Potty-mouth physicist

 kw: book reviews, science, quantum physics, debunking, pans

I should have known better. I saw the title, Quantum Bullsh*t: How to Ruin Your Life with Advice from Quantum Physics, by Chris Ferrie. I saw the opening pages, with an F-bomb in the header, and more scattered through the introduction. I figured, "I've been known to use the F-bomb, and a few related bombs, at times. I think I can handle it." I couldn't. I struggled through 1/3 of the book and gave up.

My usual practice when I decide not to finish a book is to ignore it and not write a review. I just couldn't do that this time, my conscience wouldn't let me. To be clear, I don't like this book!

Chris Ferrie is a quantum physicist. He is also one of the older Millennials, for whom the F-bomb is the all-purpose adjective and a panoply of 4-letter Anglo-Saxon epithets take the place of terms that one may actually have to engage in thinking to use properly. His whole generation could benefit from viewing To Sir With Love, the classic film with Sidney Poitier as a teacher in England; in particular, a mandatory viewing, at least ten times, of the teacher's tirade against some serious student misbehavior, which he pulls off without using a single vulgar term. Millennials are linguistically lazy, and this book was written to cater to them.

It's clear from the outset that Dr. Ferrie is quite disturbed by the scams being pulled off by charlatans of numerous stripes who wedge the word "quantum" into the name of their wares: Quantum Energy, Quantum Vodou (or Voodoo), Quantum Crystal Scanning… Ah, me, the silliness never stops. He sets out to instruct his victims/readers in what "quantum" really means and what quanta really do.

The science is good; the presentation, no way.

Should evolution matter to evangelicals?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, evolution, debunking, polemics

My wife is Japanese. She came to the US at age 25. Prior to age 30, she lived in California, though she made one brief trip to another state to visit a friend. Japan's total land area is slightly less than 90% of that of California, and California's land area is 5¼% of the area of the "lower 48" states. This is background for this story:

Just before our first anniversary I was sent on a temporary assignment to Texas. We planned to drive, and I told my wife that we would do some sightseeing along the way. She said she preferred to go to Texas as quickly as possible. I said, "We can't go past the Grand Canyon without stopping to see it." Our first day's driving took us from southern California to Williams, Arizona. The driving time is only about seven hours, including a meal and a pit stop. After a night in a motel we drove north; it is about an hour's drive to a side road and a parking lot right on the South Rim. Most of the way the road slowly climbs a tilted plateau, flat in all directions. About halfway there she asked, "Where are the mountains?" I innocently asked, "What mountains?" She asked, "How can there be a canyon without mountains?" I said, "This is a different kind of canyon." We parked next to a railing. Only after we got out of the car and went to the railing could we see the canyon. She didn't make a sound. She just stood there, for a long time, hanging on tight (the railing really was very close to the edge).

From that location, one can see to the North Rim, which is 14 miles away in three directions, to the northwest, the north, and the northeast, and is 21 miles away to the north-northeast. After many minutes of looking back and forth at the wonderful Grand Canyon through the clear, June air, she said in a small voice, "How long can we stay?"

Until she saw the Grand Canyon, my wife could not imagine it. I don't know if she had even seen pictures of it. It didn't fit in her mind. The four national parks in central Japan are each about half a square mile in area. The largest one on-land, in Kyushu, encompasses 13 square miles of land and a much larger area of surrounding ocean. Compare that with Yellowstone at 3,471 square miles and Grand Canyon National Park, with 1,902 square miles. The main canyon of the Grand Canyon is more than 200 miles long, and it simply can't fit in Japan.

We are limited by what we are used to. Until seeing the Grand Canyon, followed by the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest, my wife had no room in her imagination for such things.

This concept applies to time as well as space. Until we are adults and have lived twenty or thirty years, most of us cannot really imagine a century, let alone a millennium. If we have been lucky enough to get acquainted with a grandparent or great-grandparent who is 80-100 years old, and listen to some of their stories, a century can come to have some meaning for us. This underlies a crevasse of understanding between those of us who have studied a natural science such as geology or astronomy, and everyone else. I made a telescope, with much help from my father, at age 11. It is small but works well and I still use it. My mother had studied geology and we were rockhounds together. She also taught me of The Gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 2:2 (I read the Bible through for the first time at age 12-13).

With my small telescope I can see a dozen or more globular clusters and several galaxies. By the time I entered college I was comfortable with the great distances of these objects, and had learned clearly how such distances are determined. The closest globular cluster, M4 in Scorpio, is 5,500 light-years away. Another that is even easier to see, being much larger and brighter, is M3 in Hercules, which is nearly 34,000 light-years away. These are objects within our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The easiest galaxy to see outside the Milky Way is the great galaxy in Andromeda, at a distance of two million light years. The Whirlpool galaxy in Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs), not too far from the Big Dipper, is 23 million light years away. In my (smallish) telescope I can see this one also.

A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, about 63,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The Sun's light gets here in about 8 minutes. The light we see from the Whirlpool galaxy started on its way to us 23 million years ago. So by practicing amateur astronomy for many years I became comfortable with great spans of time.

I earned two-and-a-half degrees in geology (The "half degree" is known as ABD, "all but dissertation," because the results of my work contradicted the beliefs of a powerful professor on my dissertation committee. He took offense, and I left without my PhD. My work was later shown to be correct by others' work. That professor died without admitting he'd been wrong). I almost majored in paleontology, but went for geophysics instead. I still love paleontology, which is the study of fossils. For one of my summer field camps, I worked in Nevada on ancient reefs, aged about 300 million years. The semi-cliff I climbed almost daily was a sequence of reefs that covered a time span of several million years. The point is, I grew comfortable with time spans thousands of times greater than the kind of time that fits in most people's imagination.

During my time in graduate school I led a fellow student to Christ. He wanted to believe in Jesus but he didn't know what to do with the idea he'd heard from other Christians that the Earth "had to be" no more than 6,000 years old, "…or at most, maybe 8-10 thousand years," as some would say. He was as familiar as I was with Specimen Ridge in Wyoming, a series of more than twenty petrified forests, on atop another. They record this series of events: a forest would grow for several hundred to 1,000 years. A volcano would cover the area in twenty-to-200 feet of ash and kill the forest. A new forest would grow in the mineral-rich ash. This happened over and over. Tree rings can be counted in the petrified standing stumps. The total sequence covers more than 20,000 years. There is no room for Specimen Ridge in the imagination of a Young Earth Creationist. When I explained The Gap to him, and some other concepts that indicate Scripture can "handle" deep time, he received Jesus and was a good spiritual companion for several years, until we moved elsewhere.

Of course, along the way I also became very familiar with evolution. Fossils show that life has changed over time, which is the definition of the Fact of Evolution. Life is still changing, which means that evolution, as a process, continues, even affecting humans. Two books I reviewed recently, The 10,000 Year Explosion and Before the Dawn, demonstrate this.

Many may be guardedly okay with recent evolutionary processes, but don't care at all for the idea that all the millions of species arose by the same means. It is a hard pill to take when one's biological imagination is limited to occasional visits to zoos. People ask about mutations, and how a rabbit can turn into a horse. It can't. But some early animal had descendants that had descendants, and so forth, and one line became rabbits while another became horses. That "early animal" probably lived 100 million years ago. You don't make rabbits or horses overnight.

Such notions are the fruit of popular media, in which "Mutants" such as the X-Men or the Fantastic Four are radically changed in an instant. Hardly anyone knows that every one of us is a mutant, carrying DNA in our cells that is different from what we were born with, because of many small, "silent" (or near-silent) mutations that occur in us daily. Among all those, only the ones that occur in our germ cells (sperm or ova, depending on our sex), have a chance to make it to the next generation, but our children are born with 50-100 such small mutations that we were not born with.

Such small mutations, which occur with great frequency overall (but only affect a very tiny percentage of our total DNA because there is so much of it), can have several causes. These include chance copying errors, because the DNA copying machinery is very, very good but not perfect; and damage caused by radiation or free radicals, for example. We are a little bit radioactive. About 1/85 % of the potassium in our bodies is the radioactive isotope K-40. All the rest is either K-39 or K-41, which are stable.

Where such a mutation is not silent, it is usually because it changes the function of a protein, which is usually bad, but not always. In severe cases, the cell in which that mutation arises will die, and we never know it. There are lots of reasons cells in our bodies die by the millions daily; this is only one.

Larger mutations, with possibly greater effects, are rare, and usually harmful, but not always. They can include losing a small chunk of DNA (from a few "letters" to a few thousand), or the duplication of a little DNA, or a piece getting "loose" and being put back in place backwards or somewhere else. Very rare events include the duplication of a whole chromosome; Downs' Syndrome is the result of such a duplication. In the past, changes in the number of chromosomes have occurred with sufficient frequency that the various creatures on Earth have as few as two or as many as a thousand chromosomes.

A study of the DNA of many organisms of many types shows that all are related by common machinery to reproduce DNA, which is the first step to biological reproduction. All mutations, properly understood, that get into the germ line and are inherited, have the potential to change an organism's descendants, and if that organism's progeny multiply, over time a whole species can change a little.

The fact of evolution is plain to see. The process is not. The paragraphs above just touch the surface of the way mutations arise. How do they either increase to become common, or die out? Enter the prevailing theory of evolution, natural selection. When Charles Darwin proposed the mechanism of natural selection as a theory of evolution a century-and-a-half ago, he didn't know how new characteristics arose, nor what mechanism might "record" our characteristics. His original theory was a theory of how different characteristics could be favored or disfavored because of environmental factors, and thus give rise to disparate groups of animals from a population that once were all about the same. 

A classic example is a certain English moth that is usually light gray with dark spots, which make it hard to see on tree bark. During the early Industrial Revolution, the coal smoke in the air darkened tree bark in forests near the cities, and the moths were easier to see. Most of them. Some were darker and harder to see. Birds ate the light gray moths, so the darker ones became more common, and some of those had offspring that were even darker. As the smog got worse and trees got darker, eventually in some areas one could only find dark moths, and farther from the cities the lighter gray moths were still to be found. After the English quit using so much coal and more natural gas and liquid fuels, the bark of the trees gradually got lighter in color, and the darker moths became rare again. In this case, no new species was formed, but it could have been so had the burning of coal gone on for hundreds or thousands of years (and the average life span of an Englishman would have become shorter also).

Now that we know what DNA is and how mutations work, we have a mechanism for new characteristics to arise. They arise gradually, over long spans of time. But the example of the English moths shows that "long" can be measured in decades or centuries; it doesn't have to mean millions of years. But it is definitely numerous generations.

So here are the pieces that make natural selection work:

• Variation in a population of interbreeding organisms (a species) arises because of mutations in the DNA, mostly small but not always.
• Among the offspring of these organisms, for nearly all species, most die without reproducing.
• If a variation in the DNA of one organism makes it less likely to die young, and more likely to reproduce, that variation is more likely to "make it" into the next generation.

Consider some animals that live in grasslands near the edge of a desert, but not in the desert. They will vary in many characteristics, including the efficiency with which their bodies retain water. Some will be able to tolerate forays into the desert better than others. Over time, some number will be able to spend most of their time in the desert, and less in the nearby grasslands. Furthermore, prey animals in the desert will be different from those in the grasslands, and variants that can catch and eat "desert critters" will have a little advantage among the desert tolerant ones. Give it more time: a desert-dwelling species can be produced, leaving behind the grassland-dwelling species. They are very similar, and for a time they could even hybridize, but eventually that also will end. Now, it is not likely that the entire suite of characteristics that allow the new species to live full-time in the desert were present in the original species. Some variations were developed over time by the accumulation of small and smallish mutations. For animals with a life span of several years, this can all occur in 1,000 to 10,000 generations, say between 5,000 and 50,000 years.

If you read some books on anthropology, you'll find out that "early modern humans" were different from modern people in a few subtle ways, such as having thicker skulls and stronger bones. They lived as recently as 14,000 years ago. And, assuming they are our ancestors (anthropologists put us and them in the same species, Homo sapiens), in that time they underwent the changes that produced "modern humans". Counting four or five generations per century until rather recently, they lived 600-700 generations ago. The species Homo sapiens arose about 48,000 years ago, or 2,000 to 2,400 generations back.

Some who may have read this far, who are evangelical Christians, who have been taught that evolution is the greatest heresy, will have been poo-poohing this all as I went along. That's okay. This is leading up to my contention that whether evolution happened, and whether its mechanism was natural selection or not, has no effect on Biblical truth or the faith of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. No effect. None.

I am a scientist. I am also an ardent Christian. I learned long, long ago (half a century) that these are compatible. Sadly, there is a large and vocal cadre of evangelicals who claim the opposite. Or, at most, some of them will say that science, compatible with (their interpretation of) the Scriptures is acceptable; otherwise it is not and is even nonsense.

I wrote this piece after reading a certain book written by a young-earth creationist, a book intended to give younger Christians ammunition to shoot down evolution wherever they find it. I have decided not to name the book or its author, not to censor it (it is one of a great many), but to protect my brother, a man nearly my age whom I greatly respect as a teacher of the Bible and Biblical truth. However, in this area, he is quite incorrect, yet I don't care to pillory him publicly. So I'll just call him Bob.

The book is around a dozen years old. A lot can happen in a decade or so. For example, Bob makes a big deal about feathers. His discussion of how feathers are thought to have developed from scales (as he imagines it being thought of) is not Darwinian, it is Lamarckian. That is, he describes scales getting frayed in certain environments, and then this fraying is found to be beneficial, and is somehow passed on to descendants (that is, he thinks evolutionists think that). 

The Darwinian explanation is different: Scales come in many variations. Some of these have ribs or bumps. Ribbing can be very pronounced, or less so. In a particular sort of lizard, the ribbing was so pronounced that over many generations it resulted in scales with parallel sections, like a fan palm leaf. This was beneficial so the process continued. Later developments included cross-ribbing, and stage by stage a downy feather was produced. Maybe at first it wasn't "that downy", but wherever it was useful for retaining heat, in generation after generation these former-scales-now-downy-feathers became more like the goose down used in down jackets and sleeping bags. Once feathers of any sort arose, they could be modified over time to become the great variety of feather types we see today. 

A dozen years ago, the very few fossils that showed feathered non-avian dinosaurs were hotly contested and hardly known among the public. After 2007, a host of discoveries have resulted in a better understanding of feather evolution, which apparently started more than 200 million years ago. The first feathers were for thermal insulation. Developing feathers with aerodynamic properties, leading to flight, took tens of millions of years.

Another aspect of Bob's discussion is the "God of the Gaps" dilemma, or the problem of intermediate forms. See this illustration:

Let's consider this vaguely illustrative of the family tree of the apes, with its "root" some 25 million years ago. The tree on the left represents knowledge of paleoanthropology when I was in college; that on the right, something closer to current knowledge. The topmost orange block in each tree is Homo sapiens. The topmost blue blocks are Bonobos and Chimpanzees. The green block would be the common ancestor of all three, although we have no fossils of it at present. The purple blocks are various species of Australopithecus; one on the left, a few on the right. The orange blocks are various species of Homo. On the left, below sapiens, we have H. neanderthalensis, H. erectus, and H. habilis. I don't know how many fossils are currently included in the genus Homo, so I just added a few small blocks (small so they wouldn't overlap) at the right, with the Neanderthals replaced by two blocks to include the Denisovans.

Are the species on the "orange" branch all our ancestors? Some are and the rest are close cousins to our ancestors. Are they transitional forms? A paleoanthropologist would say Yes, as I do. But the strong creationist argument is, "Where are the transitional forms in between?" The complexity of this tree is probably less than the complexity of the actual situation through time with all the apes. What would it take to find "all" the transitional forms?

Terrestrial fossils are much more rare than marine fossils. There are tons and tons of fossil shells and corals for each person on Earth. The total number of fossils of genus Homo would fit in a footlocker. Someone like Bob (or at least like Bob a dozen years ago) will not be satisfied if we can't fill in every blank. Otherwise, he would say we haven't proved the case. Remembering that a time span of 48,000 years in human history represents as many as 2,400 generations, Bob is asking us to find a fossil to represent every generation over a span of millions of years; perhaps as many as a quarter to a half million generations from the time genus Homo split from genus Pan (chimps and bonobos). The number of fossils of early humans so far found represent 6,000 individuals. There are a lot of gaps to fill!

It's best to not belabor these points further. Where do these things fit in the Bible? God didn't inspire His prophets to write the books of the Bible to generate a natural history textbook. Moses was inspired to write for bronze age herdsmen at a time 3,000 years before it was even known that the shell-shaped things in rocks represented animals that died long ago. God's intention is to develop a relationship with people. The two "creation hymns" found in Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2 show different characteristics of God and different aspects of His relationship with the first humans. Most importantly, if they are to be taken as word-for-word literally and scientifically accurate, both cannot be true. Important things happen in different orders. But we can discern a few key items:

• In Genesis 1, God created man in his image, "Male and female He created them." This creation was of a number of persons.
• In Genesis 2, The Lord God "formed man of the dust of the ground, breathed into his nostrils the spirit (or breath) of life, and man became a living soul." The woman was "built" from a portion of the man and brought to him later.

Taken together, these show that the created part of man is not the body, which was "formed", but the spirit. The word "living" in Genesis 2:7 is emphatic, indicating that without the spirit, the soul is dead, not able to contact God.

Numerous Bible students have written about "pre-Adamic men". Some have written pretty crazy stuff. But the best, including G.H. Pember, consider that there were non-spiritual humans on Earth in the distant past that rebelled against God along with Lucifer, and were punished by God when Lucifer was defeated and became Satan. After that God put a spirit in some, or all, remaining men to become "man" with a living soul. This makes sense to me. 

Is the foregoing literally true? I don't know. Here is the point, though. If the Adam of the Bible was an individual person (some Bible teachers consider that Adam represents a corporate group of men living in God's presence six or more thousand years ago), he lost direct fellowship with God because of a sin of disobedience. The Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 20 is the result: God working through the generations to gain people who will fellowship with Him and become His bride, described as the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21.

The origin of the pre-Adamic men, if they existed, is not described. The fossils of Earth indicate that they did exist, and that they came about by evolution. Other geological work shows that the Earth is indeed a few billion years old (4.543 billion, according to the most recent work). The universe has a definite origin, which was about 13.7 billion years. It's nice to think that "Let there be light" refers to the Big Bang, which was indeed a burst of unimaginably bright light. However, that verse refers to the first step of God's re-ordering the Earth after the primordial battle with Lucifer.

The Bible tells us that Lucifer was originally the Archangel, the leader of all the angels. In Job an enigmatic passage (38:4-7) tells that the angels were present when God "laid the foundations of the Earth", singing their praises. Did God wait until there were men on earth before putting Lucifer in charge? We don't know.

For God to have a relationship with us, however, little of this matters at all. Evolution is a part of the history before Adam, long before, and although its processes continue, they don't affect us or our relationship with God. At least when the book was written, Bob was of the opinion that one could not be a faithful Christian and believe that any part of evolution is true. This is not so.

Rather, the notion of evolution as heresy is a red herring, successfully used by Satan to keep myriads of ardent children of God distracted from the important work of bringing closer and closer the Kingdom of God, of being built up as the Body and Bride of Christ (see Ephesians in particular), and casting aside all doctrinal and personal divisions so that the longest prayer of Jesus Christ, recorded in John 17, can at long last be fulfilled. He prayed, "…that they may be perfected into one, that the world may know." Jesus prayed this three different ways within this long prayer. It has never been fulfilled. The world does not yet know. This is the great shame of Christianity. How can we be one if we let such matters divide us?

Among the saints with whom I fellowship, I am a rather rare bird. Most of those who were raised as Christians would look askance at my understanding of evolution and the great age of the earth and universe. I seldom mention it because I don't care to fight with them. If it comes up, I try to keep things thus, "It doesn't matter. Whether evolution happened or not has no bearing on the Bible or on our salvation." It takes someone quite persistent to get more than that out of me.

So why go into it at such length here? Because I am comparatively anonymous in this blog, for reasons that are as valid now as they were 15 years ago when I started it. Those who care enough can find out who I am.

If you can stomach it, learn this as a slogan worth keeping:

Evolution doesn't negate any truth of the Bible, nor does it threaten our salvation.

The purported enemy we cannot live without

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, business, debunking, polemics

Whether you are reading this on a laptop or desktop computer, or on a tablet or a phone, that "device" is probably a cornerstone of your life, and it probably cost between two and twenty times the amount of pay you receive for an hour's work. The iPhone 10 or iPhone X currently retails for $999, about twice as much as a pretty good laptop computer, which is close to 40 times the hourly pay for someone with median income in the U.S. Most of the 200+ million iPhones sold in the past year cost between $500 and $800. The amount of money that changed hands was roughly $150 billion.

Why do people pay so much for an item the size of an open wallet? In a word: Value. These "devices" do, not just something people want, but a very great many things most people want, and they want it very much. So they pay.

Now look around the room you are in. If you were to count, from paper clips to furniture, the room you are in probably contains hundreds to thousands of items. Every one of those items was bought at some time, either by you or a housemate or family member, or by someone who gave it to you. In the basement room I am sitting in to write this, I have many books. Probably more than 1,000. There are nearly 30 cookbooks, for example. This computer is accompanied by two printers, a couple of scanners, several reams of paper, a big desk, and a router. A closet holds an oscilloscope and other electronics I use less frequently. On a bench behind me there are two microscopes and a great many things needed to use them effectively. Every one of these things was bought, mostly by me, at some time. The only things in the room that I did not buy is the mineral specimens on a display shelf, minerals I collected. Of course, I bought a lot of gasoline for those rock collecting trips, and I bought rock hammers and chisels, bags, etc., etc.

Every one of those purchased items, except for a very few "loss leaders", yielded a profit to the seller. Why was there a profit? Simply put, incentive. The chance to make a profit is the reason for the existence of any and every business.

Ask yourself this: If you were to go into business selling left-handed fribble widgets, and the materials to make them cost $10 each, but people are only willing to pay $8 each, why would you run such a business? You need a lot of cash to back you up, so you could effectively pay $2 each for people to take a widget off your hands! But if people were willing to buy them for $12, and no matter how many you make, you'd have a never-ending clientele willing to pay $12 each, and then you could really do business. Each widget you sell, you have a 20% capital profit. Assuming they don't take long to manufacture, so there is little time cost, that's pretty good.

But really, why do you need profit? Why not sell them for $10? The biggest reason is, you need to pay yourself for your work. You need the income to buy food, clothing, other things you want, and perhaps pay a mortgage and car payment. You have bills to pay for electricity, water and so forth. There might be a machine you could buy that helps you make widgets faster (though the materials still cost the same). Making more widgets in less time, you can earn more money, but you'll need some of that to pay off the loan you have to take out to buy the widget making machine. So, for a while you have to operate on a thin margin. Maybe net profit for a while is only 5%. But later, you'll have more income each day. Then you can get better clothing and eat out more often.

That is why there is business. To make money for people so they can buy things they don't make for themselves. Now consider, what if instead of widgets you want to make jumbo jets, and compete with the companies that make the Boeing 787 or the Airbus A380. It takes thousands of workers to run such a company. It is not just business, it is Big Business.

Does all business need to be Big Business? No. For every big company there are thousands of small ones. But many people are suspicious of Big Business. Folks complain about all kinds of things, from the high pay of executives to the "cookie cutter" nature of many products that seem like all the others. When my father ran a manufacturing company, he said the profit margin was close to zero; less than 1%. That is long term net profit, after materials, salaries, dividend payments on stock, taxes and utility bills, plus upkeep of machinery. The upkeep was the biggest uncertainty. In most years, there was a profit figure more like 4%, but the company saved it all, because every few years a big, expensive machine would need repair or restoration or replacement, and it would use up most of those savings. The profit figure in such a year might be negative 15%, but they amortized it (spread the cost out over all the years since the last time) to avoid panicking the stockholders. This company was on the boundary between small and big, with about 500 employees. It didn't need to grow any bigger; it fit its market pretty well.

If a company wants to grow, it needs a bigger profit margin. Growing companies have to get the money to grow from somewhere, and there is ultimately nowhere to get it but from current sales. You may borrow to invest in the needed equipment or facilities, but you have to pay it back…with money from current sales. I came across a good quote about profit:

"Any business arrangement that is not profitable to the other person will in the end prove unprofitable for you. The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated." —B. C. Forbes

Considering that everything you own was sold at a profit, it is odd that so many people are so down on business. In recent years (30+) there has been an increasing attitude that big business is bad in almost every way. Article after article, and many books, are published on this theme, that big business is a big problem.

Well, no doubt some problems are there. But some of the things we hear about and read about are not quite so dire. In 2009 Michael Medved published The 5 Big Lies about American Business: Combating Smears Against the Free-market Economy in an attempt to set the record straight. I recently heard about this book, and bought the e-book. The quote above is from that book.

For me this was an experiment. I wanted to know how much different reading an e-book might be from the paper books I love, my exclusive fare before this. It was actually a great convenience. Since I always have my phone with me (a $150 t-Mobile REVVL, not an iPhone), I could open the book and read whenever I had free time. I have been reading another book at the same time (not finished yet), but that book stays at home, usually by my bedside, and it is big. In another few days I'll finish that book and review it then.

What are the big lies? Putting them more briefly than the author:

1. The current downturn means capitalism is dying
2. When the rich get richer the poor get poorer
3. Executives are overpaid and corrupt
4. Big business is bad, small business is good
5. Government is more fair and reliable than business

Let me state at the outset: If you believe #5 is true, stop reading now and go start a business. You might learn something. You can't possibly have had any meaningful experience of either government or business. The Law of Government Spending is, "Nobody spends someone else's money as carefully as they spend their own."

I don't intend to rehash these 5 points. It is well worth reading the book to get the appropriate impact. I do want to address #2. In some cases, the rich really are corrupt and wasteful. But most of the rich got that way by making value where there was none. They did indeed gather a lot of riches, but the people that worked for their companies, the supplier companies they paid for intermediate products or materials, and the people who were able to pay less for their product than the competing one they had been buying before, all were richer than before.

Key learning: Business is not just about moving money around, from one set of pockets to another. Business is about creating or adding value. There is a centuries-old debate about the source of value. People say, "Oh, Gold has value intrinsically. It is valuable just because it is gold." Others say, "Gold has value because people want it." Both are right. Gold is useful and so has intrinsic value. It is also beautiful, so people want it as an ornament. There is a third reason: "Gold has a certain intrinsic value, but when it is in the ground, it isn't worth much because it takes a lot of work to mine it and refine it, and it takes more work to make things out of gold that people will pay for, such as jewelry, or special kinds of wire for electronics, or coins and medallions. Most 'value' comes from labor." This is also right. Much of the value of gold, or anything else "of value" is from the labor of those who mined, refined, produced, or manufactured it. Business creates value.

I'll also touch on #3. Is "income disparity" a bad thing? Some kinds of work, anyone can do. The classic is "digging ditches". When I was a kid, parents would say, "Get a good education. You don't want to become a ditch digger." I never saw anyone digging a ditch by hand (yes, there were backhoes in the 1950's). But we got the point. "Minimum wage" jobs are those that need little or no skill. I made my living for more than half my life as a software coder. That is a skill that is less common, and really good coders (Ahem! Yes, I was really good) are well paid because a lot of code needs to be written, it has to be high in quality, and there are not nearly as many coders as there are unskilled workers. My dad was a business executive. He was paid more per hour or month or whatever than I ever was. He had skills that were less common than mine. Not only that, a good executive or manager doesn't just do work, but facilitates the work of others so they are productive and more work gets done.

Side note: I often eat fast food, including Wendy's. The Wendy's nearest us recently went out of business and was closed. A Starbucks came in a few weeks later. There are other Wendy's places I can go to, and do you know what? I went to the nearby one because it was convenient, and it was "good enough". But compared to the others, the servers were second-rate and slow, and the parking lot was in serious disrepair. At least it was clean; one can always look into the kitchen to see that, and I'd also check the tables and floors. But it didn't do enough business to stay in business. The other Wendy's places I go to now are busier than it ever was. The difference? Management.

Back to #3. Why did the president of DuPont (Mrs. Kuhlman) earn a million dollars per month during my last few years there? Even assuming that she worked a 60-hour week (maybe she worked more), was her time worth upwards of $3,500 per hour? Could she really produce more "value" for DuPont in one hour than I could in a month? The board of directors evidently thought she could. I do know that the company was better run under her, and more profitable, than it had been under the prior two presidents (those between the legendary Mr. Woolard and her). But really, here is who I think is worth $3,500 per hour: the guy who goes in with a screwdriver and disarms a terrorist's bomb. Anybody else, I wouldn't pay more than about a tenth of that, company presidents included. But Medved's writing on this point had me about half convinced that CEO's really are worth their pay. Let's call it a draw.

And…I'll leave it all right there. Do you fear, suspect, or loathe business, especially Big Business? Remember the jumbo jets. You aren't going overseas on your vacation without one. Small business can do a lot, but it can't do everything. There's a place for businesses of all sizes. And that's as it should be. The book is a great read.

Models cannot trump reality

kw: debunking, climate change, disasters

A project named EPOCA, for European Project on OCean Acidification, aims to determine just how much trouble shellfish will be in with increased CO₂ levels, in the range up to 1000 ppm. There are two parts to this question:

1. How much harder will it be for shelled marine creatures to produce calcite and/or aragonite shells?
2. How rapidly, if at all, will those shells dissolve back into ocean water, at various levels of atmospheric CO₂?

It is to be hoped that useful answers to the first question can be answered with the experiments currently being carried out off the shore of Spitzbergen (By the way, I wonder why they aren't also trying it in more tropical waters, which dissolve much less CO₂?). The answer to the second question is already known, and it is, "Not at all, or very slowly." Why do I say this?

The blue line on this chart is of interest here. It represents CO₂ levels, measured by various proxy and semi-direct methods, for the past 450 million years. Note the tiny horizontal segment at lower left. That represents the past several million years, the period since the evolution of C4 photosynthesis, since which time CO₂ levels have been lower than at any period in prior history!

I spent many years happily collecting fossil shells from deposits throughout the geologic series from Cambrian times right through the mid-Pleistocene (550 to 2 million years ago). Let's consider the Triassic, a period during which the CO₂ level was four to five times what it is today. I have a lovely Triassic ammonite shell, with mother-of-pearl colors still evident. I don't know how long it was exposed to carbon-rich ocean waters after the death of the host animal, but it survived unscathed, even un-etched, for all the time since, some 200 million years.

Environmentalists fear that "modern" species will have "forgotten" how to make calcite or aragonite shells from more acidic waters, in the past few million years. The energetics of shell production may have changed, so that they are easier to produce now, but it is not likely that there is a difference in kind between ancient shell-producing chemistry and the modern version, just in intensity. A generation is pretty quick among shellfish. While the oceans may be acidifying at a rapid clip, compared to geologic rates, it is still rather slow compared to the adaption time frame of animals that have one or more generations per year, and plankton that have several generations per month. There is another factor to consider.

Suppose it takes several percent of a creature's energy budget to produce its shell. Further, suppose at some level of ocean acidification that requirement doubles. We must remember that it does so for all shellfish. No species or genus is going to have some kind of broad selective advantage over others. They will all be affected equally. In any species, some individuals will have a little more efficient shell-producing organs than their conspecifics, and this will continue, year after year, generation after generation. Genetic drift is more than sufficient for the species to keep up and continue making shells. I expect the EPOCA experiments to show that all species considered will have widespread ability to cope with acidification at all carbonation levels.

2012, here we come!

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, false prophets, debunking, mesoamerica

At least once per generation, since there have been Europeans in North America, members of one group or other have donned special clothing (white robes are popular), gone to a special place such as a hilltop, perhaps given away many of their possessions, and waited for a savior, or a spaceship, or the end of the world. Apocalyptic, millennial beliefs undergird American life.

While these oddities are usually carried on by small groups, sometimes apocalyptic fervor grips the entire nation, infiltrating all of popular culture. Not so long ago, the "big fear" was an asteroid hit, and two 1998 films, Deep Impact and Armageddon, made millions of dollars as millions of our fellow citizens flocked to the theaters to see them. Just a few years earlier, over about a decade, the Left Behind book series raged through like a twelve-stroke battering ram.

Now, we are told, in just over two years, we all face extinction or extermination or at least the loss of our pensions, when the Maya calendar runs out on December 21, 2012 (or maybe two days later…). The popular movie 2012 has again made millions for a crafty few. Now a professor of History, a Mayanist, has published a book with a different view. Disclaimer: The author is a relative of mine.

What did the Maya of eight centuries ago expect to happen when calendar date 13.0.0.0.0 rolled around? In 2012: Science & Prophecy of the Ancient Maya by Mark Van Stone, we find that the simple answer is, not much, depending on how good a party you throw to mark the occasion. If we notated time the way the Maya did, our last "great occasion" would have been shown as 20.0.0.1.1, but instead we showed it as 2000/1/1 or January 1, 2000. Then we quibbled for months over whether the real beginning of the 21^st Century was 2001/1/1. There was a real threat of apocalyptic troubles with the "Y2k problem" in computer systems, but computer programmers worldwide met that threat and the new Century began with hardly a ripple.

The book is composed of 34 essays, many of them interlinked in series, and eight Appendices, including a very informative FAQ that summarizes the author's points. This means you can read the book in any order, and it makes a good reference work. While the main message of the book is the debunking of apocalyptic speculation, it contains a wealth of information about what the Maya were really interested in, which was (is this any surprise?) appeasing the gods so they could all have a better life. The unique feature of Maya religious practice was that the shedding of blood was frequently performed by the religious and political leaders upon themselves! You'll have to read the book to find out where they'd stick the knife, but, gentlemen, be prepared to be squeamish. Anyway, despite depictions of the Maya as bloodthirsty purveyors of human sacrifice, that title goes to the later Aztecs, who did indeed sacrifice a few ten thousands of victims yearly. Maya sacrifices seldom resulted in death.

I find it more fascinating to learn what the Maya believed and practiced; what was really important to them. The precession of the equinoxes was not important to them, so although they measured it, they didn't account for it, and kept a 365-day year. They didn't even bother with a Julian-type "leap year" correction. They were much more interested in the 260-day period between apparitions of Venus, and how it related to a 360-day near-year with an 18:13 ratio. The special dates upon which they liked to perform coronations and special religious observances were chosen by a complex system of numerology with these factors plus small prime numbers (if you consider 273 a "small prime"). Appendix 5 contains a two-page list of "important" time periods ranging from two days to 9,504,000 days (composed of 6×11×20×20×360). This last period is more than 26,000 years, and is a pretty good match to the "grand round" of the precession of the equinoxes. This partly explains why the text depicting the date of an event in an inscription can take up more space than the recounting of the event itself.

But not all their symbols were numerical. In common with many cultures, they revered a "world tree", which was shown in many ways, such as the two shown here, along with the caption from the book (p. 99; click for a more readable image):

On the left, the tree is a fruiting cactus, rooted in a woman's skeleton and serving as a perch for a great eagle with flint-tipped feathers. On the right a pregnant tree (a very common image) is giving birth, while its root is a woman's head, as two gods assist (it is a caesarian birth). Mayan religious symbolism was much more variable than what we are familiar with, though a perusal of the stained-glass windows of three or four cathedrals reveals plenty of variation, and that is in just one Christian sect. Sometimes the eagle holds a snake in its beak, which led, via the Aztecs, to the modern seal of Mexico, seen on its flag:

The eagle grips a snake with beak and talon, standing on a fruiting cactus that grows from a bone-like pedestal standing in water. This is a clear creation-legend image. The oak and laurel leaf clusters are a symbol of sovereignty added in modern times. This image also adorns the back of Mexican coins.

If we anointed astronomers and geologists for priests, we, too might find our national consciousness grasping time periods ranging into thousands and millions of years. Instead, we get antsy waiting 60 seconds for the microwave to heat up a sandwich, and the second-most common traffic offense is running a red light, often by someone who already sat there for one whole minute while traffic cleared, and can't stand to wait another half minute for the light to "get around to changing" (the most common offense is speeding).

So how ought we prepare ourselves for Mayan date 13.0.0.0.0? Be nice to people. Forgive you brother for what he said last year. Live like the world really could end, but don't liquidate your long-term investments!

Finally, a word from the other side

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, global warming, debates, debunking, polemics

It is ironic that the prior book I reviewed is a vehemently pro-global-warming polemic, and this next is just as vehemently anti-global-warming, just as polemical. The new book is Heaven and Earth: Global Warming; the Missing Science by Dr. Ian Plimer.

The author knows he has a very tough row to hoe, so he goes the proverbial extra mile (or ten): Where most books of scientific popularization have 200 or fewer references, he has more than 2,000, which he has put in footnotes rather than endnotes. I am glad. I prefer footnotes; I am disinclined to keep paging to the back of the book, and tend to read endnotes, if at all, after the rest of the book. I don't mind glancing down now and again to see if a note has more material than just a bibliographic reference.

Long before the debate over global warning, when the term "greenhouse effect" was still in vogue, I read an article in which the author stated that even if CO2 were to rise to 1% the temperature would rise no more than 4°C or 7°F. That is a lot but it not great as some claims we are hearing.

A point which Dr. Plimer makes, which he supports with this chart, is that most of the greenhouse warming that CO2 can produce has been accomplished before the amount reaches 100 ppm.


We have here a classic situation of diminishing returns. It is one point in the book that I'll treat in some detail, then follow with a more general survey. The key to understanding it is to look at the way the spectrum of CO2 changes with its amount. The following chart shows the visible and infrared spectra of oxygen, CO2, and water. These spectra are all normalized to some specific depth of the pure gas, probably one meter (though the reference doesn't say).

See how the green line for CO2's spectrum has just a few bands, and only three that are "strong"? Let us suppose that this is for one meter of pure CO2. The atmosphere has just under 400 parts per million (ppm) at present, which is one part in 2,500. That means one meter of gas is distributed in 2.5 km of atmosphere. The effective thickness of the atmosphere is about 5 km, if you allow for the rapid thinning of air with altitude. So this line is probably quite close to the actual absorption spectrum of all the CO2 in the atmosphere between the ground and space.

Now, what happens as CO2 concentration changes? I prepared a simple spectral band absorption model to show this. First, a numerical example. Let us assume that the "standard amount" absorbs 75% of the radiation at a particular wavelength. What happens when there is three times that amount? The approach is to take the proportion that is transmitted (1-0.75 = 0.25), take it to the third power to get the new transmission (0.25³ = 0.0156), and subtract from 1 to get the new absorption (0.984 or 98.4%).

I prepared the chart below for an absorption band with a gaussian shape at low concentration, shown by the lower, black line. If the amount of gas is ten times as much, shown by the red line, there is a section with nearly 100% absorption, and the whole line is wider. With each increase by a factor of ten, the absorption band widens by a smaller and smaller amount. Going from the red line to the dashed orange line, though the amount of absorbing gas increases by a factor of 10,000, the total absorption increases only by about a factor of three.
I designed this example so that the red line approximates the absorption of CO2 near a wavelength of four microns, at 400 ppm for the full depth of the atmosphere. The solid lines above that one are for 4,000 ppm (0.4%) and 4%, at which point the amount of influence CO2 might have on the atmosphere is doubled. Four percent is also the level CO2 might conceivably achieve if we burn all known fossil fuels. This would also lower atmospheric oxygen by nearly 2%; how likely is that? Nonetheless, I show, with the two dashed lines, what the absorption would be if the atmosphere were 40% CO2, and if there were nothing but CO2 in an atmosphere with four times the density of today's atmosphere; a situation 1/10th as severe as that on Venus!

One might then ask, how can it be that Venus's temperature is 500°C? First of all, Venus receives twice the sunlight that Earth does. This means its equilibrium, airless temperature would be 65°C or 150°F. The airless temperature for Earth (experienced by the Moon) is 5.4°C or 42°F. Earth's actual equilibrium temperature is about 15°C or 59°F, mainly due to water vapor.

Take a look at what water vapor (the blue line) does in the 4-line chart above. It absorbs all wavelengths longer than 10 microns, and about half of radiation longer than 1 micron. If water were a much larger amount of the atmosphere, it would absorb so much of the outgoing radiation that a much higher temperature would be needed to move the thermal radiation to a short enough wavelength to escape to space.

CO2 has a very low absorption band longer than 6 microns, which in a very thick atmosphere absorbs everything. The "valleys" between the peaks shown also "fill up", absorbing everything from about 1.5 microns on. It requires a temperature of about 500°C to overcome this absorption, for an atmosphere such as that on Venus.

This, then is the physical explanation of the "greenhouse effect". Greenhouse gases such as water, CO2 or methane allow most incoming, shortwave radiation to reach the ground. Radiation in the absorption bands of these gases just heats the gases themselves, and the air they are part of. For the heated ground to radiate its heat back into space, it must emit enough radiation to get through the greenhouse gases. The warmer the ground is, the shorter is the effective wavelength of its thermal radiation. Longwave energy absorbed by the greenhouse gases heats up those gases, and about half of that is radiated back to the ground, so the more absorption there is, the warmer the ground has to get to achieve thermal balance. Of course, all this is complicated on a real planet because much of the heating goes into producing wind, but all energy turns into heat sooner or later.

The final point on this subject is this. At the concentrations CO2 has ranged within throughout history, its greatest effect has probably never been greater than about 3 times its present value. In the distant past, it reached concentrations as great as 1% (10,000 ppm). During one such time there was an ice age! It is never likely to come anywhere close to 1% again. Now for a summary of Dr. Plimer's message.

He is called a "denier" by some, those he might call "warmists". He makes the point that a belief in global warming has become like a religion to some. No matter what people call themselves, even atheists have strongly held beliefs about something, which they hold with religious fervor. Everybody believes in something, particularly those who deny it the loudest.

The little chart above shows average global temperatures for the past 2,000 years. I deliberately went to a source different from the ones Dr. Plimer uses. If you click on it to see the larger version, you'll be able to read the reference. This prominently shows the Medieval Warming, which was warmer than 1998, the warmest year since the Industrial Revolution began in the 1800s. With this and similar data, Dr. Plimer asks the questions, "How did it get so warm in the years around 900 and 1000, when CO2 was so much lower than it is today?" and "Why were the Little Ice Age of 1400-1850 and the late Roman period before 800 so much colder?" Unless these questions can be answered, his point is that temperature is not controlled by CO2.
Then he shows the comparison graph above, on page 89. The lower half is a similar, but smoothed, chart showing the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age as they have been understood by climate scientists for many years. The upper chart is the infamous "hockey stick" chart produced by Michael Mann and his colleagues. This chart has been totally discredited by several scientists, but is the one used by the IPCC to base its conclusions that we are all in grave danger. Is it any surprise that Dr. Plimer and others deny there is much to worry about? or that they question the motives of the leading authors of the IPCC Report?

The structure of the book echoes its short title. The Sun (Heaven) has by far the greatest influence on weather and climate. Its variation due to the sunspot cycle and longer cycles (which periodically eliminate sunspots for 50-100 years) has a significant, well-measured effect on climate. After an introductory chapter and one on history, the Sun and influences on solar influx to Earth fill one large chapter. Other heavenly influences include cosmic rays; when the sun is weaker, its reduced magnetic field lets more cosmic rays get through, and average cloudiness increases, further reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground. Cooling ensues. Warming follows a strengthened sun, amplified by a reduced cloud cover. The Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period almost without sunspots, was the coldest part of the Little Ice Age.

In his History chapter, he makes the point again and again that warming periods have been periods of increased productivity and expansion of species, and that cooling periods are marked by desertification, loss of species or mass extinction, and (in the Holocene at least) crop losses leading to reduction in human numbers. He repeats these points throughout the book, particularly in the Sun chapter, where he asks, if global warming was good for the early Romans, and even better for the late Medieval Europeans, why do IPCC scientists claim it will be bad for us?

The fourth chapter, also a long one, is "Earth". While he hits a lot of points, a big one is volcanoes. Mass extinctions seem to have occurred in sychrony with extra-large "supervolcano" eruptions that took thousands of years to burn themselves out. Each such episode produced millions of cubic kilometers of lava, and thousands of cubic kilometers of "stuff" was put into the atmosphere. A characteristic of volcanic activity is that it produces lots and lots of CO2, yet because of Sulfur oxides and solid matter also blasted into the sky, cooling is the result. By the time the cooling is over, earth processes have usually absorbed all the extra CO2 as well. But there is another, continuous source of volcanic activity, which arises in the Water chapter.

Before Water he spends a chapter on Ice, primarily the Snowball Earth period in the late Precambrian period about 700 million years ago (and perhaps another one 2,000 million years ago). Both occurred when CO2 was many times denser than it is today.

In the Water chapter he addresses the question, "Will the seas become acid?" If you measure the acidity of soda, water with a few percent CO2, it is definitely a weak acid. Not as strong as vinegar, but acid nonetheless. However, if you put almost any common kind of crust-forming rock, such as granite or basalt, in the soda, and cap it for a few weeks or months, the acidity will reduce and eventually turn to alkali. Even though granite is called an "acidic" rock, that is only with reference to basalt, which is more strongly alkaline.

Guess what forms the sea floor? Basalt. What is going on deep under the sea? For one thing, CO2 in sea water quickly hydrolyzes to bicarbonate (HCO3- ion), which is less acidic. Then bicarbonate reacts with basalt to change silicates to carbonates, except that much of it is captured by snails, clams and other growing sea critters to make their carbonate shells also. All these processes result in a sea that is distinctly alkaline.

There is a greater source of CO2 under the sea, however. The Mid-Ocean Ridge is an 80,000-km system of "spreading center" volcanism that runs through every ocean basin. The average spreading rate is 5cm/y. That results in 4 cubic km of new lava produced every year (that is 30 million tons per day). These sea-floor basalts erupt at a temperature near 1000°C. It takes a lot of water to cool them down to the 0-5°C temperature of the deep ocean. Many cubic km of water are heated continuously by this outflow. Each cubic km of lava has a lot of CO2 in it, which dissolves in the deep water. This water has been measured to have the capacity to hold a lot more CO2 than what these Mid-Ocean Ridge produces. This amount is much greater than what we are producing with all our industry. The fresh basalt reacts with some of it to keep the oceans alkaline.

A short chapter on Air challenges the entire notion of the "greenhouse effect". The radiation-in-radiation-out definition I gave above is different from what the author espouses. I don't stand with him on that one. I understand the term is a metaphor that isn't supposed to exactly equate CO2 or any other gas to the glass in a greenhouse. We all know greenhouses are more for keeping freezing or drying wind off the plants, and often have to be either heated or cooled, but they do tend to gather heat by differential radiation absorption, and this is the part of the metaphor that is useful.

In his final chapter, "Et Moi", he recapitulates his main points, and closes by asking "What if I am wrong?" Only the "wildest" of the "warmers" will claim that during the present century warming will be greater than 3°C, yet the Medieval Warming was 3°C warmer than today, with very salutary effects on all. The sea didn't wipe out coastal settlements and crops boomed. He winds up with 18 "even if" points, the last being, "Even if mitigation were as cost effective as adaptation, the public sector, which emits twice as much carbon as the private sector, must cut its own emissions by half before it preaches to us."

He started that chapter by stating, "...the greatest threat...is from policy responses to perceived global warming and the demolishing of dissent." I agree with him on this. Is he wrong, folks? Prove it. Use real data, not Mann-style "hockey stick" fraud. But I have skimmed the internet and seen mostly ad hominem fallacies against him in response to the points in this book. Their authors are a shame to the profession of science.

In his eyes, there's a big red target on Everything

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, debunking, polemics, myths

Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel—Why Everything You Know is Wrong...what a title! In twelve chapters containing 150 connected essays, John Stossel tackles—and usually hogties—150 myths many of us believe, or are persuaded by various "authorities" to believe. Given the large number, I'll do the random thing (I'm running the RAND function on my calculator as I write): OK, numbers I get are (sorted) 13, 46, 76, 106, and 128. The text below in the "Bottom Line" section is my paraphrase, not quoted from Stossel. And by the way, Stossel doesn't number the items; I am a numbering kind of guy, so I numbered my own copy.

#13 (from Chapter 1)
MYTH: We are running out of oil fast
TRUTH: Not so fast
Bottom Line: As prices rise, new resources become profitable; at current prices, we can afford to exploit oil and tar resources that will last 50-100 years, and some "alternative energy" technologies are getting competitive.

#46 (from Chapter 4)
MYTH: You know what taxes you pay
TRUTH: You don't have a clue
Bottom Line: Huge amounts of taxes are levied against corporations, which then must raise prices to stay afloat, so no matter what kind of tax there is, remember, only consumers actually pay all taxes. (Some fellow-students and I once tracked down all the ingredients in a loaf of bread, and all the taxes on their production and distribution. We found more than 120 taxes on bread...in 1978! Who pays them? The person who purchases the bread. Every penny).

#76 (from Chapter 6)
MYTH: Brand name gas is better
TRUTH: Brand name gas costs more
Bottom Line: The gas sold at Wal-Mart, 7-11, and all "non-brand" stations like Merit is refined by Chevron, Exxon, Conoco, or another brand. (I've been in the oil business, with Conoco. Jobbers buy oil from any refinery that will sell it to them, and the larger refiners, that is, brands, usually have the lowest prices to jobbers).

#108 (from Chapter 9)
MYTH: Red cars attract police attention and cost more to insure
TRUTH: It's an urban myth
Bottom Line: Try this. Call your insurance company (or one at random) and tell them you are looking at two cars, identically equipped, but you and your spouse are arguing over whether to get the red one or the white one. See what they say about pricing! They'll want to know about YOU and your record, not about the car's color.

#128 (from Chapter 10)
MYTH: Revenge is sweet
TRUTH: Forgiveness is sweeter
Bottom Line: Remember the "live by the sword, die by the sword" adage? People who hold grudges simply don't live as long or as well as those who forgive and get on with life.

John Stossel, of 20/20 on ABC, began his journalistic career as a "modern liberal", and was transformed by years of myth-busting into a "classical liberal". Nobody understands historical liberalism any more, so he calls himself, a bit reluctantly, a Libertarian, as his concluding chapter explains.

There is plenty in the book for both liberals and conservatives (both excruciatingly mis-named these days) to hate. But as Bernard Baruch said, "Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts." In nearly all 150 cases, Stossel has his facts right. The political extremes, and the masses of people who complacently follow one or the other, seldom have facts at their disposal.

So, there is plenty of hay to be made. A few "myths" turn out to be true. For example, prosperous people really are more happy than very poor people, as most of us would guess. However, the really rich aren't happier than the "middle class." It was Jackie Gleason who said, "People who say money doesn't buy happiness just don't know where to shop." His persistent sadness of-stage revealed this as empty bravado. It turns out that gradually rising prosperity is better at producing happiness than any constant state of wealth that doesn't change. Reduced circumstances erode happiness. The billionaires want another billion, and are unhappy if they drop back to "half-billionaire" status.

I'm going to add a fact or two to #16, the last in Chapter 1 (MYTH: The world is too crowded/TRUTH: That's garbage too). Is the world too crowded? The question is better restated, "Does the world have more people than it can comfortably support?" Many folks say it does, John Stossel says it doesn't, and he buttresses the argument by comparing starving Niger, with 9 people per square mile, to America (28/sq mi), the Netherlands (484) and other prosperous countries. He states, rightly, that famine and other shortagles are primarily political. However, I take issue with the Netherlands, which imports some of its food, and Japan which imports about half, as counter-examples.

Were the kleptocratic government of Niger miraculously replaced with the most benevolent of republics, they couldn't wrest sufficient food out of their land to feed their people. The CIA World Factbook entry for Niger states of the geography:

"landlocked; one of the hottest countries in the world; northern four-fifths is desert, southern one-fifth is savanna, suitable for livestock and limited agriculture"

The country has 12.5 million residents, the same as Illinois. Its land area is 14 times as great. 11.4% of Niger is arable, and most of that poorly, compared to 50% of Illinois, which is 20 degrees cooler and has much more total water. The U.S. as a whole has 15% of the land under cultivation; another 10% could be farmed. Worldwide, 20-25% of land is arable to varying degrees. The political situation in Niger accounts for the fact that less than 1% of its land is actually being farmed at present, but if all 11.4% were farmed, it would be a poor country still, as it has little groundwater.

However, we were talking about the whole earth. With 6.4 billions, is Earth too crowded? At the moment there is room for debate. At what point would everyone agree that "Enough is enough!"? Ten billion, twenty, a trillion? World population growth is currently two percent. If the death rate doesn't increase (that would be a political miracle), we'll have ten billion in 2029, twenty billion in 2064, and a trillion humans (surely that is crowded!) on Earth in 255 years, in 2262 or thereabouts.

OK, if that's my only quibble with Stossel, I'd say he has a very good book here, and he does! Read and learn!!