Was Milton Gomrath behind This?
According to The New York Post:
There was a method to their madness.
The selfish Sanitation bosses who sabotaged the blizzard cleanup to fire a salvo at City Hall targeted politically connected and well-heeled neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn to get their twisted message across loud and clear, The Post has learned.
Their motives emerged yesterday as the city's Department of Investigation admitted it began a probe earlier this week after hearing rumblings of a coordinated job action.
Sources told The Post several neighborhoods were on the workers' hit list -- including Borough Park and Dyker Heights in Brooklyn and Middle Village in Queens -- because residents there have more money and their politicians carry big sticks.
They carefully targeted neighborhoods where … the residents could actually curb unions?
What, if anything, were they thinking? Did they assume that all “working people” would never blame a union? I'm sure many people now think that unionized workers should be ionized instead.
Somehow, I don't think this was planned by the world's smartest garbageman.
Circumcision and the TSA
A few years ago, I pointed on Usenet that prohibiting circumcision would require violations of privacy:
In other words, enforcing anti-circumcision laws will require policeman
asking men to drop their pants.
I think that counts as a real violation of privacy (not a mere "penumbra"
this time).
More recently, I realized that, owing to the Trained Sodomy Administrators, we actually have policeman asking men to drop their pants.
Uh oh.
The Nature of Pro-Muslim Political Correctness
There are two brands of politically-correct defenses of the Other.
- The general defense: We have no right to judge societies. (Please note this also applies to their version of Western Civilization.) This also includes the idea that anything that goes wrong with a society is due to capitalist oppression. After all, holding a society responsible for its own problems is judging it.
- The specific defenses: These are defenses of the Other based on claims that said Other does a better job at something considered valuable than Western Civilization does. For example, the claims that China is much better at long-term planning, that Stalin's Soviet Union was able to industrialize in record time, that Native Americans preserved the ecosystem, that pre-agricultural societies had what is now considered to be an “enlightened” toward sex, … These claims aren't as self-contradictory as the general defense even if many of them are totally imaginary.
Offhand, I can't think of any specific defense of Islam from a non-Muslim on the left. All such defenses of Islam are based on the general defense.
I can think of an explanation or two of this odd fact but the explanation is half-baked enough to go back in the oven for a while.
Addendum: Never mind.
I Think That's “Fixed” as in a Fixed Boxing Match
According to New Scientist, George Soros thinks economics has to be fixed.
On the other hand, maybe he wants it to be neutered instead.
By the way, if we know less about economics than we thought, wouldn't that mean we don't know enough to regulate it?
Why We Need Muslim Immigration
In San Francisco, there's a ballot measure to ban circumcision:
San Francisco residents may vote on a ballot measure next year that would outlaw circumcision.
The initiative, which requires 7,000 signatures before it can be added to next November's ballot, would make it a misdemeanor to "circumcise, excise, cut or mutilate the...genitals" of all minors, and would not make exceptions for religious reasons.
The decision to permanently remove a boy's foreskin should not be made by parents, says Lloyd Shofield, the proposal's author.
I suspect this wouldn't get very far if we had more Muslim immigrants.
I Thought We had Already Hired Them
The latest plan to improve mass transit is to hire slime molds:
Since the best city planners around the world have not been able to end traffic jams, scientists are looking to a new group of experts: slime mold.
That's right, a species of gelatinous amoeba could help urban planners design better road systems to reduce traffic congestion, a new study found.
This is very strange. I thought governments have been run by slime molds for years.
My earlier comments on slime molds can be found here, there, and yonder.
We Don't Have to Worry about This
The New York Police Department has run a simulation of a terrorist attack similar to the Mumbai attack three years ago. In this simulation, they took over Macy's:
The police officials were given a fictional scenario that began with President Barack Obama visiting New York for a bill signing. At the same time, convicted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was scheduled to appear in a federal court.
The attacks began with bombings in downtown Manhattan "that resulted in 18 dead and dozens injured". The president went ahead with the bill signing at the World Trade Center site, when another bomb went off nearby. He was whisked away.
But the attack was not over.
Six gunmen piled out of a van at Herald Square and opened fire on shoppers and pedestrians. They then entered the Macy's department store and took 26 hostages.
I find that a bit hard to believe. I'm sure that in a real terrorist attack, the rest of us could defend ourselves with candy canes (there must be lots of them in Macy's this time of year):
Skylar Torbett, also a junior, said administrators told him, "They said the candy canes are weapons because you can sharpen them with your mouth and stab people with them." He said neither he nor any of their friend did that.
Set seriousness bit to ON. To paraphrase Richard Mitchell's remarks on anti-intellectualism, hoplophobia only begins with the hating of guns. From there it goes on to the ferreting out of hitherto-unsuspected manifestations of weaponry.
Gun Control and the Anti-Capitalist Mentality
After reading a review of The Illusion of Free Markets (apparently based on the theory that property rights require the State which, of course, means that everybody with property is on welfare), I realized the connection between gun control and socialism. In a society where you are unable to defend yourself, it's easy to think that property requires the State whereas if you are able to defend yourself, private property is seen as something that precedes the State. (My earlier criticisms of the claim that property rights are another type of welfare can be found here and here.)
Where do they get their crazy ideas?
The Illusion of Free Markets was written by Bernard Harcourt, a student of Sheldon Wolin, the author of a heaping pile of organic fertilizer known as Inverted Totalitarianism (earlier criticized here). I'm reminded of the following quote from Richard Mitchell:
IT is a poet's luxury to sit around and wonder what the vintners buy one half so precious as the stuff they sell. For us, it is harsh necessity to discover what the school people learn one half so preposterous as the stuff they teach. It's not all that easy, for the stuff they learn usually turns out to be twice as preposterous as the stuff they teach.
This argument does not lead where it was intended
While looking for comments on The Illusion of Free Markets, I found the following question:
If you have any idea of how the Mafia operated , think about it, and think about what a legalized Mafia would be doing, acting like, etc.
We know what kind of government the Mafia would set up. It would include gun control (ObSF: The Syndic by C. M. Kornbluth).
Wasn't This in the Silmarillion?
Scientists in Taiwan have claimed that gold nanoparticles could turn trees into streetlights.
Fëanor was not available for comment.
What to Cut and Why
As a result of YouCut (based on the ordinary citizens selecting government programs for termination), Scott Aaronson has sarcastically asked which scientific fields count as “hard” and therefore worthy of support. I will supply a non-sarcastic response.
One reason for academics to try to do without external support as much as possible is that such support produces the suspicion that they’re trimming their results to the agenda of the supporters. For example, it's common for critics of the Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis to claim that the supporters are merely looking for grants. (This type of theory is not limited to one side of the political spectrum.)
To the extent this happens, I don't think this is a matter of researchers asking supporters what answer they want and then producing it. It's more likely a matter of asking for a grant to find out if X is true (where X is something the supporter wants to be true) and then not publishing if the research doesn't produce a positive result.
One possible way to fight that is to preferentially support fields where negative results are mentioned more often. That might at least produce some peer pressure to report those negative results. It might even cut down on conspiracy theories.
In the specific case of research supported by corporations, anything that mentions “rent seeking,” should be considered a negative result.
History Is Moving Right
You can tell history is moving right when an idea invented by conservatives as a compromise is now considered left wing.
This isn't even that new. The same thing occurred with the negative income tax.
The Unexpected Hanging and Reality
There's a well-known paradox (explained here) about unexpected execution:
Once upon a time, on a Sunday evening, a prisoner was found guilty. The judge declared the prisoner would go to prison and be executed sometime in the coming week (Monday through Friday), but that the exact day would be a surprise for the prisoner. Now, the prisoner reasoned as follows: “I can’t be executed on Friday; because, in that case, it wouldn’t be a surprise. After Thursday, by process of elimination I’d know the exact day. So, Friday isn’t the day. But then, Thursday can’t be the day either. If I’m not executed by Wednesday, then I’ll know the day is Thursday, since I’ve just ruled out Friday. So, it’s not Thursday either. Similarly, it’s not Wednesday, Tuesday, or Monday. Hallelujah, I’m saved!”
This has had a real-world analog:
When the hangman failed to summon him from his cell by late December, Toshihiko Hasegawa, a convicted murderer, reckoned that, by the practices of Japan's penal system, he had at least one more year to live.
After weeks of intense foreboding over the approach of death, Mr. Hasegawa wrote his adoptive mother to tell her that he could at last breathe freely again for one more year, when he expected that his execution watch would resume.
………
Two days later, though, without any advance notice to him or his family, the 51-year-old prisoner was led from his cell and hanged.
In both cases, what appeared to be logical reasoning didn't quite work.
A Difference between Communism and Nazism
Instapundit is commenting on why Communists are treated differently by the media and academia than Nazis. This is not a matter of Communist holocaust denial. The typical response to Stalin's holocaust is not to actively deny it but to ignore it. (This is sometimes combined with the premise “If I haven't heard of something, it didn't exist.”) There are two reasons it is ignored. First, Communists made themselves boring. Second, leftists regard lessons from the past as unimportant. If you expect a whole new world different from anything that has gone before, there is no reason to think conclusions derived from the past are valid.
Communist motto: The sun will not rise tomorrow.
Neo-Nazi motto: The sun did not rise yesterday.
There is another reason for academia to defend Communists but not Nazis. Communism was backed by an extremely elaborate theory that required hiring lots of professors to explain. Nazism was much less elaborate. Since the first law of expert advice is to hire experts (Genesis 41:33), experts prefer Communism.
Life Imitates Science Fiction, Again
According to the New York Times:
Call it the Imagine Diet. You wouldn’t have to count calories, track food points or memorize rules. If, say, some alleged friend left a box of chocolate truffles in your home this holiday season, you would neither throw them away nor inhale them all. Instead, you would start eating imaginary chocolates.
………
So far, the Imagine Diet exists only in my imagination, as does any evidence of its efficacy. But there is some real evidence for the benefits of imaginary eating from experiments at Carnegie Mellon University reported in the current issue of Science. When people imagined themselves eating M & M’s or pieces of cheese, they became less likely to gorge themselves on the real thing.
“Sweet Dreams, Sweet Nothings” by Elizabeth Moon, Analog, September 1986.
Their Next Plan Is to Disable Stone Tablets and Cave Paintings
After making themselves a temporary nuisance on the Internet, Operation Payback will next try to disable fax machines.
There will be a slight pause while you say, “Who cares?” (as Jack Benny used to say).
Once Is an Accident
Twice is enemy action.
A second SF author has been arrested for what amounts to a refusal to kiss the butt of somebody in authority.
First it was Peter Watts. Now it's Joel Rosenberg.
Stay tuned.
Battle of the Conclusion Jumpers
I've seen two different reactions to the news of the possible discovery of arsenic-based life. On the one hand:
According to evolutionists, the evolutionary view of a single (and very ancient) origin of life is supported at the deepest level imaginable: the very nature of the DNA code in which the instructions of genes and chromosomes are written.
………
So while scientists are still holding on to the "DNA proves one universal common ancestor" claim, that idea is starting to look more shaky. There has now been discovered another significantly different type of DNA.
On the other hand (seen via Michael Flynn):
"The polite thing to say is that discoveries such as this don't really impeach the credibility of established religion, but in truth of course they really do," David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association (AHA), a leading secularist organization, said of this week's revelations about the microbes discovered in Lake Mono in California.
"The fact that life can spring forth in this way from nature, taken in context with what else we've learned in recent centuries about space and time, surely makes it less plausible that the human animal is the specially favored creation of all-powerful, all-knowing divinity," Niose said.
The two sides are in complete agreement: Any new fact proves they were right in the first place. If this research peters out (instead of panning out), they will still be in agreement that it didn't actually mean anything.
Maybe Exelon Support Is Not a Good Sign
On earlier occasions, I suggested that the connection between Exelon, America's largest nuclear utility, and Obama might be a good sign for this administration. Now it turns out that Exelon isn't pro-nuclear after all. There might be a bargain with anti-nuclear ideologues we don't know about. Is either WikiLeaks or Openleaks interested in following up?
By the way, the second article produces an obvious question: What is the opposite of NIMBY?
Preventing a Menace
BngBng reports on a potential future left-wing rabble rouser. We'll have to recruit him before he gets any further.
Since he's 15, the solution is simple: Hand him a copy of Atlas Shrugged (capitalism explained in such a way that an adolescent can understand it). Next year, he'll be on the other side.
This Just in: Research Finds We're Awesomely Awesome!
Okay, so the headline is not original.
According to a recent study of, of all things, eye movements (seen via Brothers Judd):
In a new study, UNL researchers measured both liberals' and conservatives' reaction to "gaze cues" – a person's tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person's eye movements, even if it's irrelevant to their current task – and found big differences between the two groups.
Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not.
In other words, we natural dissidents on the right side of the political spectrum are independent thinkers who refuse to follow the herd. We go beyond “trust and parrot” and …
OW!
I think I slipped a disk while patting myself on the back.
There's also the minor problem that this was based on a sample of only 72 subjects. Maybe we should wait until a real study has been done before jumping to conclusions.
Addendum: The paper can be found here.
Not a Long-Term Solution
Former Secretary of State George Shultz discusses a potential effect of WikiLeaks:
… But there is still another side to the problem. In the wake of this affair, the amount of candid written material related to the daily conduct of American foreign policy will surely diminish. We will lose our capacity to learn from our experiences, whether positive or negative. Historical memory will slowly be eradicated.
………
There is now a widespread, conscious reluctance in our society, whether in business or politics, to create records—and a disposition to destroy them when they exist. What I worry about is our ability to portray history accurately if such records are not at hand and leaders try to rely on their own memory, which is often flawed. …
What if a few decades from now we see routine use of computers implanted in the brain? It might become impossible to turn off recording devices without turning off brains. Even if computing power goes into creating “ems”, a refusal to record might involve discrimination against ems. That's likely to backfire.
On the other hand …
On the other hand, that might be Mr. Assange's goal:
In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance." He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. "To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed," he writes. "Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate," he writes, and "pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result."
His central plan is that leaks will restrict the flow of information among officials—"conspirators" in his view—making government less effective. Or, as Mr. Assange puts it, "We can marginalize a conspiracy's ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment. . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself."
I doubt if Mr. Assange's actions will have his intended effect in a society, such as the United States, that is not actually an authoritarian conspiracy. The United States has several distinct factions and, in a WikiLeaks environment, those that are most inclined to secrecy will do something stupid. (This might already be happening. Did the CRU data release produce a culture of secrecy that resulted in the notorious “exploding kids video”?).
Meanwhile, given the authoritarian nature of the WikiLeaks organization, maybe we need WikiLeaksLeaks, an organization dedicated to revealing everything WikiLeaks is trying to keep secret.
I Thought He Was in Favor of It
Julian Assange is of two minds when it comes to espionage:
MADRID — President Barack Obama should resign if it can be shown that he approved spying by US diplomatic figures on UN officials, the founder of WikiLeaks said in an interview published Sunday.
"The whole chain of command who was aware of this order, and approved it, must resign if the US is to be seen to be a credible nation that obeys the rule of law. The order is so serious it may well have been put to the president for approval," Julian Assange told Spanish daily El Pais.
The US shouldn't arrest him. He should arrest himself.
Gold-Pressed Latinum?
Scientists have claimed to have found element 111 in gold.
We are still waiting for dilithium crystals.
A Note on Wikileaks
To my fellow wingnuts: Someday we might need to leak something.
To repeat something I have said before:
OTOH, the most obvious organization for terrorists and fellow travelers to infiltrate is the Federal Government, so we Americans should be given immediate access to classified material. We should be wary of secrecy. It can enable enemies of freedom to flourish.
This even applies to the Current Unpleasantness. For example, many government agencies have reacted by taking any discussion of threats offline. Since The Enemy has been plotting for years, they probably already know about those threats and even if they didn't it would take them years to do anything. Taking any mention of the threats offline will hamper the ability of ordinary citizens (the people who prevented the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania from being used as a weapon and the people who stopped Maxwell Stupid, the shoebomber) to come up with countermeasures. Instead, we are supposed to let the goofballs in the FBI, CIA, etc. to defend us.
But wait, there's more. Ralph Nader, the Arab American most likely to be a real sleeper agent, went to great lengths to get Dubya elected. Is there another sleeper agent in Dubya's staff? Was the same person responsible for the criticisms of Israel, the word "crusade," the phrase "Infinite Justice," and dropping food packages the same color as bombs? Is the secrecy policy a matter of national security or is it to enable moles to work undetected by reporters?
Even if the Feds haven't been infiltrated, deputizing spies will merely provide them with more information than they can handle. A single organization can't monitor that much information. That's why everybody must have snooping devices. The CIA can't monitor wannabee terrorists, their neighbors will have to do the monitoring.
If we look at the Current Unpleasantness, the government had the data needed to catch the terrorists ahead of time but did not have the manpower to analyze it. Once we get close to 300 million people on the case...
Modern wars are fought with intelligence. Each of us is a member of the unorganized militia and now we should regard each of us as a member of the unorganized CIA.
This even applies to encryption. Supposedly, it is now a public menace. If that's the case, we should ensure that decryption is as widespread as possible. IOW, the DMCA must be repealed.
Addendum: This movie was mistimed.
A Problem with Potential Anti-TSA Regulations
One problem with passing laws defending the right to privacy is that they can be by the government against citizens as well as vice versa. For example:
This summer the issue of recording on-duty police officers has received a great deal of media attention. Camera-wielding citizens were arrested in Maryland, Illinois, and Massachusetts under interpretations of state wiretapping laws, while others were arrested in New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Florida, and elsewhere based on vaguer charges related to obstructing or interfering with a police officer.
Someday a backscatter x-ray might be needed to find out what the government has been up to. If we pass enough laws against it, those laws may be used against you.
Anti-wiretapping laws used to look anti-authoritarian, too …
A Crime against Nature?
BP has been accused of a crime against nature in an Ecuadorian court (seen via BoingBoing).
The term “crime against nature,” of course, has more than one meaning. I wonder how many environmentalists realize they're providing a precedent that could be used by the other ignorant army.
A Real Case of a Juggling Scientist
In case anybody was dubious about PhD Comics' use of a juggling scientist, there was a real one, Claude Shannon:
While I was at MIT, I heard stories that Shannon had unicycled down the Infinite Corridor, juggling as he went. I have yet to find anyone who actually saw this event, but I’m still asking.
and
Unlike most brilliant theoretical mathematicians, Claude was also wonderfully adept with tools and machines, and frequently built little gadgets and inventions, usually with the goal of being whimsical rather than practical. "I've always pursued my interests without much regard to financial value or value to the world. I've spent lots of time on totally useless things," Shannon said in 1983. These useless things would include his juggling robot, a mechanical mouse that could navigate a maze, and a computing machine that did all its calculations in roman numerals.
This
Explanation: I was planning to post something on that and somehow never got around to it. Meanwhile I also pushed the wrong button and a stub intended as a reminder to myself to write about it got published. I'd delete it except someone already commented.
On the other hand, I'd already posted on the same topic.
I Read Too Fast
At first I thought this headline read:
Students Campaign For Alternative Humans
Now, where did I put my “Mutants for Nuclear Power” button?
The Great Minds Training the Next Generation
A hoplophobic teacher tried to ban pencils (seen via View from the Porch):
The memo explained that students would be issued a pencil that would be collected at the end of the school day, for use in class. It asked parents to discuss the rules with students over the weekend and to be sure they did not bring contraband writing implements into class.
………
The teachers’ memo explained that the change was being made because of behavior problems and indicated that any student found in possession of a pen or mechanical pencil after Nov. 15 would be “assumed” to have the implement “to build weapons,” or to have “stolen” it from the classroom art supply basket.
The really astounding part is that the school administration actually showed some sense:
A letter banning the possession of anything but a school-issued No. 2 yellow pencil in sixth-grade classes at North Brookfield Elementary School “went over the line,” the school superintendent said yesterday. The letter that was sent home indicated teachers were dealing with a discipline problem and believed the ban would address the issue.
In a related story…
Some years ago, a teacher broke new ground in the treatment of antonyms:
Pink's story reminds me of a tale that made the rounds of the Mensa
newsletters back when, concerning a kid who brought home a paper marked
wrong by the teacher. The question was "What is the opposite of frog?"
The incensed parent challenged the teacher, claiming that there is no such
thing as the opposite of frog, whereupon the teacher in the haughtiest
possible manner informed the parent that the opposite of frog is tadpole.
Most people I've asked say the opposite of “frog” is “gorf,” but a few say it's “anti-frog.”
A Suggestion
The TSA irradiation policy can continue … as long as the officials looking are nude and visible to the public.
What sauce for the goose …
Search My Bag But Not My Butt
I wasn't planning to say much more about the TSA nonsense (I rarely fly) but the news that Janet Napoleonic complex wants to extend the same system to trains and buses is forcing me to reconsider.
I'll say more after the steam has stopped pouring out of my ears.
Maybe I can look on the bright side: It will be an opportunity to recruit libertarians…
My earlier comments on bag searches can be found here, there, and yonder.
It Just Might Work
Yohogania Energy Resources has found a way to fight global warming that might be even better than nukes:
Sustainable Coal Mining
For every 200 pounds of coal we extract, we bury a tree.
They Exist!
There are actually some people willing to defend the Tit-Squeezing Authority. For example, Orin Judd regards the following as an adequate refutation of Bruce Schneier's criticism of the TSA policies:
Put two planes at the airport gate and offer Mr. Schneier a flight on the one where passengers have been thoroughly searched or on the one where it is assumed that's a waste of time and money and which one is he getting on? 'Nuff said.
The plane where the passengers haven't been searched is more likely to have a passenger with the weaponry that might help fight back against terrorists.
As for the other side of the defenses of Totally Screwing Americans … To any leftists who might be reading this, the numerous accusations that the Tea-Party protests are astroturf are based on the same amount of evidence as this heaping pile of horsebleep.
Sheep Must Be Smart
… and locusts must be geniuses.
According to a recent study:
The study analysed available data on the brain and body size of over 500 species of living and fossilised mammals. The brains of monkeys grew the most over time followed by horses, dolphins, camels and dogs.
It found that groups of mammals with relatively bigger brains tended to live in stable social groups. The brains of more solitary mammals such as cats, deer and rhino, grew much more slowly during the same period.
Slime molds, of course, are the most social creatures on Earth (even if they sometimes make logical errors) and must be superintelligent.
Artificial Intelligence vs. Intelligence Amplification, Part IV
My earlier speculations on AI vs. IA can be found here, there, and yonder.
In Part II, I gave as a reason to regard IA as more likely than Colossus, Skynet, or HAL 9000:
The theory that a few Great Minds can outdo a crowd of supposedly-lesser minds is one of the bases of central planning. The central planners supposedly know best. In the real world …
Along similar lines, attempts to keep undesirables out of the United States generally kept out people we can now recognize as assets.
In the Leviathan version of AI, democracies have generally been more successful than dictatorships. Similarly, attempts to regulate corporations (whether pro- or anti-corporate), have generally pushed business across the state or national boundary.
More recently, Robin Hanson in his series of posts on Overcoming Bias on “ems” has made it clear that he expects the next exponential mode to be a matter of an exponential growth in the number of emulated personalities (called “ems”). I had earlier thought he was theorizing a situation similar to that in “Slow Tuesday Night” by R. A. Lafferty.
I was a bit dubious about Hanson's theory on the grounds that I thought the surplus computing power would be more likely to go into amplifying ordinary human beings than into making more human personalities. I then realized that that was based on the theory that “a few Great Minds can outdo a crowd of supposedly-lesser minds,” which is the same theory that I rejected earlier.
Hmmmm… Maybe AI will be more important in the future than I had expected…
An Update on Upper-Dimension Axioms
I just realized that the first upper-dimension axiom on my Netcom/Earthlink site (earlier mentioned here) also implies Euclid's axiom. In English, the axiom means that every sphere can be put inside a n-dimensional simplex. In a Lobachevskian space there's an upper limit to the size of a triangle.
After Listening to Parts of The Girl Who Beat a Dead Horse Trilogy on Tape
After listening to parts of The Girl Who Beat a Dead Horse trilogy on tape (also known as the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson), I decided it sounds too much like a leftist revenge fantasy. Not merely leftist, but Stalinist. (If you betray the Great People's Socialist Revolution comrade, we will depict you as a sadistic pervert and anybody who comes to your aid as downright fascist.)
Does this mean I have to read it to be sure?
A Color I Didn't Know Existed
According a commenter at Hot Air:
The fact is that the United States is now and always has been an overwhelmingly European and Christian nation- the so-called melting pot containing mostly by far white protestants of Anglo-Germanic descent.
“Far-white”? What color is that? Is it anything like “infra-yellow” from the Green Lantern comic books?
New You Can Use
There's a Russian holiday called Procreation Day … in case you were planning to move there.
Shorter Kenneth Brower
Freeman Dyson is a heretic! STONE HIM!
Old News
The fact that some of Gödel's undecidable statements were about natural numbers is old news. The new part is that now some of them are understandable to mathematicians who aren't specialists in the subject. Actually, that is big news to those of us who used to suspect that logicians pulled their statements out of a vulgar body aperture just to be ornery.
The news article was seen via Orin Judd, who thinks it's a defense of theology. Come to think of it, even that interpretation is old news. I'm reminded of Paul Gordan's statement:
Das ist nicht Mathematik. Das ist Theologie.
There was even a theological doctrine that inspired a mathematician or two.
A Problem with an Overpopulation==Disaster Scenario
The following is a common illustration of why We Must Do Something About Imminent Overpopulation Immediately (quoted by Dan Gardner):
Imagine a test tube filled with food. That's the Earth, he says. Now introduce a single bacterium to that test tube and let it grow exponentially. In the first minute, one bacterium becomes two bacteria. In the second minute, two become four. Four become eight. Eight become 16. If it takes one hour for the bacteria to multiply until they fill the entire test tube and there's no more food -- and the bacteria all die -- when will the test tube be exactly half full of food and half full of bacteria?
In the 59th minute. Which is strange because at that moment things look fine. But the very next minute, catastrophe strikes.
The problem with the above scenario isn't, contrary to Dan Gardner, that an environmentalist is more certain about the catastrophe than about potential solutions. It's quite common for some parts of a field of knowledge to be known to a greater degree of certainty than other parts. To put this is terms that my fellow wingnuts can understand, it's possible to be certain that funny money will lead to inflation and also disclaim the knowledge that can enable a government to pick winners.
The problem with the scenario is that it points the reader's attention at the ratio between the time until Disaster Strikes and the total elapsed time (in this case 1/60). The important ratio is that between the time until Disaster Strikes and the reaction time of the organisms in question. That is likely to be less spectacular.
There's also the little problem that bacteria use up the nutrients but don't produce them. That's unlikely with humans.
More on Sewage
Free the Animal has a suggestion for how to obtain vitamin B12 the vegan way:
Here's what I propose: Let's encapsulate fresh, raw poop -- from ruminants or primates (intervention studies could later determine which is more effective in raising B12 levels). Can you imagine the premium you could charge if it had to be air tight, refrigerated, so the bacteria could keep doing their thing all the while?
There are precedents in stone-age beer and Kopi Luwak coffee.
In other words, it's been done.
Debate Wanted
The news that a recent study showed that alcohol is more dangerous than nearly any illegal kind of mind-shrinking chemical has been going around the blogosphere. A debate between these researchers and the other researchers (these guys?) who have been claiming marvelous benefits from drinking may be amusing … at least to those of us with some brain cells left.
While I'm at it …
This is as good a time as any to point out the most important reason to legalize marijuana: Legalization will keep stoners from voting. The only possible explanation for California's election results is that it was the result of a coalition between stoners and public-employee unions. (The unions must have voted down Proposition 19; if it were passed they would have been deprived of their allies.)
Two Different Waves of the Future
The left still regards itself as the Wave of the Future. They can buttress that by pointing to the support of the media and academia (which are of growing importance in society) and the tendency of many immigrant groups to vote Democratic. An essential part of that self image is the support of Jewish voters. Jews are disproportionately involved in media and academia and are regarded as an immigrant group (even when third generation) by mainstream leftists and allegedly right-wing loons.
On the other hand, we see the fact that people in more traditional households vote Republican and are out-reproducing the Enlightened Ones. These two tendencies collide in the Ultra-Orthodox community which is both Jewish and traditional. If the left can get the support of the Hasidim, they can continue to pat themselves on the back.
It looks like the Democrats lost Hasidic support this year.
In a possibly-related story, Congressman McMahon channeled his inner Samuel D. Burchard and was defeated.
A Rare Republican Loss
I regret to say that, owing to the loss by State Senator Frank Padavan, I work in a district that will not be represented by any Republicans at all.
In previous elections, I noticed signs saying “Democrats for Padavan.” I didn't see any this year. The Democratic strategy of trying to ensure unanimity among people they regard as their base may have paid off in this case. (It might also explain the election results in southern New England.)
By the way, is it my imagination or did the Democrats win a disproportionate percentage of close races?
After a Decade and a Half
In Willful ignorance as a campaign platform, Orac said:
It's depressing to think that after today people like this may well be running the House:
Intellectual standards in politics are definitely declining. Just a decade and half ago, we had a Speaker of the House with a PhD!
Update on Undecidable “Elementary” Geometry
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had trouble locating upper- and lower-dimensional axioms for Tarski's system. You can find examples in this presentation. On the other hand, I prefer mine.
As for devising a plausible way to express spirals, I have run into a problem. Whenever I try thinking too hard about lines, circles, and spirals, the theme song for The Thomas Crown Affair keeps going through my head and interfering…
The Abolition of Man?
There's a discussion at Less Wrong on the feasibility and morality of stopping possible future changes in values:
Change in values of the future agents, however sudden of gradual, means that the Future (the whole freackin' Future!) won't be optimized according to our values, won't be anywhere as good as it could've been otherwise. It's easier to see a sudden change as morally relevant, and easier to rationalize gradual development as morally "business as usual", but if we look at the end result, the risks of value drift are the same. And it is difficult to make it so that the future is optimized: to stop uncontrolled "evolution" of value (value drift) or recover more of astronomical waste.
Regardless of difficulty of the challenge, it's NOT OK to lose the Future. The loss might prove impossible to avert, but still it's not OK, the value judgment cares not for feasibility of its desire. Let's not succumb to the deathist pattern and lose the battle before it's done. Have the courage and rationality to admit that the loss is real, even if it's too great for mere human emotions to express.
A society that can stop values from changing is what C. S. Lewis warned about in The Abolition of Man:
The latter point is not always sufficiently emphasized, because those who write on social matters have not yet learned to imitate the physicists by always including Time among the dimensions. In order to understand fully what Man's power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. And we must also remember that, quite apart from this, the later a generation comes—the nearer it lives to that date at which the species becomes extinct—the less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects will be so few. There is therefore no question of a power vested in the race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.
The real picture is that of one dominant age—let us suppose the hundredth century A.D.—which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well aas stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.
Reading mid-20th-century SF (with psychohistory or the Lensmen or the Psychology Service etc.) and comparing it to mid-20th-century history made me realize that the above quote was not any kind of a straw-man argument. At the time, it was a common idea that just as knowledge of Nature led to control of Nature, knowledge of Man would lead to control of Man. The question of who would do the controlling was rarely mentioned. (Reading The Abolition of Man out of context makes it look like a wacko combination of “traditional values” conservatism and green nonsense.) It looks like there's an attempt at Less Wrong to revive this.
As for fighting this, I suspect the best tactic is likely to be, of all things, space colonization. Once hominids are spread over several solar systems, even the most powerful Planners won't have complete control. Interstellar distances might not yet be “God's quarantine regulations” but they might be someday.
Seriously Now, What Do You Think Is Going to Happen?
In view of the unlikeliness of the scenarios in the preceding post, I suppose I should mention what I think is the most likely effect of our civilization getting close to a carrying capacity: Rents will rise. There's lots of evidence increasing rents cause lower birth rates. In other words, we can expect population to level off long before any catastrophe.
The real question
The real question isn't whether there's clear evidence of current overpopulation (there isn't). It isn't even whether overpopulation is theoretically possible (it isn't the slam dunk that Malthusians think, but it's “the way to bet”). The real question is whether overshoot is likely.
Let's consider the consequences either way. If overshoot is unlikely, we don't have to worry about overpopulation until it actually happens. Since it's not actually happening, we don't have to worry about it. If overshoot is likely, we have to worry about overpopulation even if it doesn't look like a problem. In particular, we should be sensitive to even the slightest hint of population problems, even if they're anecdotal.
There are three main reasons to take overshoot seriously. First, overshoot is a phenomenon frequently observed in animals. It is rarely seen in plants. As far as ecology is concerned, humans are, of course, plants. When there are more of a species of animal there is less of what that animal eats. When there are more of a species of plant, the resources the plant needs either increase (soil) or stay the same (sunlight). The only resources that humans treat the way animals do are fossil fuels and wild fish. Both of those should be obsolete soon.
Second, in the past overpopulation theorists tended to underestimate carrying capacity. When they predicted population would level off soon, the population increased past the point they predicted. Rather than admit they made a mistake, some of them started to claim that the population would not level off but instead crash. On the other hand, now that some countries are declining in population, that theory may disappear.
Third, there's the potato chip from Brazil phenomenon. In It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown, there are the following lines:
Lucy: Well, look here. A big yellow butterfly. It's unusual to see one of those at THIS time of year, unless of course, it flew up from Brazil. I'll bet that's it. They DO that sometimes, you know. They fly up from Brazil.
Linus: That's no butterfly! That's a potato chip.
Lucy: Well, I'll be. I wonder how a potato chip got all the way down here from Brazil!
Overshoot looks like a potato chip from Brazil.
A Math Problem Posed by a Reason Commenter
In the course of a discussion of a Ronal Bailey column on overpopulation hysteria, D Kingsbury (that's the author best known for a novel about eugenicist cannibals trying to breed professional politicians) wrote:
"We are headed for the stars, whether you're ready or not," says Mr Lol. Ha. ha. Lol, you are obviously not a mathematician and probably cannot even add. Learn something about exponential functions. If the human race started to expand TODAY at the velocity of light, and was able to convert ALL mass in our path to serve the human need for bodies, and at the present rate of population increase, we'd run out of mass in less time than it took to get where we are now from the time of the pharaohs. Lol, RIGHT NOW you are in the middle of a violent population explosion and you just don't see it because you are such a transient mayfly. With your limited command of reality you couldn't possibly see as far as a future where man might be involved in interstellar exploration!
In response to that, I wrote:
Okay. If we're expanding close to the speed of light, time dilation will slow the rate of growth.
In turn, D Kingsbury replied:
Hertz, you don't understand time dilation. In the first place, time dilation requires an INCREASE in mass. People may be screwing at a slower rate but they are multiple-thousands of times heavier and multiple-thousands of times more resource (mass) hungry. AND they have to STOP to colonize. Nor do you understand volume to surface ratios -- the bigger you are (volume) the smaller is the "surface to volume ratio." Jeez, take a math course. Sure we can go into space, maybe even interstellar space -- but you can only do that from a stable population base. Note that I said "stable" not "constant." If you look at stability as a mathematical concept, what we have today CANNOT be defined as stable. Don't worry, nature's constraints will FORCE a stable configuration whether it is 9 billion or Trantor's 30 billion or whatever You may not like that world when it comes. If you are a teenager now, in forty years you may be one of the desperately poor multitudes -- unless you're one of the few who will have figured out how to exploit your fellow man and are rich enough to hire guards and own an armored car. Even then you might end up in a spider hole like Saddam after a few years of living off your fellow man. If you seriously think we humans can avoid nature's constraints you have tipped over into insanity. Run as fast as you want, the constraints will catch up. The boogy-man lives under your bed.
Oh boy, it's a calculus problem! (Calling it differential equations might have been a bit pretentious.)
Let's set up the equations according to the model. The rate of increase in total human biomass M is Ṁ = αTdM, in which α is the growth rate and Td is the time-dilation factor. Since we are assuming “the human race started to expand TODAY at the velocity of light, and was able to convert ALL mass in our path to serve the human need for bodies” and if we further assume that the human need also includes transportation needs, we must recall that the time dilation Td = Ec2/M, where E is the total energy available and c is the speed of light. The total energy E = Dc2(ct3), where D is the density of the universe and t is the time. Putting it together, we get: Ṁ = αM2/D(ct3). This can be expressed as: dM/dt = αM2/D(ct3) or d(1/M) = (α/2Dc3)d(1/t2). When we integrate both sides, we get: 1/M = (α/2Dc3)(1/t2) + Constant. To sum up: M = 1/[(α/2Dc3)(1/t2) + Constant].
Long breath now …
The long-term behavior of M depends on whether the constant is positive or negative. If M is small enough, the constant will be positive, which means time dilation will ensure that population levels off. If it is large enough for the constant to be negative, the population will reach ∞ in a finite time. It looks like Kingsbury assumes the constant was negative.
In order to judge whether the constant is positive or negative, we must compare M (the human biomass) with 2Dc3t2/α. If we want to know what t is, we should consider the total mass available to humanity at the time of the singularity, Mh and set it equal to Dc3t3. When we put everything together, we get: D1/3Mh2/3c/α. The density of the universe (according to some astronomers) is 5×10-27 kg/m3. We can assume that Mh is the mass of the Earth: 6×1024 kg. c is 3×108 m/s. The fastest human population growth rate, according to Malthus, is 6%/year, which is α = 2×10-9 s-1. This amounts to 8×1024 kg. The current human biomass at 7×109 people and 100 kg per person (a round figure) is 7×1011. In other words, the population is small enough that Kingsbury's scenario is nonsense.
It is, of course, possible to move the goalposts and point out that the above calculations are oversimplified to “the limits of the preposterous and beyond” (as Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson would have said), but there's no reason to believe that a more thorough analysis would be any more supportive of Malthusian theories.
One last trivial little point: D Kingsbury said in the quotes above: “Jeez, take a math course.” I think I have.
A Possible Explanation of the Waste Heat Obsession
One of the favorite hobbies of Malthusians is to try to derive a reason why Population Growth Must Stop from first principles. The analysis is written down on the proverbial back of an envelope, which is then passed from environmentalist to environmentalist without coming in contact with reality.
One of the most obvious attempts was the use of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which can be misinterpreted to say everything must decline. In a more sophisticated use, it says that, in a closed system, heat will accumulate. (Never mind, that the Earth isn't a closed system.) I suspect John Holdren's belief that heat is a major global problem (mentioned here) came from that. I recall that the first objections to nuclear power plants came from people worried about “thermal pollution.” in roughly the same era. It petered out when Jeremy Rifkin published Entropy, a New World View and exposed it to public scrutiny.
There are other attempts. In 1959, Isaac Asimov wrote an essay “Life's Bottleneck” in Fantasy & Science Fiction (reprinted in Fact and Fancy) about the danger of the world's supply of phosphorus washing into the sea. (In the real world, phosphorus is the 12th commonest element in the Earth's crust and can be easily recycled from bullsh!t anyway.) This has been passed from one self-congratulatory environmentalist to another for years.
There's also the claim that if we expand at an exponential rate long enough, the space occupied by human bodies will be expanding faster than the speed of light. Of course, in that case, time dilation will reduce the rate of growth. (I intend to post an analysis of this in a day or two, complete with differential equations.)
Addendum: The above-mentioned analysis is up.
Saaaay What!?
According to Instapundit:
Forget cultural insularity or smugness. The main problem with the “new elite” is that they’re not an elite at all. That is, they aren’t particularly smart, or competent. They are credentialed, but those credentials aren’t so much markers for smartness or competence, or even basic education, as they are admission tickets to the Gentry Class, based on good standardized test scores.
He was making sense until the last phrase. I've been more impressed with their opposition to standardized tests. The combination of claims of brains and opposition to any objective method of testing those claims is not the mark of the arrogant but the mark of bluffers.
An Irrelevant Comment on the LCROSS Data
If LCROSS detected a witches' brew of chemicals on the lunar surface … does future senator O'Donnell have anything to do with it?
They Might Understand It All Too Well
According to Lydia McGrew, college students today have a bizarre reaction to “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. (For the benefit of anybody who didn't read the story, it's about an apparently-normal small town in which one person is chose by lot each year to be a human sacrifice.) Instead of reacting with horror, the students defended the townspeople on the grounds that we're not supposed to judge a society.
One possible reason for the change is that the most obvious instance of the unwilling being sacrificed with the approval of the Establishment within memory in the 1970s was a war carried out by a drafted army. The most obvious instance of the unwilling being sacrificed with the approval of the Establishment today is abortion. (In the early 1970s, abortion had been opposed by the Establishment within the memory of college students.) In other words, they took the viewpoint of the sacrificed in the 1970s and the sacrificers today.
Which reminds me … Many of my fellow wingnuts will look at cultural relativists and figure they are in favor of letting every civilization develop in its own way but will make an exception for Western Civilization. On the contrary, they believe in letting every civilization develop in its own way including Western Civilization … which to them means Roe vs. Wade cannot be criticized.
As for fighting this, one possibility is for a teacher to announce that the teacher comes from a culture where people with those ideas flunk and that, by cultural-relativist principles, a decision to flunk an entire class cannot be criticized. For obvious reasons, this can be done only by tenured professors.
XKCD vs. John Campbell
According to XKCD, the lack of use of psychic phenomena is a major argument against the reality of such woo:
Eventually, arguing that these things work means arguing that modern capitalism isn't that ruthlessly profit-focused.
On the other hand, according to John Campbell editorials, businesses do use psychic phenomena … but keep it secret.
On the gripping hand (am I overusing that phrase?), the mainstream media haven't uncovered that. That means:
- They're missing an opportunity to do some scandal mongering (superstitious capitalists are wasting YOUR money!).
- A bunch of humanities majors are missing an opportunity to bash the people who passed the classes they flunked.
I won't more than mention the fact that the numerous claims across the Internet that oil companies use dowsers tend to be short on specifics.
I'm a Bit Embarrassed by This
Just a day or two after ridiculing “Darwinian believers” who know almost nothing else about science, Ilkka Kokkarinen mentioned the same idea, but used as an example a concept I am not familiar with:
In spirit of Derb's observation of how "belief in evolution" is really just a class marker, as is easily revealed by asking the supposed evolution enthusiast to explain the Fisher-Kolmogorov equation (or even better, simply acknowledge the existence of innate hereditary variation in humans), one easy way to shut these pests up is to ask them to prove that the Mandelbrot set is symmetric with respect to the real axis.
On the other hand, at least I have some idea why the Mandelbrot set is symmetric with respect to the real axis.
On the gripping hand, I suspect the Fisher–Kolmogorov equation is less fundamental than inclusive fitness or hormesis, concepts I did know about.
The Late Benoît Mandelbrot
The late Benoît Mandelbrot helped heal the split between pure and applied mathematics. Before Mandelbrot, we had pure mathematicians working on things such as Cantor sets, non-differentiable curves, and point sets consisting entirely of branch points (which were obviously far more complex than anything in applied mathematics) and, on the other hand, we had applied mathematicians working on things such as line noise, financial markets, and the Eiffel Tower (which were obviously far more complex than anything in pure mathematics). Mandelbrot pointed out that, to a good approximation, the two lines of research were about the same thing.
Mandelbrot's research has another implication. I'm sure it's occurred to most people who have studied the hard sciences that they're far more useful than that fuzzy stuff. This is important because being useful is one of the best ways to ensure that you aren't fooling yourself. On the other hand, most pure mathematicians are bound to wonder if their apparently-useless specialties are just more of those fuzzy subjects. When Mandelbrot found a use for some of the most apparently-ridiculous parts of mathematics, he gave the rest of us an excuse to study the not-yet-useful stuff. Maybe someday we'll even find a use for the Banach–Tarski paradox.
A More Easily Evaluated Problem?
According to John Holdren (quoted here, seen via Greenie Watch):
A more easily evaluated problem is the tremendous quantity of waste heat generated at nuclear installations (to say nothing of the usable power output, which, as with power from whatever source, must also ultimately be dissipated as heat). Both have potentially disastrous effects on the local and world ecological and climatological balance.
The above quote appears to be real. On the other hand, it's from an article hidden behind a paywall. On the gripping hand, a search using Google Scholar will bring one to the same article.
I'll say it's a “more easily evaluated problem.” The above quote can be easily evaluated to be a heaping load of bullbleep. If we assume that the world population is 6.8 billion (almost enough to stand on Zanzibar), that a future advanced civilization uses 1.5 kilowatts per person (the same as the current U.S.), and that the power is generated at a thermal efficiency of 33%, then the total heat output (from both the power generators and the eventual dissipation of the electric power as heat) is about 3×1013 watts. The sunlight hitting the Earth is about 1.8×1017 watts, 6000 times greater. The extra heat won't be noticed.
If the human population rises to over a trillion, we might start to see some problems. On the other hand, by that time we will be spread all over the Solar System, which will increase the heat-dissipation area by a factor of billions.
The Cultural Correlations for Darwinism vs. Creationism
The cultural correlations for Darwinism vs. Creationism (recently discussed by TJIC) don’t fit very well. In a rational world, you would expect the Darwinian believers to have large families, to disapprove of homosexuality or euthanasia, and to be skeptical of central planning (also, see this blog).
On the other hand, the correlations fit Malthus (Darwin's predecessor) vs. cornucopians very well. It looks like Darwinism inherited the Malthusians.
Addendum: The phrase “Darwinian believers” might need an explanation. When people who know almost nothing else about science are convinced of the truth of Darwin's explanation of evolution, they're taking it on faith.
Are Building Restrictions Caused by Small Families?
A small family has different economic incentives regarding what type of zoning law to support than large families. For a one-child family an increase in housing costs by $10,000 will increase the family's wealth by $10,000 but the eventual house costs of the child by only $5,000 (assuming the child's spouse pays for half the costs). For a six-child family the eventual house costs will increase by $30,000 in that scenario. So if you ever wondered why people in areas with relatively-high birth rates are more likely to support capitalism, the answer should be obvious.
There's Wind Power …
… and there's breaking wind power:
A pilot project run by Centrica in a plant at Didcot sewage works, Oxfordshire, is the first in Britain to produce renewable gas from sewage for households to use.
I Knew My Math Education Would Have a Use
As a result, I understood the last panel and title text of this Xkcd cartoon and the odds are you didn't.
Advice for the DioGuardi for Senate Campaign
There's a problem with the Joe DioGuardi for Senate campaign: his smile.
Joe DioGuardi's smile looks like he heard a rumor of a newfangled facial expression called a “smile” and wanted to try it out. It looks downright un-American.
Either try for a more realistic (or at least more American) smile or ditch the smile completely. There's a handy excuse for ditching the smile: This economy is not a matter for smiles.
Parasites Have Parasites
According to Jonathan Swift:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.
In a related story, the IRS has bedbugs.
Undecidable “Elementary” Geometry, II
A couple of years ago, I mentioned that the elementary geometry of points, lines, and circles becomes undecidable when it includes screws or spirals. More recently, I have wondered how to express a suitable set of axioms for spirals. If we start with Tarski's axioms, this includes the necessary (but insufficient) step of replacing the two-dimensional upper- and lower-dimension axioms with their three-dimensional equivalents.
According to the Wikipedia article on Tarski's axioms, it can be easily extended to higher dimensions by changing the upper- and lower-dimension axioms. On the other hand, it didn't include examples of those and the papers that give examples appear to be hidden behind pay walls. So I had to devise my own…
In short, I have uploaded a file containing a JavaScript program to produce upper- and lower-dimension axioms to my Netcom/Earthlink site. (This included the JavaScript program mentioned here.)
Next I have to come up with a plausible way to express spirals …
Life, in JavaScript for Opera
I have just uploaded a Life program to my Netcom/Earthlink site. It is supposed to produce a Life display using JavaScript to produce bitmaps. It only works properly in Opera (the scrappy independent web browser).
How Much Do Irreligious People Know about Religion?
I'm sure most of my fellow reactionaries have heard about a Pew poll that showed atheists and agnostics did better on a test of religious knowledge than religious people.
I noticed there were two groups of irreligious people in the survey “Atheist/agnostic” (who did well) and “Nothing in particular” (who did badly). My initial reaction was to suspect the difference is that atheists will argue in favor of unbelief, whereas nothingists don't bother. On the other hand, the people passing around the “Open letter to Dr. Laura” a few years ago (which sounded amazingly like Christine O'Donnell talking about evolution) were arguing in favor of unbelief but were rejecting a middle-school understanding of religion. The distinction between “Atheist/agnostic” and “Nothing in particular” appears to be important, but I'm not sure of what it is. (The distinction has gotten into Jewish folklore.)
This does explain why some people are invincibly convinced that they know far more about religion than the actual religious people, even if they have a middle-school understanding.
Is counter-signaling involved?
It's possible the apparent low quality of argumentation among atheists might be counter-signaling. It's also possible that someone who isn't signaling at all might be mistaken for someone who's counter-signaling.
Along similar lines, Matt Simpson at Less Wrong claimed to be counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-signaling. I suppose someone who is above all the levels of n-counter-signaling would be ω-counter-signaling … and someone who is better than that is ω+1-counter-signaling …
Of course, the theological opinions of someone able to ω1CK-counter-signal (ω1CK is the ordinal greater than which no ordinal can be conceived) should be taken very seriously because He really is God …
Markets Are Faster than Government
XKCD noticed a problem (identifying @ssholes) and advocated a government solution. Before any government could grab credit, a business started solving the same problem.
I'm not sure if the business will also charge a “negligence fee.”
The Most Sensible Thing the UN Has Done in Decades
The UN has appointed an ambassador to space aliens:
THE United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earth’s first contact for any aliens that may come visiting.
Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN's little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire.
At least now we know what to do when asked, “Take me to your leader.”
Addendum: There's an update.
A JavaScript Bug and Stephen Hawking's Theology
I just found that a JavaScript program I had been working on had a bug in it: Some of the variables had not been initialized and, instead of being empty strings, printed out “undefined” when I tried displaying them. I then realized I had made the same mistake Stephen Hawking had made when he said:
Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. … It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.
According to Stephen Hawking's theory, the universe as we know it can develop from the cosmological equivalent of an empty string. (Actually, I'm not so sure about that. His theory might involve the universe developing from zero, which requires even more to be defined.) Zero is not the same as undefined. If a physicist says he has evidence the universe started from zero, the question of how the zero was created is not meaningless.
I'm reminded of a famous anecdote about teaching statistics:
One of my college professors liked to ask his classes, “What is the difference between zero and nothing?” After allowing the students several minutes of metaphysical and sophomoric discussion he would write “0” and say, “That's zero.” Then, with a flourish he would erase the zero explaining, “And that's nothing.”
To a physicist, the differences between undefined, nothing, and zero might seem like quibbling. To a mathematician or a computer programmer, it's not.
Digression: The theory, by the way, is still speculative. If I recall correctly, the “no-boundary” condition requires a finite universe and it is currently unknown if the universe is finite or infinite. On the other hand, that really is just quibbling.
To return to the creation question: Some people have been claiming that it makes sense to assume this universe is a simulation running in a larger universe. I'd like to see a debate between those people and Stephen Hawking.
Mexico ≠ Mexicans
Our glorious leader correctly (for once) said:
Long before America was even an idea, this land of plenty was home to many peoples. The British and French, the Dutch and Spanish, to Mexicans, to countless Indian tribes. We all shared the same land,
In response, Real Clear Politics said:
Mexico declared its independence on September 16, 1810. It was recognized on September 27, 1821.
Repeat after me:
State and society are not the same thing!
State and society are not the same thing!
State and society are not the same thing!
…
Aren't we wingnuts supposed to know stuff like that?
Two Types of Loonies
There are dangerous loonies and harmless loonies.
More on dangerous loonies
The above-mentioned dangerous loony said:
In a video interview this week, White House Office of Science and Technology Director John P. Holdren told CNSNews.com that he would use the "free market economy" to implement the "massive campaign" he advocated along with Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich to "de-develop the United States."
Environmentalism looks like a bait-and-switch operation. First, we are given the bait that the “green” technologies of alternative energy, compact fluorescent bulbs, and toilets that have to be flushed several times are just as good as the ungreen technologies and then, once they've banned the ungreen technologies, they turn around and say we must “de-develop.”
Some of my fellow wingnuts may be dubious about the use of the term “free market economy.” What he means is that the Greens will first pass regulations that make the unfavored technologies unaffordable and then accuse us real free-market people of being hypocrites for supposedly being pro-bailout.
This Must Have Been One of the Mouse–Human Hybrids
A mouse in Taiwan roared (seen via TJIC):
A mouse bit a venomous viper to death after it was thrown into the snake's cage as a lunchtime snack.
The tiny rodent killed the snake after a fierce 30-minute battle, emerging with "barely a scratch on him", according to on person who saw the fight.
I supposed that mouse was one of the mouse–human hybrids that future Senator O'Donnell was worried about.
The Jindal administration will appoint the mouse Secretary of Defense. We'll have to get on their good side.
A Milestone at My Day Job
I have actually used eTeX for something useful.
Of course, one of the things I found was that I had installed it wrong a few years ago…
How to Outlaw the Proposed Ground-Zero Mosque
Justice Breyer explains that all you need is a big enough riot:
Last week we saw a Florida Pastor — with 30 members in his church — threaten to burn Korans which lead to riots and killings in Afghanistan. We also saw Democrats and Republicans alike assume that Pastor Jones had a Constitutional right to burn those Korans. But Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told me on "GMA" that he's not prepared to conclude that -- in the internet age -- the First Amendment condones Koran burning.
“Holmes said it doesn't mean you can shout 'fire' in a crowded theater,” Breyer told me. “Well, what is it? Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”
I'm sure the opposition to the mosque is taking notes. How many Tea Partiers with Molotov cocktails will be needed?
On the other hand, I'm disappointed that a judge who believes in freeing the mouse isn't in favor of freeing much else.
XBM RIP
I have rewritten the JavaScript on my Netcom/Earthlink site to produce BMP instead of XBM.
It seems to work with all major browsers.
A Note on the Politics of Science and Engineering
Jeffrey Ellis (seen via TJIC) has been speculating on why scientists seem to be to the political left of engineers. I think it might have something to do with the fact that in the most prominent controversy in the past few decades involving both science and politics (creationism) right-wing crackpots have been on the wrong side whereas in the most prominent controversy in the past few decades involving both engineering and politics (nuclear energy) left-wing crackpots have been on the wrong side. (I tried combining the controversies in my suggestion for a Science Debate topic.)
Recently, the Anthropogenic Global Warming controversy (which has to do with both science and engineering) has been heating up. Many scientists will look at it and think “the yahoos are ignoring facts again” and many engineers will look at it and think “the hippies are interfering with energy supplies again.” The fact that the yahoos and hippies are on opposite sides makes things harder to sort out.
My take on it is:
- The scientists are right: There is such a thing as AGW.
- The engineers are right: It is not a crisis; it can be fixed easily provided the bleeping hippies don't interfere.
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