completeconfusion

Where British stoicism came from

2009-04-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

A century ago, early children's literature wasn't enthusiastic about boosting kids' self esteem just for it's own sake. Child rearing had a grittier, more realistic feel to it, back then, and children's feelings weren't always spared. Here's a passage - and yes it's real - from the the ninetheeth century English children's book, "Lessons for Children Three to Four Years Old", by Anna Laetitia Aiken Barbould. n.p., as cited by cited by Susan Tyler Hitchcock in "Mad Mary Lamb", p135:

"Do you know why you are better than puss? Puss can play as well as you; and Puss can drink milk; and lie upon the carpet; and she can run as fast as you, and faster, too; a great deal; and she can climb trees better; and she can catch mice, which you cannot do. But can Puss talk? No. Can Puss Read? No. Then that is the reason that you are better than Puss - because you can talk and read . . . If you do not learn, Charles, you are not good for half as much as puss. You had better be drowned."

And mind you, back then children knew that unwanted kittens were commonly drowned, and may have seen the practice, too. No wonder narcissism and feelings of entitlement were less common then than now!

Uppity appliances advocated

2009-04-17T17:12:00.000-07:00

re:
Attention-seeking objects will be hard to part with
17 April 2009

James Pierce at Indiana University in Bloomington is designing ways for objects to periodically make their presence felt, forcing us to "reflect" on them more often. He believes that this will increase our sense of attachment to our possessions, helping to end our unsustainable habit of constantly buying new things and dumping the old.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227045.700-attentionseeking-objects-will-be-hard-to-part-with.html

I'm very glad intelligent, creative people are taking a chance or two and trying to come up with new ways to put a few speed bumps in front of consumerism.

But I'm not sure misbehavior is the way. My father didn't keep his beaters around longer if they were especially temperamental - we all buy badly behaved or too hard to understand electronics and software, and then return it or shelve it, or garbage it.

Variable reinforcement seems like a better bet to me, appealing to the gambler in all of us - how about engraving a lottery ticket good for a hundred years into every consumer item. The ticket would be more likely to win the longer the "ticket" was still out there, a bit more likely every year. Then we could cling to our old toasters "just a little while longer" waiting for them to pay off. Of course, there could be unintended consequences, you might increase hoarding, or fuel consumerism. Learning theory says that variable reinforcement is astonishingly powerful.

The only other thought that occurs to me is, once technology allows, have every consumer item make friends with our kids, who would then be heartbroken if we got rid of them...

PS - The ancient greeks actually used to hold trials for tools that had injured or killed their owners, and condemn them to death. Sort of a "closure" thing, I guess.

Death to Tax Cuts, Long Live Tax Cuts

2009-02-23T10:55:00.000-08:00

There's something infuriating about Obama and the Democratic Senate having to accept unproductive tax cuts in order to create any sort of stimulus. After all, previous ill-advised tax cuts are already hamstringing the government's ability to respond effectively to the crisis; and irresponsible tax-cuts were very much part of the weaselly mind-set that created the present crisis.

Again and again the right has been able to use the mantra of "tax-cuts" to hornswoggle the average voter and taxpayer into voting, not for genuine conservatism: but mere corporate rapacity.

So here's the long-term answer. I think it's inevitably where we'll end up, so let's get there while there's still something of our economy and culture to save: The Democratic party, and Canada's Liberals, should commit themselves to moving the tax system, over about a decade, over to one in which the average voter will not pay one dollar in income tax (and perhaps other taxes.)

Elections are won when 51% of the electorate agree with you, and very few people have a long-winded intellectual or ideational commitment to low taxes, for good reasons or bad. They just like the way money jingles in their pocket, that's all. If that same money is in the government's pocket, they don't hear that nice jingle any more; so that's not as much fun.

Fine. Done. Egalitarianism is not a bad thing, overall. No more taxes for you! You're obviously not responsible enough to know what they're for, anyway! At least this way, the most vicious ideologues on the right can't buy your vote for a song, ever again!

So the whole burden of taxation goes onto the top half of the population; and 50% of the voters won't think about taxes, again, ever, because they don't have to, and can't profit by it.

This tax shift means sharply punishing very high salaries, but why not? If a salary cap and high salary tax is acceptable in the big sports league, something like it won't exactly cause a peasant's revolt if government tries it. This one policy action can forever change the mathematics of every election to come. I believe it would initiate a swing away from the intensely corrupt government and legislation that we've seen over the last couple of decades, which ended in a great crash - because the average victim of that excess, the average taxpayer, can't be fooled into thinking that they're getting a part of the action. They're out of that game.

Note that starting on this road may mean, over time, not taxing the less rich half of those who actually vote - and not merely the less rich half of those who could vote or are registered to vote; but this doesn't change the math radically.

What "legal" means

2008-11-29T13:43:00.000-08:00

There seems to be a lot of confusion here in Victoria, and at city council, about what the word "legal" means.

It is the duty of the police to enforce the law, and others to conform to it. BUT:

The law consists of the Constitution, Charter of Rights, previous legal decisions (precedent), common law, Tort (civil) law, and - according to the Nuremberg tribunal - supervening international legal and moral norms as well. TOGETHER these constitute the law. (Albeit the last is contradicted by the Notwithstanding Clause of the Canadian Constitution, which clause could be invoked for anything at all including the mass murder of people with red hair, elimination of free speech, or a new holocaust - all these would be superficially "legally" in Canada if the Notwithstanding Clause were invoked.)

A statute or bylaw may declare night day and day night, but that doesn't make it so. Policework is not merely a game of "Simon Says" where we substitute "City Council" for "Simon." That game isn't legal in Canada. The latest whim of council isn't law unless it conforms to the Charter of Rights, Constitution, etc. Not for the police, nor anyone else. Neither is it enough to say that whatever the courts have not specifically ruled out in previous decisions is therefore legal should a brand-new bylaw declare it so. There's no principle in law that everything is legal "until it is specifically ruled against by a judge." (This is the equivalent of "let's just do it until we get caught" or "it's legal until we get caught." But, no it ain't.)

In summary: "I was just obeying orders" doesn't remove culpability from authorities, post-WWII, or according to Canadian law.

Where the police have every reason to suspect that law and bylaw might conflict, the legal course is instead to set up a test case, with the cooperation of those affected where possible (a "collusive action"); and to otherwise suspend any enforcement until the courts have ruled on that test case.

The police, who are in an increasingly difficult position, have been very ill-used by Council and by their own management as tools to break the laws. This taints the reputation and effectiveness of the police generally, diverts them from the duties they were trained for, and make any future cooperation between the homeless community and law enforcement officials extremely difficult - yet that cooperation must eventually come about, for everyone's sake. Nevermind what you see on the TV show CSI, police have always relied on the community to do the bulk of the work in discovering, reporting and providing the evidence to enforce the law. This will have to be true for the homeless community as well in the future, but nothing could create a larger obstacle to this than years of directed, systematic law-breaking by the people entrusted and paid to maintain the law.

The question is, why have the police decided to be such thorough (and culpable) codependents? It may be that both they and the City Council believe that intimidation and some degree of cruelty and lawlessness by the police will discourage homelessness here, or at least, discourage the homeless from moving to Victoria. Where law isn't sufficient, skirting the law or simply breaking it, is the next resource. Anyone can understand the temptation to grasp at simple solutions for growing, and frightening, problems, if not the contempt for the law. Extra homeless people in Victoria are an inconvenience for everyone including the homeless people already here, but...

Given the compulsory nature of most homelessness and, for that matter, the uniquely kind weather of Victoria within Canada and B.C. (although most homeless are not newcomers), this experiment in twisting the arms of the victims again and again is absolutely futile. Sooner or later, council must come to understand this, however distressing it may to them to give up on the dream of violently pushing away homelessness must be to the more comfortable. If this was going to happen, it would have happened - the police were freer in previous years to act illegally (and did) than they can possibly be in the years to come now that the scrutiny of the courts has been aroused.

I would not wish to be a police officer in Victoria, or nearly anywhere else in North America, today. I am grateful that many are willing to serve as peace officers. But I earnestly appeal, with emotion that cannot enter into this text, that the police, and in particular their management, look to their own interests, and their own future interests with regard to the questions pertaining to homelessness. The council has thoroughly betrayed those interests, and the police cannot act too quickly to ensure that their officers now strictly obey the whole of the law, and begin to rebuild the reputation that they must have to do their job (and to do it more easily and in less peril) within and without the homeless community.

I might humbly submit that in order to commence this new approach, the police should immediately cease some techniques they now employ to evade accountability: Primarily, stop using volunteers merely dressed as police at the front desk who don't actually know the law. This current practice allows citizens to believe they have made a report to the police by talking to the front desk, or that they have advice from authority, when neither is true. Moreover no record of any kind is made of their report unless the volunteer on their own sole authority decides to tell them how to make an actual report, in writing, on the correct form. This is a great way to keep crime stats down, but thoroughly mischievous, as well, and calculated to bring the police into disrepute. Everyone showing up at the desk can be given a number and one sentence description of their report (anonymous or not) which is reported and retained by the police for future reference. Similarly re phone reports, everyone phoning in has to be given a report number and the call be databased, even if with a one-sentence description, and even if the report was anonymous. Now, my experience has been that phone operators seem to be trained to do everything they can, including balding lying about what the law is, in order to avoid any report being recorded if at all possible. I don't doubt that the police are underfunded, but this isn't the way to deal with that. It might even be that actually recording all crime reports would result in more funding.

by Russell Johnston

http://confusioncomplete.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-legal-means.html

The Swan of Avon Explained?

2008-11-29T10:58:00.001-08:00

Is what follows too obvious to say, or has it been too obviously overlooked?

I've been looking at Sir Francis Bacon's writings on the beginning of Science, and the Royal Society - spurred on by a CBC radio "Ideas" program that I had to look up quotes for online next day, since I was listening in healthy, true darkness.

Related Google enquiries led to links to the question of whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare. I love such thoroughly eccentric explorations of history, true or false, credible or laughable, for the same reason that anyone who's read a huge pile of history books (and doesn't have their head stuck up their ass) ought to love 'em - they take me far from the well-worn facts of history I've read about, often literally hundreds of times, into genuinely new territory (whether my guide is inept or not.) That's refreshing if you love history but sometimes find it hard to obtain genuinely new grist for the mill.

In the process of encountering many delicious tidbits of otherwise hopelessly obscure history that's refreshingly new to me, it could be I've stumbled on an overlooked clue to the mystery of authorship, just maybe, maybe (if there is any mystery, of course.)

Should you want to know why Ben Jonson called Shakespeare "Sweet Swan of Avon", as Bertram Theobald did:

"Now one word about the 'Sweet Swan of Avon.' Has it ever struck anyone that if this phrase is to be taken at its face value, it is singularly inept as a simile? The verses of a poet are melodious,or should be."

http://www.sirbacon.org/bertrambj1623folio.htm

It may be instructive to look at a line very early on in Robert Green's "Groats-Worth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentance" (1592), incidentally our first published mention of Shakespeare, which line is retailed as if it were a common enough saying of the time:

The Swan sings melodiously before death, that in all his life vseth but a iarring sound.

http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/greene1.html

That is: "The Swan sings beautifully at death, who all his life used (issued) only a jarring sound."

In the context of that popular saying (as it seems from the context in Green's pamphet), Jonson's calling Shakespeare "a sweet swan of Avon" has new meaning. It's quite a funny line (and still packs a punch today) if the the rude Shakespeare from Avon were not much of a poet, but the Shakespeare about to become part of history with the posthumous publication of the Folio, was a very fine poet indeed.

But note that how melodious a swan is depends very much on the species of the swan.

Which leads us to another explanation: that Green's contemporary version of the saying isn't relevant, but the Phaedo is, where Plato has Socrates say that swans "having sung all their life long, do then sing more, and more sweetly than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are about to go away to Apollo, whose ministers they are." Or even Shakespeare himself, who in Othello has Emilia say "I will play the swan, and die in music."

If so, Jonson only meant to say that Folio was the Bard's beautiful final song, as it was.

Or, we could give the final word to Wikipedia, "Swan Song":
The phrase "swan song" is a reference to an ancient belief that the Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) is completely mute during its lifetime until the moment just before it dies, when it sings one beautiful song.

Cygnus olor was originally native to the British Isles, and that restores the Baconian jest to Jonson's words.

Jonson and Green were both playwrights and contemporaries in London and might be supposed to have used the allusion similarly, or likely so. On the other hand, Johnson was self-educated but would have known Plato. Still Green went to Cambridge and Oxford and could hardly have escaped knowledge of the Phaedo, himself. We report, you decide.

How we got here - according to the Governor of the Bank of Canada

2008-11-24T11:21:00.000-08:00

Wonder why we have a depression or recession thanks to the subprime lending crisis? Here's an insider's view:

Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney interviewed by Carrie Gracie
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/the_interview.shtml
Last Updated: Saturday, 22 November 2008, 23:32 GMT

Excerpts:

"A: The fear had become self-fulfilling."
....
"Q: What exactly, in your view, went wrong? These banks just borrowed too much, was it?
A: "They borrowed too much: they did two things, they borrowed too much, they had too much debt, relative to their amount of capital without question, but they felt they could do that because they felt they weren't taking any risk. And they short-circuited some of the very basic aspects of banking. Which is that, banking is about, in some respects it's about relationships, you should know your customer, you should know the business or person you're lending to, um, and you should, ah, do analysis in terms of their ability to repay. And what became, they did two elements of shorthand for that, instead of having that type of relationship credit-based, you know, hard-nosed the [garbled] advisor type of banking, what they did was, they relied on other people to make judgements, these were the famous credit agencies that were rating them at triple A or, they felt that they were taking on a loan, but it only mattered - they weren't going to hold onto the loan, it only mattered how quickly they could sell it to somebody else. In the terminology, they had 'warehouse risk'. So as long as they could get rid of the hot potato, quickly, it didn't matter. Well, you know, the music stopped eventually, they still had it, and because they had it in such size, it's been a very painful process to work that out.
....
Q: And why wasn't that spotted...
A: We had some faith in this as well...
[A: The mistake that was made was that when the subprime market was small, you had to be a good risk to get in but as they expanded the likelyhood of default increased] "But people were seduced, or only remembered the old assumption, they didn't realize that the expansion of this [subprime lending market from 2% of US lending to 15%] would change the equation."

The End of Night: Why We Need Darkness

2008-10-30T11:17:00.000-07:00

Go National Geographic!

I've been (quite futilely) trying online to get people with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome to consider turning off the light switch a bit more. (Ok a lot.) You might suppose that desperately ill, suffering people would be eager to try a fairly easy, natural way that someone else swears has worked wonders for them. If so, you couldn't possibly be more wrong! This is my second try, I got absolutely no-where two years ago - so I resolved to be much more forceful and jump straight down the throat of anyone who wanted to merely gainsay the research, but supplied no bibliography - just their prejudices. There have been very few takers willing to reach up to that switch and turn it off more often! But the good news is, there have been a couple. As Bruyner (Lance Armstrong's team manager) says in his book, if you want the prize, you have to be willing to bend a few fenders (he is notorious for his driving as he follows Lance on the tour along narrow mountain roads.)

Wholly by coincidence, at the local newsstand I see that the new November National Geographic has emblazoned on its cover: “The End of Night: Why We Need Darkness" which includes discussion of health effects for humans, and so many other animals. I've included below the relevant quotes:

Light Pollution
Our Vanishing Night
Most city skies have become virtually empty of stars.
Published: November 2008
By Verlyn Klinkenborg

Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.
For most of human history, the phrase "light pollution" would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth's most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been as likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow.
....
Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet, a process being studied by researchers such as Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, co-founders of the Los Angeles-based Urban Wildlands Group. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being "captured" by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop. Migrating at night, birds are apt to collide with brightly lit tall buildings; immature birds on their first journey suffer disproportionately.
....
Frogs and toads living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses.
....
Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need an undiminished view of the night sky for our work, but like most other creatures we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives—one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.
For the past century or so, we've been performing an open-ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body's sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a biological toll. At least one new study has suggested a direct correlation between higher rates of breast cancer in women and the nighttime brightness of their neighborhoods.
In the end, humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs in a pond near a brightly lit highway. Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural patrimony—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/light-pollution/klinkenborg-text/

False Left-brain Right-brain Test

2008-10-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

"Left Brain v Right Brain Test"

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0%2C023739%2C22556678-23272%2C00.html

Someone else pointed out to me that if you put your attention on the shadow of the foot she turns anticlockwise. This attention to the shadow unravels the mystery it seems to me, and shows the test false:

The shadow of the lifted foot is, since it's only visible in part of its arc, is unambiguously going anti-clockwise so the dancer is too - only if your brain is so selective that it never really sees or takes in that shadow can anyone interpret the movement as clockwise.

Therefore, I think this is a decent test of Alzheimer's (sorry bro), or maybe typical male laser-like focus on naked female bodies. (Male brains during orgasm have intense activity in a small area unlike female for example.)

IMHO, a well-functioning brain will unconsciously take into account the foot-shadow and can then only give one interpretation. But we know from other studies that male brains don't function that well well viewing naked nubile females.

Today's excitement: trying to figure out today whether I'm smelling dead neighbor out in the hallway (wouldn't be the first time in the last month or so.)

Interesting new study shows genetic illnesses aren't caused by new mutations but the opposite - very old genes going back to single-cell life. If that holds up, this tells me these illnesses are 99% environmental, triggered by our dazzlingly unnatural modern lives. Light being suspect number one for me, but not the only suspect.

Genetic-based Human Diseases Are An Ancient Evolutionary Legacy, Research Suggests

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081016124043.htm

Russ

So many String Theories, so Little Time

2008-10-25T14:22:00.000-07:00

Why 10 to the 500th power is a small number.

NOTE - what follows is a very restricted argument about one aspect of one point made versus String Theory, the size of the possibilities it admits: 10 to the 500th power. I'm not competent to wander from that restricted topic here; although I include references to statements from those who are. My point may be so minor that everyone in effect assumes it, never bothering to state it, but the frequency and vigor with which the number 10500 pops up appears to belie this.

Suppose you are a prosecuting attorney. You believe you have the criminal. Unfortunately you need evidence, and so far the admissible evidence, including a blood type only restricts the perpetrator to one of 10 to the 500th power DNA combinations, isn't anything like sufficient. 10 to the 500th people is obviously greater than the earth's population, for starts. Even if only a few hundred million people are actually walking around with the right blood type, it would seem that you haven't made much progress on your case. If you need to go to court tomorrow, of course you ought to dismiss the case.

But let's say you can count on more than a year before this case shows up on the calendar. That's lots of time to get new evidence, and if even a little DNA shows up, then that will narrow the possibilities instantly, and at least logarithmically. There are so many DNA combinations that almost any substantive DNA result will be more unlikely than "merely" 10 to the 500th power. So, sure, right now, your evidence is consistent with too many possibilities. But one DNA discovery will blow nearly all, or all, of those possibilities away. Additionally, suppose you find 10 pieces of more ordinary evidence that are compatible with only one in a thousand of the suspects that haven't yet been ruled out by blood type. Barring codependent variables, that's 10,000 of your 500 zeros gone into the ether... in other words, this sort of evidence will eliminate possibilities logarithmically, also. In other words, for investigators contemplating possibilities, 10 to the 500th just isn't as large a number as it is for, say, the average price-sensitive shopper.

Just then your assistant says, "Hey, our LHC - the Large Heuristic Collator is supposed to start up this year! It data mines way more than our current databases. Just one or two discoveries there, could knock out nearly all of those other supposed suspects - or all of them, if we've got the wrong guy." Now things don't look so hopeless.

The Large Hadron Collider might do something similar to, or for, String Theorists; knocking out all but one of their models, or all of their models. According to Woit, just one unexpected new particle within the energy range of the LHC and String Theorists will be mighty short of zeros in that exponent, very quickly, since none of their possible theories will be compatible with such a particle. Still, it's not logically impossible (actually some sever critics say the theory is already inconsistent, I believe) that other LHC results, will narrow the window and do so in a way that remains consistent with M-theory and 10 to the 500th will be history, replaced by 1000, 100, or 1 (or zero). Woit demurs, at least in part, saying that in the case of the search for superpartners that they've already hedged their bets with the anthropic principle, and have an explanation at hand for every result.

Woit's claim of hedging brings up the real worry, it seems to me: which is whether 10 to the 500th in fact represents the last kludge, or the last epicycle. Is 10 to the 500th in truth just the tiniest tip of the iceberg of what malleable multi-dimensional math can be patched up to provide (pardon the aglomeration of alliteration, there), once string theorists are more motivated to expand their horizons?

If the latter, then what string theorists have been developing is "merely" a language in which some future theory could be expressed. Woit would then be correct to say that it's no more a theory than calculus, by itself, is a physical theory. Now, such research is not necessarily useless, by any means (although its application might turn out to be far removed from particle physics.) Developing a language in advance of need is, however, surely no reason to crimp anybody else's funding, much less everybody else's funding - particularly anybody trying to develop an actual theory, you know, with predictions and stuff. If Woit is right about the irrelevance of the LHC for string theorists (so long as the standard theory isn't equally embarrassed, I take it), then given the expense involved in creating collisions that are orders of power more energetic, perhaps a moratorium on spending in "language development" for at least a few decades is in order.

From my uninformed viewpoint, string theory might still be a winner. Someone knowing calculus before Liebnitz or Newton might have a hunch that it could describe planetary orbits and reasonably start groping around for a relationship or constant to plug in that might pop out some elliptical orbits. This may even be roughly what Newton and Hooke did, in fact. (According to Hooke) when a particular possibility for the attraction between masses (inverse square of distance) was mentioned to Newton by Hooke (who may have already proved the consistency of an inverse square law with circular orbits), Newton had in hand the mathematical language to prove that that specific relationship fit the elliptical evidence Kepler and Tycho had previously provided. Newton also claimed at the time that he had already previously proved this result for ellipses and an inverse square law: but his papers did not contain such a work or any notes concerning it, whereas a discussion between Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley about whether the inverse square law would produce elliptical orbits took place in 1684, two years before Newton published the Principia. The interesting possibility is that, whether or not he had anticipated Hooke, Newton's preeminence today may be a direct result of his spending considerable time researching the language with which future theories might be expressed, rather than trying to charge ahead to next discovery with the mathematical tools already developed, or pressing ahead with experiments not much different than those already published. If string theorists have done the same, that may not be all bad. Given the cost of each new generation of cyclotron, it may even be inevitable. During the nineteen twenties, Russian filmakers had no film. Year after year, they could only sit around and discuss what future films might be like, and the techniques they could employ - in other words, all that they could do was to invent the next language of film. As "Battleship Potemkin" showed, they succeeded wonderfully in this, and turned out not to be "useless eaters" [if the reader will pardon that Nazi-era phrase] after all.

Other places to peruse re this topic:

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/08/lee-smolins-trouble-with-physics.html

'Theory of everything' tying researchers up in knots
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/14/MNGRMBOURE1.DTL

Woit's blog:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

Mold. I've been nailed by mold.

2008-10-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

A word to the wise, from the unwise!

I've suffered from a year of terrible health - and in particular terrible sleep - since moving into my present apartment. Turns out the place was flooded and the previous resident probably turfed out for that reason.

I should have known before I moved in. The rug was wrinkled (and still is) as if it was just a bit too big for the floor. Sure sign of a flood, but I'm from semiarid country originally and I wasn't familiar with such things. Plus a specifically asked about the musty smell and the (non-profit!) landlord insisted that that was just the rug cleaner. It wasn't. The rug is very old, but it wasn't removed, much less a proper remediation done. I even asked about whether formaldehyde might be causing my symptoms, but the building manager denied that and kept firmly clammed up. There was no problem and they weren't going to do anything. A letter from my doctor asking them to move me left them utterly cold. No way no way no how were they going to do anything - including mention that they knew perfectly well what the real problem was, and it's impossible to believe they didn't know. Why do non-profits uniformly, given enough time, become somewhat more evil than other sorts of institutions (look up the history of HIV and the Red Cross, or that of any communist state) - "because they can", that's why. (Clinton's reason.) That is to say, there's no mechanism for removing nasty non-profits, no equivalent of bankruptcy (moral bankruptcy laws for non-profits, anyone?)

As for my being naive: because I'm more used to living in near-desert conditions, I had no idea how many steps needed to be taken to keep humidity low in a rain-forest-like climate. I like to soak beans overnight and then boil them for hours, to reduce the lectins, for example. But it never occurred to me to put the smoke-hood fan on, then. Hey, nothing was on fire.

The result of a little extra humidity triggering a huge preexisting mold condition? Horrible sinusitis causing asthma causing apnea causing a whole lot of seizures and boatloads muscle pain. Large doses of creatine controlled the seizures, but I still wasn't sleeping more than an hour at a time, with many hours awake in between, most nights. (Plus the productive cough, watery eyes, headaches, etc that mold typically produces.)

The good news is that mold isn't that scary - it triggers one's immune system (an allergic effect) and therefore the sinusitis etc; but there are no literally toxic effects. Keep the humidity way down so that mold growth is all but stopped and you may be okay in the same place. (If it's caused by condensation in the outside walls that's beyond your control and you can only move or remodel however.)

So here's hoping a new chapter of life begins... soon, I'm sure hoping...

Some good mold links:

http://www.epa.gov/mold/moldguide.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold_growth,_assessment,_and_remediation

http://www.mouldfacts.ca/blog/2007/04/mold-symptoms.html

Graft and War, the Eternal Couple

2008-09-19T11:11:00.000-07:00

"The 101st had seldom been in a rest area. What the men saw there made them wonder how any supplies ever reached the front line. Twice in Haguenau they had received a beer ration of three bottles each. The cigarettes they got were Chelseas or Raleighs, much despised. No soap, an occasional package of gum, once some toothpaste - except for C and K rations and ammunition, that was all that reached the front lines. Being near a supply depot in the rear, the men learned why. The port battalions unloading the ships coming from America got their cut, the railroad battalions helped themselves to Milky Way candy bars and cases of Schlitz beer, chalking it up to "breakage," the truck drivers took the cartons of Lucky Strikes (by far the favorite brand), and by the time division quartermaster and regimental and battalion S-4 skimmed off the best of what was left, the riflemen on the front line were fortunate to get C rations and Raleigh cigarettes."

p321 Band of Brothers; E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest
by Stephen Ambrose

Dynamic Story Sorting

2008-09-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

Seems there's nothing that can't be patented these days including "page up"... but just in case somebody later on tries to make this minor suggestion their own private property (like so many other things)...

(email to news organization/publisher Sept 4, 2008)

"I didn't remember this queue notice or I wouldn't have asked re the delay in publishing my recent articles. The delay does mean that I will tend to publish somewhat time-sensitive articles (ie anything based on recent studies) elsewhere, however.

But I do have a suggestion - I apologize, since it's a bit rude to suggest work others might do, particularly programming, still...

Someday, maybe go to a dynamic two-tier system, as is found on other news sites, where people can click for more articles from a given day, and make it so that articles are tracked so that the most popular "hidden" articles are swapped with less-clicked articles on the front page, as the day goes on and stats accumulate. Come to think of it, for all I know, this last might be a patentable suggestion. I'll publish it on my blog.

Thanks for listening to what might be an impertinence....

Travel Web Sites and Tips

2008-08-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

A list of web Travel Resources:

(cut and paste the URLs, I'm too lazy to code them all.)

www.thebathroomdiaries.com find a washroom

www.doctor-travel.com advice on making travel easier

www.roadnews.com how to cope with computer issues when travelling
www.laptoptravel.com gizmos etc

www.localsintheknow.com

www.kropla.com guide to phones, plugs, TV standards etc

www.web-travel-secrets.com use the web to help you travel
has great links
www.web-travel-secrets.com/links/links.html

www.longtriptips.com esp re airtravel

the Center of Travelology
www.angelfire.com/ct/travelology/index.html

Mastercard ATM locator:
www.matercard.com/atm
VISA ATM locator:
www.visa.com/pd/atm/main.htm

www.booksites.com travelers stories

Re travelling light:
www.verber.com/mark/travel/packing.html
www.travelite.org see the FAQ
www.henricson.se/mats/upl Universal Packing List

Lava Lamp principle harnessed for ocean-going “perpetual-motion” vehicle.

2008-02-11T18:40:00.000-08:00

Will military applications be next? See the BBC story:

BBC NEWS
Robot glider harvests ocean heat
By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

A sea-going robotic glider that harvests heat energy from the ocean has been tested by US scientists.

The yellow, torpedo-shaped machine has been combing the depths of seas around the Caribbean since December 2007.
....
It generates its energy for propulsion from the differences in temperature between warm surface waters and colder, deeper layers of the ocean.

Wax-filled tubes inside the craft expand when it is gliding through warmer water. This heat is used to push oil from a bladder inside the hull to one outside, changing its buoyancy.

Cooling of the wax at depth reverses the cycle.

Full news story at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/7234544.stm

Published: 2008/02/08

Parmenides Pooh-poohed

2007-12-26T14:21:00.000-08:00

Below is a short comment on an interesting recent article on Parmenides,

Parmenides—father of modern thought
Published by
Tom Nuttall
December 19, 2007 in Science and technology and Philosophy.

Read more Greek history, and less Greek philosophy, and I think you’ll have a very different understanding of the rise of the ancient importance of reason than the one given by this article however.

Internal to cities: wealth, intermarriage and force held far more importance than reason. But the ancient Greek historians recount again and again how critical reason and rhetoric were as a military force multiplier amongst diverse city states without permanent alliances. Conflicts in such multiplayer games were won by those who could persuade others to join temporary alliances of interest, faith, heritage, or anything else that seemed appealing.

Reason was a desperately important survival skill, and a competitive blood sport as well - emissaries from both camps would often be simultaneously appealing for help from prospective allies, and if memory serves: not infrequently, debating each other in front of them.

(I can't help sneakily thinking, though, that Parmenides could very well have been trying to discourage or satirize the use (or merely misuse) of reason in human life, with a poem that was simply hilarious to contemporary farmers - and farmers today for that matter.)

More Steroids and Baseball

2007-12-13T13:08:00.000-08:00

When I wrote and Steroids and Moneyball, I was told I was greatly exaggerating a situation that affected only a tiny handful of players, not an industry.

http://confusioncomplete.blogspot.com/2005/07/steroids-and-moneyball.html

Uniformly, my correspondents flatly stated that the problem couldn't be that so extensive that it was changing the very management of the game. Mitchell's report now says the problem is and has been larger, in fact... and then wishes to change the subject. Moreover it relies on two or three sources only, and unmasks only the most highly indiscreet players. Anyone who took any precautions at all to hide their use, Mitchell doesn't know about.

Every time the subject of steroids has been mentioned, for years now, baseball management and players have been saying "It's all out. Let's move on." Implying (and lying) that the whole story was known. The latest Mitchell report tying the biggest names to illicit drug use puts the lie to previous denials, and then repeats the same nauseous mantra: "No blame. Move on. No penalties."

But that neglects an essential fact about steroid use: much of the positive effects on athletic performance, such as muscle bulk and strength are PERMANENT not temporary. The cheaters will retain the advantage, those who didn't cheat will continue to be deprived of careers if Mitchell's advice is taken. Nice.

We've become a society that believes neither in retribution NOR deterrence: that doesn't believe in punishment or penalties or even occasional time-outs it seems. In this New Age, everyone, starting with upper management it seems, is an anarchist!

All very charming, but the idea that rule of law is superfluous has been tried before and it didn't work well. Some example we're now setting for our kids. In effect we're saying: "Forget Christianity (or any other major religion). Forgiveness is a human right; all that Christian stuff about repentance and heartfelt change being necessary first? Screw that. Do what you like, however shocking. Forgiveness is your birthright and if someone tries to deny that to you for any reason whatsoever, you have every reason to be outraged! How dare they!"

So now we have a society that isn't merely post-Christian, is post-morality, period. We could survive the former, but not the later.

Keynes on Capitalism

2007-08-21T12:06:00.000-07:00

Since it's not up on the net, according to Google, here's a terrific quote from the famous economist Keynes:

“Modern capitalism”, [Keynes] wrote a few years before the Great Slump, “is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers. Such a system has to be immensely, not merely moderately, successful to survive.”

- John Maynard Keynes quoted in Harper's Magazine, November 2001, p 82, in a review of Robert Skidelsky's biography: reviewer Nicholas Fraser.

A suitable epitaph for hippiedom I suppose, though it was written decades before.

Back for a bit

2007-07-25T12:24:00.001-07:00

I'm feeling better, after a rough time much exacerbated by copious amounts of second-hand smoke served up by subsidized housing (your tax dollars at work.) Now I need to get caught up in a lot of ways (and find new digs without the smoke if that's possible in my price range.) Maybe with room for an electric wheelchair this time, that might be nice.

So I may or may not be back to update this blog for a bit, but it's nice to be able to spend some time at the computer indulging myself writing small bits, working my way up to tackling larger projects that have been fallow.

Fraudulent subprime mortgages

2007-07-25T11:22:00.000-07:00

This was originally a reply to: “Fraudulent subprime mortgages” (click the title of this post to go there.)

On that (rather famous economist) blog, there is a lively discussion about who was defrauded whom. My take:

The ultimate purchasers of the loans didn't stop to analyse how the legal changes in the resale market had suddenly removed any incentive for the initial "lenders" (now really more like scouts than investors) to vet homebuyers. Largely, although not exclusively, the large investment institutions who were hurt when the music stop "fooled themselves." Or rather their hirelings profited (in the short term at least) from self-deception or a lack of "fiduciary curiosity", to coin a term - while the firms who paid these bozos their bonuses lost an far bigger pile of money.

What's most interesting is the parallel between the functionaries who ultimately stuck their investment firms with these loans and the similar functionaries in accounting and stock-sales firms who fully cooperated with Enron frauds with similarly disastrous results (See the film "The Smartest Guys in the Room.") Again and again, decade after decade, now; the big money seems to be in making "Dutch Book" between the interests of large financial institutions, and that of their higher-level managerial staff, who turn out to be very willing to betray the long-term interests of their employers. Bonus structures focused on the short-term obviously exacerbate those differences (conflicts of interest!), which are already extremely problematic for ordinary stockholders.

In support of this view, many of the biggest losers were hedge funds, and note this quote retailed in the same blog:

"...the top 25 hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined (both realized and estimated)."

(originally from Steve Kaplan and Joshua Rauh, http://www.nber.org/papers/w13270)

I don't doubt that bonuses for short-term "performance" were a big part of those "earnings."

It may be that enough evidence is in now in to suggest that with few exceptions, bonuses for management that exceed a small fraction of their wage are an irresistible encouragement to fraud, particularly if the crimes first originate outside that company and give the illusion of allowing theft without ultimate responsibility. It isn't possible to plug every mousehole, to remove every possible fraudulent scheme, so dangling huge carrots in front of executives that most will only be able to reach if they tell themselves and their bosses a few convenient (but eventually very costly) lies is a very bad idea - unless you've just gotten your management degree and want to improve your lifestyle, of course.

CompleteConfusion.com

PS - what does it say about our society that neither Marginal Revolution's website spell checker nor that of Open Office has ever heard of the word "analyse"? No wonder there's a problem with subprime mortgages (amongst other things.)

Simpsonized Russ

2007-07-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

This is my Simpsonized portrait. As a promotion for the movie, you too can have a photo transformed into a .png image, at http://www.simpsonizeme.com

I didn't say it was going to be pretty, but it is rather accurate, I'm afraid.

Surplus Value

2007-07-24T16:19:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I can't resist commenting on a blog, and I often reproduce those comments here. This was in reply to a criticism on a comment by Adam Smith on the contribution to price, of labor. Note that the labor that goes into creating machinery and finding, extracting and refining the fuel to run machinery counts here too, not just direct manual labor per se:

And what adjusts supply and demand? Usually labor. If a meteorite lands in your backyard and you decide to sell it, your labor hasn't determined its price.

But there is a market in meteorites, and its prices are determined by the efforts of those who scour their favorite windblown desert sites in dune buggies (with half their finds going to universities if they are searching on Federal Lands.)Markets not determined by labor at one moment usually become so.

Of course, Smith uttered an overgeneralization. But over time where labor is applied is the factor that can be most easily changed, so it ends up determining prices rather closely, even with commodities - but of course it is the marginal labor, of getting the most labor-intensive last part of the supply to market that determines price, often leaving much "economic profit."

It's not impossible that Marx was groping for this last concept, ineptly, with his lamentable theory of "surplus value" (which Bertrand Russell excuses as an emotional outburst due to reading to much about child labor)although this interpretation of mine may be much too kind. In transitional (or subtly corrupt) economies such profits can be very wide spread amongst the rich.

submitted to
http://adamsmithslostlegacy.com/ASLLBlog.htm

Remote control assassination takes a giant step forward

2007-02-27T08:35:00.000-08:00

Long ago one of the Sci-Fi ideas I considered writing up as a story was the use of remote control birds, ideally pigeons as a tool for assassination. They could carry more than enough plastic explosive in their digestive track to decapitate a target. Imagine a pigeon, or an innocent dove flying over a well-guarded Presidential Candidate's outdoor rally... then landing on his shoulder... and exploding.

The Chinese have now developed just this technology, the remote control pigeon, according to today's news. The Robot Engineering Technology Research Center at Shandong University of Science and Technology use brain implants to control the birds flight.

Welcome to the ever braver new world.

The register finds this new tech hilarious and obviously useless: "Sadly, the report 'did not specify what practical uses the scientists saw for the remote-controlled pigeons', Reuters notes."

I'm less amused, or convinced this technology will never be employed by anyone.

Virgin Earth Challenge

2007-02-17T17:22:00.000-08:00

My quite possibly half-baked answer for the Virgin Earth Challenge for solutions to CO2 buildup/removal:

This suggestion might be either naive or old hat, but: Why not sequester carbon where the wells are, filtering it from the general atmosphere and then pumping it underground,?

We do something like this already to filter out oxygen from airliners' fuel tanks to prevent explosions:

"Called a fuel tank inerting system... Before it enters the tank, air is forced through bundles of fibers that filter out the oxygen.

Steve Zimmerman: These fibers are really in the structure of very small straws the size of a human hair. So there's millions of these fibers laid axially down the length of the air separation module. So, air that's 24% oxygen enters these fibers and starts traveling down their length. Now because of the nature of the fiber and the structure of the molecules, oxygen's allowed to be absorbed into the walls of the fiber, and then exits the fiber and is collected and dumped overboard. Whereas the balance of the air that continues traveling down these fibers, becomes more and more nitrogen enriched as it flows down the length."
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/innovation/transcript_episode5.html

Now if you have two filters, and first take out everything bigger than CO2 and then use a second filter to take out the CO2, you can use wind power or other erratic but renewal sources of power to pump air through fiber filters and take CO2 out of the atmosphere at the sites of old oil wells, and put it underground.

Granted, it would be still better to suck it from your auto tailpipe and shove the dirty CO2 underground, but it's not possible to do that economically, on an industrial scale.

When Gaming Threatened to Wreck Society... in Tudor England

2007-02-01T09:15:00.000-08:00

We aren't the first people to think maybe games are getting out of hand. Back in the Tudor Age, in England, the situation became serious enough that a series of laws were passed to get people back to what they were “supposed to be doing.” It wasn't video games that were sucking up peoples time then, of course, but tennis, bowling, and skittles. What men and boys were supposed to be doing in their free time was playing at archery - so that in time of war (think Agincourt) there would be plenty of experienced, skilled archers to send out with the mounted troops and pikemen.

Even so by 1512 the English Parliament thought that the illegal games were drawing so many people away from archery as a leisure sport that the nation was in peril: “archery and shooting in longbows is right little used but daily mininsheth, decayeth and abateth more and more.” Possibly your boss or teacher can sympathize. Again in 1542 Parliament passed even stricter measures, angered that sly gamers had evaded the previous laws by inventing new games, such as shuffleboard - or shove ha'penny as it was at first - and were now playing at these. The situation was bad enough that bowmakers, unable to make a decent living in England, were beginning to move to her traditional enemy: Scotland. So games other than archery became legal only when licensed, and most people were forbidden to play any games except at Christmas. Now, there's an argument to use when your parents wants you to drop the Wii and socialize during the holidays: “Aww, Mom, have a heart: even during the middle ages they let people play games during Christmas - unless they needed help burn a witch or something!”

In case you're wondering, yes there were plenty of guns on every battlefield in the sixteenth century; but they weren't yet cheap and effective enough to entirely displace archers, and in any case the English were more conservative than other armies, preferring to what had worked well for them before. (Your boss or teacher might agree with that sentiment too.)

It's worth mentioning that these “games” weren't exactly the same then as they are now. For instance football (soccer), which had been outlawed in 1314, had a field that was often miles long. Both men and women could play, and there was no restriction on the size of each team. Rules were scarce: so long as you didn't draw a weapon or actually kill an opponent; you could stop whoever had the ball in any way you possibly could, and however violently - without penalty. One reason given for suppressing football at the time was that seriously wounded players tended to nurse their resentments for some time afterward.

There's more about life in those “good old days” between the pages of such books as “A Brief History of the Tudor Age” by Jasper Ridley, Robinson, Constable & Robinson, London, 2002 which was originally published as “The Tudor Age” in 1998, which I've drawn from liberally for this comparison to modern mores - if, of course, you can stopping playing games for long enough to read.

There's a lot we don't know and can't read about those times however.For instance we don't know when paper airplanes were invented, or whether anyone played with them then - although paper may have been too expensive to give to children. No doubt the designs up at BestPaperAirplanes.com were unknown, but Leonardo Da Vinci does mention some kind of glider that involved paper in his notes, and origami was common.

Better Buoyancy for Ballons, Blimps and Dirigibles

2007-01-29T13:08:00.000-08:00

This may be old hat but it might be relevant to the geostationarybananaovertexas.com project. If I have money for patents anytime soon, it'll go to other patents, but if someone else wants to invest, let me know.

Self-Contained system to replace ballast or gas-release - or other means of changing buoyancy and altitude in lighter-than-air balloons or dirigibles

Russell Johnston, PhotoperiodEffect.com
August 10, 2001 version - last revised January 29 2007
Proposed Provisional Patent Application

Examples of applications:
Dirigibles and other shaped inflatable lighter-than-air (or partially lighter-than-air) devices are being reintroduced as lifting devices (SkyCat of Cardington, England, CargoLifter), tour vehicles (Zeppelin-NT, in service), and proposed as more ideal "cell-phone towers" hovering high over cities (Sky Station International of Washington, DC). As well, NASA plans a balloon expedition to Mars.

Advantages:
A self-contained system which did not involve the taking on or discarding of ballast, or the releasing of gases in order to reduce buoyancy would be more convenient and practical, particular for frequent use. For example, the proposed CargoLifter CL 160 Airship heavy lifting system would have the craft taking on large amounts of water ballast whenever it released a large load. This might well make releasing such loads in remote areas or to mountain tops inconvenient. Repeatedly picking up and releasing loads by such means might be extremely inconvenient. The alternative of gas release, particularly of Helium, is very expensive. In sum, ballast or gas-release systems are highly inconvenient, particularly for repeated use. In the case of the NASA probe, they would not be practical for any lengthy exploration of Mars without a means of adding ballast or gas in situ, yet to do without any means of changing altitude in order to descend to examine the surface closely would obviously limit the mission's usefulness.

The Proposed Device:
In this system buoyant gas is converted from having lift to becoming weight, and therefore ballast, without loss, by compressing it in a container within the craft. It is re-converted to lift again by releasing it from that container into the general bladder or gas envelope it came from. This would necessitate pumps/compressors and the use of some energy. However, it would offer very fine control of the craft's lift and therefore altitude, without any loss of ballast or gas, and the process could be repeated as needed. In previous times, the canister to contain the compressed gas, and perhaps the pumps needed, might have been prohibitively expensive. Modern materials have changed this equation, probably enough to make this a weight-economical secondary system or primary system for altitude control (or to vary the weight-lifting capability) of such lighter-than-air craft. In the case of the NASA probe, such a device could be designed to be discarded at some point to allow higher-altitude surveys, if desired.

It might be necessary or convenient, for non-rigid airships or otherwise, to provide secondary bladders which would operate on these principles so that at least one portion of the structure remained rigidly inflated, even when such buoyancy bladders are deflated.

A better system than the above might be to provide a second "ballast air" bladder inside the main (buoyancy) bladder with a connection to the outside air. (During a descent, for example) air could be pumped into this bladder to replace any buoyant gas that was being compressed, adding a minor amount of weight and more importantly, maintaining the main bladder's pressure at a constant amount. When more buoyancy was wanted, and buoyant gas released into the main chamber again, air would be pumped out/released from the secondary or "air ballast" bladder. Such a system might be considered a bit more closely analogous to the way submarines work, and might be especially useful for shaped balloons or airships without a rigid frame.

Note, in any case, that only a portion of the buoyant gas needs to be compressed in order to alter the buoyancy of the craft overall. In order to vary altitude for a craft whose weight is being held constant, perhaps only quite a small portion - reducing the weight of such a system.

Prior Art:
(This is not intended to be exhaustive, and health and other work have prevented a proper search.) Fish have air bladders that are not wholly unlike such a device, and of course, submarines also vary their buoyancy, and by similar means. Air is used to displace water from the surrounding ocean in buoyancy tanks in order to make the machine more buoyant; and air is released or removed from buoyancy tanks, being replaced by outside water, in order to allow the machine to sink. So far as I know, a way of applying such principles to airships has not been introduced, however. Nor do I know with certainty whether submarines re-compress air from their buoyancy tanks instead of releasing it. If not, that advance would fall under this idea as well.