kw: book reviews, science fiction, animal fiction, short stories, collections
It is really hard to review one of Mike Resnick's anthologies. I love the ideas he embodies in the stories, but to discuss the idea inevitably reveals too much about the story, and his surprise endings are half the fun…even if you can sometimes see the ending coming by halfway through.
Resnick's Menagerie gathers the best of Mike's animal stories and a few essays, including a hilarious tragicomic recounting of him and his dogs participating in a dog show while he has a sprained ankle. I had read a few of the stories before, such as "The Elephants on Neptune" and "Stalking the Vampire". When I compare the range of these two stories, and consider also "Post Time in Pink" and "The Boy Who Cried 'Dragon'", I marvel at the range of the author's interests and expertise.
I think it safe to mention at least a couple of the stories, and I'd feel remiss if I didn't try. "Barnaby in Exile" centers on an extra smart chimpanzee, who can sign (ASL I suppose), and communicates on the level of a human adolescent. It is told from Barnaby's viewpoint, as much as Mike is able to enter a chimp's mind. As a sweet tragedy, it ranks with Asimov's "The Ugly Little Boy", which famously made Robyn Asimov cry and say, "You didn't tell me it was going to be so Saaa-aad!".
In "Travels With My Cats" we learn how powerfully writing can turn a life, even a life that has descended into default staleness. As one whose life is built around my reading, I was affected by this story the most of them all. By reading, we really do commune with the author. I have a colleague who learned ancient Greek solely for the purpose of reading the plays of Aeschylus and Thucydides in the original language. Maybe one day he'll find these gents on his porch swing of an evening.
This book deserves a permanent place in the bookshelf of anyone who likes animals, and good short fiction, and the kind of humor that catches you unaware, about half an hour after you've read a story.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Friday, September 14, 2012
Guitar Tuning - harmonics plus tweaking
kw: music, musical instruments, instruction
I played guitar for forty years before I obtained an electronic tuner. At first, I kept my guitar in tune by ear using the piano; my mother was a fine pianist and our piano was kept in tune. Before going off to college, I got a tuning fork, the A-440 one. I learned to tune the A string by sounding its 4th harmonic, striking and setting the fork, and tuning for zero beats. Then I tuned the rest of the strings using harmonics, which I'll describe shortly.
As my ear got keener, I noticed that tuning with pure harmonics led to certain chords, such as D, not sounding quite right, and I tinkered with the tuning a lot before I learned more about what I was doing. Finally I learned enough about equal temperament and how the harmonics relate to it to get my guitar tuned right, no tinkering needed.
This fingerboard diagram, the first octave cropped from a larger illustration in Wikipedia Commons, shows how the 3d and 4th harmonics relate everywhere but between the G and B strings:
The Nut is on the left, and the bridge would be off to the right a distance equal to the width of this image. The harmonics at the 7th fret (the rightmost set of orange dots) are the 3d harmonics, and those at the 5th fret are the 4th harmonics. You produce a harmonic by very lightly touching a string above the fret, being sure not to depress the string, and plucking the string near the bridge, preferably pretty close. The closer you pluck to the bridge, the greater the amplitude of higher harmonics. The 4th harmonic is strongest when you pluck 1/8th of the way up the string from the bridge, or about 3.2 inches (80 mm or so). This is also a good place to pluck for a strong 3d harmonic, which avoids having to adjust when you are trying to get two strings to sound on different harmonics so you can hear if they are in unison, or nearly so.
"Nearly so" is very meaningful in this context. This table shows why. Note first that the 4th harmonic of the A string is 440 Hz when it has been tuned to the tuning fork. Now, when the D string is in proper tune according to equal temperament, its 3d harmonic is almost half a Hz higher. By the same token, the 4th harmonic of the low E string is almost 0.4 Hz lower than the 3d harmonic of the A string, when the E is properly tuned.
Early on, I would tune to exact harmonics, using the A string to tune the E and D, then the D to tune G, the low E to tune the high E', then the high E' to tune the B. Working out the math, we find that with A at 110 Hz, the two E strings are then 82.5 and 330 Hz, the D is 146.67 Hz, G is 195.55, and B is 247.5 Hz. We'll see in a moment that tuning a pair of strings to harmonics this way results in the lower string being 2 cents sharp with respect to the higher string. A "cent" is 1/100th of the halftone interval. Thus if E and E' are 2c sharp, B becomes 4c sharp, while D is 2c flat and G is 4c flat. Thus the G-B interval is off by 8c.
One would think that these little errors, which amount to fractions of a Hz, would be too small to hear. Not so. An error of one musical cent or two is not easy for everyone to hear, but almost anyone can hear an 8c mistuning. This table shows the frequency and cent differences, string pair by pair, and how I compensate for them:
As you can see, for the lower strings, the frequency differences are less than 1Hz, so it is hard to adjust by counting beats. In my experience, I cannot hear the beat when it is less than 1Hz, and I can barely hear the B4 to E'3 beat. What I do, then, is adjust until there is a difference I can barely detect. For example, I first tune the low E to the A using E4 and A3, and get it exact by nulling the beats. Then, knowing that the E is a tad sharp, I flat it until I can just detect the difference. I do so for each pair. This procedure leads to a final tuning so close to equal temperament that the G and B sound good together, and the chords D, A, C and E all sound equally good.
Of course, now that I have an electronic tuner, I can get a guitar in tune pretty quickly, but I have found that the green light stays on over an interval of plus-or-minus a cent or two. Thus, after I tune electronically, all the strings are probably within a cent or so of being right, but if I tweak a little by ear, I can make my guitar sound just a little bit better.
One caveat. This does not take inharmonicities into account. Because of small nonlinear effects the harmonics are slightly sharp compared to the open note, but for a guitar using steel strings the difference is half a cent or less at the 4th harmonic, and negligible at the 3d harmonic. Nonetheless, the result is a slight stretch of the tuning. You may know that pianos are usually stretch tuned, and over the 88-key range, the highest notes are 10-15 cents sharp as compared with the lowest notes. Piano strings are stretched tighter than guitar strings, and the harmonics get sharper as a result. Stretch tuning makes notes a few octaves apart sound better together. This is also true for the guitar, in principle, but it is very rare to play notes more than 3 octaves apart on the guitar. I haven't found a noticeable difference.
I played guitar for forty years before I obtained an electronic tuner. At first, I kept my guitar in tune by ear using the piano; my mother was a fine pianist and our piano was kept in tune. Before going off to college, I got a tuning fork, the A-440 one. I learned to tune the A string by sounding its 4th harmonic, striking and setting the fork, and tuning for zero beats. Then I tuned the rest of the strings using harmonics, which I'll describe shortly.
As my ear got keener, I noticed that tuning with pure harmonics led to certain chords, such as D, not sounding quite right, and I tinkered with the tuning a lot before I learned more about what I was doing. Finally I learned enough about equal temperament and how the harmonics relate to it to get my guitar tuned right, no tinkering needed.
This fingerboard diagram, the first octave cropped from a larger illustration in Wikipedia Commons, shows how the 3d and 4th harmonics relate everywhere but between the G and B strings:
Early on, I would tune to exact harmonics, using the A string to tune the E and D, then the D to tune G, the low E to tune the high E', then the high E' to tune the B. Working out the math, we find that with A at 110 Hz, the two E strings are then 82.5 and 330 Hz, the D is 146.67 Hz, G is 195.55, and B is 247.5 Hz. We'll see in a moment that tuning a pair of strings to harmonics this way results in the lower string being 2 cents sharp with respect to the higher string. A "cent" is 1/100th of the halftone interval. Thus if E and E' are 2c sharp, B becomes 4c sharp, while D is 2c flat and G is 4c flat. Thus the G-B interval is off by 8c.
One would think that these little errors, which amount to fractions of a Hz, would be too small to hear. Not so. An error of one musical cent or two is not easy for everyone to hear, but almost anyone can hear an 8c mistuning. This table shows the frequency and cent differences, string pair by pair, and how I compensate for them:
As you can see, for the lower strings, the frequency differences are less than 1Hz, so it is hard to adjust by counting beats. In my experience, I cannot hear the beat when it is less than 1Hz, and I can barely hear the B4 to E'3 beat. What I do, then, is adjust until there is a difference I can barely detect. For example, I first tune the low E to the A using E4 and A3, and get it exact by nulling the beats. Then, knowing that the E is a tad sharp, I flat it until I can just detect the difference. I do so for each pair. This procedure leads to a final tuning so close to equal temperament that the G and B sound good together, and the chords D, A, C and E all sound equally good.
Of course, now that I have an electronic tuner, I can get a guitar in tune pretty quickly, but I have found that the green light stays on over an interval of plus-or-minus a cent or two. Thus, after I tune electronically, all the strings are probably within a cent or so of being right, but if I tweak a little by ear, I can make my guitar sound just a little bit better.
One caveat. This does not take inharmonicities into account. Because of small nonlinear effects the harmonics are slightly sharp compared to the open note, but for a guitar using steel strings the difference is half a cent or less at the 4th harmonic, and negligible at the 3d harmonic. Nonetheless, the result is a slight stretch of the tuning. You may know that pianos are usually stretch tuned, and over the 88-key range, the highest notes are 10-15 cents sharp as compared with the lowest notes. Piano strings are stretched tighter than guitar strings, and the harmonics get sharper as a result. Stretch tuning makes notes a few octaves apart sound better together. This is also true for the guitar, in principle, but it is very rare to play notes more than 3 octaves apart on the guitar. I haven't found a noticeable difference.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
A great explainer makes all the difference
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, mathematics, equations
I've been told I ought to show a book's cover in these reviews. I almost never do. In this case, I just had to. The cover illustration by Jennifer Carrow is incomparable! It is said that Euler's Identity (we will come to it) is the most beautiful equation ever devised, and it ranks high among equations printed on T-shirts for math lovers. This circle of 17 of the most influential equations belongs on one of those T-shirts.
I admit this mathematical soup bowl doesn't have the concise heft of the Maxwell System (4 very short equations, and probably the "equation" most commonly found on a geek's T-shirt). But it does show that a major chunk of modern technology depends on a working understanding of a few deep principles.
The equations chosen by Ian Stewart for In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations that Changed the World span the gamut of mathematical understanding. And mathematical understanding makes nearly everything work upon which we depend: auto engines, electrical power transmission, cell phones, the water and sewage system, airplanes, and the radios and TVs we dote upon.
Some of those equations go way, way back. The venerable Pythagorean Theorem, that the sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle equals the square of the long side (c²=a²+b²), is possibly 500 years older than Pythagoras, pushing it back some 3,000 years. Much more recently the Logistic Equation (new x=kx(1-x)) has codified the "butterfly effect", illustrating that in unstable systems, and nature is full of them, a butterfly that decides to flap twice instead of once during a particular moment can make the difference between a clear day two weeks later, or a thunderstorm.
The title embodies a lovely pun. A mathematical equation is a mental machine, used to combine things we know into discovery of what we don't know. It is usually written with some symbols on the right, the "knowns", and you have to solve it to get an "answer", symbolized by whatever is on the left, the "unknown". In the case of Pythagoras's equation, we know a and b, and use the equation to find a value for c.
For the Euler Identity, embodied in the seven characters shown here, there is nothing to "solve". Rather, it expresses a deep relationship between quantities that once were thought to have nothing to do with one another. The first symbol, e, the exponential number, is the basis of natural logarithms (a large subject all in itself). The second, named pi, is the circumference of a circle whose diameter is 1. This is not one of the 17 equations, but shows up in the chapter on the square root of -1, which is often written i, and originally called "the imaginary number". When I took engineering math courses, though, we used j, both to use a larger symbol that we would be less likely to misplace, and to get our minds used to the fact that this number is very, very real. All of modern electronics, and indeed, all wave phenomena, would not work without it.
For those that know a smidgen of trigonometry, the first cluster of symbols above, the exponential function of pi times i, represents a particular combination of the sine and cosine function, which adds up to -1. Until i was understood, the others had no known relationship.
I have known some of the equations in Dr. Steward discusses, but others were new to me. In all cases, his explanations may not have made me any kind of expert, but they did convey an understanding of what the subject was about. For example, I had only a glancing contact with Maxwell's Equations in the past. There is really no way for me to get into these; I'll just say that their chapter got me a little closer to understanding the relationship between electrical and magnetic fields that wrap together into light, radio waves and x-rays. That little pair of symbols after the fourth equal sign, mu-zero times epsilon-zero, works out to the reciprocal square of the speed of light. When you solve the two lower equations together, you get the speed of light, an insight that led Maxwell and his colleagues to realize that light is an electromagnetic wave.
Most of us will never know much about such things as the way air and gasoline vapor mix inside an auto engine. We just want to drive the car. Fortunately, some very smart people do know a great deal about vapor mixing and burning, and also about the way the steering wheel affects the direction the tires point, and how to do so stably, plus how to size the brakes so you can safely stop. We don't have to know digital signal compression theory to operate a cell phone. But a few folks have to know it to design its circuitry. The equations that lie beneath all our gadgets can be beautiful to a mathematician, and wholly opaque to most of us. But if you read this book, you'll appreciate the power of a skillful explainer such as the author, to crack open the lid on our minds. It can take years to learn to work some of these mental machines. With Ian Stewart's help, it takes just a few minutes to appreciate their effects.
I admit this mathematical soup bowl doesn't have the concise heft of the Maxwell System (4 very short equations, and probably the "equation" most commonly found on a geek's T-shirt). But it does show that a major chunk of modern technology depends on a working understanding of a few deep principles.
The equations chosen by Ian Stewart for In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations that Changed the World span the gamut of mathematical understanding. And mathematical understanding makes nearly everything work upon which we depend: auto engines, electrical power transmission, cell phones, the water and sewage system, airplanes, and the radios and TVs we dote upon.
Some of those equations go way, way back. The venerable Pythagorean Theorem, that the sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle equals the square of the long side (c²=a²+b²), is possibly 500 years older than Pythagoras, pushing it back some 3,000 years. Much more recently the Logistic Equation (new x=kx(1-x)) has codified the "butterfly effect", illustrating that in unstable systems, and nature is full of them, a butterfly that decides to flap twice instead of once during a particular moment can make the difference between a clear day two weeks later, or a thunderstorm.
The title embodies a lovely pun. A mathematical equation is a mental machine, used to combine things we know into discovery of what we don't know. It is usually written with some symbols on the right, the "knowns", and you have to solve it to get an "answer", symbolized by whatever is on the left, the "unknown". In the case of Pythagoras's equation, we know a and b, and use the equation to find a value for c.
For those that know a smidgen of trigonometry, the first cluster of symbols above, the exponential function of pi times i, represents a particular combination of the sine and cosine function, which adds up to -1. Until i was understood, the others had no known relationship.
Most of us will never know much about such things as the way air and gasoline vapor mix inside an auto engine. We just want to drive the car. Fortunately, some very smart people do know a great deal about vapor mixing and burning, and also about the way the steering wheel affects the direction the tires point, and how to do so stably, plus how to size the brakes so you can safely stop. We don't have to know digital signal compression theory to operate a cell phone. But a few folks have to know it to design its circuitry. The equations that lie beneath all our gadgets can be beautiful to a mathematician, and wholly opaque to most of us. But if you read this book, you'll appreciate the power of a skillful explainer such as the author, to crack open the lid on our minds. It can take years to learn to work some of these mental machines. With Ian Stewart's help, it takes just a few minutes to appreciate their effects.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Pushing my small camera's limits
kw: photography, photographs, techniques
This morning I happened to awake quite early, so I was heading for my car prior to sunrise. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the Moon near Venus. I grabbed the camera I always carry in my lunch bag, and snapped this, zoomed all the way out (3X). I could see that, handheld with a 1/6-sec exposure, it was rather blurry. Also, the camera had focused on the leaves, which while still blurry are sharper than the Moon.
It took me a couple of minutes to run back inside and grab my
mini-tripod, and then to back my car up so I could use it for a base. I took
another shot with the leaves in the frame, and finally this one for
which the camera focused on the Moon. Much better. There is just one thing missing in this shot, that does show up in the first one: Earthshine is just barely visible in the upper image. In the few minutes between the images, the sky brightened to the point that it swamped the Earthshine. This exposure was 1/15 second, so the sky brightness had more than doubled.
I'll have to await another occasion that I can get a sharp picture of the Moon with Earthshine. Getting Venus in the same frame is probably not in the cards. The residual blurriness in the second image is primarily due to the inexpensive optics in the Canon SD1200. Both images are 1080x720 pixel clips out of 10Mpx frames (7.8% of the frame).
I'll have to await another occasion that I can get a sharp picture of the Moon with Earthshine. Getting Venus in the same frame is probably not in the cards. The residual blurriness in the second image is primarily due to the inexpensive optics in the Canon SD1200. Both images are 1080x720 pixel clips out of 10Mpx frames (7.8% of the frame).
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Why I floss
kw: dental care
The number of people who report that they floss their teeth daily ranges from 22% to 48%, depending on how the pollster asked the question. Prior to about age 32, I was one of those who did not floss, and nobody had been able to convince me that I ought to do so. Then, when I went to graduate school, and moved to South Dakota, I got a new dentist.
The first time I went in for a cleaning, I saw a poster similar to this on the wall (different old codger). It got my attention, and the dentist never had to say a word. I've flossed ever since.
A friend recently mentioned why he flosses: He was told, "Just floss the teeth you intend to keep". It is all in how you say something!
The number of people who report that they floss their teeth daily ranges from 22% to 48%, depending on how the pollster asked the question. Prior to about age 32, I was one of those who did not floss, and nobody had been able to convince me that I ought to do so. Then, when I went to graduate school, and moved to South Dakota, I got a new dentist.
A friend recently mentioned why he flosses: He was told, "Just floss the teeth you intend to keep". It is all in how you say something!
Monday, September 10, 2012
I knew Time was left wing, but...
kw: politics, language
How you say something reveals how you think about it. In the most recent issue of Time, dated Sept 17, 2012, the cover article is titled "One Nation on Welfare: Living Your Life on the Dole", by Michael Grunwald. His attitude is simple: the Government owns you, and any "benefit" you receive is a subsidy. The article is illustrated with four large photos, littered with yellow squares. Some of them state:
Wrong! Taxes are when "the Treasury" reaches into your pocket. A deduction is a statutary provision that "allows" you to reduce what "they" take, because you are behaving in a way "they" think is worthwhile and want to encourage, or because you have incurred an unusual expense, and "they" are in part giving you recompense. Two examples will suffice.
When I first began doing my own taxes in 1967, all consumer interest was deductible from income taxes: home mortgages, car loans, and credit card interest, for example. Two things were changed about ten years later. First, all consumer interest other than mortgage interest was removed from the list of allowed deductions. In particular, that part of the deduction was thought to be driving a rapid increase in people getting deeply into debt via credit cards, revolving-charge accounts at retailers, and unsecured loans. The change in the law did make a dent in unwise borrowing, but consumer credit has continued to increase anyway. It was also considered "unfair" that rich people with a dozen homes scattered about the country (or the world) were deducting huge amounts of interest from their income taxes, so the law was changed to allow the deduction only for a primary residence and a secondary one (such as a vacation home). The deduction for house 1 and house 2 was retained, because it is desirable to encourage home ownership. People who own their own home usually take better care of it than renters (as every one of my friends who is a landlord will attest). Occupant-owned houses simply last longer and cost less in the lifetime of the structure, than rented properties.
Secondly, in 1967 nearly all medical expenses were deductible. At the time, there were no HMO's or other vestiges of socialized medicine. "Traditional" health insurance was "Major Medical", which paid for hospitalization or visits to the emergency room. When you went to see your family doctor, or bought pills or had an injection, you simply paid for it. If you were a sickly sort (or hypochondriac), you might spend a lot more than the average. The medical deduction partly offset this. Though an increasing set of limiting thresholds has been imposed, now about 7%, before you can deduct anything, the principle is the same.
Let us recall that a deduction is not a tax write-off. If you had "extra" medical expenses of $10,000 last year, over and above the threshold, and you are in the 20% bracket, taking the deduction will yield a $2,000 reduction of your taxes owed. I don't call that very generous, but it is what it is. Also, if you had mortgage interest of 4% on a $150,000 loan, or $6,000, in the same tax bracket, that deduction will reduce your taxes by $1,200.
For people who take the time to think it through, the mortgage interest deduction can allow them to buy a slightly better home. If you can afford a payment of $6,000 per year (ignoring escrowed taxes and insurance), working the math backward means you could afford an up-front payment of $7,500, and at 4% the loaned amount would then be $187,500. That's enough for an extra bedroom or a nicer neighborhood. Now your deduction is $1,500 instead of $1,200. Is this money "taken" from the government? No. On average, you are among those who are increasing in prosperity, earning more, spending more, and particularly in this case, supporting home builders at a higher level than you might have done without the deduction. The extra $37,500 (at least; we've ignored down payment) in the cost of the home went into someone's pocket, who had it to spend and make their own contribution to the flow of cash in the economy.
This is not to say that all tax offsets and genuine subsidies (many of which are in the form of direct payments) are good. Some are "special interest" items that benefit a few who really don't need it. But let's consider one more, farm subsidies. In the author's yellow box, these are pegged at $15 billion. In a $3.8 trillion federal spending spree (there is no budget, for three years running), that is a rounding error-sized amount. It comes to about 2.4% of the total amount we spend on food in America. While not all of this little nest of subsidies is well spent, the main effect has been to allow larger numbers of small farmers to stay in business. This, again, is a case of encouraging behavior that is better for the country. So not all subsidies are "bad things".
But to state that we are all "on the dole"? Ridiculous! Consider the Interstate Highway System and Air Traffic Control. These are examples of what President Obama was actually talking about when he said, "You didn't build that". While the way he said it was a monumental gaffe, just think what life here would be like without them. Prior to President Eisenhower's initiative in the 1950s, the best road from where I live to my cousin's home in Bucks County, PA was the road now called Route 202. You can still go that way, if you want to spend an extra hour on the road. But it's better to take the Interstate and the feeders attached to it, also built with federal funds. And if air traffic were strictly a state-by-state system, probably with conflicting standards, could we support 3 million daily flights around the country? Are you on the dole when you take a road trip, or fly somewhere? No.
"The Dole" properly refers to support for those who cannot support themselves. As a society we have the Welfare system, administered at the state level. Of course, because no law is perfect, there are abuses, which various "workfare" bills have attempted to address. But there is no question that some folks simply can't make it without help, and as a civilized people, we have decided to help. "The Dole" is not properly applied to publicly supported infrastructure that enable more efficient economic activity. If federal money was used to improve the local sewage disposal system, or the township's water supply (true in both cases), are all of us living here "on the dole"? Hardly! We paid the taxes that were used to pay for those projects. In such cases, yes, dammit We Did That! It was just indirect.
And so, finally, even in the case of Interstate highways and air traffic control, every dollar used to create those systems was taken from the American people. We Did That. Or, more properly, Our Parents Did That. To keep those systems running well, we continue to pay taxes to "the Feds", which uses them to pay for infrastructure maintenance. It is not "the dole" if you pay for it.
To avoid going on and on, and so I can have my lunch before the end of the day, I'll stop here.
How you say something reveals how you think about it. In the most recent issue of Time, dated Sept 17, 2012, the cover article is titled "One Nation on Welfare: Living Your Life on the Dole", by Michael Grunwald. His attitude is simple: the Government owns you, and any "benefit" you receive is a subsidy. The article is illustrated with four large photos, littered with yellow squares. Some of them state:
- At least $15 billion goes each year to farm supports.
- The IRS allows a $3,800 tax exemption per child and more for child care.
- Deductions for health care expenses cost the Treasury $184 billion a year.
- Charitable tax deductions cost the government about $40 billion a year.
- Depreciation of business property like computers and other capital goods cost the feds $5.7 billion in 2011.
- The home-mortgage-interest deduction costs the Treasury $84 billion a year.
Wrong! Taxes are when "the Treasury" reaches into your pocket. A deduction is a statutary provision that "allows" you to reduce what "they" take, because you are behaving in a way "they" think is worthwhile and want to encourage, or because you have incurred an unusual expense, and "they" are in part giving you recompense. Two examples will suffice.
When I first began doing my own taxes in 1967, all consumer interest was deductible from income taxes: home mortgages, car loans, and credit card interest, for example. Two things were changed about ten years later. First, all consumer interest other than mortgage interest was removed from the list of allowed deductions. In particular, that part of the deduction was thought to be driving a rapid increase in people getting deeply into debt via credit cards, revolving-charge accounts at retailers, and unsecured loans. The change in the law did make a dent in unwise borrowing, but consumer credit has continued to increase anyway. It was also considered "unfair" that rich people with a dozen homes scattered about the country (or the world) were deducting huge amounts of interest from their income taxes, so the law was changed to allow the deduction only for a primary residence and a secondary one (such as a vacation home). The deduction for house 1 and house 2 was retained, because it is desirable to encourage home ownership. People who own their own home usually take better care of it than renters (as every one of my friends who is a landlord will attest). Occupant-owned houses simply last longer and cost less in the lifetime of the structure, than rented properties.
Secondly, in 1967 nearly all medical expenses were deductible. At the time, there were no HMO's or other vestiges of socialized medicine. "Traditional" health insurance was "Major Medical", which paid for hospitalization or visits to the emergency room. When you went to see your family doctor, or bought pills or had an injection, you simply paid for it. If you were a sickly sort (or hypochondriac), you might spend a lot more than the average. The medical deduction partly offset this. Though an increasing set of limiting thresholds has been imposed, now about 7%, before you can deduct anything, the principle is the same.
Let us recall that a deduction is not a tax write-off. If you had "extra" medical expenses of $10,000 last year, over and above the threshold, and you are in the 20% bracket, taking the deduction will yield a $2,000 reduction of your taxes owed. I don't call that very generous, but it is what it is. Also, if you had mortgage interest of 4% on a $150,000 loan, or $6,000, in the same tax bracket, that deduction will reduce your taxes by $1,200.
For people who take the time to think it through, the mortgage interest deduction can allow them to buy a slightly better home. If you can afford a payment of $6,000 per year (ignoring escrowed taxes and insurance), working the math backward means you could afford an up-front payment of $7,500, and at 4% the loaned amount would then be $187,500. That's enough for an extra bedroom or a nicer neighborhood. Now your deduction is $1,500 instead of $1,200. Is this money "taken" from the government? No. On average, you are among those who are increasing in prosperity, earning more, spending more, and particularly in this case, supporting home builders at a higher level than you might have done without the deduction. The extra $37,500 (at least; we've ignored down payment) in the cost of the home went into someone's pocket, who had it to spend and make their own contribution to the flow of cash in the economy.
This is not to say that all tax offsets and genuine subsidies (many of which are in the form of direct payments) are good. Some are "special interest" items that benefit a few who really don't need it. But let's consider one more, farm subsidies. In the author's yellow box, these are pegged at $15 billion. In a $3.8 trillion federal spending spree (there is no budget, for three years running), that is a rounding error-sized amount. It comes to about 2.4% of the total amount we spend on food in America. While not all of this little nest of subsidies is well spent, the main effect has been to allow larger numbers of small farmers to stay in business. This, again, is a case of encouraging behavior that is better for the country. So not all subsidies are "bad things".
But to state that we are all "on the dole"? Ridiculous! Consider the Interstate Highway System and Air Traffic Control. These are examples of what President Obama was actually talking about when he said, "You didn't build that". While the way he said it was a monumental gaffe, just think what life here would be like without them. Prior to President Eisenhower's initiative in the 1950s, the best road from where I live to my cousin's home in Bucks County, PA was the road now called Route 202. You can still go that way, if you want to spend an extra hour on the road. But it's better to take the Interstate and the feeders attached to it, also built with federal funds. And if air traffic were strictly a state-by-state system, probably with conflicting standards, could we support 3 million daily flights around the country? Are you on the dole when you take a road trip, or fly somewhere? No.
"The Dole" properly refers to support for those who cannot support themselves. As a society we have the Welfare system, administered at the state level. Of course, because no law is perfect, there are abuses, which various "workfare" bills have attempted to address. But there is no question that some folks simply can't make it without help, and as a civilized people, we have decided to help. "The Dole" is not properly applied to publicly supported infrastructure that enable more efficient economic activity. If federal money was used to improve the local sewage disposal system, or the township's water supply (true in both cases), are all of us living here "on the dole"? Hardly! We paid the taxes that were used to pay for those projects. In such cases, yes, dammit We Did That! It was just indirect.
And so, finally, even in the case of Interstate highways and air traffic control, every dollar used to create those systems was taken from the American people. We Did That. Or, more properly, Our Parents Did That. To keep those systems running well, we continue to pay taxes to "the Feds", which uses them to pay for infrastructure maintenance. It is not "the dole" if you pay for it.
To avoid going on and on, and so I can have my lunch before the end of the day, I'll stop here.
Sunday, September 09, 2012
The worlds next door
kw: book reviews, science fiction, alternate worlds
Some stories require more suspension of disbelief than others. Having just completed reading a (mostly) scientific survey of the origin of the universe, including a brief discussion of the multiple worlds hypothesis, I was less ready than usual to read The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. But a good yarn can captivate me anyway, and this one did. The Pratchett/Baxter collaboration is one of the more fortunate combos in the sci-fi world today.
Most science fiction is based on asking, "What if this or that were different…?" Here, it is, "What if there really are a multitudes of parallel Universes, and what if there were a way to 'step' from one to another?" In this novel, the word 'step' takes on a whole new meaning. The authors thought this through quite thoroughly, and a few of the important implications include:
By the way, I read somewhere that the approved directions for a fourth dimension are Ana and Kata. As prefixes, "ana" means to build up, as in anabolism, and "kata" means to break down, as in katabolism; they are the two halves of metabolism. Of course, any pair of antonyms one might choose instead of East and West are going to have extra baggage, so perhaps the authors were wise to stick with East and West.
The stepper device is powered by a potato with dissimilar metals stuck in it, forming a crude battery. All commercial batteries contain iron, so none can be used. However, I've made potato batteries; the usual way is to use a piece of heavy copper wire and an iron nail. Obviously, some other metal has to be used in a stepper's potato battery. Which one it is, is never mentioned. I wonder why iron is discriminated against, though.
The action is set just far enough in the future, about 20 years, that Moore's Law is likely to have produced a modest-sized computer that could contain a downloaded, or in this case, reincarnated, human soul. A Tibetan who died at just the right moment takes up residence in a newly-booted-up organic computer. Once it is verified that he is really "in there", and thus it would be murder to turn off the computer, he gets the backing of a powerful magnate, is paired up with a young man who needs no technical help to step, and can endure rapid stepping (most can't). They go on the adventure of a lifetime, into the High-Meggers, worlds a million steps away and further.
Along the way, the authors get to try out an extreme evolutionary hypothesis: Suppose a pre-DNA form of life became dominant. How would it evolve, and what would be the result after 4+ billion years? Further, would there be a way for modern humans to communicate with…whatever it is?
These ingredients have produced a tasty ragout of a book, a great read. And it is a clever place to begin a new series, if the authors are so disposed. After all, with a few million newly-discovered Earths to choose from (and that is just to the "West"), they'll never run out of almost-ordinary situations they can tweak to their heart's content.
Some stories require more suspension of disbelief than others. Having just completed reading a (mostly) scientific survey of the origin of the universe, including a brief discussion of the multiple worlds hypothesis, I was less ready than usual to read The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. But a good yarn can captivate me anyway, and this one did. The Pratchett/Baxter collaboration is one of the more fortunate combos in the sci-fi world today.
Most science fiction is based on asking, "What if this or that were different…?" Here, it is, "What if there really are a multitudes of parallel Universes, and what if there were a way to 'step' from one to another?" In this novel, the word 'step' takes on a whole new meaning. The authors thought this through quite thoroughly, and a few of the important implications include:
- Evolution played out differently on different Earths. Sundry hominids, that can step between worlds, could then be behind legends of fairies or elves or trolls.
- Stepping may be an evolved skill.
- With possibly infinite real estate suddenly opened up to humanity, how will it affect politics and economics? Just consider if known gold mines can be re-mined many times over…
- People would vary in their ability to step, once it is unleashed. Suppose it is easy and quick for some, tricky (requiring technical help) and slow for most, and impossible for some. Class warfare, anyone?
By the way, I read somewhere that the approved directions for a fourth dimension are Ana and Kata. As prefixes, "ana" means to build up, as in anabolism, and "kata" means to break down, as in katabolism; they are the two halves of metabolism. Of course, any pair of antonyms one might choose instead of East and West are going to have extra baggage, so perhaps the authors were wise to stick with East and West.
The stepper device is powered by a potato with dissimilar metals stuck in it, forming a crude battery. All commercial batteries contain iron, so none can be used. However, I've made potato batteries; the usual way is to use a piece of heavy copper wire and an iron nail. Obviously, some other metal has to be used in a stepper's potato battery. Which one it is, is never mentioned. I wonder why iron is discriminated against, though.
The action is set just far enough in the future, about 20 years, that Moore's Law is likely to have produced a modest-sized computer that could contain a downloaded, or in this case, reincarnated, human soul. A Tibetan who died at just the right moment takes up residence in a newly-booted-up organic computer. Once it is verified that he is really "in there", and thus it would be murder to turn off the computer, he gets the backing of a powerful magnate, is paired up with a young man who needs no technical help to step, and can endure rapid stepping (most can't). They go on the adventure of a lifetime, into the High-Meggers, worlds a million steps away and further.
Along the way, the authors get to try out an extreme evolutionary hypothesis: Suppose a pre-DNA form of life became dominant. How would it evolve, and what would be the result after 4+ billion years? Further, would there be a way for modern humans to communicate with…whatever it is?
These ingredients have produced a tasty ragout of a book, a great read. And it is a clever place to begin a new series, if the authors are so disposed. After all, with a few million newly-discovered Earths to choose from (and that is just to the "West"), they'll never run out of almost-ordinary situations they can tweak to their heart's content.
Friday, September 07, 2012
Astronomers are the real time travelers
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, astronomy, cosmology
This will be the seventh book "about" cosmology that I've reviewed here: How it Began: A Time-Traveler's Guide to the Universe by Chris Impey. I never tire of astronomy or cosmology. However, it is getting harder to find a book that covers new ground. Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time is a hard act to follow! Dr. Impey manages to follow very, very well.
The plan of the book ensures nothing will be missed.
A significant feature of the book is great analogies. For example, while explaining the fusion furnace in the Sun's core, Impey notes that the power generated is about 280 watts per cubic meter, "the same as a compost heap." The fact that a cubic meter of solar core weighs about 150 tons per cubic meter is elided over for the moment. Thinking about that, I realized that pound for pound, a compost heap is hundreds of times as energetic as the core of the Sun! Of course, a compost heap's heating cycle is over in about a year. That cubic meter of star stuff can cook along for millions of years before it needs to import a little hydrogen from further up to keep going. And just by the way, this helps us understand why "doing" fusion in a Tokamak is so hard; we're trying to devise a fusion system that is thousands of times as rapid as Solar fusion (I wonder just how many people realize that the Sun's volume is 1.3 million times the volume of Earth, and it weighs 333,000 times as much—most of it is less dense than water).
Dealing with light and special relativity, early in the 9th chapter there is a scene discussing "slow light", in which the speed of light is about a meter per second (around 2.2 mph). You can walk faster than that, though it is dangerous to do so; turn on a switch and you must wait a few seconds to see what is in the room; waving at a friend across the street may be futile because the friend might be half a block away before seeing your wave; driving and riding a bicycle are probably impossible, and even jogging would apparently have you seeing events in reverse order. In a note among the endnotes, Impey jokes that he had to "leave Einstein bound and gagged in a corner and play fast and loose with his theory." Actually, the scene had to be in a classical Newtonian universe, so you could outrun (or outwalk) the speed of light. In such a universe, approaching anything at any speed would just make you move closer and closer in time to its "present". In other words, you would seem to move faster forward in time, not backwards in time. You could not see events in reverse, because the light that is "behind" you could not catch up to you.
So let us at least ungag Einstein in his corner, and consider the scene if "slow light" of 1 m/s were the case. It isn't too hard to stroll along at speeds up to 0.9 (2 mph), but trying to get all the way up to light speed, you'd find your feet dragging, as though you were pushing something heavy—and you are: you. Even at 0.9 your inertial mass would be more than doubled. There'd be no brisk walking, no jogging, and certainly no bike or auto (if they existed) could go any faster than a medium walk. You'd also notice that the world seemed compressed ahead of you, and brighter and bluer, and things to the side would seem to whip by and dim behind, fading redly. In fact, pushing as hard as you could toward a bright light would be inadvisable. You'd likely get a bad sunburn from the excess UV.
By the way, it is stated on page 193 that light illuminates a room in a ten-billionth of a second. Not so fast, Dr. Impey! Light travels about a foot per nanosecond, or a meter in 3 ns. A medium-sized bedroom is thus filled with light from a central lamp in about 8 ns, and appears fully illuminated to you, standing it the doorway by the light switch, by 20-26 ns (depending on whether the door is in a corner or mid-wall). Fast enough for practical purposes, but 200 times slower than the author suggests.
Later in the same chapter is a great explanation of the extra dimness of distant galaxies because of Hubble expansion. Ordinarily, if a bright object is twice as far away, you receive ¼ the amount of light, simply because it covers ¼ the visual solid angle while its surface brightness, in lumens per square degree, is the same. However, if the first distance is a few billion light years, the light would be somewhat redshifted, and doubling the distance more than doubles the redshift (it is not a linear relationship, and a chart on p.203 shows the function). For example, looking back 5 billion years (a visual distance of 5 billion light years from our perspective), the redshift is about 0.5, but at 10 gy, the redshift is close to 1.8, rather than 1.0.
By definition, at a lookback time of 13.72 gy, the actual instant of the Big Bang, the redshift is near-infinite (we are not sure whether it is actually infinite). The redshift is related to the factor by which light is stretched by the stretching of space. To conclude, two exactly similar galaxies, one at 5 gy and one at 10 gy, would not differ in brightness by a factor of 4, but by a factor of close to 7.5. In particular, not just the total light from the further one would be less, its surface brightness would be about 45% less. This is why it takes such huge telescopes to see the most distant galaxies; not just because they are visually small, but because they are extra-dim (and we haven't even touched upon the extra dimming by intergalactic gas).
In the explanation of Dark Energy, which is the current explanation for an apparent acceleration of Hubble expansion since 8 billion years ago, I was struck by an odd thought. This mysterious Energy is apparently constant on a volume basis, so its total quantity increases as the Universe expands. Now that sounds a lot like a kind of continuous creation! Fred Hoyle would be pleased.
Dr. Impey doesn't ignore philosophy. The chapter titled "Something Rather Than Nothing" is pretty much all philosophy. After all, we have no empirical evidence (yet) why or how a Universe could contain matter rather than just a sea of photons. And at the book's writing, the Higgs Boson hadn't been detected yet (Now it has: for more, go here and search for ATLAS). He spends a quarter of the chapter on the fine-tuning problem, AKA the Anthropic Principle, which states that if certain physical quantities were a little different, we could not exist. Actually, most of the "fine tuning" turns out to be in a rather wide range, so the Penrose Number of 10 to the 10 to the 123d power "against", is rather too pessimistic (to put it extremely mildly!). In perspective (sorry, I can't stop myself), the fanciful number Googol (NOT Google) is 10 to the 100th power and Googolplex is 10 to the Googol-th power. Let's coin the Gargle as 10 to the 123d power. The Penrose Number is a Gargleplex.
Finally, here is a great graph (p 342) that summarizes just why the Planck Time (~10-43s) and Planck Length (~10-35m) represent an absolute limit to how far we can probe the beginning of time. Unless… unless the Universe is part of a Multiverse, and new quantum events trigger the creation of new Universes, so that ours is just a bubble blown off from a corner of an earlier one. I know Chris Impey had to take the obligatory excursion into Strings and superstrings and multiverse theory and all that. Considering that the number of possibly viable "string theories" is a Googolplex to the fifth power, it bears more resemblance to Medieval monks deciding how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Fortunately, Dr. Impey seems to keep his tongue firmly in his cheek, and manages to distance himself from astro-theological speculations.
There are things we know, and things we don't know, and very likely there are things we cannot know, even if we survive for millions or billions of years. The little triangle at bottom center of the chart above represents a region of "cannot know, whether there is something to know or not". A smidgen of humility is a salutary attribute for a scientist.
The book's main text is 362 pages, but do be sure to read the endnotes. They are equally entertaining, and take you to page 416 with the greatest of ease.
This will be the seventh book "about" cosmology that I've reviewed here: How it Began: A Time-Traveler's Guide to the Universe by Chris Impey. I never tire of astronomy or cosmology. However, it is getting harder to find a book that covers new ground. Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time is a hard act to follow! Dr. Impey manages to follow very, very well.
The plan of the book ensures nothing will be missed.
- Part 1, "Proximate", takes us from Earth and the Solar System out into the Galaxy.
- Part 2, "Remote", covers the rest of the Universe, with frequent reminders that the farther we look, the further back in time we see.
- Part 3, "Alien", doesn't deal with E.T.'s hardly at all, but with the hierarchy of increasingly unfamiliar regimes in which we find ourselves as we approach the first year, the first second, the first picosecond, and back to the Planck time interval after the Big Bang began…and perhaps a bit beyond.
A significant feature of the book is great analogies. For example, while explaining the fusion furnace in the Sun's core, Impey notes that the power generated is about 280 watts per cubic meter, "the same as a compost heap." The fact that a cubic meter of solar core weighs about 150 tons per cubic meter is elided over for the moment. Thinking about that, I realized that pound for pound, a compost heap is hundreds of times as energetic as the core of the Sun! Of course, a compost heap's heating cycle is over in about a year. That cubic meter of star stuff can cook along for millions of years before it needs to import a little hydrogen from further up to keep going. And just by the way, this helps us understand why "doing" fusion in a Tokamak is so hard; we're trying to devise a fusion system that is thousands of times as rapid as Solar fusion (I wonder just how many people realize that the Sun's volume is 1.3 million times the volume of Earth, and it weighs 333,000 times as much—most of it is less dense than water).
Dealing with light and special relativity, early in the 9th chapter there is a scene discussing "slow light", in which the speed of light is about a meter per second (around 2.2 mph). You can walk faster than that, though it is dangerous to do so; turn on a switch and you must wait a few seconds to see what is in the room; waving at a friend across the street may be futile because the friend might be half a block away before seeing your wave; driving and riding a bicycle are probably impossible, and even jogging would apparently have you seeing events in reverse order. In a note among the endnotes, Impey jokes that he had to "leave Einstein bound and gagged in a corner and play fast and loose with his theory." Actually, the scene had to be in a classical Newtonian universe, so you could outrun (or outwalk) the speed of light. In such a universe, approaching anything at any speed would just make you move closer and closer in time to its "present". In other words, you would seem to move faster forward in time, not backwards in time. You could not see events in reverse, because the light that is "behind" you could not catch up to you.
So let us at least ungag Einstein in his corner, and consider the scene if "slow light" of 1 m/s were the case. It isn't too hard to stroll along at speeds up to 0.9 (2 mph), but trying to get all the way up to light speed, you'd find your feet dragging, as though you were pushing something heavy—and you are: you. Even at 0.9 your inertial mass would be more than doubled. There'd be no brisk walking, no jogging, and certainly no bike or auto (if they existed) could go any faster than a medium walk. You'd also notice that the world seemed compressed ahead of you, and brighter and bluer, and things to the side would seem to whip by and dim behind, fading redly. In fact, pushing as hard as you could toward a bright light would be inadvisable. You'd likely get a bad sunburn from the excess UV.
By the way, it is stated on page 193 that light illuminates a room in a ten-billionth of a second. Not so fast, Dr. Impey! Light travels about a foot per nanosecond, or a meter in 3 ns. A medium-sized bedroom is thus filled with light from a central lamp in about 8 ns, and appears fully illuminated to you, standing it the doorway by the light switch, by 20-26 ns (depending on whether the door is in a corner or mid-wall). Fast enough for practical purposes, but 200 times slower than the author suggests.
Later in the same chapter is a great explanation of the extra dimness of distant galaxies because of Hubble expansion. Ordinarily, if a bright object is twice as far away, you receive ¼ the amount of light, simply because it covers ¼ the visual solid angle while its surface brightness, in lumens per square degree, is the same. However, if the first distance is a few billion light years, the light would be somewhat redshifted, and doubling the distance more than doubles the redshift (it is not a linear relationship, and a chart on p.203 shows the function). For example, looking back 5 billion years (a visual distance of 5 billion light years from our perspective), the redshift is about 0.5, but at 10 gy, the redshift is close to 1.8, rather than 1.0.
By definition, at a lookback time of 13.72 gy, the actual instant of the Big Bang, the redshift is near-infinite (we are not sure whether it is actually infinite). The redshift is related to the factor by which light is stretched by the stretching of space. To conclude, two exactly similar galaxies, one at 5 gy and one at 10 gy, would not differ in brightness by a factor of 4, but by a factor of close to 7.5. In particular, not just the total light from the further one would be less, its surface brightness would be about 45% less. This is why it takes such huge telescopes to see the most distant galaxies; not just because they are visually small, but because they are extra-dim (and we haven't even touched upon the extra dimming by intergalactic gas).
In the explanation of Dark Energy, which is the current explanation for an apparent acceleration of Hubble expansion since 8 billion years ago, I was struck by an odd thought. This mysterious Energy is apparently constant on a volume basis, so its total quantity increases as the Universe expands. Now that sounds a lot like a kind of continuous creation! Fred Hoyle would be pleased.
Dr. Impey doesn't ignore philosophy. The chapter titled "Something Rather Than Nothing" is pretty much all philosophy. After all, we have no empirical evidence (yet) why or how a Universe could contain matter rather than just a sea of photons. And at the book's writing, the Higgs Boson hadn't been detected yet (Now it has: for more, go here and search for ATLAS). He spends a quarter of the chapter on the fine-tuning problem, AKA the Anthropic Principle, which states that if certain physical quantities were a little different, we could not exist. Actually, most of the "fine tuning" turns out to be in a rather wide range, so the Penrose Number of 10 to the 10 to the 123d power "against", is rather too pessimistic (to put it extremely mildly!). In perspective (sorry, I can't stop myself), the fanciful number Googol (NOT Google) is 10 to the 100th power and Googolplex is 10 to the Googol-th power. Let's coin the Gargle as 10 to the 123d power. The Penrose Number is a Gargleplex.
There are things we know, and things we don't know, and very likely there are things we cannot know, even if we survive for millions or billions of years. The little triangle at bottom center of the chart above represents a region of "cannot know, whether there is something to know or not". A smidgen of humility is a salutary attribute for a scientist.
The book's main text is 362 pages, but do be sure to read the endnotes. They are equally entertaining, and take you to page 416 with the greatest of ease.
Thursday, September 06, 2012
You'd think they forgot the TV cameras were on
kw: politics, religion, current events
I hardly saw any of the Democratic Convention, but I did catch the odd "Booing God" moment. Here is how it was reported by Josh Lederman and Julie Pace of the Associated Press, as reported on Yahoo News:
I hardly saw any of the Democratic Convention, but I did catch the odd "Booing God" moment. Here is how it was reported by Josh Lederman and Julie Pace of the Associated Press, as reported on Yahoo News:
Needled by Mitt Romney and other Republicans, Democrats hurriedly rewrote their convention platform Wednesday to add a mention of God and declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel after President Barack Obama intervened to order the changes.
The embarrassing reversal was compounded by chaos and uncertainty on the convention floor. Three times Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the convention chairman, called for a voice vote on the changes and each time the yes and no votes seemed to balance each other out. On the third attempt, Villaraigosa ruled the amendments were approved — triggering boos from many in the audience.
I give credit to the President for requesting the changes, even though it has the flavor of too little, too late. Dear party leaders: when you detect you are in the hole, at least stop digging!
Commentators favorable to the Democrats have been scrambling ever since, stating that the ones who'd voted No were booing Mayor Villaraigosa, not God or Jerusalem. It doesn't matter. They were against the changes, some perhaps for good reason, and some for no good reason.
It is well known that militant atheists are a vocal constituency of the Democratic party. They are tentatively supported by a larger, less vocal number who believe religion has no place in politics. I tend to sympathize with this latter bunch, though I disagree. It is also well known that a constituency of anti-Zionists (some of them Jews) has also found a home among the Democrats. Some of these, probably a minority (and certainly none of the Jews), are also anti-semitic, though they've learned to keep that rather quiet. It appears that it was largely due to these folks' influence that administration officials recently met with representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Whether a party platform mentions reliance on God, doesn't concern me much. It does concern me that the status of Jerusalem was initially left out, and had to be reinstated by Presidential request.
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
How full of galaxies is the sky?
kw: references, galaxies, astronomy
This is just a quick reference note, to bring together a few useful quantities. I began to wonder just how many galaxies there might be in each square arc-minute or arc-second of the sky. I was surprised at the result.
First, the entire sky contains 4 x pi x (180/pi)² = 41,252.96 square degrees. This comes to 148.51 million square arc-minutes or 534.62 billion square arc-seconds. The best resolution under "good seeing" with a ground-based telescope, and not enhanced with wavefront correction technology, is about one arc second. Thus, just recording and managing those half a trillion "sky pixels" is a big job already. The Hubble Space Telescope has a resolution in blue light of 0.05 arc-sec, so its potential number of "sky pixels" is 400 times greater.
How well populated is the sky? The Atlas of the Universe contains these figures:
How big will they appear? A typical dwarf galaxy of 1,000-light-year size, 13.4 billion light years away (right after the universe cleared up enough to see that far), has an angular diameter of 0.015 arc second. So even Hubble won't be able to do more than register its existence in a particular pixel. Back up to 13 billion light years, when larger galaxies were forming up, and a 100,000 light-year-sized galaxy would subtend 1.5 arc seconds. Hubble can see a little detail in such an object. We can expect, as wavefront correction improves for large, and multiple-instrument, ground-based telescopes, that clearer images of such faraway objects will be obtained.
It is going to take a while, however, for a multi-exabyte database of the sky to be gathered and curated. Astronomers have a never-ending subject to explore!
This is just a quick reference note, to bring together a few useful quantities. I began to wonder just how many galaxies there might be in each square arc-minute or arc-second of the sky. I was surprised at the result.
First, the entire sky contains 4 x pi x (180/pi)² = 41,252.96 square degrees. This comes to 148.51 million square arc-minutes or 534.62 billion square arc-seconds. The best resolution under "good seeing" with a ground-based telescope, and not enhanced with wavefront correction technology, is about one arc second. Thus, just recording and managing those half a trillion "sky pixels" is a big job already. The Hubble Space Telescope has a resolution in blue light of 0.05 arc-sec, so its potential number of "sky pixels" is 400 times greater.
How well populated is the sky? The Atlas of the Universe contains these figures:
- Number of large galaxies in the visible universe: 350 billion.
- Number of dwarf galaxies (ditto): 7 trillion.
How big will they appear? A typical dwarf galaxy of 1,000-light-year size, 13.4 billion light years away (right after the universe cleared up enough to see that far), has an angular diameter of 0.015 arc second. So even Hubble won't be able to do more than register its existence in a particular pixel. Back up to 13 billion light years, when larger galaxies were forming up, and a 100,000 light-year-sized galaxy would subtend 1.5 arc seconds. Hubble can see a little detail in such an object. We can expect, as wavefront correction improves for large, and multiple-instrument, ground-based telescopes, that clearer images of such faraway objects will be obtained.
It is going to take a while, however, for a multi-exabyte database of the sky to be gathered and curated. Astronomers have a never-ending subject to explore!
Monday, September 03, 2012
Perhaps 223 is long enough
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, bureaucracy, polemics
My father used to say that institutional change had to follow the "Moses Principle": Forty years in the wilderness, until the entire generation dies out. He was thinking of paradigms of running a business. When someone comes along with a new idea, it can take a generation for it to take root and take over.
But nations are not like businesses. It can take hundreds of years to turn the course of a nation, should it survive so long. We really ought to take warning from the ossification of China for hundreds of years until the Communist revolution. And without the American revolution, England would have continued its own ossification and, most likely, have been eliminated from the world stage long before the Nineteenth Century.
The career of the United States' federal government has led to its own ossification, as it has become subject to an unbreakable bureaucracy, every bit as stagnant and deadly as the one that gripped China for four centuries. I complained in an earlier post that the federal payroll has grown so large, that reducing "government spending" in any meaningful way would put one or two millions out of work. I had no idea; my figures were off by a factor of at least two, in a most unfortunate direction!
I find in Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent, by Edward Luce, that the size of the federal payroll is limited by statute to 2 million, irrespective of the military, but that our leaders have gotten around this by hiring contractors, which now number nearly 11 million! Add in the military, and the total number of federal personnel exceeds 14 million. That is coming up on 5% of the total U.S. population, and is more than 10% of the working population.
You'd think, with so many people doing the government's business, that a lot of work would get done. In reality, their productivity is a fraction of the productivity of the average business enterprise. The primary business of a bureaucrat is to avoid responsibility. Somehow, it has come about that dozens of committees, regulatory bodies, and agencies get involved in the siting, design and construction of a single bridge. There is chapter after chapter in Start Thinking that illustrates this principle with examples from every area in which the government is involved (and that is nearly everything!). I think it safe to say that the web of multiple responsibilities guarantees that no single person is ever responsible for any particular decision. Thus, no matter what a Presidential candidate may say about "reforming" Washington, the system of today's federal government is a Gordian knot, now the size of a battleship, and there is no sword sufficient for a latter-day Alexander to slice it open.
Mr. Luce's premise is that this and other ills are not directly the "fault" of the government. We keep voting for the people that run this circus. What we have not done is demand a say in the bureaucracy. Nor can we, with the current system in place. A generation ago, a commission reported, "If any nation were to attempt to impose upon America the current system of education, it would be considered an act of war." In spite of "No child left behind" and "Race to the top", it has gotten worse. At the time, the U.S. education system was ranked eighth; now it is twentieth, and falling. Amazingly, just yesterday I met a family from Shanghai, who moved here so their children, middle-schoolers, could "have the benefit of an American education." What were they smoking? They lived here ten years ago, but I don't think they realize how much has changed in just that short decade. From what I can determine, it is now nearly two years since Chinese primary education surpassed America, and in math and science, China is now number one in the world.
I happen to live in a favored location, along the Eastern seaboard, where there is good support for maintaining infrastructure. This is mainly so that congresspersons can more readily travel back to their districts, from New York to South Carolina. If the nation's capital were in Omaha, I wonder what the highway and train systems of Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas would be like? (I understand the Vice President still takes the train home to Delaware frequently; now with half a dozen Secret Service bodyguards. The Wilmington station has now been named for him.)
Elsewhere in the country, parts of the Interstate Highway System are crumbling, and the side roads are worse. And trains? Forget it. A few years ago my brother and his family reserved a sleeper for the 3-day ride from Ohio to California for a family reunion. The ride was so bruising, that my sister-in-law, who is terribly afraid to fly, insisted that they cancel the return reservation and fly home. Much of the trip, the train went no more than 35 mph due to poor track conditions, and even at that speed, the train shook terribly.
In the memorable chapter "Maybe We Can't: Why Money Continues to Rule Washington", the author details how the entrenched system defeated every intention of President Obama, and of George W. Bush before him, to make any improvements. In a sense, going to war is about the only thing a President can do nowadays. Even the famed (and vilified) "Obamacare" bill wound up containing very little of what Obama originally proposed, and nearly everything that the insurance lobby wanted. It is strange: The Republicans are finally getting around to revealing that the "Affordable Care Act" guts Medicare to the tune of more than $700 billion, but they have neglected to point out that nearly all of that will go straight into insurance premiums!
P.S. I am a registered Republican, so I am allowed to vote in primary elections. You can bet that I do not vote straight ticket. Sadly, my wife and I may be the only ones on our block who bother to find out what candidates really stand for and what initiatives really are proposing.
My mother once said that the 50% voting rate in America was a sign that the people were satisfied; at the time nearly 100% of the Russians voted, but could only vote "Yes" or not vote at all. In America, those who voted were mainly those who want a change plus a number who don't want a change and want to counter the opposition. That principle worked well in 1955. It doesn't any more. We are like the proverbial frog in the slowly-heated cauldron, that doesn't try to jump out until the water is warm enough to loosen its muscles so much it can't jump, so it gets boiled. We have been gradually jollied into the present situation over two generations, by my reckoning. It won't be an easy road back.
Mr. Luce doesn't claim to have a prescription for change. The closest he comes is to quote lobbyist Mark Garten, "America will ultimately stand or fall by the health of its middle class." At the moment, the middle class is squarely in the sights of an ossified bureaucracy. This is not a Liberal-Conservative problem. It is a "Damn right I'm going to cover my ass so I can't be held to blame for my decisions" problem that afflicts nearly all of those 14 million federal employees and contractors. There is no simple prescription. Thomas Jefferson wrote, in words that ought to have been included in the Constitution, but were not:
In his own review of this book, David Gergen of CNN wrote, "Warning: this book could be a danger to your peace of mind." I am certainly happy to have finished reading it. I hope I can return to better sleep as the shock wears off.
My father used to say that institutional change had to follow the "Moses Principle": Forty years in the wilderness, until the entire generation dies out. He was thinking of paradigms of running a business. When someone comes along with a new idea, it can take a generation for it to take root and take over.
But nations are not like businesses. It can take hundreds of years to turn the course of a nation, should it survive so long. We really ought to take warning from the ossification of China for hundreds of years until the Communist revolution. And without the American revolution, England would have continued its own ossification and, most likely, have been eliminated from the world stage long before the Nineteenth Century.
The career of the United States' federal government has led to its own ossification, as it has become subject to an unbreakable bureaucracy, every bit as stagnant and deadly as the one that gripped China for four centuries. I complained in an earlier post that the federal payroll has grown so large, that reducing "government spending" in any meaningful way would put one or two millions out of work. I had no idea; my figures were off by a factor of at least two, in a most unfortunate direction!
I find in Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent, by Edward Luce, that the size of the federal payroll is limited by statute to 2 million, irrespective of the military, but that our leaders have gotten around this by hiring contractors, which now number nearly 11 million! Add in the military, and the total number of federal personnel exceeds 14 million. That is coming up on 5% of the total U.S. population, and is more than 10% of the working population.
You'd think, with so many people doing the government's business, that a lot of work would get done. In reality, their productivity is a fraction of the productivity of the average business enterprise. The primary business of a bureaucrat is to avoid responsibility. Somehow, it has come about that dozens of committees, regulatory bodies, and agencies get involved in the siting, design and construction of a single bridge. There is chapter after chapter in Start Thinking that illustrates this principle with examples from every area in which the government is involved (and that is nearly everything!). I think it safe to say that the web of multiple responsibilities guarantees that no single person is ever responsible for any particular decision. Thus, no matter what a Presidential candidate may say about "reforming" Washington, the system of today's federal government is a Gordian knot, now the size of a battleship, and there is no sword sufficient for a latter-day Alexander to slice it open.
Mr. Luce's premise is that this and other ills are not directly the "fault" of the government. We keep voting for the people that run this circus. What we have not done is demand a say in the bureaucracy. Nor can we, with the current system in place. A generation ago, a commission reported, "If any nation were to attempt to impose upon America the current system of education, it would be considered an act of war." In spite of "No child left behind" and "Race to the top", it has gotten worse. At the time, the U.S. education system was ranked eighth; now it is twentieth, and falling. Amazingly, just yesterday I met a family from Shanghai, who moved here so their children, middle-schoolers, could "have the benefit of an American education." What were they smoking? They lived here ten years ago, but I don't think they realize how much has changed in just that short decade. From what I can determine, it is now nearly two years since Chinese primary education surpassed America, and in math and science, China is now number one in the world.
I happen to live in a favored location, along the Eastern seaboard, where there is good support for maintaining infrastructure. This is mainly so that congresspersons can more readily travel back to their districts, from New York to South Carolina. If the nation's capital were in Omaha, I wonder what the highway and train systems of Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas would be like? (I understand the Vice President still takes the train home to Delaware frequently; now with half a dozen Secret Service bodyguards. The Wilmington station has now been named for him.)
Elsewhere in the country, parts of the Interstate Highway System are crumbling, and the side roads are worse. And trains? Forget it. A few years ago my brother and his family reserved a sleeper for the 3-day ride from Ohio to California for a family reunion. The ride was so bruising, that my sister-in-law, who is terribly afraid to fly, insisted that they cancel the return reservation and fly home. Much of the trip, the train went no more than 35 mph due to poor track conditions, and even at that speed, the train shook terribly.
In the memorable chapter "Maybe We Can't: Why Money Continues to Rule Washington", the author details how the entrenched system defeated every intention of President Obama, and of George W. Bush before him, to make any improvements. In a sense, going to war is about the only thing a President can do nowadays. Even the famed (and vilified) "Obamacare" bill wound up containing very little of what Obama originally proposed, and nearly everything that the insurance lobby wanted. It is strange: The Republicans are finally getting around to revealing that the "Affordable Care Act" guts Medicare to the tune of more than $700 billion, but they have neglected to point out that nearly all of that will go straight into insurance premiums!
P.S. I am a registered Republican, so I am allowed to vote in primary elections. You can bet that I do not vote straight ticket. Sadly, my wife and I may be the only ones on our block who bother to find out what candidates really stand for and what initiatives really are proposing.
My mother once said that the 50% voting rate in America was a sign that the people were satisfied; at the time nearly 100% of the Russians voted, but could only vote "Yes" or not vote at all. In America, those who voted were mainly those who want a change plus a number who don't want a change and want to counter the opposition. That principle worked well in 1955. It doesn't any more. We are like the proverbial frog in the slowly-heated cauldron, that doesn't try to jump out until the water is warm enough to loosen its muscles so much it can't jump, so it gets boiled. We have been gradually jollied into the present situation over two generations, by my reckoning. It won't be an easy road back.
Mr. Luce doesn't claim to have a prescription for change. The closest he comes is to quote lobbyist Mark Garten, "America will ultimately stand or fall by the health of its middle class." At the moment, the middle class is squarely in the sights of an ossified bureaucracy. This is not a Liberal-Conservative problem. It is a "Damn right I'm going to cover my ass so I can't be held to blame for my decisions" problem that afflicts nearly all of those 14 million federal employees and contractors. There is no simple prescription. Thomas Jefferson wrote, in words that ought to have been included in the Constitution, but were not:
"…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."How long will it take until the American people decide that the "evils" are no longer "sufferable"? Our union has lasted 236 years, and the federal government 223 years. For the union to continue, the present system may need to be abolished and replaced. Churchill said, "Americans always do the right thing, after exhausting all alternatives." It seems we are just about out of alternatives. Mr. Luce writes that we actually need a new Constitutional Convention, but "That can't happen." I pray that it can happen.
In his own review of this book, David Gergen of CNN wrote, "Warning: this book could be a danger to your peace of mind." I am certainly happy to have finished reading it. I hope I can return to better sleep as the shock wears off.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Opus 1601 is for the pollinators
kw: natural history, insects, pollinators
Today I took a day off to do yardwork, leaving more of the Labor Day weekend free. It was easy to notice that the small flowers had plenty of pollinators. I have been watching the news about honey bees and colony collapse disorder, so I am alert to the level of "alternative pollinators". This collage shows that there are plenty of them.
I took pictures of quite a variety of insects that were coming to these flowers, but only these six were in good focus. The first four (the top row and the lower left) were all on the chives. The small, dark bee at lower left was the smallest variety I was able to get a picture of. There was a multitude of smaller bees, but they are too quick to photograph without better equipment. The wasp at upper left apparently has a sweet tooth. A close look showed it was lapping nectar. Other varieties of wasp visit the flowers to capture small bees; they paralyze them and bury them for their larvae to eat. I was happy to see very few of such wasps today. The skippers at bottom center are shown just over life size. They are on a blue, finely-divided composite flower I haven't identified. The fritillary butterfly at lower right is on a pink flower, another one that grows in fine clusters. This is also close to life size. These pink flowers were mainly visited by skippers, and there were also some small, dark bees flitting about. A robber fly would occasionally make a pass at a skipper, but I never saw it catch one. It was also too quick to get a picture of.
Today I took a day off to do yardwork, leaving more of the Labor Day weekend free. It was easy to notice that the small flowers had plenty of pollinators. I have been watching the news about honey bees and colony collapse disorder, so I am alert to the level of "alternative pollinators". This collage shows that there are plenty of them.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
A crystal future?
kw: book reviews, science fiction, space aliens, artificial intelligence
Like many, I have a lively interest in the possibility of other sentient species throughout the Universe. I have supported the SETI program for decades, including running the seti@home "screen saver". More recently, I have vetted a few thousand stars' light curves for the Planet Hunters project; I noted this morning when I checked in that there are 666,916 participants.
However, as a radio amateur, I realize how unlikely it is that SETI will turn up anything, even if there are millions of inhabited planets "out there". Our term as a radio-loud species lasted barely 100 years (it is all on cable and glass fiber now), and even though some TV stations of the 1960s-1990s utilized million-watt transmitters, even the Arecibo 300 m radio telescope would be unable to detect I Love Lucy or Jeopardy at a distance greater than about 10 light years. An intelligent species 100 to 1000 light years away would need to do one of two things to produce a signal we are capable of detecting: point a gigawatt signal right at us using a kilometer-scale dish, or broadcast an omnidirectional signal with a power of billions of gigawatts. Both are costly undertakings.
An economic analysis that I read a few years ago compared the cost of a huge radio transmitter to the cost of sending a number of small (around 10 kg) objects, propelled at about 1% of light speed, carrying some kind of message. The hard part is for such a small object to carry a technology for slowing down at the other end! One percent of c is about 100 times the velocity of Earth as it orbits the Sun. That's a lot of kinetic energy to shed.
This is the kind of idea a science fiction writer can run with. Couple it with likely developments in computer technology, possible advances in artificial intelligence, and a few projections—or flights of fancy—about human society, and a book like Existence by David Brin emerges. A very enjoyable book, I might add.
Some 40-50 years in our future, with a planetary population of 9 or 10 billion who are apparently all networked into the MESH (successor of WWW), an effort has finally been undertaken to clean up the mess left behind by NASA, ESA, and the various Soviet and Russian space agencies. With tens of thousands of broken satellites, shed fuel containers and bolts and bits of exploded stuff, near-space is getting hazardous. A trash-collecting astronaut named Gerald snags an unusual crystalline object, so rather than nudge it into an Earth-intercepting orbit, he retrieves it, at some risk to his career. When Gerald and the object return to Earth, he touches it, whereupon a word appears—a lot like the way a magic 8-Ball toy's message floats up—: Greeting.
So, as usual, the author leaves it up to the brains in the alien machine to figure out how to communicate with us. In an already big book (553 pages), this does avoid a large digression, so I can forgive it. Anyway, you might ask, is this the only one? No, as it turns out, and something like half the book is taken up with the consequences of finding multiple crystal ovoids from competing species, now that people know what to look for. Yes, the aliens are competitors. A peaceful Galactic Federation is about as likely as a one-world government here on planet Earth, or even less so. Star Wars trumps Star Trek.
I won't go further along the plot line. There are too many other fascinating threads to this story. Much is based on continued increases in becoming one with our computers. All but the very poorest (there is still a bottom few percent, more's the pity, but I am not surprised) have access at least to TruVu specs that let them access the many levels of the MESH. The software in the specs takes its cues from where you focus your gaze. Many, particularly the younger folks, get equipment installed in their vocal chords and teeth, and wear intelligent contact lenses, so they can effectively live in the MESH and control it with subvocal commands and tooth-taps and eye-flicks and hand motions. (Let it be noted, fifteen years ago I predicted to friends that "soon" people will be able to get a smart cell phone—the "smart phone" had yet to appear—implanted in the mastoid bone, attached to a tiny microphone in the jaw and a tiny speaker in the wall of an ear canal; it would respond to spoken or muttered commands. Maybe "soon" still means another 20-50 years…)
True artificial intelligence has yet to arise, but Brin's 2050s society has a close simulacrum, that can pass the Turing Test if it doesn't go on too long. Allied words have been coined, such as maind, aiware, aitomatic, aissistant and ailectronic. A brief vignette, wherein a high school student manages to download the personality of her pet rat into a computer, sets the stage for the crystal ovoids to contain numerous downloaded personalities. Then there are new acronyms. My favorites are WAIST (Wow! Ain't It Strange That…) and TSOOSU (To See Ourselves as Others See Us, and the command tsoosu invokes a MESH view of oneself from nearby cameras).
Here is an idea for someone capable of writing it into a novel: a possible process for capturing someone's personality in software. A backpack containing a massive neural network with heuristic programming, plus a "sensor hat" you would wear. Other sensors on or in the body are possible, but I haven't thought that out. You would wear the equipment for a few weeks or months, while it tries to learn to predict your behavior from the stimuli you encounter, plus periods during which you explain your behavior to the backpack. I suppose a breakthrough would occur at some point, and thereafter the longer you wear the equipment the better the simulation gets. How good you want it to be depends on the purpose to which it will be put. Once created, the simulation is easily copied. This would probably work best with people who have a lot of toleration of solitude, because such a simulation of your personality is most likely to be used to control a machine with a dangerous or one-way mission, including a small interstellar spacecraft.
That brings us to another interesting thread: Auties, a slang word for autistic people. Might it be that, for those who don't communicate, their only possible mode of communication is not words but something else, such as dance or broad-spectrum sounds packed with more meaning than our "words"? Brin treats at least some Auties as an evolutionary advance or even the vanguard of a new human species, one with immensely greater problem solving skills than run-of-the-mill geniuses.
Last evening I heard Sher Valenzuela speak to the Republican National Convention. Her son is autistic. She and her husband started their business, 15 years ago, in hopes of earning enough money to afford the specialized therapy their son needed. They succeeded. He is soon to be a sophomore in college. It would be amazing if such children had untapped potential and we could somehow learn to bring their abilities to fruition. In Brin's story, ubiquitous computer technology makes this possible. In our world, today, I dare not offer such hope, not yet. We know so little… I do know this. The two best computer programmers I ever met are autistic. I don't mean they have Asperger's syndrome. They have much more trouble communicating than my friends who have Asperger's. They have machine-like minds, and have said that dealing with people requires them to run a sort of social simulator program in their heads, which takes a lot of effort.
Another thread, a less encouraging one, is the Trillies, the trillionaires who scoop off about the top third of all human productivity for their pleasures and hobbies. There is a hint near the end of the book that their influence is abating, by the year 2100 or so. Really, what possible good comes of having billionaires and trillionaires around? I know one billionaire. He is a nice guy. But is the Earth better off if he owns, like, one percent of its land surface? The billionaires and some other celebrities are the new aristocracy. They would do well to beware, and learn from events such as the French Revolution.
When I worked at Conoco, the Marland Museum had a placard with a quote of E. W. Marland, founder of Marland Oil and then Conoco. As I recall, it says, "Who knows why people do what they do? I spent money like water on my town and my people, and they prospered." Let us remember that the money "he spent" was originally earned by those people in that town. My supervisor's and manager's salaries—and right up to the CEO—comes from money my colleagues and I bring into the company, which is not paid back to us but to them. The work that they do does not earn money directly, but rather produces the environment for us to earn the money. If they do it well, they deserve just compensation. I don't believe, however, that there is a person on the planet whose work is worth more than about half a million dollars per year (my CEO earns a million a month).
Finally, I was very intrigued by a list of twelve detailed questions, directed at Lurkers, possible alien AI objects in our solar system, as to why they have kept silent all this time. Think about it. If self-replicating Von Neumann machines are the least expensive way to communicate with the Galaxy, and it would only take 5-10 million years for such devices to spread to every star, multiple times, then where are they? Is the human race truly the only intelligent species? Two books explore the boundaries of this question: Vital Dust by Christian DeDuve and Rare Earth by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. But before you read them, read Existence.
Like many, I have a lively interest in the possibility of other sentient species throughout the Universe. I have supported the SETI program for decades, including running the seti@home "screen saver". More recently, I have vetted a few thousand stars' light curves for the Planet Hunters project; I noted this morning when I checked in that there are 666,916 participants.
However, as a radio amateur, I realize how unlikely it is that SETI will turn up anything, even if there are millions of inhabited planets "out there". Our term as a radio-loud species lasted barely 100 years (it is all on cable and glass fiber now), and even though some TV stations of the 1960s-1990s utilized million-watt transmitters, even the Arecibo 300 m radio telescope would be unable to detect I Love Lucy or Jeopardy at a distance greater than about 10 light years. An intelligent species 100 to 1000 light years away would need to do one of two things to produce a signal we are capable of detecting: point a gigawatt signal right at us using a kilometer-scale dish, or broadcast an omnidirectional signal with a power of billions of gigawatts. Both are costly undertakings.
An economic analysis that I read a few years ago compared the cost of a huge radio transmitter to the cost of sending a number of small (around 10 kg) objects, propelled at about 1% of light speed, carrying some kind of message. The hard part is for such a small object to carry a technology for slowing down at the other end! One percent of c is about 100 times the velocity of Earth as it orbits the Sun. That's a lot of kinetic energy to shed.
This is the kind of idea a science fiction writer can run with. Couple it with likely developments in computer technology, possible advances in artificial intelligence, and a few projections—or flights of fancy—about human society, and a book like Existence by David Brin emerges. A very enjoyable book, I might add.
Some 40-50 years in our future, with a planetary population of 9 or 10 billion who are apparently all networked into the MESH (successor of WWW), an effort has finally been undertaken to clean up the mess left behind by NASA, ESA, and the various Soviet and Russian space agencies. With tens of thousands of broken satellites, shed fuel containers and bolts and bits of exploded stuff, near-space is getting hazardous. A trash-collecting astronaut named Gerald snags an unusual crystalline object, so rather than nudge it into an Earth-intercepting orbit, he retrieves it, at some risk to his career. When Gerald and the object return to Earth, he touches it, whereupon a word appears—a lot like the way a magic 8-Ball toy's message floats up—: Greeting.
So, as usual, the author leaves it up to the brains in the alien machine to figure out how to communicate with us. In an already big book (553 pages), this does avoid a large digression, so I can forgive it. Anyway, you might ask, is this the only one? No, as it turns out, and something like half the book is taken up with the consequences of finding multiple crystal ovoids from competing species, now that people know what to look for. Yes, the aliens are competitors. A peaceful Galactic Federation is about as likely as a one-world government here on planet Earth, or even less so. Star Wars trumps Star Trek.
I won't go further along the plot line. There are too many other fascinating threads to this story. Much is based on continued increases in becoming one with our computers. All but the very poorest (there is still a bottom few percent, more's the pity, but I am not surprised) have access at least to TruVu specs that let them access the many levels of the MESH. The software in the specs takes its cues from where you focus your gaze. Many, particularly the younger folks, get equipment installed in their vocal chords and teeth, and wear intelligent contact lenses, so they can effectively live in the MESH and control it with subvocal commands and tooth-taps and eye-flicks and hand motions. (Let it be noted, fifteen years ago I predicted to friends that "soon" people will be able to get a smart cell phone—the "smart phone" had yet to appear—implanted in the mastoid bone, attached to a tiny microphone in the jaw and a tiny speaker in the wall of an ear canal; it would respond to spoken or muttered commands. Maybe "soon" still means another 20-50 years…)
True artificial intelligence has yet to arise, but Brin's 2050s society has a close simulacrum, that can pass the Turing Test if it doesn't go on too long. Allied words have been coined, such as maind, aiware, aitomatic, aissistant and ailectronic. A brief vignette, wherein a high school student manages to download the personality of her pet rat into a computer, sets the stage for the crystal ovoids to contain numerous downloaded personalities. Then there are new acronyms. My favorites are WAIST (Wow! Ain't It Strange That…) and TSOOSU (To See Ourselves as Others See Us, and the command tsoosu invokes a MESH view of oneself from nearby cameras).
Here is an idea for someone capable of writing it into a novel: a possible process for capturing someone's personality in software. A backpack containing a massive neural network with heuristic programming, plus a "sensor hat" you would wear. Other sensors on or in the body are possible, but I haven't thought that out. You would wear the equipment for a few weeks or months, while it tries to learn to predict your behavior from the stimuli you encounter, plus periods during which you explain your behavior to the backpack. I suppose a breakthrough would occur at some point, and thereafter the longer you wear the equipment the better the simulation gets. How good you want it to be depends on the purpose to which it will be put. Once created, the simulation is easily copied. This would probably work best with people who have a lot of toleration of solitude, because such a simulation of your personality is most likely to be used to control a machine with a dangerous or one-way mission, including a small interstellar spacecraft.
That brings us to another interesting thread: Auties, a slang word for autistic people. Might it be that, for those who don't communicate, their only possible mode of communication is not words but something else, such as dance or broad-spectrum sounds packed with more meaning than our "words"? Brin treats at least some Auties as an evolutionary advance or even the vanguard of a new human species, one with immensely greater problem solving skills than run-of-the-mill geniuses.
Last evening I heard Sher Valenzuela speak to the Republican National Convention. Her son is autistic. She and her husband started their business, 15 years ago, in hopes of earning enough money to afford the specialized therapy their son needed. They succeeded. He is soon to be a sophomore in college. It would be amazing if such children had untapped potential and we could somehow learn to bring their abilities to fruition. In Brin's story, ubiquitous computer technology makes this possible. In our world, today, I dare not offer such hope, not yet. We know so little… I do know this. The two best computer programmers I ever met are autistic. I don't mean they have Asperger's syndrome. They have much more trouble communicating than my friends who have Asperger's. They have machine-like minds, and have said that dealing with people requires them to run a sort of social simulator program in their heads, which takes a lot of effort.
Another thread, a less encouraging one, is the Trillies, the trillionaires who scoop off about the top third of all human productivity for their pleasures and hobbies. There is a hint near the end of the book that their influence is abating, by the year 2100 or so. Really, what possible good comes of having billionaires and trillionaires around? I know one billionaire. He is a nice guy. But is the Earth better off if he owns, like, one percent of its land surface? The billionaires and some other celebrities are the new aristocracy. They would do well to beware, and learn from events such as the French Revolution.
When I worked at Conoco, the Marland Museum had a placard with a quote of E. W. Marland, founder of Marland Oil and then Conoco. As I recall, it says, "Who knows why people do what they do? I spent money like water on my town and my people, and they prospered." Let us remember that the money "he spent" was originally earned by those people in that town. My supervisor's and manager's salaries—and right up to the CEO—comes from money my colleagues and I bring into the company, which is not paid back to us but to them. The work that they do does not earn money directly, but rather produces the environment for us to earn the money. If they do it well, they deserve just compensation. I don't believe, however, that there is a person on the planet whose work is worth more than about half a million dollars per year (my CEO earns a million a month).
Finally, I was very intrigued by a list of twelve detailed questions, directed at Lurkers, possible alien AI objects in our solar system, as to why they have kept silent all this time. Think about it. If self-replicating Von Neumann machines are the least expensive way to communicate with the Galaxy, and it would only take 5-10 million years for such devices to spread to every star, multiple times, then where are they? Is the human race truly the only intelligent species? Two books explore the boundaries of this question: Vital Dust by Christian DeDuve and Rare Earth by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. But before you read them, read Existence.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Who built it?
kw: business, politics
I have been watching the Republican Convention on C-SPAN. The theme of the event is "We Built It." With this statement and the sentiment behind it, I heartily agree.
When President Obama said, "You didn't build that," he ignited a firestorm that threatens to burn steadily through November and beyond. Oh, I know what he was trying to say, that the national highway system, the air traffic control system, and bridges and so forth, that business takes advantage of, were government programs, and businesses "couldn't do that."
In the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, there is a very enlightening scene. The character played by Sidney Poitier has been drawn aside by his parents, who are trying to convince him of their viewpoint (that he shouldn't marry a white woman). His father uses the old, "We gave you life, we raised you, we educated you" argument. He answers, "You did what you were supposed to do. Parents all do that. But parents aren't supposed to choose my job or my wife. Only I know what will make me happy."
By constitutional provision, the government is supposed to provide for interstate commerce (highways and bridges and air traffic control systems). A government that will not provide infrastructure for its citizens is doing them a disservice. But a government cannot and must not tell you what kind of (legal) business to go into, or how many employees to hire, or where you must borrow (if you need to) and so forth. Government cannot tell a farmer when to plant; the failure of Soviet agriculture for 70 years proves that, as does the continued failure of North Korean agriculture. Government cannot decide for you what kind of supplies your company might need, nor set your alarm clock for you, nor stipulate how few or how many hours you must work in a week. When you have a business, it is your business.
Businesses were succeeding for centuries before "government" built anything. The old roads, that may have started out as cow-paths, not just in colonial America but in Europe and Asia, the old roads that are still the main arteries of travel in much of the Third World, were not government projects. Wherever the government has, rightly, provided infrastructure, the country's economy has prospered as compared to former times. This is a 5,000-year-old principle. But in old Assyria, if Mr. Sathrop had a chariot-building cottage industry he runs out of his house, there was nothing the imperial officials could do to "help" him run that business. It is also a 5,000-year-old principle that micromanagement by government guarantees failure (which is why American education began to go downhill with the creation of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and has fallen even faster since the split-off of the Department of Education).
Mr. Obama, I know what you thought you were saying. I reckon it was even well-intentioned. But you simply put your foot in you mouth up to the knee. You have no clue what it takes to build a business. You have never done so, and I suspect you have very, very few you would call friends who have; maybe none. We are very fortunate as a country that, in the 1950s and 1960s, government did a few things that government is supposed to do. The decades of "the good life" were a result. But then government began meddling in things not enumerated in the Constitution. As a result, for more and more of us, the good life is over.
President Obama and VP Joe Biden might be re-elected. I hope not, but they might. If so, four more years of pathological mismanagement of America will certainly lead to a Republican landslide in 2016. But if Mitt Romney is elected, and both houses of Congress shift to the right, there is a chance that the huge inequities and injustices and enormous deficits of the past three-plus years can be reversed. Dear God, I hope so!!
I have been watching the Republican Convention on C-SPAN. The theme of the event is "We Built It." With this statement and the sentiment behind it, I heartily agree.
When President Obama said, "You didn't build that," he ignited a firestorm that threatens to burn steadily through November and beyond. Oh, I know what he was trying to say, that the national highway system, the air traffic control system, and bridges and so forth, that business takes advantage of, were government programs, and businesses "couldn't do that."
In the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, there is a very enlightening scene. The character played by Sidney Poitier has been drawn aside by his parents, who are trying to convince him of their viewpoint (that he shouldn't marry a white woman). His father uses the old, "We gave you life, we raised you, we educated you" argument. He answers, "You did what you were supposed to do. Parents all do that. But parents aren't supposed to choose my job or my wife. Only I know what will make me happy."
By constitutional provision, the government is supposed to provide for interstate commerce (highways and bridges and air traffic control systems). A government that will not provide infrastructure for its citizens is doing them a disservice. But a government cannot and must not tell you what kind of (legal) business to go into, or how many employees to hire, or where you must borrow (if you need to) and so forth. Government cannot tell a farmer when to plant; the failure of Soviet agriculture for 70 years proves that, as does the continued failure of North Korean agriculture. Government cannot decide for you what kind of supplies your company might need, nor set your alarm clock for you, nor stipulate how few or how many hours you must work in a week. When you have a business, it is your business.
Businesses were succeeding for centuries before "government" built anything. The old roads, that may have started out as cow-paths, not just in colonial America but in Europe and Asia, the old roads that are still the main arteries of travel in much of the Third World, were not government projects. Wherever the government has, rightly, provided infrastructure, the country's economy has prospered as compared to former times. This is a 5,000-year-old principle. But in old Assyria, if Mr. Sathrop had a chariot-building cottage industry he runs out of his house, there was nothing the imperial officials could do to "help" him run that business. It is also a 5,000-year-old principle that micromanagement by government guarantees failure (which is why American education began to go downhill with the creation of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and has fallen even faster since the split-off of the Department of Education).
Mr. Obama, I know what you thought you were saying. I reckon it was even well-intentioned. But you simply put your foot in you mouth up to the knee. You have no clue what it takes to build a business. You have never done so, and I suspect you have very, very few you would call friends who have; maybe none. We are very fortunate as a country that, in the 1950s and 1960s, government did a few things that government is supposed to do. The decades of "the good life" were a result. But then government began meddling in things not enumerated in the Constitution. As a result, for more and more of us, the good life is over.
President Obama and VP Joe Biden might be re-elected. I hope not, but they might. If so, four more years of pathological mismanagement of America will certainly lead to a Republican landslide in 2016. But if Mitt Romney is elected, and both houses of Congress shift to the right, there is a chance that the huge inequities and injustices and enormous deficits of the past three-plus years can be reversed. Dear God, I hope so!!
Aprotic - new to me
kw: words
Reading a report I found the word aprotic. I could guess that it refers to a chemical that cannot donate a proton, thus limiting the kinds of reactions it can undergo. Such substances make good solvents, good hosts for oxidation-reduction reactions (which operate by trading protons). A little searching confirmed my horseback hunch.
Digging around in Google Books, the earliest reference I could find is in a 1953 volume, Non-Aqueous Solvents by Audrieth and Kleinberg (seemingly earlier uses in print are instances of typos or mistaken OCR, such as 1907 for 1987. Of course the Google Books project hasn't snarfed up everything just yet).
Early usage focused on nonpolar solvents such as benzene, or non-H-bearing chemicals such as sulfur dioxide, but in more recent years polar chemicals that hold their hydrogens very tightly have been included, such as phosphazenes, which are full of NH2 groups but do not permit any hydrogen ions to be removed. Acetone and DMSO are considered aprotic, polar solvents.
A useful word, in certain contexts, and an interesting one to have learned.
Reading a report I found the word aprotic. I could guess that it refers to a chemical that cannot donate a proton, thus limiting the kinds of reactions it can undergo. Such substances make good solvents, good hosts for oxidation-reduction reactions (which operate by trading protons). A little searching confirmed my horseback hunch.
Digging around in Google Books, the earliest reference I could find is in a 1953 volume, Non-Aqueous Solvents by Audrieth and Kleinberg (seemingly earlier uses in print are instances of typos or mistaken OCR, such as 1907 for 1987. Of course the Google Books project hasn't snarfed up everything just yet).
Early usage focused on nonpolar solvents such as benzene, or non-H-bearing chemicals such as sulfur dioxide, but in more recent years polar chemicals that hold their hydrogens very tightly have been included, such as phosphazenes, which are full of NH2 groups but do not permit any hydrogen ions to be removed. Acetone and DMSO are considered aprotic, polar solvents.
A useful word, in certain contexts, and an interesting one to have learned.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
In from the cold - he beat the odds
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, autobiographies, espionage, policy
Sometimes I get a book so far beyond my experience, the author may as well be another species. Such a book is The Art of Intelligence: Lessons From a Life in the CIA's Clandestine Service, by Henry A. Crumpton. You may have read Bob Woodward's book about the first year of the war in Afghanistan, Bush at War. Did you wonder, who was Hank? Wonder no longer. It was Hank Crumpton.
During the first months of the war, the Taliban were routed and many al Qaeda (AQ) fighters killed or driven into hiding. As Woodward wrote and Crumpton confirms, this was largely due to a coordination among the CIA, U.S. Special Forces, and Afghan tribal leaders, well before any American (and Coalition) troops were on the ground. Hank directed this phase of the war. About a third of the book's text covers the war in Afghanistan, but there was a lot that led up to it. I must admit, much was beyond my comprehension. I am a techie, a "geek", and I'm still learning human relations. I do think, however, that I caught a most important fact: The early success (which was not repeated in Iraq) was due to human relations, that led to a vast flow of intelligence that was intelligently used to provide air cover and logistical help and some amount of practical aid for the Afghan ground fighters.
Well, a lot did lead up to this, both in world affairs and in Hank's life. He obtained entry to the CIA and to the Clandestine Service at quite a young age, and did well. He became a productive recruiter of "unilateral resources", foreign nationals who worked with the CIA (this is in concert with Liaison, which is more of a 2-way street). Hank spent years in Africa, and he and his wife raised a family there. When the slow churning of the Federal mind (such as it is) realized that terrorism was becoming a real threat, Hank got the opportunity to work in counterterrorism. This led, in a few years, directly to his being asked to direct the opening phases of the war against AQ and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
After the first year, the war fell into the possession of the professional military. A ground war began, that is still going on, and proceeding slowly if at all. Hank makes the point repeatedly, that the three presidents who best understood the value of intelligence were George Washington (a spymaster supreme), Abraham Lincoln, and George H.W. Bush (former head of the CIA). Presidents Bush, Jr, and Obama both started their terms mostly ignorant of intelligence, but grew to rely on it.
After Afghanistan, Hank worked in National Resources (NR), that arm of the CIA that works on American soil. Few folks realize they are even there. Their task is focused on international policy, not on spying on U.S. nationals, but they use in-country resources, such as business leaders and visiting foreigners, as sources and resources.
One result of the counterterrorism work is friction with the FBI, which treats terror crimes as law enforcement targets, rather than as acts of war (It seems many in civilian government still do not realize that World War III began in 1992, or perhaps earlier. I place it on that date because it is the first bombing of the World Trade Center by AQ). War is different than it was in Roman times, or in 1864, or 1912, or even 1944. The war in Vietnam was our first failure to recognize the value of guerrilla tactics. By the time American forces figured this out and began to get the upper hand, national leaders had lost the political will to win, and pulled out. The later years in Afghanistan, and the entire Iraq adventure, shows most of the Pentagon brass still doesn't get it.
I really have to digress here. A comedian in about 1970 said, "I heard it costs us $150,000 per VC (Viet Cong) fighter we kill. We can buy them off cheaper than that!" The "after-war" in Afghanistan has cost a trillion dollars or so, all consumed by an army that is in the business of blowing things up and killing people. we could have spend 80% of that on infrastructure for the country and jump-started them as a modern nation. The same goes for Iraq. We had won within the first year. Spending the next trillion dollars on rebuilding and modernizing their infrastructure would have gained us a reliable ally. Instead, we have bungled both wars and made a growing roster of enemies as a result.
I hope Hank's successors in Clandestine Services, and in Counterterrorism, and in NR, are doing a good job, as well as he did or better. It is only a matter of time until the next 9/11. Someone will slip through again, because you can't watch everywhere or everybody. The Dept. of Homeland Security needs to recruit us patriotic and loyal citizens as deputies, in a much, much more productive and definite way than having a few signs around that whiningly beg us to report "suspicious activity". We need a National Neighborhood Watch; dare I dub it NNW?
OK, off soap box. Although I didn't understand all he wrote, I really enjoyed Hank's stories. I have two relatives who were spies. One is dead, the other doesn't talk about his service. They were not CIA (not that I know of!). But the essence of such work is human relations. It is like computer hacking; as Kevin Mitnick wrote in Ghost in the Wires, his primary weapon was gaining the confidence of someone who could grant him access to systems he really shouldn't have been getting into. He is a brilliant programmer, no doubt, but it is his human skills that led to his being called the world's most dangerous hacker. So with Hank Crumpton. He didn't need to be a gun-toting gadget-happy James Bond or Matt Helm. He just needed to be a good drinking buddy. He just happens to be a drinking buddy with a razor sharp mind and a prodigious memory. A good writer, too.
Sometimes I get a book so far beyond my experience, the author may as well be another species. Such a book is The Art of Intelligence: Lessons From a Life in the CIA's Clandestine Service, by Henry A. Crumpton. You may have read Bob Woodward's book about the first year of the war in Afghanistan, Bush at War. Did you wonder, who was Hank? Wonder no longer. It was Hank Crumpton.
During the first months of the war, the Taliban were routed and many al Qaeda (AQ) fighters killed or driven into hiding. As Woodward wrote and Crumpton confirms, this was largely due to a coordination among the CIA, U.S. Special Forces, and Afghan tribal leaders, well before any American (and Coalition) troops were on the ground. Hank directed this phase of the war. About a third of the book's text covers the war in Afghanistan, but there was a lot that led up to it. I must admit, much was beyond my comprehension. I am a techie, a "geek", and I'm still learning human relations. I do think, however, that I caught a most important fact: The early success (which was not repeated in Iraq) was due to human relations, that led to a vast flow of intelligence that was intelligently used to provide air cover and logistical help and some amount of practical aid for the Afghan ground fighters.
Well, a lot did lead up to this, both in world affairs and in Hank's life. He obtained entry to the CIA and to the Clandestine Service at quite a young age, and did well. He became a productive recruiter of "unilateral resources", foreign nationals who worked with the CIA (this is in concert with Liaison, which is more of a 2-way street). Hank spent years in Africa, and he and his wife raised a family there. When the slow churning of the Federal mind (such as it is) realized that terrorism was becoming a real threat, Hank got the opportunity to work in counterterrorism. This led, in a few years, directly to his being asked to direct the opening phases of the war against AQ and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
After the first year, the war fell into the possession of the professional military. A ground war began, that is still going on, and proceeding slowly if at all. Hank makes the point repeatedly, that the three presidents who best understood the value of intelligence were George Washington (a spymaster supreme), Abraham Lincoln, and George H.W. Bush (former head of the CIA). Presidents Bush, Jr, and Obama both started their terms mostly ignorant of intelligence, but grew to rely on it.
After Afghanistan, Hank worked in National Resources (NR), that arm of the CIA that works on American soil. Few folks realize they are even there. Their task is focused on international policy, not on spying on U.S. nationals, but they use in-country resources, such as business leaders and visiting foreigners, as sources and resources.
One result of the counterterrorism work is friction with the FBI, which treats terror crimes as law enforcement targets, rather than as acts of war (It seems many in civilian government still do not realize that World War III began in 1992, or perhaps earlier. I place it on that date because it is the first bombing of the World Trade Center by AQ). War is different than it was in Roman times, or in 1864, or 1912, or even 1944. The war in Vietnam was our first failure to recognize the value of guerrilla tactics. By the time American forces figured this out and began to get the upper hand, national leaders had lost the political will to win, and pulled out. The later years in Afghanistan, and the entire Iraq adventure, shows most of the Pentagon brass still doesn't get it.
I really have to digress here. A comedian in about 1970 said, "I heard it costs us $150,000 per VC (Viet Cong) fighter we kill. We can buy them off cheaper than that!" The "after-war" in Afghanistan has cost a trillion dollars or so, all consumed by an army that is in the business of blowing things up and killing people. we could have spend 80% of that on infrastructure for the country and jump-started them as a modern nation. The same goes for Iraq. We had won within the first year. Spending the next trillion dollars on rebuilding and modernizing their infrastructure would have gained us a reliable ally. Instead, we have bungled both wars and made a growing roster of enemies as a result.
I hope Hank's successors in Clandestine Services, and in Counterterrorism, and in NR, are doing a good job, as well as he did or better. It is only a matter of time until the next 9/11. Someone will slip through again, because you can't watch everywhere or everybody. The Dept. of Homeland Security needs to recruit us patriotic and loyal citizens as deputies, in a much, much more productive and definite way than having a few signs around that whiningly beg us to report "suspicious activity". We need a National Neighborhood Watch; dare I dub it NNW?
OK, off soap box. Although I didn't understand all he wrote, I really enjoyed Hank's stories. I have two relatives who were spies. One is dead, the other doesn't talk about his service. They were not CIA (not that I know of!). But the essence of such work is human relations. It is like computer hacking; as Kevin Mitnick wrote in Ghost in the Wires, his primary weapon was gaining the confidence of someone who could grant him access to systems he really shouldn't have been getting into. He is a brilliant programmer, no doubt, but it is his human skills that led to his being called the world's most dangerous hacker. So with Hank Crumpton. He didn't need to be a gun-toting gadget-happy James Bond or Matt Helm. He just needed to be a good drinking buddy. He just happens to be a drinking buddy with a razor sharp mind and a prodigious memory. A good writer, too.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Rethinking Rev. Wright
kw: sociology, religion, race
A few years ago, I heard the sound clips on the radio, of Rev. Jeremiah Wright saying "God damn America!". Naturally, I had a very negative reaction. Since that time, I have reflected a time or two about it, and I finally decided to get off my duff and learn more. After reading transcripts of some of his sermons, including "that one", I think I have a better handle where he is coming from.
On March 19, 2003, the invasion of Iraq began. Nearly four weeks later, on April 13, 2003, Rev. Wright spoke on the text Luke 19:37-44, where Jesus on Palm Sunday wept over Jerusalem, "…because you did not recognize the time of your visitation." The sermon is titled, "Confusing God and Government". His initial goal was to decry the Iraq invasion and the trumped-up reasons for it.
The sermon has three sections: "Governments Lie", "Governments Change", and "Where Governments Fail, God Never Fails". It was at the end of the second section that he said,
I now look at his "Damn" statement as an example of preacher's hyperbole, and not entirely out of line. In the past, the U.S. government has killed citizens (look up "WWI bonus army"), and has treated some as less than human. The question is, to what extent are these things still true? Because Rev. Wright is a bit older than I and even more because he is black, he lived through the Civil Rights era with much keener sensibilities than I did, and it had a powerful effect on me. To him, the Jim Crow provisions we all once lived under are a living memory, and a painful one.
Someone once said, "The universal bank of Trust accepts deposits, but if you make a single withdrawal, the account is closed." Trust once lost may never be regained. Considering the extent to which most government leaders lie, quite by habit it seems!, how far can we trust them? That is what the Rev. is asking. I would answer with him, not so very far!!
I began to rethink the "Damn" statement after a conversation with my aunt. She is a dear Christian lady aged 92. She does not agree with anything President Obama has done, and she thinks he is bad for this country. But, she said, "I think he will be re-elected, mainly because God wants to punish America." I don't know if God is still in the nation-punishing business. If he is, the U.S. is an easy target, but not the easiest.
Religious people often point out that at least half of Americans commit adultery, but this is true everywhere; the whole world fits that target profile! And among the rich and powerful, worldwide, it is nearly 100%. Could it be gambling and casinos? If so, Monte Carlo and Monaco would be the first targets of divine lightning. No, God's primary issue is oppression. The Bible has many expressions of God's displeasure with the rich who withhold a worker's pay, or who foreclose a widow's dwelling. And even though God permitted the Assyrians and the Babylonians to chastise Israel (the northern kingdom) and Judah (the southern kingdom), when they enthusiastically oppressed the captives, going beyond the chastisement God had in mind, God punished them even more severely; Assyria and Babylonia are gone, but Israel remains.
So I can see where Rev. Wright is coming from. His teaching has been called "Black Liberation Theology." Well, there is a spectrum of this "theology", and he is actually rather moderate. I dug out one salient societal indicator: the unemployment rate for those 20 and older:
It is clear, America has a ways to go to become race-blind. This is just one item that underlies black liberation theology. Nonetheless, it is not a Christian theology. Jesus had a lot bigger purpose than liberating people from government excesses. He worked to free us all from indwelling Sin! Rev. Wright does teach this, so I cannot say that his theology is non-Christian, nor anti-Christian as I once thought; yet it does have a theological element that is not Christian, but political.
We Whites also need liberation, though, from stereotypes, from our cultural and ethnic ignorance, from our assumed entitlement. But that is not an onus I place on Jeremiah Wright and his ilk. As a Christian leader among a congregation of my own (one of mixed races, though mainly Asian), that is my job.
A few years ago, I heard the sound clips on the radio, of Rev. Jeremiah Wright saying "God damn America!". Naturally, I had a very negative reaction. Since that time, I have reflected a time or two about it, and I finally decided to get off my duff and learn more. After reading transcripts of some of his sermons, including "that one", I think I have a better handle where he is coming from.
On March 19, 2003, the invasion of Iraq began. Nearly four weeks later, on April 13, 2003, Rev. Wright spoke on the text Luke 19:37-44, where Jesus on Palm Sunday wept over Jerusalem, "…because you did not recognize the time of your visitation." The sermon is titled, "Confusing God and Government". His initial goal was to decry the Iraq invasion and the trumped-up reasons for it.
The sermon has three sections: "Governments Lie", "Governments Change", and "Where Governments Fail, God Never Fails". It was at the end of the second section that he said,
God Damn America!—That's in the Bible—for killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!He had led up to this, and I think it was spontaneous, by recounting the failures of the U.S. Government, particularly regarding race, and beginning with the Constitution and its provision that a slave was counted as 3/5 of a person (The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of 1865 and 1868 annulled this provision). He believes that HIV was created by government "as a means of genocide against people of color" (Which is strange; in the U.S. the majority of victims are not black).
I now look at his "Damn" statement as an example of preacher's hyperbole, and not entirely out of line. In the past, the U.S. government has killed citizens (look up "WWI bonus army"), and has treated some as less than human. The question is, to what extent are these things still true? Because Rev. Wright is a bit older than I and even more because he is black, he lived through the Civil Rights era with much keener sensibilities than I did, and it had a powerful effect on me. To him, the Jim Crow provisions we all once lived under are a living memory, and a painful one.
Someone once said, "The universal bank of Trust accepts deposits, but if you make a single withdrawal, the account is closed." Trust once lost may never be regained. Considering the extent to which most government leaders lie, quite by habit it seems!, how far can we trust them? That is what the Rev. is asking. I would answer with him, not so very far!!
I began to rethink the "Damn" statement after a conversation with my aunt. She is a dear Christian lady aged 92. She does not agree with anything President Obama has done, and she thinks he is bad for this country. But, she said, "I think he will be re-elected, mainly because God wants to punish America." I don't know if God is still in the nation-punishing business. If he is, the U.S. is an easy target, but not the easiest.
Religious people often point out that at least half of Americans commit adultery, but this is true everywhere; the whole world fits that target profile! And among the rich and powerful, worldwide, it is nearly 100%. Could it be gambling and casinos? If so, Monte Carlo and Monaco would be the first targets of divine lightning. No, God's primary issue is oppression. The Bible has many expressions of God's displeasure with the rich who withhold a worker's pay, or who foreclose a widow's dwelling. And even though God permitted the Assyrians and the Babylonians to chastise Israel (the northern kingdom) and Judah (the southern kingdom), when they enthusiastically oppressed the captives, going beyond the chastisement God had in mind, God punished them even more severely; Assyria and Babylonia are gone, but Israel remains.
So I can see where Rev. Wright is coming from. His teaching has been called "Black Liberation Theology." Well, there is a spectrum of this "theology", and he is actually rather moderate. I dug out one salient societal indicator: the unemployment rate for those 20 and older:
- White: 6.6%
- Asian: 6.3%
- Latino: 10.3%
- Black: 14.1%
It is clear, America has a ways to go to become race-blind. This is just one item that underlies black liberation theology. Nonetheless, it is not a Christian theology. Jesus had a lot bigger purpose than liberating people from government excesses. He worked to free us all from indwelling Sin! Rev. Wright does teach this, so I cannot say that his theology is non-Christian, nor anti-Christian as I once thought; yet it does have a theological element that is not Christian, but political.
We Whites also need liberation, though, from stereotypes, from our cultural and ethnic ignorance, from our assumed entitlement. But that is not an onus I place on Jeremiah Wright and his ilk. As a Christian leader among a congregation of my own (one of mixed races, though mainly Asian), that is my job.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Clear at dawn
Kw: weather, clouds, sky
We are far enough past the summer solstice that I sometimes get out before sunrise. Today I was out, under a half twilight, and at first saw a totally clear sky. I saw them frequently when I lived in the mountain west. I called certain days, "Couldn't find a cloud to save your life." I very rarely see such a day here.
As it happened, I was wrong. Once I got away from the house and could see the northeastern sky, there were perhaps a dozen small, scattered clouds. Oh, well.
A look at the tables at Weather Today gave me a little perspective. In this area there are nearly 100 sunny days yearly. I take that to mean with nearly no cloud cover, like this morning. We also get 41 inches (1.04 m) of precipitation in about 115 days. Interesting, I saw that Daytona Beach, FL gets 97 sunny days yearly, also has 115 rainy days yearly, but gets 48 inches of rain.
A few places are extreme in one way or another:
South Dakota is called the "northern sunshine state". It is not as sunny as Arizona, but Rapid City does get 111 sunny days and only 96 rainy ones. Most of the other 158 days have few clouds and they cover less than half the sky. It only gets overcast when it is going to rain or snow in earnest. I really remember those fine, fall mornings, with a deep blue sky from horizon to horizon. This morning's sky, though marred by those few small clouds, was nice and blue but quite pale by comparison. Deeper blues will come by October, but nothing here in the Philadelphia area can compare to a clear day in Big Sky country, which covers a lot more ground than just Montana.
We are far enough past the summer solstice that I sometimes get out before sunrise. Today I was out, under a half twilight, and at first saw a totally clear sky. I saw them frequently when I lived in the mountain west. I called certain days, "Couldn't find a cloud to save your life." I very rarely see such a day here.
As it happened, I was wrong. Once I got away from the house and could see the northeastern sky, there were perhaps a dozen small, scattered clouds. Oh, well.
A look at the tables at Weather Today gave me a little perspective. In this area there are nearly 100 sunny days yearly. I take that to mean with nearly no cloud cover, like this morning. We also get 41 inches (1.04 m) of precipitation in about 115 days. Interesting, I saw that Daytona Beach, FL gets 97 sunny days yearly, also has 115 rainy days yearly, but gets 48 inches of rain.
A few places are extreme in one way or another:
- Cold Bay, AK has the fewest sunny days, 10, but not a lot of precipitation, 36 inches (0.91 m), yet there are 228 rainy days yearly. I guess most of them are actually drizzly days.
- Hilo, HI has only 36 sunny days a year, but gets 129 inches (3.28 m) of rain in 278 rainy days. I've been told that the frequent, smallish rains are called "pineapple juice". They sure make the pineapples grow.
- Yuma, AZ has 242 sunny days yearly, the most in the U.S. In just 17 days with measurable precipitation, it gets no more than 3 inches (0.08 m) of rain. Most of that comes as one or two gully-washers.
South Dakota is called the "northern sunshine state". It is not as sunny as Arizona, but Rapid City does get 111 sunny days and only 96 rainy ones. Most of the other 158 days have few clouds and they cover less than half the sky. It only gets overcast when it is going to rain or snow in earnest. I really remember those fine, fall mornings, with a deep blue sky from horizon to horizon. This morning's sky, though marred by those few small clouds, was nice and blue but quite pale by comparison. Deeper blues will come by October, but nothing here in the Philadelphia area can compare to a clear day in Big Sky country, which covers a lot more ground than just Montana.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Life out of death
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, death
Most people have never seen a Sexton Beetle. This one, identified as Nicrophorus investigator in Calwer's Käferbuch, from which this illustration comes via Wikipedia, is found across northern North America. It is one of 68 known species in the genus Nicrophorus. Some are all black, but most have dark orange markings on a black background.
To see one, on a hot summer day place a dead mouse in a field somewhere, then stand back and watch. One or more beetles ought to show up soon, and a mated pair will proceed to move the mouse carcass to a spot with soft enough ground, and bury it. Underground, the female lays eggs and tends them until the larvae are well on their way to devouring the mouse. She will leave; the larvae will pupate and emerge weeks or months later as adult beetles. As you might have learned in The Lion King, this is part of the circle of life.
This is typical of the way small animals are disposed of in the wild. If they are not eaten by a predator, the beetles probably get them. It is the fate of nearly all animals in nature to be eaten. This is the message of the opening section of Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death by Bernd Heinrich. Of course, he does not stop with mice. The deaths, and particularly after-death disposal, of deer, swine and larger animals are discussed, as is the career of "the ultimate recycler", humans.
Later in the book the human and natural viewpoints are contrasted. For example, at a salmon run in Alaska, a grizzly bear does not always eat all of a fish. It often eats just the fatty eggs and discards the rest to be eaten by the ravens and other scavengers in the vicinity. To us, we consider that the bear has "wasted food". But why not ask the ravens if any actually goes to waste? They get fed, as do many other creatures, from birds to mammals to insects and reptiles. And, of course, bacteria and fungi get their share.
Ravens, vultures and eagles are, to various extents, carrion birds. Even the so-called dedicated predators (such as lions or wolves) will take carrion when they get the chance; it is safer than attacking a prey animal, though fighting off other eager eaters can be risky enough. These all are just the most obvious "undertakers". Unlike human undertakers, they do not dispose of a body to hide or preserve it, but to consume it and to recycle its energy content. One vignette describes the many lives that feed upon a fallen giraffe.
In clear and lyrical prose, the author discusses also the fate of trees that fall in the woods (and are not dragged off by loggers). A "nurse log" can take 200-500 years to decompose, all the while supporting a varying crew of fungi, insects, bacteria, smaller plants, and eventually other trees. Then there are the various ways that things that die in lakes, streams or oceans are recycled. To see a truly gross video, search for "hagfish eating whale" in YouTube. The action happens several kilometers down on the ocean floor.
In the last section, the author gets more philosophical. He had been prompted to write the book by a letter from a friend requesting a "green burial"; that is, having his body left on the ground on land belonging to Dr. Heinrich in the Maine woods, there to be consumed by nature's undertakers. Of course, without proper permitting and supervision, such disposal of a human body is illegal. Rather than bothering him, or a friend who owns land in the woods, contact Green Burial Council, which can help you find such services, or at least a way to be buried without being embalmed in formaldehyde, so your substance can be returned to the earth.
Considering that it can take centuries for the formaldehyde to break down and release a body to decomposition, and that cremation uses huge amounts of fuel, going green is a better option. Whether religious or spiritual views of life after death are accurate or not, there is still a body to be disposed of when a person "transitions". Letting it provide life to nature is another kind of life after death, the life of many creatures that would be deprived of a meal by formaldehyde or the fire.
It is only in the "developed" countries that such deprivation is practiced. Green burial, including "air burial" (feeding the birds) is still the worldwide norm. And why not? We are animals also. From dust (soil) we came, and to dust we shall return.
To see one, on a hot summer day place a dead mouse in a field somewhere, then stand back and watch. One or more beetles ought to show up soon, and a mated pair will proceed to move the mouse carcass to a spot with soft enough ground, and bury it. Underground, the female lays eggs and tends them until the larvae are well on their way to devouring the mouse. She will leave; the larvae will pupate and emerge weeks or months later as adult beetles. As you might have learned in The Lion King, this is part of the circle of life.
This is typical of the way small animals are disposed of in the wild. If they are not eaten by a predator, the beetles probably get them. It is the fate of nearly all animals in nature to be eaten. This is the message of the opening section of Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death by Bernd Heinrich. Of course, he does not stop with mice. The deaths, and particularly after-death disposal, of deer, swine and larger animals are discussed, as is the career of "the ultimate recycler", humans.
Later in the book the human and natural viewpoints are contrasted. For example, at a salmon run in Alaska, a grizzly bear does not always eat all of a fish. It often eats just the fatty eggs and discards the rest to be eaten by the ravens and other scavengers in the vicinity. To us, we consider that the bear has "wasted food". But why not ask the ravens if any actually goes to waste? They get fed, as do many other creatures, from birds to mammals to insects and reptiles. And, of course, bacteria and fungi get their share.
Ravens, vultures and eagles are, to various extents, carrion birds. Even the so-called dedicated predators (such as lions or wolves) will take carrion when they get the chance; it is safer than attacking a prey animal, though fighting off other eager eaters can be risky enough. These all are just the most obvious "undertakers". Unlike human undertakers, they do not dispose of a body to hide or preserve it, but to consume it and to recycle its energy content. One vignette describes the many lives that feed upon a fallen giraffe.
In clear and lyrical prose, the author discusses also the fate of trees that fall in the woods (and are not dragged off by loggers). A "nurse log" can take 200-500 years to decompose, all the while supporting a varying crew of fungi, insects, bacteria, smaller plants, and eventually other trees. Then there are the various ways that things that die in lakes, streams or oceans are recycled. To see a truly gross video, search for "hagfish eating whale" in YouTube. The action happens several kilometers down on the ocean floor.
In the last section, the author gets more philosophical. He had been prompted to write the book by a letter from a friend requesting a "green burial"; that is, having his body left on the ground on land belonging to Dr. Heinrich in the Maine woods, there to be consumed by nature's undertakers. Of course, without proper permitting and supervision, such disposal of a human body is illegal. Rather than bothering him, or a friend who owns land in the woods, contact Green Burial Council, which can help you find such services, or at least a way to be buried without being embalmed in formaldehyde, so your substance can be returned to the earth.
Considering that it can take centuries for the formaldehyde to break down and release a body to decomposition, and that cremation uses huge amounts of fuel, going green is a better option. Whether religious or spiritual views of life after death are accurate or not, there is still a body to be disposed of when a person "transitions". Letting it provide life to nature is another kind of life after death, the life of many creatures that would be deprived of a meal by formaldehyde or the fire.
It is only in the "developed" countries that such deprivation is practiced. Green burial, including "air burial" (feeding the birds) is still the worldwide norm. And why not? We are animals also. From dust (soil) we came, and to dust we shall return.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
A mushroom harvest
kw: natural history, fungi
I went out to mow, taking advantage of the spate of nice weather. When I got to the side yard, it didn't take long to run across this big mushroom. Its cap is about 15 cm (6 in) across. It felt woody, more like a bracket fungus (shelf mushroom, like you find on tree trunks) than a "toadstool".
A later search among fungus identification web sites indicated that it is probably a species of Boletellus. Most members of this genus are not edible, but I wouldn't want to eat such a woody mushroom anyway.
When I pulled it out, I found beneath it a dark brown spore print. The spore color helped identify it. I suppose I could also have gathered some spores to check under the microscope. The main way you distinguish among dark-spored Boletellus species is by spore morphology.
Instead, I went around the yard and gathered them all up. They were clearly following the trace of roots of a tree, a sweet gum or Liquidamber, that we removed five years ago. It takes the roots of a cut-down tree years to be convinced that they are dead. At that point, the commensal fungi push up fruiting bodies like these in an effort to propagate wherever the wind blows.
Here is the collection, on the back stoop. I count six mature fruits (two are shown sideways, in back, so their white underside is visible) and fourteen smaller ones. All are quite woody, and it took some effort to break them free from the mycelium underground. The one shown above is on the left.
From a close look at the underside I saw that they have no gills. They have pores instead, but I was hard put to see the pores, they are so small. It was the fine pores that led me to the genus identification. Even though the pores are small, they are quite large enough to drop copious spores, which are less than 10 microns in size. That spore print shown above must contain millions of spores.
The pores look like this at about 10x magnification. The brown object is a piece of weed stem that the mushroom had enveloped as it grew. Compare these tiny pores with the pores of Boletus fraternus, a smaller and softer mushroom with a red cap and yellow underside, that I found growing in a corner of the yard when I was gathering the Boletellus.
I understand that Boletus fraternus is edible. I don't plan to test the notion. I am reasonably certain of my identification, but not enough to stake my health on it!
Here it is, in case someone wants to tell me I got it wrong (or right!).
A later search among fungus identification web sites indicated that it is probably a species of Boletellus. Most members of this genus are not edible, but I wouldn't want to eat such a woody mushroom anyway.
Instead, I went around the yard and gathered them all up. They were clearly following the trace of roots of a tree, a sweet gum or Liquidamber, that we removed five years ago. It takes the roots of a cut-down tree years to be convinced that they are dead. At that point, the commensal fungi push up fruiting bodies like these in an effort to propagate wherever the wind blows.
From a close look at the underside I saw that they have no gills. They have pores instead, but I was hard put to see the pores, they are so small. It was the fine pores that led me to the genus identification. Even though the pores are small, they are quite large enough to drop copious spores, which are less than 10 microns in size. That spore print shown above must contain millions of spores.
I understand that Boletus fraternus is edible. I don't plan to test the notion. I am reasonably certain of my identification, but not enough to stake my health on it!
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