The Real Da Vinci Code

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.