Jupiter through the first telescopes. Recently, there was a new storm that formed, that they called The Little Red Spot. The little red spot ran into the big red spot and emerged from the other side. This reminded me of the dune behavior above.

How can something merge completely, yet something remains of the original, and then is reborn out the other side? What can you think of in life that is like this?

Messiness of Life

I was listening to the May 22 episode of Science Friday, the interview with Doug Bellamy, a professor and recent author of a book about using native plants in your yard. See http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200905225

In one sense, he was talking about letting your yard go shaggy, but in another sense, it was about returning your yard's habitat to a natural variety of plants that native species can use. He talked about how trees attract caterpillars, moths, and butterflies, which in turn attract songbirds. Native trees attract a huge variety of insects. Exotic trees transplanted from far away attract few insects and form a beautiful but sterile environment.

I have often been at odds with the suburban desire for order and cleanliness. When did we decide that all the world is defective unless it looks like a golf course?

Not that I'm immune to the Stepford yard syndrome. I was running down the road the other day and looked down a hedgerow treeline, and I thought that it seemed ragged and would look better if it was trimmed up like a hedge bush. I immediately caught myself and thought about how the creatures in the treeline probably like the raggedness. They probably enjoy finding the branch that sticks out the most like a watch tower to get a good look, or building their nest in a little hollow, all nestled in by the limbs. It's interesting how life finds toeholds in the niches, how variety makes craggy locations for life. I remember hearing a reference about how beavers are usually found in the crags of life, and the speaker asked if god made the crags or did beavers just evolve to take advantage of the crags so that's where they accumulate.

The truth is that life needs rough edges to cling to. It's true on a bacteriological size scale, where crevices are where cultures hide and multiply. It's also true on a macro scale, where species like rough edges. Many animals, like deer, like to live in a fringe of forest and clearing. They find protection in the forest and food in the fields.

We have to make a concerted effort to let things go native, to provide for the messiness of life that all living things demand.