Constitutional Protected Speech - Facebook "Like" Doesn't Cut It...

A sheriff, Adams, ran for reelection.  Two of his employees, while Adams was still sheriff, "liked" him on his Facebook page.  Later, Roberts, who ran against Adams won.  The two employees were dismissed.  (Full case ruling here.)

The employees sue claiming that Roberts fired them for exercising their right to "free speech" under the Constitution.

The court finds that Facebook "Like" is not free speech.

So is this right?

Is a Facebook "like" equal to a black arm band (Tinker) or burning a flag (Texas v. Johnson)?

In the wired world there's a lot of concern over this.

How can something so ubiquitous as "Like" not be speech?

The court's reasoning was pretty clear:

First of all at issue was only the action of clicking the "Like" button.  Neither plaintiff could show that they actually made statements on the page.

As compared to Tinker where black armbands were worn in protest this is markedly different.  People actually wore the arm bands in a public place.  They physically showed up where others could see them.  And, in the case of Tinker, this was considered "speech."

In this case the plaintiff's couldn't show that they had made any speech - there was no record of any Facebook posts - only the fact that they had clicked the "Like" button.

The court felt that "free speech" had to have substantive content and "will not attempt to infer the actual content of Carter's [plaintiff] posts from one click of a button on Adam's page."

Now I think this is interesting.  Here the court is likening (no pun intended) "Like" to something without substance.  I think a comparable act in the physical world might be a "thumbs up" to fellow students wearing black arm bands.

The physical act of raising your thumb could mean support - and it could mean "get the hell out of my school."

But without additional information (which in the case the plaintiff's failed to provided, i.e., actual Facebook posts) what is the court to do?

Do I really "Like" everything on Facebook I click "Like" for?  Perhaps I am trying to impress a member of the opposite sex so I like what he or she likes to "get noticed."

The court is saying that without more information "Like" means nothing.

It might be like making a quiet statement in a large crowd.  Perhaps I can prove I made a statement but if no one hears it does it deserve Constitutional protection.

Secondly courts don't place as much substance on "Facebook Friends" for good reason.

In Quigley Corp. v. Karkus, 2009 U.S. Dist. Lexis 41296 (May 15, 2009) (see this) involving an issue revolving around whether a corporate board member had fully disclosed relationships the court found that failing to include a specific "Facebook Friend" was not a substantive item.

Why?

Because either party can "end" the friendship by merely deleting it through Facebook.

So if the "friendship" is that fleeting is it real?

I think the court rightly says that without other evidence of involvement between the parties no.

And to be clear let's contrast this with explicit Facebook behavior.  In this link the Philadelphia Bar describes how its unethical for a lawyer to use "Facebook" friends via a third party to infiltrate someone's Facebook friends.

Why is this legally different than a "Like?"

Because someone is actively engaging in a subterfuge in which Facebook is used as a tool to extract or gain information that would otherwise not be possible to gather, i.e., Facebook is a communication medium - like a phone.

I can call you on the phone and pretend to be a new neighbor and pump you for information - I can do the same on Facebook - the details of the medium don't matter because the act of subterfuge is the same in either case.

The bottom line, sadly I think for those in love with the digital social world, is that "Like" is not equal to true speech.

While "like" might have value for mining social data about you I don't agree its necessarily protected free speech.  I think that there must be something else involved (personal communications, other meaningful dialogue in some other documented medium such as email).  Only in the context of this does "Like" have meaning.

So what about a "Like" causing you to get hired (or not) as I wrote about in "Can Your 'Social Presence' Get You Hired?"

I think its a bit of a different question.

Outside of a legal context like is more "Like" a choice of a car or clothing.

If you're going down to Social Services to sign up for welfare or you're going to pull out your "Access" card at Walmart its best not to drive down in your Cadillac SUV or Lamborghini.  While you certainly can do that the act of choosing that particular vehicle says something about you none-the-less speaks about you.

Similarly you might not want to apply for that job chaperoning teen dances with "I Like'm Young" tattooed on your forearm.

Clearly you're choice to say or show how you feel but their might be consequence...

Nutrition: Led Astray by Bad Science and "Big Pharma"

Over the last few years there has been a lot of questioning about the nature nutritional supplements have on things like cancer.

Once recent study, documented here and here, describes how reserachers "looked at observational studies of several supplements including anti-oxidants, folic acid, vitamin D, and calcium."

According to the second link the study authors found: “The importance of oxidative stress for carcinogenesis does not establish that the administration of supplemental antioxidants will protect against the carcinogenesis that oxidative stress may induce” and “Supplementation by exogenous antioxidants may well be a two-edged sword; these compounds could, in vivo, serve as pro-oxidants or interfere with any of a number of protective processes such as apoptosis induction.”

In lay terms these substances might cause more harm or even cancer than any good they cause.

Now this to me brings out a very important distinction that I have so far never seen.

The big pharma/medical science complex is always looking at direct cause/effect type scenarios - particularly on the cancer front.  They like the results to show things like "all thing being equal cancer growth without X was 50% and with X was 25%."

They call this evidence.

But human bodies and lives are not lab dishes nor are they "closed" laboratory environments and I think this really makes most of this "studying" just a lot of foolishness.

The first thing to become a real "science" is that the medical world is going to have to figure out how to deal with the placebo effect.  This is well documented and very powerful.  It can heal you, make you operate as if you have no problems when you do, it can even kill you - and its all in your mind.

Now being based on allopathy - the science of opposites - modern medical thinking says you treat something "wrong" with an opposite, e.g., if the cancer is growing you find something to stop it from growing.

But your body isn't a closed system - like a set of billiard balls on a table demonstrating particle physics.  What I mean by this is that as long a no one shakes the table (nor are there any earth quakes, etc.) precisely rolling one ball into another based on physical laws results in the same outcome.  If there were not true then trick-shot pool artists would not exist.

Yet this is what the concept of allopathy is all about.  I roll ball A into ball B at a given speed and angle and I expect a certain result - B rolls into the pocket say.  Now, if I take ball C and precisely roll it into the path of B I can prevent B from rolling into the pocket, or send it back in the direction of A or whatever.

And if humans functioned like machines or billiard balls this would all make perfect sense.

But we don't.

In the real world imagine that same pool table on the back of an old pickup truck.  The truck is rolling down a rocky creek bed. 

In the bed of the pickup truck is the pool table and its not tied down to anything so its bucking and sliding around as the truck bounces over the rocks in the creek bed.

Now on the table are the two balls we talked about before A and B.

And, on a horse running along side the truck, is our pool hustler - cue in hand - ready to make a shot.

Now even if this is the same pool table that was in a nice, clean, quiet bar - and even if the balls and the equipment and people are all the same - is it reasonable to expect our pool shark to be able to make the same kind of shots he would in the quiet bar?

Of course not.

Yet medical science thinks that the "real world" people live in is based on the "quiet bar" model where actions have predictable opposite reactions.

And, when this doesn't work, medical science says "well, we're really stuck with a bunch of pickups running down the creek bed so instead of simple experiments we'll use statistics over a broad range of pickups."

So eventually we have some sort of statistics that show a kind of cause and effect.

But really there is a lot of noise in this - different pickups, creek beds, pool sharks, horses, and so on.

What not accounted for in all this is what's different or the same about the environment for these experiments - maybe only some of the creek beds are really bumpy - maybe a lot are smooth.  Maybe some pool sharks are excellent horsemen - or their brother-in-law is driving the truck more slowly to make his job easier, and so on...

So these experiments are more "open" than a quiet bar where we can produce simply, predictable cause and effect results.

And so it is with nutrition.

Medical science basically assumes that the average "Joe" just wakes up one day and takes a supplement - say calcium - to prevent cancer.

Then they look at what happens to "Joe" after that - compared to all the other "Joe's" in a given study does a given "Joe" have a greater chance of his cancer returning.

But what is left out here?

Well, for one thing what was the nutritional state of Joe's body before we studied him?  Was he suffering from malnourishment?  What was he thinking about his body image (the placebo effect)? What genetics did Joe have for or against him? and so on...

Since as far as I know there is no known science that tells us if a person is at some "optimal health." 

There is no way to measure this reliably.

So we don't know what's wrong (or might be going wrong) to begin with (for example, as I contend, most people in the US are malnourished to begin with which predisposes them to certain modern health problems). 

We also don't have a way to compare the results of a person taking a supplement versus that same person doing something else (obviously because that person can only do A or B - not both at the same time).

We can't control for things like TV ads that people see that suggest they have certain health problems and should be worried about them.

Worse - nutrition, at least from my perspective, takes a long time - many years before you figure out what's good for your body - and it takes a long time to correct deficiencies with proper supplementation.

And no one really wants to wait around trying to get people into some known state of health before the study even starts.

And on and on and on and on...

So the bottom line to me is that these kinds of studies are meaningless.  They tell us that if some people take this or that they might have a greater epidemiological risk of A or B - but since we don't know where they started we really no nothing...

Worse - studies like this act as negative noise to scare people away from questioning their basic nutrition.

So sadly, at least so far, I have no real way to measure or even scientifically analyze what I am doing with my own nutrition save for experimenting on myself.

And the best I can do with that is comparing where I was versus where I am and were I stand against others over time. 

How do I feel?

How do I perform?

There are other nutritional-based ideas that probably also come into play: relative acidity of people's bodies, things like that - again all driven by diet but not taken as part of the big picture.

The bottom line is that "science" does not work well in large, complex open systems (just like global climate).

Image if medicine use a "model" of you to treat you...

Modern Educaton and the "Negative Wedding Dowry"

I am fascinated with articles and stories on the level of education that we have and what we do with it.

I recently came across this WSJ article.  The premise is simple: we in the US are falling behind the rest of the world in education.  The idea is you measure how much education you have at 25 and compare that to how much your parents had at the same age.

In most prior generations the "amount" of education each new generation has has exceeded that of their parents.

But since about 1970 or so, for men, that has changed.  In 1970 about 65% of men had more education than their parents.  Today that number is around 40%.

Considering that today's schools don't actually provide the same type or amount of education the level of you might find 40 years ago I would say that that number is far, far lower.  Maybe 20% of men today have more education than their parents.

Me and my generation was probably one of the last to take "getting educated" seriously.

Ask a techy graduate from virtually any school who Thucydides is or about the Emperor's of Rome and all you will see is blank stare.  Ask them about World War II, or Korea, or about a foreign country, or about the news - more blank stares.  In fact, ask most college graduates about any subject outside their narrow scope of specialization and all get is, well, nothing...

Prior to 1975 the Vietnam War drove men to college - it was the only way to get a "deferral" from the draft.  But by 1975 there was no more war so men said "to hell with education" and went back to being, er, well, men.

Meanwhile woman have been advancing in "education" - today there are more women graduates of college than men.  But again - they seem to have very little in terms of actual "education."

But women, according to the same article, are also losing ground with respect to their parents in terms of education even though they are relatively steady in terms of college graduation.

The peak of our "educatedness" was about 1970 or so for both sexes - and its been down hill since then.

So what does this say about US as Americans?

Well, for one thing, the supposed "smartest" among us are leaving the workforce because of retirement.  I am not sure that in and of itself is a bad thing because the "smartest" have not done much for us in the last 40 years save for take us from first place in education to a paltry 14th or so in the world.

So what does that leave?

The "less educated."

Personally I find the characterization of "less educated" as somehow inferior troubling because it does not take into account common sense, life satisfaction and talent.

Education in and of itself is basically useless.  Teach a man engineering and you have an engineer - whether working on a gas chamber for genocide or a spaceship to the moon.

Its what you as a person do with that education that matters.  How you use it and what you use it for.

Today education is sold as a tool to "make money."

Get that "ticket" and you'll be set for life...  or will you?

The variance in income between careers you can enter with a bachelor's degree is probably an order of magnitude, i.e., ten times.  A petroleum engineer might make $120,000 USD to start, a English major $12,000 USD flipping burgers at McDonalds.

So what you do apparently matters a lot too.

My companies stopped hiring computer science graduates around 1985 because all they wanted was a good job - they weren't concerned with the work aspect of it.

So if money is all you care about become a mid-level drug dealer - no education or student loans required.  (You see them all the time at places like Chucky Cheese - but SUV's, lots of gold, etc.)

I think all this is taking us off the "moral" cliff...  People don't care about anything but money any more and education in the last forty years has made this worse because the "morality" aspect of education was stripped away during that time.

The "less educated" will and are becoming our leaders - how do you make rational economic decisions for your constituents if simple math is beyond you?

The answer is you don't...

You make decisions based on power alone - no morality, no education, no leadership.

And look at what you get - today's effort to bail out the USPS with tens of billions of dollars.

Not because it makes sense, not because its right, not because of anything but votes and power.

You get the idea that if you pay $10 billion dollars today you might save $10 billion dollars over several years.

Huh?

Why not just save the $10 billion dollars over several years and not pay anything?

Total savings: $10 billion dollars.  (And no, you're not saving $20 billion because you never spent it in the first place.)

What madness: running the government like rationalizing going to a sale to spend money you don't have on what you don't need.

We now owe more on education than credit card debt...

And since men have been opting out of the education system for four decades this means that all that debt is piling up disproportionately on women.

So while women may have the edge in "degrees" they also have the edge in "debt."

And where does this take us?

Imagine a world with a "negative wedding dowry" (please, take my daughter and her $100,000 USD of debt) and you'd see why marriages are failing and men are failing to take up seriously with women.

Little wonder more children than ever on on anti-depressants...

Oracle, Java and "Don't Be Evil"

I've been following the Oracle/Google trial over the Java implementation Google used in its Android software: Dalvik.

Basically the trial boils down to this: Google decided that in order to build Android it needed Java.  There were issues with licensing Java from Sun to Google decided to build its own Java implementation.  Subsequently Larry Elison's Oracle purchased Sun and sued Google for stealing its intellectual property.

So there are a couple of tricky aspects to this.

First, what does "build your own Java" mean?

Java is a language defined by specifications and API's.  An API describes the what's typically called a class or package.  Say I have a class describing geometric objects.  They might have attributes like height and width.

Now I might use those geometric objects on a screen and when I do it means something to set the height or width to a new value, e.g., the object's size changes in some way.

The details of how that actually works are implemented by code inside the class and not visible outside the API or interface.

So if you want to make your own class for geometric objects you can look at the Java API and create your own implementation of how that class works.

Now Oracle's lawyer is asking an interesting question:  Does Google think that the API itself - the description of the class - is a publicly available resource, i.e., not the property of Oracle.

Typically computer languages have some sort of manual or BNF (syntax description) that describes the language and what its statements mean.  So for example you might see this:

   IF Statement

       'if' '(' expression ')' 'then' statement [ 'else' statement ]

What this says is the for an "if" statement you have an if followed by an expression.  Typically the expression evaluates to a "True" or "False" value and subsequently the statement after either the "then" or "else" is executed.

Now in general computer languages are considered to be, at least by geeks, in the "public domain" in the sense that someone can pick up the manual and create their own implementation of that language.

The reason of this is that while the manual containing the description of the language is protected by a copyright the implementation of a program to process that language written by someone looking at the manual is not so long as they don't use copywritten material in the program they write.

This last underlined part is important.

Now many computer languages of the past are basically just like this in terms of their description.

But Java is a bit different.

In addition to the parts describing the language itself there is also a notion of classes that are "part" of Java - in other words Java is more than just a language - it also includes classes to do specific things.

An example of a Java class might be:

  public class ExampleClass {

    private String fred;

    public void setfred(String s) {
      fred = s;
    }
  }

Now this code doesn't do much but it shows how to define a class, in this case ExampleClass.

If you go to Oracle's site (here for example) you will see a fantastically complex set of classes to support Java.  Now each of these classes has specific class names, routines, and so on.

Now at the trial Google freely admits that it used the names of Oracle's classes in its version of Java - not Oracle's Java implementation - but its class names.

Now at the bottom of each and every Java documentation page on Oracle's site you see this:

Copyright © 2009-2011, Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

Seems pretty plain that Oracle thinks this stuff is its property and that its covered by a copyright.

In addition there is a License link right next to the copyright notice.  The first thing that it says is this:

License for Evaluation Purposes. Sun hereby grants you a 

fully-paid, non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide, limited
license (without the right to sublicense), under Sun's 

applicable intellectual property rights to view, download, use and
reproduce the Specification only for the purpose of internal evaluation.

(The underline is mine.)

Seems pretty clear that you cannot use this specification to write your own Java and distribute it around the world in your Android cellphone software package.

Now at the trial according to this Wired story the follow exchange occurred:

... 

Schmidt said that Google had planned to use Java from the start of the Android project, but he also said that he didn’t agree with the vocabulary Boies used in describing the Java programming language and platform.

“An interface is a specification. A name,” Schmidt said curtly. “There’s a collection of those names that forms the standard that Java uses. We, Google, implemented those interfaces in our own way.”

“Just to be clear,” Boies responded, “you copied the 37 Sun Java API specifications?”

“We used the interface names, which is how one does this, and then did our own implementation of those services,” Schmidt said.

“Are you saying is that the only thing you copied was the names?” Boies asked. And Schmidt said “yes.”

...

Here Google's Eric Schmidt admits that Google took the various class names (routines, classes, and so on) - presumably from Oracle's copywritten web pages - and created their own virtual Java machine Davlik.

Now to my mind this is like copying a story from a book, changing just the names of all the characters, and claiming its not a copy of the original story but your own original story.

The very essence of Java is this class library.  Now Google did not create a new, equivalent class library of their own making with original names and original classes.

And I think Google might have a problem here.

While Google did not use any proprietary Oracle property they did, apparently, copy all of the class names and so forth which are covered by copyright.

Normally in the world of computer geeks its a complement that someone likes the computer language you designed so much that they copy it.  But these days, and particularly with Oracle, copyright is more in vogue than the "coolness" of creating a language everybody wants to use.

Of course this will all come down to a jury decision - which will likely be an non-technical decision because most juries are not technical folks.

But I think Google may have run afoul of Oracle here and I don't see how they can claim otherwise.

But who knows...

This is why I personally don't like Eric Schmidt or the way Google does things.  Its "don't be evil" policy does not seem to require anyone to be careful and dot all their i's and cross all their t's before launching a major cellphone platform for the whole world to use using someone else's intellectual property.

Social Security - Not Keeping Up with the Times

Today we find that 56 million Americans are either on Social Security or disabled.  That's 56/311 or 18% of the population of the entire country.

The average benefit per recipient is $1,125 as of March 2012.

So the monthly tab for Social Security is $1,125 x 56,000,000 or some $63 billion (with a 'B') USD a month or about three quarters of a trillion (with a 'T' US dollars) a year (750 billion or so).

For comparison the entire US "for hire" trucking industry is less than 1/3 of this on an annual basis.

The entire US healthcare industry is on par with this number at $788 billion per year.

Social security pays benefits to both older Americans and the "disabled."

These funds are accounted for separately and in about 2016 the "disability benefits" fund is going to run out of money.

(As a side note, according to this WSJ article, more is paid out of the funds than is paid in.  If the funds "went bust" the benefit rate would be cut about 25% - so the funds take in 25% less than they pay out at any given time.)

Now at some other point in our history this might not be such an immediate crisis but today things are different.

The US already carries some $15 trillion USD or so in debt - about equal to (or 100% of) the GDP of the US.'

Medicare is not far behind Social Security: see this as an example.

This is what I consider to be a "crisis level" debt - along the lines of Greece, Spain and Italy, for example.

Recently I heard an interesting statistic.

Not only are all the tax payments of the current generation spent, but also all the tax payments of our children's generation and our grand children.  That's right - we have already spent the money my grandchildren will pay in taxes during their lifetimes.

Nice!


(Its little wonder the kiddies could give a rat's ass about us old geezers... We've already robbed them blind for what?  A fancy retirement condo?  A golf membership?)

In part some of this is caused by a "mismatch" in benefits versus the time period in which the program was created.

In the mid-1930's life expectancy was about 62 years of age.

Social security didn't "kick in" until you retired at age 65 - or until you were at 5% over the "average life expectancy."  Basically you were expected to work past your life expectancy.

Because of this arrangement about seven (7) workers paid into Social Security for each retired worker collecting benefits.  This makes sense given the structure of the program as it was created.

Today that would be about 82 years of age (5% over a life expectancy of a conservative 79).

But the "retirement age" has stayed at 65 for the last 80 years or so of the program - even though life expectancy has increased by about 15 years (see this table).

This has created a situation where today only a few workers pay in for each retired worker - and I believe that by the time I retire the ratio will be two paying in for each retired worker.

So not only is the program "broken" in the sense that its output exceeds its funding - but the basic design of the system has not been overhauled in some 80 years all the while people continue to live longer but not pay into Social Security for the delta between what was set up in 1935 and today.

So its destined to fail as it currently stands.

No amount of taxation can replace a bad design.

While some might argue about the "fairness" of this to older people you must also consider the fairness to the "workers" contributing.

Soon two people will pay the same proportion to fund one retiree as did seven in the 1930's - an increase of almost three-fold.  Few, I think, would object to the burden to pay created at the rate in the 1930's.

I see no way to make this more "fair" other than to dramatically "push back" the retirement age - an event that's unlikely to occur in today's political climate.

Another significant problem is that despite the funding of Medicare our senior population is not getting "more healthy."

All things being equal one would think that, once retired and on Medicare, the medical coverage they receive would reduce a senior's dependence on medical care - but the reverse is instead true.

So during their extra 15 years of life people do not live well and require constant and expensive medical care.

What all this boils down to is the "politician's dilemma."

"Where there is insufficient funding for a popular social payout program its always better to just keep paying than face the truth about bankruptcy or borrowing."

You find this from the smallest municipalities retirement program to the largest US government programs.

I am almost 55 years old.  I do not plan to retire - its that simple - particularly given the state of the economics related to social security.

For all those crying about raising taxes and so forth to fund this madness instead I think you should consider simply "opting out" of these programs to save money for those who cannot afford to do so.

Thucydides, Facebook and The Paper Chase

Paper Chase Theatrical Poster - Wikipedia

A consequence of the current educational problem in the US is, I think, carelessness.

As a small child with an overactive imagination I was always quick to jump to conclusions - most of the time wrong conclusions.  My mind, good at creating relationships between events often did not have enough information to make the right connections - so I simply got it wrong.

In the olden days of the 1970's places like college were designed to eliminate this.

I think that little epitomizes this more than the old television series from that time called "The Paper Chase" staring John Houseman.  Houseman played Professor Charles Kingsfield who said at the beginning of each episode: "You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush; you leave thinking like a lawyer."

The idea, of course, was that until you knuckled down and learned the law and how to think you were an idiot.

A few years later I found my own Professor Kingsfield.

Professor Fowler.  She was old and she taught ancient Greek.  She was old school and like the fiction Professor Kingsfield tolerated no nonsense and demanded results.

Most of the rest of the classes, even Latin which was taught in the same department, were modeled at that time on the new methods of liberal college instruction - friendly, accessible teaching assistants, office hours were you could bargain for a better grade, that sort of thing.

Not Fowler's class.  The taught it once.  You learned it.  She issued assignments.  You did them.

She didn't care if you did them or not.  She wasn't "friendly" and "helpful" - she simply expected you to keep up and learn.

If she called on you you had better produce results or you would be an embarrassing yourself in front of your peers.

Within the first few weeks at least half the students dropped the class.

It was do or die.

So I worked at it - hard.  The class was fairly small so it was easy to gauge your progress.  Every day I studied declensions, endings, accents, verbs and so on.  It took more time than calculus or history.

But over the course of the first semester I began to realize that not only was I learning ancient Greek but I was also learning to discipline myself.  To teach myself to think clearly - to reason out the nonsense from the reality.

I stayed in her class for two semesters.  By the end we could read certain passages (the simplest ones) from the Bible, we could read a little Thucydides who wrote "The History of the Peloponnesian War," and some other things.

Thirty some years later I cannot remember much about the details of ancient Greek but I do retain the discipline I learned.

And this has made a huge difference in my life - the difference, I think, between success and failure.

I know when I do a job if the job is merely adequate or fully correct.

For my money this was the most crucial thing I learned in my life - intellectual discipline.

So today, when I read stories like this one about how mistakes with cell lines are muddling and stalling cancer research I have to wonder: didn't these researchers learn academic discipline?  To check their work thoroughly?  To take nothing for granted?

It would seem not.

A few month's back I wrote "Falsified Medical Studies the Norm" - it covered the fact that most of the academic medical results published today cannot be reproduced outside academia in commercial settings.

My guess is that what's missing in academia today is not technology or knowledge but instead discipline.

The discipline to "do the right thing," to "remain honest" and so one.

Today, however, from my perspective, college teaches "groupthink."

Groupthink is the phenomena where groups of people tend to settle on a decision that yields "group harmony" instead of correct or accurate results.

You see this all the time today in corporations: I can't possibly go against so-and-so - it would destroy his work.  So instead of doing the right thing we go down the road of nonsense and foolishness so that everyone is happy and wrong.

This is what I see has happened in education, particularly at the college level, over the last few decades.  Hard, Professor Kingsfield (or Fowler) teaching methods have been replaced by methods that don't involve soul-searching, brain frying, self tormenting critical thinking.

So its little wonder that in the real world we now have commercial enterprises that operate along the same lines: lax, loose and sloppy.

But now these commercial enterprises are in the process of "taking down" the US as a world leader.

Why?

Because the vary basis of our countries progress in the world of technology and medical science is undermined by sloppy, lazy groupthink.

And sadly, this is not the worst of it. 

Groupthink is also taking over our morality.

We don't make clear decisions on what's "right" and "wrong."  Today, particularly in academia, there isn't a "right" and "wrong" as there was in the last hundred-or-so thousand years of humanity.

Instead there's a new model: Am I in within the bounds of the "groupthink" or am I outside?

Outsiders face ostracism - regardless of facts and objective reason.

Groupthink is a tool were social pressure is used to motivate thinking - whether on Facebook or in the classroom.  Social pressure to "think like the rest of us."

Yet virtually all significant scientific and intellectual progress over the centuries does not evolve from "the group mind" or "groupthink"  Instead it comes from the "outliers" who want to think about something in their own unique way.

Until Facebook the internet and computers were domain of techies and geeks.

But no longer.

Unfortunately what you are seeing and will continue to see is that Facebook is a tool for social engineering and peer pressure to enforce groupthink on outliers.  To create social "sameness" for the sake of "harmony."

Sadly this is becoming our national pastime - Facebook and friends.

And its taking our intellectual freedom and discipline along with it...

Frac'ing, the EPA and the Emperor's New Clothes

So in its zeal to protect us from ourselves the EPA has issued new regulations constraining how hydraulic fracturing (fracing) of natural gas wells.

One of the goals of this new regulation (look at the "Overview Fact Sheet") is to reduce VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) released into the atmosphere.  They estimate that some 190,000 tons of VOCs would not be released upon implementation of the these new regulations.  Also some 12,000 tons of "Air Toxics" and up to 1.7 million tons of methane.

On the surface this seems like a laudable goal.

However, a little research reveals the following.

The best estimates I can find on the mass of the earth's atmosphere is that its approximately 5 x 10^15 tons.  So these VOC's the EPA is regulating represent .000000000002 % of the atmosphere.

The cost of this to the natural gas industry?

Tens of millions of dollars a year.  But don't worry - these costs will be offset by profits...

So given these numbers let's see what's being talked about at a more technical level.

A US football field is approximately 91.44 meters long.

If we take .000000000002 x 91.44 we get 1.8 * 10^-10 or something about the size of a hydrogen atom.

So the relationship we are talking about here is the length of a football field to the length of a hydrogen atom.

So let's take this a bit further.

Suppose I have a kite string 91.44 meters long attached to a kite flying up in the sky.

The EPA is proposing that something the size of a single hydrogen atom will have an impact on the kite's string.  (Of course, the kite string is much thicker than the hydrogen atom so we can simply imagine it to be of the thinnest material known to man instead of actual string - the results are the same.)

We could also think about this in terms of the number of atoms involved, but the numbers are so ridiculously large that its not worth even writing it out.

Now in science we know that at STP (Standard Pressure) a single Mole of Hydrogen gas, or about 10^24 hydrogen molecules, takes up about 22L - or let's say two 5 gallon gasoline containers.


We cannot, due to quantum mechanics, even know anything about where a single atom of hydrogen would be in this volume of gas much less what its impact would be on, say, a kite string, i.e., it cannot have a measurable impact at the macro level of the kite string.

Yet they are regulating it.

And claiming this has any effect at all on the planet or our atmosphere is beyond ridiculous.

Personally I think that this is the result of bad education.

If it was my job to think about these things, and actually it is as a citizen of the US, one would have to see how preposterous these "regulations" really are.

Even the millions of tons of methane supposedly produced is dwarfed by the annual production of methane in the world that we know about.

And as far as global climate change water vapor dwarfs any impact of methane.

So, at least in my mind, this is not about science at all.

Its a shame to even call it scientific.

Its all about ignorance.

The emperor is not only not wearing any clothes, there isn't even an emperor in the first place.

US Education: Modern Indentured Service

From Wikipedia - An Indenture

As a small child in grade school in the 1960's we learned about "indentured servitude."

An indentured servant, unlike, for example, a slave, was a free person.  The idea was that if owned a farm during Colonial times you likely need farm hands to help you - there was a lot of work to do: planting, tending, harvesting, thrashing, and so on - and no cash until you sold your crops.

So if you had little or no cash flow how did you hire help?

The solution was to create an indentured servitude contract with a young person in Europe.  You, the farmer, would pay to have them transported to the Colonies.  There they would work for you for a period of years, often five or more, and, in return, you would provide them food, transportation, room, board, and so on.

Today practices like this are unknown in the free world... Or are they?

Here in the US it would seem that education is the siren of today's "brave new world" - calling kiddies from high school to borrow money that their future labor will pay.

So like Colonial times your "job" is the "farm" where you will work - paying your room and board as well as your cost of transport to this new world - your student loans.

Unlike Colonial times though, becoming indentured to banks and federal government offers no guarantee of work.

And there in lies the rub.  At least if you left England on a boat for the "brave new world" you knew you could find work somewhere - after all - sea captains and boats were going there and they were doing it for pay of some sort.

But it seems that today's kiddies are not as swift as their counterparts in the 1600's.

For one thing, the liberal drumbeat that "college pays" is simply false.  Yet there is an entire infrastructure in place geared toward feeding kiddies outbound from high school into the maw of "higher education" - replete with loan officers at the door to ensure there's tens of thousands of dollars available to pay for that education.

If colleges believed in the product they produce they would educate the children on their own dime and extract payment from the child's subsequent success using that education.  After all, as I was told a college education is a "ticket" to a good job.

Ha ha ha...

Right.

Just ask these two: Jodie Romine and Dean Hawkins.  They are described  here.  She has $100K in debt that costs $900 USD a month to service, he pays 40% of his monthly income toward student loans.

They are indentured to the US Government and US banks for far more than the three to seven years a Colonial indentured servant served.

Now, of course, these two agreed to take these loans on.  No doubt coerced by well meaning college and government bureaucrats that an business degree "was the ticket to the future."

But given they are products of today's high school system its no wonder they bought this BS hook, line and sinker.

I wrote about this in "21, 55K a year, and no Debt.."

Kids today are lied to by adults - by school counselors, but college admissions people, by literally everyone:  "you can't go wrong with a college education..."  oh no..

But even in 1976 when Mrs. Wolf and I lived in our first apartment while I attended school you could tell something was wrong.

We lived in a three floor walk-up on the second floor.  Above us lived a couple - the husband an English graduate student - the wife had a job.  He toiled away on his PhD with Tom Jones.  We had literally nothing when we go there - a mattress on the floor, a table and a couple of chairs, just enough to get by.

I remember talking to this guy - he was very condescending: you're just stupid kids - what are you doing here - why are you married - you should be out having fun...

I remember asking him why he was working so hard at a PhD which he acknowledged would likely get him a job at McDonalds at best (there was a glut of English PhDs about in those days).  I didn't get much of an answer.  (I never asked where he got the money for school but I imagine in those days he was a paid Teaching Assistant which covered tuition.  His wife covered the rest of the costs I suppose.)

I worked and went to school.  I studied electronics on my own and got a decent job with my hard-won knowledge.

I am certain that within a year or two I was making more money per year than that guy ever did in his life.

Fast forward many years.

A relative is toiling away at a PhD.  He reaches a crossroads: get a job and pay the bills or commute far away to school to get a PhD in a very narrow liberal arts discipline.  He goes for the latter to live "the academic lifestyle" - whatever that is.  Again the school pays the way somehow for this.  The relative, as an older adult, can barely afford to "get buy" needing help from family...

Great investment.

But these two were the lucky ones - the escaped (at least I think they escaped) unsaddled by a house-worth of debt.

Imagine that same guy from 1976 having a hundred grand in debt, and English Lit PhD, and no job.

What are these people thinking?

You can go wrong with an education - very wrong.  You can owe the rest of your life for something that you cannot use.

This is worse, far worse, than indentured servitude.

Its almost like slavery.

Yet its the norm.

So much the norm that today students and former students owe nearly a one trillion (with a T) USD to banks the US government.

Those poor SOBs in the WSJ link - they will be unable to have a family, buy a house, or do much of anything - all because they were lied too.

If I (or Bernie Madoff) sold them a bogus "investment" of that same magnitude I'd be in jail.

But colleges get off because "education is good."  Its not their problem if little Johnny can't get a job.

The question that needs to be asked is "good for what?"

Declining SATs?

A falling place in the world as far as math and reading are concerned?

The highest cost medical system in the world that yields 33rd place for over-all health, leaves pregnant women without proper vitamins and minerals and gives their infant a good chance of dying?

This is crap.

High school kids are sold this crap and they and their parent buy it.

And its expensive - killer expensive.

Its time that "big education" got behind their product.  They need to front-end fund little Johnny's education and get paid on the "back end" as little Johnny succeeds.

If little Johnny fails why should the college get paid at all?

A Real War Against Women...

US (upper right) leads the world in energy consumption

I've been watching a series of TED videos on one of the satellite TV stations.  These are just "reposts" of videos available on the TED website.

The other day this one featuring Hans Rosling caught my attention.

The premise of the video is that our world view of things like life expectancy and health in "third world" countries is very, very wrong.

Here in the United States we tend to think that we have the best life expectancy and the best healthcare  system.  But this video shows some interesting facts.  (You can see this at www.gapminder.com.)

For example, we can see that life expectancy in 1800 was lead by Asia and was the world leader at about 35 years of age.  By 1900 Asia was still the world leader at perhaps 40 years of age.  But by 2,000 life expectancy rose significantly for everyone - the lowest being 35 years in the poorest countries.

In the US our life expectancy lags many, many other countries.

Similarly, in child mortality the US lags perhaps dozens of other countries.

What's interesting here, though, is the countries with the lowest child mortality: Japan, Iceland, Norway, among others.  The US is on par with Serbia and Brunei in child mortality.

Most countries that take a substantial portion of their food from the sea lead here.

In the Murder per 100,000 people category the US lags in an even more dismal position behind Communist China.

So what does this tell us?

For one thing, if you play with the "timeline" at the bottom of the chart you will see that, as I have written here, life in the US was different fifty years ago.  Then the US was much more of a leader in many of these categories.

So, what happened?

The progress in the US from the 1960's on began to "slow down" and our leadership was taken over by other countries, whose progress in these areas accelerated so that they overtook us.

Despite the fact that we used more energy than anyone else.

Now interestingly (and not really very surprising) is that this UN data does not show some interesting facts like percentage of the population involved in government and related infrastructure.

If you play around with this tool for a while you see that our problems here are of our own making.

For example, we are the world leader in obesity.

We spend 1% of all household power used in the US on powering video game consoles (see this) - not from gapminder.org.

We rank high in corruption.

We are world class wasters of energy.

We are the world leaders in wasting healthcare resources.  The char below shows us (again, upper right) spending the most on healthcare of any country.  All for a paltry 30th or so position in overall health metrics (life expectancy, infant mortality rate, etc.)

And since I was a child we have fallen behind the rest of the world (run the slider back to the 1950's to see this).

Personally I see this as a catastrophic failure of the "baby boom" generation to live up to its expectations.  Instead of building on the victories of WW II we squandered our position in the world on "self fulfillment," drugs, and "feeling good" about ourselves (I could not find a category for these on the gapminder chart but I am sure we are world leaders).

What the hard data says is that we waste our healthcare and energy dollars more than any other countries and get very poor results from them.
(At least we feel good about being losers though...  probably due to our world-class consumption of anti-depressants - again no category for this on the chart.)



We don't need to spend more money - we need to do better with what we do spend - a lot better.

And this is the crux of the issue - here in the US we are well taxed - but we get effectively very little for it - particularly in healthcare.

And because no one can think for themselves we see nothing wrong with this state of affairs.

No outrage that we spend the most in the world on healthcare for 33rd place.

Why?

I think that the answer is lack of morals and corruption.

We place a high value on the dollar and making money and government run health systems are primary targets for rip-offs.

Having hundreds of government workers doing the someone's job for them is the same as corruption because there is no guarantee the "government worker" is going to make an efficient decision.

If you don't believe me thus far see this article.

Here in the US pregnant women don't get enough iodine.  Iodine is cheap and plentiful and absolutely necessary for health.  Many years supply costs maybe $20 USD.

Yet for our world-leading spending on health care pregnant women are seriously deficient in iodine.

Basic vitamins and minerals not being supplied by our "world class healthcare system."

We even have an expensive FDA and regulations up the wazoo - and they do nothing.

Duh!

Seems to me this is a real war against women...

The New Definition of "Live Music"

About four months ago I wrote "The Future of Music" where I describe how virtual singers and musicians will be entertaining people in the future.

To be sure I did not expect to find the results of this so soon.  None-the-less here we have Tupac Shakur entertaining people at Choachella 2012 Arts and Music Festival:



Its interesting to point out that Tupac has been dead for the last 25 years or so (September 13, 1996).

Yet here he is, as I described in "The Future of Music" entertaining people.

So entertaining in fact, that he may go on tour according to this WSJ article.

Now, in point of fact, this is not a 3D image but merely a 2D image and no, Tupac is still dead.

What you see is a video projected in such as way as to create the illusion of 3D.  The effect is from the 1860's and is called "Pepper's Ghost" - basically a mirror and a transparent screen organized with a projector to create the illusion.

Tupac is a virtual computer-generated Tupac projected onto this screen.

The effect was realistic enough, apparently, to have upset people.

So now there are a couple of interesting questions.  One images that someone must own Tupac's image and certainly his music rights.

So does this mean people will pay to go see a dead entertainer? 

Will today's kids even really know (or care about) the difference?

In twenty years someone will describe having seen this concert and my guess is no one will know or care if he was alive or dead at the time...

Sort of gives a new definition to "live" music...

Innocent or Guilty: Don't Ask an Eye Witnesses

I ran across an interesting number statistic at the "Innocence Project" web site.: 289.

That's the total number of convictions overturned by DNA evidence in the United States.

Not per year or month...

That's ever, for all time.

Even more interesting is that of these 289 convictions overturned about 75% were originally convicted on faulty eyewitness testimony.

A more interesting statistic, cited here,  is a bit more chilling - during that same time frame tens of thousands of cases were prevented from moving forward because of DNA testing.

Eyewitness testimony is not terribly reliable as it turns out for several reasons.

For one - the "act" of remembering something can subtly change what's being remembered: it was a dark car but was it black?  Or dark blue?

For another, over time, memory fades.

Yet in the United States each year according to this article about 75,000 convictions occur each year based on eyewitness testimony along.

In a country with millions of prison inmates its hard to imagine relying on something so prone to error.

And while I am not suggesting that 75% of these 75,000 convictions are wrong - its still a troubling statistic taken in this context.

Couple this with the "Casey Anthony" problem of conviction on purely "circumstantial evidence" and you have the making of a real issue: a justice system based on a lot of faulty input.

Two hundred some years ago when there were no computers, cameras, cell phones, and so on eyewitness testimony was the best thing going.

But don't forget it was for things like Joe down the lane stealing Emma's pig for the most part.  There were far fewer sophisticated crimes like there are today, er, at least relatively sophisticated, e.g., bank card theft, etc.

In Europe this has been addressed to a degree by installing video surveillance cameras on every street corner.  Of course, now you're shy a little freedom because your being filmed all the time.

In the past I think that "morality" was a large factor in preventing crime. 

People knew that crime was wrong and from a young age were taught that it was also a sin that would likely send them to eternal hell.

But today things are far different.  There is no longer a "right" and "wrong" taught in school.  There is an epidemic drug problem, at least here in the US, that drives people to crime.  There's less stigma associated with crime - for one thing because far more things are crimes to begin with than 200 years ago.

For every crime there is not the "hate crime" version of that crime, for example.

In the past people had different things to worry about day-to-day as well.  If you didn't have a garden or farm or some means to acquire food then you starved - so a lot of your time was bound up in making sure that you had what you needed.

Given that sort of existence it would be easy to see if you weren't doing your job as well - if your fields weren't planted in the spring or you were seen sitting around all the time instead of tending your crops is would be fairly obvious that come fall you'd be hungry.

But that's not true today.  Today no one has any pressure on them whats-so-ever to "do the right thing."

Part of the problem I think is that the "justice system" is big business so it needs new customers.  So what better way to do it than to create a need by making more crimes...

As the modern age progresses I think hope that people will start to realize that they are giving up too much in this area.  But it seems unlikely - there are too many "so-and-so laws" to protect us from things that a "justice system" just cannot protect us from;

The things people might do if they think they can get away with it.

eBooks: A Race to the Bottom?

"Planned Obsolescence" and advancing technology?

For many years I have been fascinated by what I call the "race to the bottom."

A good example of this is the current "battle" over ebook pricing.  What's in play is whether or not Apple and other "colluded" to keep prices up in order to keep profits up.

The basic book model for probably centuries was to have authors and publishers.  Publishers were responsible for manufacturing and marketing the work of authors - the thought being that an author is not into manufacturing and distributing books or doing their own marketing.  Publishers also funded the "float" between the time the work on the book started and finished - such as research and work on the authors part.

In the pre-internet world this made sense - ads for books were bought in newspapers, offered on TV or radio, and so on.  Authors would do book tours, radio interviews, and so on as part of the marketing strategy as organized by the publisher.

This is very similar to what was done for "records" and "CDs" before the intervention of Napster and iTunes.

As technology changed so did these business models.  The internet did away with the need to physically manufacture things, for example.

So all that's left in the cost of the equation is the payments to the author and the cost of marketing.  Marketing, in the digital age, is also under pressure because many purchases of ads today are internet based - so again the cost of physically "manufacturing" a magazine or poster or mailer is now out of the equation.

To me this kind of pricing pressure on the "end user" cost of a book makes sense.  As efficiencies are introduced into the system elements that are not needed come out and prices drop.

But there is a more interesting aspect to this as well.

As a child we were relatively poor so when we purchased things as a family the idea was to purchase something of the best quality your could afford.  The idea being that the item was going to have to last because you would not be able to purchase another one for some time due to the cost.

In those days it was common, for example, for a kid to have one set of "play pants" that were worn after school so as not to damage your school clothes.  These might be thread bare and well worn but mom made sure they were always as clean as they could be.  Play pants were typically "good clothes" that had passed their prime - good clothes being necessary for "going out" to school, church and family functions.

Clothes were valued on how "sturdy" they were with the idea that many kids would wear them via hand-me-downs, i.e., older cousins passed clothes on to younger cousins.  So a good shirt or pair of pants would last many years and your investment in them would be a good one.

This, to me, is the notion of a "quality purchase."

Today we have a large WalMart SuperCenter near by.  I don't buy any clothes there at all because their "combat lifetime" is usually a few washings in the washing machine.  They are generally ill-fitting, the selection, while large is useless for me because I am too "thin" around the waste.  The materials they are don't hold up at all to wear.

But one thing is true for sure - they stuff there is cheap.

The reason its cheap, as I told my son as he was growing up, is that under the WalMart is a direct tunnel through the center of the earth to China where they make all its products.

Well, not really, but instead there's and endless supply chain of containers sailing from China each day full of the cheapest possible materials US manufacturers can spec Chinese companies to make.  (Contrary to popular belief the Chinese can make good products - the US companies specing the purchases require them to make them cheaply.)

So why is this?  Is this like ebooks and music?

To some extent yes.  Chinese labor is far less expensive than in the US - so making something there is cheaper - even when you add in the $5,000 USD or so cost of shipping a container full of that material to the US.

But the other, far more serious problem, is that of "planned obsolescence."

Today people of have lost the idea of quality.  Its been replaced with "price."

Today A is better than B if it costs less for what superficially appear to be the same features.

For example, a WalMart flatscreen is generally less technically able than the same item purchased elsewhere.  My experience is that say you have flatscreen model ABC.  Normal, non-Walmart outlets sell ABC-50 but WalMart, on close inspection, sells ABC-20.  The -20 model having fewer HDMI outlets, fewer audio outlets, and all the rest (but you will only know this if you shop carefully). The holes are in the case but instead of a connector there's a plastic knock-out still in place.

Unless you know to look you won't realize you're getting less.

So what does this have to do with ebooks?

In addition to the technology cost savings on price modern ebook distribution is bending to the same price effects.  For example, I as an individual can now publish a book on Amazon, or music (which I have done - see the blog sidebar).

I no longer need an editor or producer.  The spell checker and the Microsoft Office Grammar checker fill in for free.

Unlike flatscreen TV's the author can now produce a product at home to sell directly to his/her consumer without any of the intermediate steps.

So they do.

Now whether or not this is a good idea is probably an open question.

I have read a lot of "self published" books recently.  Some are excellent, some are mediocre.

Some cost $.99 USD and some are even free.

So while I can now get a decent read for free if I am clever, what does this do to the market?

It drives the costs down.

As individual authors succeed at creating "mini best sellers" this way they are forcing out of the equation editors, editing, marketing, and so on.

Now a really good author may not need an editor.  But many times they do...

So you get a far cheaper book that's not as well written as it could be.

This pushes publishing houses on cost.  An ebook publisher-based book might cost $7.99 USD or $12.99 (compared to a hardback costing $25.99).   An Amazon author-published book might cost $2.99 or less.

By by publishers.

Amazon or Kindle or whoever puts all the books out there for free - with reviews and other details directly available on your web browser. 

The infrastructure of Amazon, for example, is already there - web servers, physical distribution, wires, lights, programmers, targeting algorithms, you name it.

The "cost" to them of adding one more CD or book, especially an ebook, is very close to zero.

The problem here is that, as a consumer, its a very hard choice to buy a book for $12.99 when I can get six or a dozen for the same price.  Sure one or two might be crap but so what?  I am getting more for my money...

Or am I?

Its hard to tell - in general I think that without question the quality of what we have today is far, far less than decades ago.

And there is constant pressure on prices to drop, i.e., a race to the bottom.

In the case of ebooks Amazon or maybe Apple will win because of their entrenched technical infrastructure.

I think, though, everyone else will lose.

Some a lot, like a publisher, and some a little, like authors and readers.

But in general the concentration of "value" for publishing will move to places like Amazon.

But Amazon is not a book publisher, it has not editors, etc.  So its product quality is poor.

And you and I are left with either reading an expensive best seller or buying a dozen best-seller wanabe's for the same price.

I think the later will win...

And soon to follow (and they are already here) are "free" books.

My guess is that the next step will be for authors to pay you to read their books.

Its all a race to the bottom.

As it is Above, So it is Below...

The "Quantum Machine"

The other day Mrs. Wolf and I were watching TV.  I had found a series of TED shows and was watching one about Aaron O'Connell who had constructed the first human-made object to demonstrate quantum behavior.

Quantum mechanics is a language describing what happens on an incredibly small scale - electrons, photons, sometimes atoms and molecules.  It was invented some hundred years ago to explain why, when hot metal cooled, the cooling was not "uniform" but instead dropped by "quanta."

Today the most famous and infamous aspect of quantum mechanics is the "two slit experiment."  I will leave it to Dr. Quantum to explain this:



At issue is not what actually happens, i.e., is something like an electron or photon actually two different things (a wave and particle) at one, but what we observe happening.  To date no one knows what actually happens at the quantum level, i.e., why we see what we see with the two slit experiment.

In the case of Aaron O'Connell he has created an object much larger than an atom or electron and has demonstrated that quantum effects can be induced and measured there, essentially a quantum "machine". (See this in Science Magazine - you have to register but its free save for spam).

He speaks in his talk about how, in his mind, he could not accept that something like an electron could behave as both a particle and wave at the same time and set out to show that conventional physics was wrong by building a device to show the effects larger than an atom.

Mrs. Wolf is very scientific - our home is always filled with a variety of biological, health, botanical and chemical wonders and experiments.   But she's not very comfortable with the physics thing though - particularly the one things is in two places at the same time aspects of quantum mechanics.

My interest in this particular program was not so much for the physics aspect, even though Aaron's achievement is remarkable, but for how it demonstrates the processes of breaking through the "standard dogma" of science.

Prior to Aaron's work quantum effects were only visible at the atomic scale.   They are not represented at the scale human beings operate at.

 Mrs. Wolf is not the first to find these behaviors so troubling either. 

A physicist name Erwin Schrödinger claimed that, if quantum mechanics were in fact true, then a quantum measuring device could be placed in a sealed box with a cat.  The measuring device would be connected to a vial of poison such that when a quantum effect occurred the vial would be broken and cat would die.  Since quantum effects can exist in more than one state, i.e., have occurred and not occurred, just like Aaron's vibrations in his metal detector, Schrödinger argued that the cat would have to exist in the box as both dead and alive.

To me what's fascinating is where work like Aaron's will lead because no one knows and he's found a way to "break out" of the classic (no pun intended) modes of thinking about quantum mechanics.  How large a quantum machine can one build?  What aspects of us are quantum, if any?  And so on...

Quantum physics today is a hundred years old and much of the new physics work revolves around other things like "string theory" today. 

Aaron's work will I think offer new avenues of exploration in both "real" and quantum world.

At another level there is an old saying: "As it is above it is below."

What this means is that in many ways things at a larger level mimic that at a smaller level, and vice versa. 

For example, if you have ever watched a fast-flowing river passing over exposed rocks you'll see what's called an "eddy."  This is the place downstream of the rock were the water actually flows back upstream.  What happens is the fast moving water is split by the rock and, where the water splits, there is a "hole".  Water must flow back upstream to fill it.

Now imagine yourself visiting a large auditorium where thousands of people are flowing in through many doors.  But one set of doors is "out of order and locked."  Like the river the "fast moving crowd" flows in through the open doors.  But those, having entered the building, who need to adjust their coats or fiddle with a small child often move over to the space behind the locked doors because the crowd is not flowing there. 

Just like the molecules of water in the river the "particles" of crowd - humans - behave in the same way.

I think this applies to quantum mechanics and our lives as well - we just don't yet understand how.

Lying and other US Federal Crimes

Recently the Ninth Circuit Court decided that breaking a "terms of service" agreement was not a Federal Crime.  This differentiates "hacking" (willful effort to steal or acquire information) from simply ignoring "terms of service."

Well that's a relief, its always nice to be a little less of a Federal Felon daily...

On the other hand why have "terms of service" at all?  I suppose to boot you off if you misbehave.

On the other hand it probably doesn't matter.

Let's say that the feds just think you are doing something bad so they pay you a visit.

If that visit is inconclusive and they still want at you they can always whip up a charge of "federal lying."

Basically this is any kind of "false statement" you might make.  Of course you might make such a statement without knowing it - say as with this:

Feds: "Did you violate the terms of service when posting X to Facebook?"

You: "No."

But in fact, unknown to you, you did violate the terms - say the picture was a bit racy or stolen from someone else (even unknowingly).

So long as they can show you did something and told them the opposite - regardless of whether you knew or even could no - they can charge you with "lying."

It works because the burden of proof will fall to you.

You'll be arrested and charged and now you will have to pay lawyers to show that your statement was made in ignorance and was not willful "lying."

Good luck with that.

You can read here about Nancy Black who owns a "whale watching" business.  One of her boat captains "whistled at a whale" (according to the article) which is the crime of "whale harassment" (I am not making this up).

She became involved with the prosecutors decided she was "lying" about what happened.  Of course, she maintains, how could she - she wasn't on the boat.

Not matter, the feds charged her anyway and she could face many years in prison if convicted.

But things are even more insane than this.

A new law before the US Senate will make it a Federal Crime to embed an "infringing video."

Like that new dance step video so you post it to Facebook - boom - you're a federal criminal.

So the internet is becoming a tools to ensnare people in federal crimes.

In past, as I have written in this blog, law involved mens rea - the notion of intent.

Say I am in your store and we are discussing a potential purchase.  On the counter are laid out several items.  Suppose I accidentally walk to the restroom (or out the door) with one in my hand.  Did I intend to steal it?  The legal use of mens rea (guilty mind) for theft is clear - I have to intend to steal it.  Its not a crime if is simply a mistake.

On the other hand, these new laws don't involve mens rea at all.  Simply performing an act, such as embedding an "infringing" video on a blog or Facebook page, is the crime.  No "intention" is involved.

So even you child can be a federal criminal.

Just logging into Facebook could ultimately be a crime if "infringing" images or videos appear.

How nice.

Leave it to the US and its lawyers to make the internet a tools for generating legal fees.

Too Much Sun Screen: The Dogma of Stupid

I came across an interesting article in the WSJ claiming basically that everyone should be wearing sun screen every day.  The article screams "DANGER" because the incidence rate has increased eight-fold for young women since 1970 or so (no statistics were offered).

The best information I could find goes back to 1999 from this CDC web site.

You can see that for white people (top green line) the rates has been increasing slowly and steadily for about ten years.  I could not find evidence on the site for what was reported earlier than this.

Interestingly skin cancer seems to be a phenomena significant only to white people - other races are impacted but a very low rates (other statistics here from the American Melanoma foundation).

Now if the sun were the problem I would imagine that skin cancer would be commonly reported the further south that you go.  So, for this CDC site, I grabbed this image:

This is rather counter-intuitive at first glance.  Most of the heavier rates (darker colors, rate per 100,000 people) are in the pacific northwest, north and far northeast of the US.   There are some higher rates on the US east coast as well.  But in the states where I would think it would be highest, e.g., Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, New Mexico - the incidence rate is the lowest.

Now Arizona gets far more sun than Minnesota does - yet there is more skin cancer the farther north you go (at least in some directions).

So what about death rates from skin cancer?

I took this image from the same CDC site (I modified the colors so that the redder the state the higher the skin cancer death rate):

Here one sees some unexpected results: not all the states with the highest incidence rates have the highest death rates - South Dakota, with one of the lowest incidence rates has one of the highest death rates and Minnesota, with one of the highest incidence rates has one of the lowest death rates.

Further, one imagines that in Texas and New Mexico you would see higher rates - but both of these southern states along with Louisiana and Mississippi have low incidence and low death rates.

To me these charts do not scream "Wear Sun Screen 100% of the Time."

The supposition is that both UVA and UVB rays from the sun penetrate the skin and trigger cancerous growths which develop into skin cancer.

Now, buried in the American Melanoma foundation link is an interesting fact: skin cancer on women's torso's ages 15-29 is the fastest increasing incidence rate among all demographics.

How odd.

One imagines that if the sun were causing this problem it would be common in all southern states.  But its not...

On the other hand, one would expect that for women using tanning beds, especially in northern climates where there isn't much sun exposure, too much tanning might be the cause of skin cancer.  And give that young female torso's are where the rates are increasing the fastest one has to believe that tanning beds are much more likely the problem.

So what about all this slathering of high SPF crap on your skin?

Well, there are two problems there:

First, you skin is a big source of vitamin D.  It creates this vitamin D from sunlight.  Without sunlight and other sources of vitamin D you can become deficient.

Slathering high SPF sunscreen all over kids before they go outside denies them vitamin D production - especially in their critical early years.

Some, such as this article, don't believe this to be an issue.  I think it probably is, at least for small children who do not get enough vitamin D from other sources.

Second, one has to wonder what is in sunscreen.

Here there is less direct concrete evidence but people are at least questioning the basic idea of slathering unknown chemicals daily on themselves.

To block UV (A or B) sun screens are using chemicals like titanium dioxide or "nano particles."

Titanium dioxide has been around for decades (its the white stuff on the lifeguard's nose at the beach).  But today's sunscreens bring this chemical into contact with the entire body.  And these particles are small and can enter the blood stream through the skin.

Similarly with "nano particles" (finely ground zinc or titanium dioxide or other chemicals).  No one really knows if they can penetrate your skin or what they will do to you if they do (see this).

I think the dogma of stupid rules this area of health care.  To me the facts are clear:

1) If you are white skin cancer is a fact of life - be aware of your body and what you skin is doing.

2) Stay out of tanning beds and don't lay burning in the sun.

3) Occasional use of "old fashion" sunscreen is probably okay, e.g., at the beach for a vacation, and to prevent serious burns.

4) Do go out in the sun for a walk or other regular exercise to ensure you get enough vitamin D.

As far as any science is concerned - one thing that has entered our lives since the 1970's has been tanning and tanning salons.  Yet I can find no statistics on them.

I wonder if they have anything to do with the increased incidence of cancer on young female torsos...

Dogma of Stupid: LSD to treat Alcoholism

So I was under the foolish assumption that education was about learning - learning being the process where you conduct activity, make mistakes, use those mistakes as feedback to correct behavior and/or assumptions, and, in the end, discover something new.
Wikipedia says "Learning is acquiring new, or modifying existing, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information."

I have to take issue with this definition because its not so clear on what "acquiring" involves.

My guess, based on this WSJ article, is that in today's world "acquiring" involves mostly "being told what to think."

Now I wonder how that works for riding a bicycle?  Don't you have to work at it in order to learn how to balance and steer?  Same with a car - I know of no "driver's ed" where you are simply "told" how to drive.

But at least in science there seems to be little room for anything but the "standard dogma."

To wit, in Tennessee, according to the linked article new legislation would "allow teachers to question "the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses" of theories "including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

Imagine - a law stating that you don't have to spout the traditional dogma - whatever that might be...

So what's the point of my comment on this?

Well, for one thing, at least in my opinion, when no one questions standard dogma you get science like this: "LSD May Help Alcoholics Stay Off Booze."  (And yes, its "acid" from the 1960's we are talking about...)

According to these "scientists" LSD is "...  safe and nonaddictive, although it could carry acute psychiatric adverse events such as anxiety and confusion."

For me its hard to imagine trading an alcohol addiction for dependence in some for or other on LSD - a substance which does not always bring out the best in people.

Here's a nice example of what an LSD dose does to someone from the 1950's (when LSD was a "legal" substance).

Now having spent many hours in bars playing music I am used to conversations with heavy drinkers - especially after a long night out.  I really don't see much of a difference between the effects of LSD in this movie and those bar conversations.  The women's reaction to LSD appears to match common side effects of LSD - disorientation, strange visualizations, and so on (the classic "Timothy Leary" symptoms).

But this woman and her LSD trip are not what I am concerned. about:  "Modern science" says LSD is "safe and nonaddictive" for alcoholism treatment?

Would you want this woman under the influence of LSD driving your child's school bus?  A car?  Performing medical tests on you?

I doubt it.

So what's wrong with these "researchers" suggesting that this is better than alcoholism?

My belief is that the "researchers" were the product of modern dogma-based education where things like "alcoholism is bad" and "smoking is bad" are beaten into children's heads like drum beats for 12 or more years.

The problem with this drum beat is that it offers no model to think about what the real problem is or what a reasonable solution might be.  No one in their right mind would simply trade one addiction problem for another.

How about spending some time learning about addictive personalities.

How about understanding what's driving the person to drink the first place?

How about thinking what little Jr. will do when the local "LSD" shop opens up down the road from the school.

But that's not what these researchers think about.

No big picture thinking.

And little wonder because they were not taught to think for themselves.

No questioning.  No free thinking.  No reasoning out solutions to hard problems.

All because "education" is delivered as a nice, thought-out-in-advance package of pablum for ready consumption by untrained and unthinking fools.

And worse, evil Republicans have to pass a law to simply allow a discussion of opposing scientific view.

As they say in England this is barking mad.