Bronies, Dekotora, Faedism: Why Incorrect "Facts" Will Never Go Away

An example of Dekotora

The internet is about the quick and effortless propagation of information, right?

I can write in this blog and people literally on the other side of the plant are notified and can read it.

But there is an interesting question about what I write.  Is it correct factually or just some BS I made up?  To address this I always try to include links to sources of information I use.  For example, a few months ago I wrote the popular post "CT Scans - Known Cancer Cause in Children."  In order to show that I did not simply make up that information I included several links to sources of information I used so that readers could do their own followup.

Are the sources I chose accurate?

That's really a good question.

Now, in the case of CT scans there are a number of objective issues as well as any subjective ones.  X-ray's are in fact known to be dangerous.  While you can chose not to believe this there is a reason the X-ray technician puts on a lead apron.

CT scans require the use of multiple X-rays (many hundreds or thousands).

X-ray's can damage DNA in cells.

Many years of study and research have born out these statements.  But that doesn't mean it happens every time you get a CT scan but it increases your chances of being harmed by X-ray's is you use a CT scan.

So a simple "sanity test" tells me that its quite possible the article on CT scans is correct, i.e., it make sense in objective terms.

So even if the paper and/or articles I site are wrong I would still be cautions of CT scans for these reasons and I would hope that with some 85 million a year occurring others would retest any sort of hypothesis regarding their danger.

But much of what is on the internet is not factual or even correct.

Much is simply nonsense, made up, wishful thinking or worse.

But once any kind of information - correct and factual or wrong - escapes into the wilds of the internet it turns out that its very hard to "correct."

There is an interesting article by Samuel Arbesman at Wired on this topic: "Paradox of Hoaxes: How Errors Persist, Even When Corrected."

He points out how incorrect information in all forms persists long after it is identified and corrected on the internet and in other realms such as scientific research.

So what does this say in general?

I think it tells us that the first to publish something in any area of endeavor is going to dominate the thinking about that endeavor even if it is wrong.

Now what factors drive this process of persistent errors?

Certainly the errors themselves have no life - so something must be promoting and maintaining them.

Part of the problem is rooted in today's dearth of analytical thinking.

Kiddies in school are not taught to evaluate what they see and hear analytically or skeptically.  Instead they are fed a steady stream of "gospel fact" and told not to question it.  As they proceed through the educational system their focus and reliance on their own analysis of a situation becomes repressed in favor of raw "facts" promoted by others.

Technology merely serves to enhance the propagation of this incorrect information.

Its one thing to be ignorant in your basement bedroom - its another to blast your ignorance out to dozens or hundreds of social network friends.

In the past entire states liked to promote their independent thinking, i.e., Missouri as the "show me" state.  There are several stories about origination of the "show me" slogan listed here on a State of Missouri site. 

The most popular legend, according to the site "... attributes the phrase to Missouri's U.S. Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1897 to 1903. While a member of the U.S. House Committee on Naval Affairs, Vandiver attended an 1899 naval banquet in Philadelphia. In a speech there, he declared, "I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me [ underline mine ]."

But skepticism today is passe.

Instead it would appear you "elect" an ideology at a young age and simply "live that lifestyle" regardless of any facts or realities to the contrary.

So questionable facts that may come along are simply ignored as something that falls outside your "lifestyle" choice.

Given this its little wonder that erroneous facts escape and cannot be put back in the box.

For example, if an erroneous fact appears that supports your "lifestyle choice" you accept it as true because it solidifies your personal choice.

With social media this means that your like-minded friends will also receive this information.

Any contrary fact, however, are likely to be ignored because they might invalidate your lifestyle choice.  So these are simply ignored.

Let's take the notion of "global warming."

In this regard I am from Missouri - "show me."  And since I wasn't born yesterday I expect, instead of "frothy eloquence" some sort of concrete facts which stand on their own.

I am a skeptic.

But what if I am some sort of "greeny" that simply "knows" as part of my lifestyle that global warming is caused by man and there must be bad?

I will simply process and retain all pro-global warming information and ignore anything that points to the contrary.  So if some fact I, as a global warming "supporter" is invalidated I will, by my nature, not wish to process or accept it.

And therefore wrong information will persist.

I argue it will persist even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.  Much like I showed with the study that shows smoking does not cause lung cancer.

The notion that it does, promoted since the 1960's, has no factual basis that I can find other than "doctors" said it was true.  I doubt very much that this meme will ever die.

But I am a skeptic and so are others, at least of my generation.

So what's happening I think is this.  Each little subgroup of society is developing their own fantasy world in which they live that only accepts and processes positive information about their little fantasy world.

For example (I am not kidding), listed here are "Bronies" - male fandom built around "My Little Ponies - Friendship is Magic,"  "Dekotora" - Japanese truck decorating, the "Sect of Gadget Hackwrench" worships Gadget Hackwrench from Chip n' Dale's Rescue Rangers, "Otherkin" are people that act/believe/think they are animals (see this in Second Life), Teen Werewolves, Guro Lolita, Beyonce's Baby is Evil, Xena fandom, and Faedisim (belief in faeries).

Of course, these are the more "fringe elements."  These propagate up as parts of other subcultures, for example atheist song writers, manga art, environmental and political groups, and so forth.

So if I am into Dekotora its unlikely I'll be receptive to information that says automotive lighting is, say, bad for the environment.  But it is likely that I'll be receptive to something that, for example, says its good to get a lot of self worth from material possessions like fancy decorated trucks.

I suppose that skepticism is also a subculture too - a diminishing one in a society filled with this kind of thinking.

Its little wonder our society (and society in general) is heading off the face of a cliff at full throttle.
 

School Lunch Changes: Too Little, Too Late

I've read a number of articles on school lunch changes.  Basically the old Coke, fried chicken nuggets, fries and some twinkees are out and healthy fare like fruit, vegetables, and so on are replacing them along with calorie limits and curbs on various other things.

The kiddies are not happy according to US Today.

Sadly these dietary changes are the least of the kiddies problems.   And, while the US Government is attempting to change things for the better its more than likely too little too late.

These changes were spawned by the obesity hue and cry - the kiddies eating too much processed sugar and carbs.

But unless there is an across-the-board change in their diet they will simply find what they crave elsewhere.

As I am coming to understand things the real problem is that all the processed food served today is basically nutritionally valueless.

Calories and nothing actually nourishing: no proper vitamins and minerals.

So your body craves more and more in an attempt to consume something helpful nutrition-wise.

The oils (mostly soybean but many others as well) used to make it are bad for you (GMO made) and screw up you ability to have normal sugar levels in your system.

The meats and dairy products are stuffed with antibiotics and hormones.

The problem is actually the kiddies (as well as their moms and dads for the most part) are addicted to junk food quite literally.

Their bodies so polluted with crap that unless they are eating the bad foods they are used to eating they feel dissatisfied.

Hence the YouTube protests and "black market" twinkees.

My how things have changed since the early 1970's when I was in highschool.

Back then they made actual meals with honest-to-God local food.  You could eat as much as you liked.

There were no soda machines and only a single candy bar machine which was rarely used.

There was no food when you arrived or after you left - only food for lunch.

Food made by actual human cooks right there at the school in a regular sort of kitchen.

Lunch cost something like a quarter or fifty cents.  You could eat as many as you purchased.

Today I think the diabetic shock of what kids eat would kill me.

Sadly I would estimate that some 80% or more of today's health problems: obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and on and on are all caused by what we eat.

Healthy foreigners who come to the US have drastic changes for the worse within a year after coming here.

While I applaud the US Government's effort to push a decent meal for school lunch I think far more drastic changes are in order for success.

I am quite certain no one has the balls to make the needed changes.

Given a rational diet the calorie limits shown at the front of the video are quite reasonable but depend on what else the kiddies are eating during the day: school breakfast and dinner for example.

Horny Teens, Driverless Cars, and Forgottonia

Last night on the news a banner headline scrolled across the screen: Google driverless vehicle travels 300,000 miles without an accident (er, well, there was an accident but it was while the human tender hand taken over control of the vehicle).

According to this federal site passenger vehicles traveled about 2 trillion miles in 2009.

With about 40,000 traffic deaths a year we expect a death every 50,000,000 (50 million) miles driven.

So in order to see how well a driverless car performs we need to see a lot more miles of testing: 166 times more than 300,000 in order to get to the average number per highway death.

But good old California can't wait for this kind of testing and recently signed into law a driverless car law (see this).

Driverless cars have all sorts of hightech gadgetry like radar, computers, GPS, live internet connections, and so on to make them work.

Many dozens or thousands of additional "points of failure" in addition to things like wheel lug nuts and tires which can fatally fail.  (The car "constantly scans Google Maps" for updates while driving according to the article - let's hope there's no mistake on the road leading along the quarry.)

I wrote "Death by GPS" a couple of years ago.  It covered a couple that followed a GPS right off a cliff into a quarry where they died.

Perhaps there are more than a couple of thousand points of failure to consider???

So by 2015 California will have a set of regulations for driverless cars.

I expect that the California Bar Association is rubbing their hands together in delight over this.

You have to understand that each year 250,000,000 cars drive a couple of trillion miles.  During that time there is a relatively low fatality rate with humans at the controls.

No doubt when the driverless car is working well it too will have a low fatality rate.

But that's not really an issue.  Its getting to that point that I see problematic.

What happens when the engineers at Google (the service provider for this blog) make mistakes?

Agile development will no doubt come into play and I am quite sure there will be details that no on will think of.

Nails on the road blowing out multiple tires on a tight, busy, rainy road.

Solenoids, radars, Google maps and mechanical contrivances sticking, failing to work as designed, or reporting incorrect values.

What will happen should the car lose "connectivity" on a busy highway?  Will the couple in the back seat have time to get dressed and take control? 

Once horny teenagers discover these cars there will be no need for "parking" any longer - simple tell the car to drive in a big wide loop around town and hop into the back seat.

No doubt there will be "Law and Order" episodes about sabotage - the jealous husband or wife tinkering with the autopilot to kill the unwanted spouse.

For kidnapping you'll just have to tie up your victim, program the car and set it off running around the city - that way the police dogs won't be able to find them...

Of course there will be accidents.

Whose fault will those be?  Google's?  Your's?  The car's?

What if your car is out driving without you?  Will you be at fault?

You can bet that Google will never take any blame for software or hardware failures.

It will likely take the insurance industry and the court systems twenty or thirty years per state to sort out.  And, like gay marriage, some states will have more forgiving laws than others.

Then there will be the terrorists.

Want to screw the entire city?  Just jam the GPS or internet signal and all the cars will come to a stop.

Or just send out "bent" GPS information that makes a giant loop out of everything.

Generations of children will grow up not knowing how to drive or take life-and-death responsibility for their own or their friends and families lives.

 Need to get rover to the groomer - just stick him in the car and program it to take him there.

Place unknown to Google maps will simply be forgotten: Like Forgottenia - a section of western central Illinois which was bypassed by the Interstate road system.  If your street isn't on Google maps there won't be any "going home" either.

US Medicine and Education: The Odds Favor Failure

Whose fault is this?

Before going to a new restaurant people will often use a guide like Zagat to determine what sort of experience they are likely to have.  Perhaps you might spend fifty or even a hundred dollars on such a meal.

When people go to a hospital or enroll in a university - something which will easily cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars typically there is not actual guide to help make the decision.

Certainly everyone knows that such-and-such a school is the "best," or that XYZ hospital is "the best" but what is this based on?

According to this article hospitals kill about a thousand people a week in the US via medical errors, mistakes and so on - or about 50,000 people a year.  I think this number is low compared to other statistics I have seen - but its hard to say exactly what kind of specific errors, e.g., drug mistakes, etc. are included in this number.  One average I think that, over all, due to medical "mistakes" of all kinds some 300,000 people a year die.

You might go to a "good" university.  But what's your success versus debt ratio?  Are you going to get a degree that really a job that will allow you to repay you college debt?

If you are willing to consult something like Zagat why do most people simply go by "word of mouth" on far more important activities such as a hospital stay or selecting a school?

In the case of medicine there is a culture that prevents people from calling out problem physicians or processes.  Younger interns may see things like surgeons with incredibly high problem rates enjoy fantastic reputations and wonder why.  But calling out such a scenario would almost certainly prevent that intern from getting a job at the hospital in the future.

Similarly there is an "alumni" culture at many schools.  Successful leaders in business or academia that have graduated and succeeded.  They promote the school heavily and look for money from other alumni in order to further the schools reputation.

As a highschool kid what do you or your parents, on the other hand, know about the success rate of students.  How many graduate?  How much debt to they carry?  How successful are they in later life at paying off their debts?

Sadly information about doctors, hospitals and college success rates is not something readily availabe to consumers.

These institutions have a vested interest in keeping you in the dark because, armed with detailed information, you might not view their particular institution or school so highly.

People often choose a college, doctor or hospital based on reputation.

In reality there is little else to go on.

But would you eat somewhere new without being able to see a menu?

You might, based on the recommendations of a friend.  But if the genre of food was not something you were familiar with or the recommendation was from someone you barely knew you might not be so inclined.

Across all food sources in the US, according to this NY Times article and this CDC web page between 3,000 and 5,000 people die each year.

Would you eat at the local Wendy's or McDonald's chain restaurant if you knew 50,000 people died there each year?

In Pittsburgh in 2003 the Mexican chain Chi-Chi's was hit with a Hepatitis A outbreak that killed at least four people and made some 660 others sick (see this).

The chain went bankrupt and disappeared from the restaurant scene forever within a few months.

Hospitals kill 12,500 times more people each year.

No one cares.

Universities crank out folks with massive debt each year - hundreds of thousands (see this previous post).

But parents and students are blinded by the "reputation" of the school - fabulous football or credentials.

No one asks "what's the success to debt ratio?"

Imagine if I had an independent survey of graduates and drop outs.

Let's imagine that 60% of the students graduate.

Let''s imagine that of those who graduate 20% make enough money to afford paying off their student debt (this means having a life and enough extra money beyond a debt payment to, say, buy a car or home).

Let's imagine that it costs $50,000 USD to graduate.

So your "chance" of success is .6 x .4 or .24 (about one in four).

So effectively you are going to gamble four to five years of your life and $50,000 on a one-in-four shot of breaking even over the next ten years (the least amount of time to pay off a $50,000 student loan).  So school plus debt payoff equals about fifteen years total.

I say "breaking even" because you might get a job as plumber or electrician in that same time frame, complete your apprentice-ship and afford a decent life as well in your own business.

Its only in the very long run that you might come out ahead if the education you pay for and live to pay off offers more than some other opportunity.

Good thing kids today don't learn how to calculate odds.

Good think potential patients don't either.

If we were educated in this regard we wouldn't tolerate this kind of abject nonsense.

In the end you might do better in Las Vegas if your lucky.

The image at the top was taken from an "Occupy Wall Street"-type web page about "we are the 99%."

Who told these fools to borrow money for an education which had no prospects in the current economy?  Who told them to borrow more money than the average annual wage where they lived for an education they could not use?

Why their government job and highschool guidance counselors.  People with no real world experience at all in making a living on their own.

Yet these people seem oblivious that they themselves made the choice to follow this advice (they are, for the most part, students on this page).

Like following the pied piper.

Maybe "college" is not the answer.

Maybe hard work and common sense are.

College debt is like kicking a dead whale along the beach.

Imagine...

Legal Coercion - How the Government Invalidates Your Sixth Amendment Rights

The Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution says: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense."

Plea bargains, however, have come to take a far more prominent role in recent years.

So prominent, in fact, that 97% (according to this source) of all criminal cases are resolved by plea bargains.

That's with an "average" conviction rate outside the federal system at a rate of around 75%.

So are that many more federal defendants guilty?  Or is this just some trick by the federal government to bypass the Sixth Amendment.

In this area an academic study revealed that college students, placed in a situation (rules, consequences, etc.) similar to what federal criminal defendants see, plead guilty 55% of the time even when innocent.

That's right, the federal government's model likely coerces defendants into pleading guilty at a similar rate even when innocent.  (See this as a recent example.)

Trials are expensive, so are lawyers, investigators, experts, and so on and so forth.

And, as illustrated by the popular TV program "The Closer" morphing into a plea-bargain-based "Major Crimes" we see what the focus of law enforcement is becoming.

Conviction at the lowest cost.  Get the defendant to do the minimum acceptable time for the crime without a trial via a plea bargain.

Clearly in the 1700's when the Constitution was penned the model for crime and conviction was far different.

But today, with governments going bankrupt there is tremendous pressure to save money.

Save money by cutting corners for those least in a position to deal with it.

So though you many enjoy the "right" to a trial it seems like the chances of you getting one are diminishing.

How can this be?

Quite simply by getting to to agree to your own guilt before the trial.

Problem solved for the state.

However, as the academic study points out, people will, in fear, confess to crimes they did not commit in order to obtain what they see as the "lesser of several evils."

So how is this different than a half an hour in closed room with a big cop and black jack?

Answer: It's not.

So its taken a few centuries but those in "governmental power" have again found a way to achieve what they had achieved in England before our forefathers left: a way to have absolute power over citizens.

In the past the motivation was purely power, in the case of England the power of the Crown.

But today, its the power of money, er, well, the power of cost savings and bureaucratic laziness.

Basically it boils down to either

A) Spend a couple of hundred thousand USD for a lawyer and maybe be acquitted.  Probably lose your house, your spouse, go bankrupt, etc.

B) Take the plea on a couple of years in prison regardless of your guilt.  At least you'll have a chance of not losing everything.

Can you say intimidation?

With today's economic crisis this will only get worse.

Its already moving down to the state and local level.

Sadly, this would seem to beg for fighting back with a trial that looked, at least to the government, as vastly expensive.

Forcing them to offer a lower plea rather than pay the big bucks to prosecutors, investigators, experts, etc.

Isn't the US justice system fair and fun?

Posting on Facebook = Accessory to a Crime

A hostage situation in downtown Pittsburgh, PA USA has just ended.  Single alleged perp in a private downtown office building.  Swat team, streets cleared for blocks.

During the turmoil the alleged perp posted several messages on Facebook (see this Reuters article).

According to the Reuters article:


"Several people responded to Thaxton on Facebook saying they were praying for him and encouraging him to cooperate with police.

But others urged him to continue his standoff, Harper said. Police were monitoring those Facebook messages and those people could face criminal charges as accessories, he said."

So what does the underlined part mean?

Commenting on Facebook may make you an accessory to a crime.

What happened to free speech?

What if the man had been previously robbed by his victim, or his child injured?

Would commenting still be a crime?

Perhaps the police should sweep the bystanders for sympathizers and arrest them?

Little wonder Facebook stock is in the toilet.

Why Science Requires Consistent and Absolute Morality (Why Secular Ethics Aren't)

A common fantasy I see virtually everywhere today is that there is no need for moral behavior: no absolute right or wrong.  Everything is "relative" in the character and morality department.

So can this actually be true?

Well, lets explore this a bit.

A common argument is that religion, a common "carrier" of morality, is unnecessary in today's world of advanced science, engineering and evolution.

After all, man evolved from "scratch" through whatever means and was not created, right?  Therefore any religion man may have is simply some sort of "artifact" of that process.

While one can claim a position like this unfortunately it is, by definition, simply fantasy.

And here's why...

Science is a human process created by man to extract information from the world at large.  To separate fact from fiction.  To create repeatable examples of processes, study and activities that illuminate the actual processes we see in the world for what they are.

In order to do this, i.e., in order to have a repeatable experiment, moral and ethical integrity is required.

Without it you would see what you see today: "US Scientific Medical Studies: A 1 in 20 Accuracy Rate?"

Very simply if someone is the slightest bit dishonest in their scientific research the research is flawed and unusable.

The process of science is not about having to tease shreds of truth from a melange of hocus pocus, ranting, falsified data, and politically or ideologically motivated thinking.

The idea of science is about simplicity and honesty: I did X, I collected X' in terms of data, I concluded X''.

So what is science with morality and ethics?

Basically nothing but noise. 

Noise that distracts those attempting to produce honest results from their efforts.

Noise that distracts society from other, more important matters.

So can ethics and morality exist alone outside of some other, divine or otherwise, context?

Well, human secularism accepts as a basic idea that you must "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" or "Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."

So, underlying an human secular (non-religious) morality and ethics is this basic concept.

Upon this concept humans have built a variety of complex areligious sets of secular ethics (see this for an example).

Unfortunately there is a very simple problem with this model.

It relies on "consensus" to determine its moral basis.   A society may, as a group, chose to treat a subset of its members in a particular way.  The problem is that in this context a majority (in terms of wealth, vocal ability, power, etc.) always enforces its will upon the minority.

A very simple example of how this can "go wrong" would be this:  A terrible disease is rapidly overtaking a population.  It is determined that a few experiments, possibly with fatal outcomes, on small children will yield results that could save the entire population.

So the "do unto others" clause becomes problematic.  Who is doing what to whom?  Is the obligation of science to the society as a whole or to the individuals which may die during the scientific process?

Its easy to see how this makes science a squishy, amorphous humanist endeavor.

As a scientist I am certain that such and such will do good for society but my data does not quite show what it needs to in order for this to be true.  So I falsify some to ensure it does.  Or perhaps my politically correct associates pass my research on because they have a similar belief.

In the end the such and such does only a mediocre job of helping anyone - perhaps causing more harm than good.

Was society helped by this?

I argue that very simply the answer is no, and not just no for this case but no in any case where there is not an absolute morality dictating behavior.

A notion of absolute right and wrong.

Without it ambiguity is always possible - and even with it.

However, a consistent overall absolute model of right and wrong ensures that all societal decisions regarding a given matter will be based on consistent terms.  Without it there is always the danger that a majority motivated by their own ideals will sway the outcome in their favor.

Money Changers in the Temple: The Debt Fantasy

Another horrific fantasy today is the "debt fantasy."

When you are young at some point you probably are offered a credit card.  No doubt with high interest. 

The "idea," of course, is that you will learn how to use it responsibly.  But, because you are new to the world of "big finance" you get a 29% interest rate and a small credit limit.

Like heroin, the idea is not to get you to try the credit card, the idea is to addict you.  So plenty of free samples are provided.

(In 2009 according to this USA Today article the average undergraduate credit card debt was $3,100 USD.)

The fantasy here, of course, is that you can "have" what you can't afford to have.

If it's too good to be true it probably is, and that's certainly true for debt.

Well, at least for college students you can always get your credit card debt discharged in bankruptcy.

But this fantasy extends well beyond college kids.

Our president tells children how they must have an education - every last one - to be "successful."

What is not provided is a means to "afford" that education so silently most of our children follow him, like the pied piper, into crippling debt along with a useless college degree.

And since this kind of "debt lifestyle" is so common these same children vote for elected officials that operate our cities, states, and government like a credit-card-crazed college freshman running up further debt - in fact debt to pay the interest in more debt.

We are today a nation of debtors.

With no collateral to back it up (can you return your college degree to retire you debt?)

As a nation we spend around $4 billion USD a day and we borrow almost half of that each day.

The other day I saw this little cartoon on Facebook:

Now in this particular biblical story Christ feeds the masses with a few loaves and fish.  This is accomplished via a miracle - an event attributed to divine intervention.  The loaves and fish replicate themselves until everyone has their fill.

One imagines that with divine intervention involved it matters little how many people are involved or whether they honestly need the food.

But our government is not divine (contrary to what you might have seen and heard in the past).  Its unable to simply manufacture food from nothing.  Yet, like Christ, it intends to feed everyone who shows up asking for food.

So how does it accomplish this?

Through a governmental "miracle" that does not involve divine intervention but instead involves debt intervention.

To many debt intervention is like divine intervention.  You don't see how it actually works but the results give you immediate gratification for what you crave right now - in this case food.

The only problem is that you are really not feeding the poor if you rely on debt.

Since you could not afford to feed the poor in the first place you are merely delaying the consequences of being broke to some future point, i.e., while the food will be acquired and distributed today at some point you will be unable to continue with the fantasy that you can afford to do this and will no longer be able to borrow money to do it.

At that point people will actually begin to starve.

So are the people better off being tricked into believing they are being support by someone or something that is simply delaying the inevitable?

This is the difference between debt intervention and divine intervention. 

Divine intervention does not incur or involve debt.

But there is yet another fantasy involved here. 

Those that pretend to be divine when faced with a crisis like the masses on the hill who are hungry.

Now I cannot speak for Christ unlike the cartoons authors, but biblically speaking least (interesting that Google cannot spellcheck "biblically"), one has a hard time imagining Christ sending a couple of folks over to the money changers in the Temple (or going himself) to borrow money (take on debt) to pay for fishes and loaves.

Lucky for him he could use divine intervention to accomplish this miracle.

But today's politicians are not divine so they pretend to be Christ-like by borrowing money to make it appear as if they are and can provide fish and loaves in the same way.

Of course, creating this fantasy also involves lying about what's happening.

This is, of course, because we are borrowing the money from the very community which we are feeding.  Basically leaving empty I.O.U.'s in exchange for money today.

Money changers in the Temple.

But what happens when the money changers run out of money to lend?  I doubt they could rely on divine intervention either...

So here we are today - the money changers tables are empty.

The Temple is empty too.

The masses on the hill have eaten all the food our borrowed money can provide.

Do we think we can rely on a divine miracle to save us?

How the "Porn Fantasy" Affects Women

I've notice something interesting lately.  The line between fantasy and reality seems to be blurring considerably in an number of areas of society:

The "free" dictionary has, for the definition of fantasy, two apropos definitions (out of several others): "An imagined event or sequence of mental images, such as a daydream, usually fulfilling a wish or psychological need." and "An unrealistic or improbable supposition."

As I mentioned a few posts ago in "The Power of Video: Hard Core Pornography and Climate Change" young males in our culture are strongly influenced by video.

But what's even more interesting is why they are looking at so much pornography in the first place.

In the past, say twenty years ago, young men were strongly influenced by something else: young women.

Now over the last many millenium this was the way of the world - there was nothing else for a young man to think about save for young women as he grew up.  Society supported this by requiring young people to choose spouses (for the most part) and raise families.

The reason for this, though apparently not obvious to today's youth, was to build a strong society.

Now if young women were interested in young men it would seem that the young men wouldn't need pornography - one imagines that having that having an actual relationship would trump a session with a porno queen.

Certainly there are plenty of images of women for young men to see - in advertising in particular, on video, and so on.

But one has to believe that if there were women interested in men the men would be busy with the women instead of the pornography.

But this is apparently not the case.

Women have come to believe somehow that waiting a long time to find a partner is somehow better than finding one when they are young.  (See "Women are Insane, Men are Stupid: Where have all the good men gone...")

So today women are apparently busy with other things besides men until their thirties - which means the men are left with nothing to do as I wrote in the link above.

Later in life women seem to have a rekindled interest in men but complain that the men are all useless.

The point of the post is that because women no longer expect men to act like men, i.e., supporting children, providing, they don't.

And this is fantasy as well: that men will somehow simply wait around for the women to need them and magically (fantastically) "grow up" to be the men the women feel should be available to them.

But the men, idle, simply spend time watching porn and wasting time.

So both men and women today, particularly younger men and women, seem to be lost in parallel fantasies about life: men left to porn and video games by women busy doing other things.  Later in life the women find that the porn and video games have not made the men good men.

So why are women living in this particular fantasy.

In the recent past, say only a few decades ago, women knew that having a good man was important: regardless of whether they stayed home and had children or whether they went out and worked - a good man was simply a good man.

And what was a good man (for those that don't know)?

Someone with character, a good work ethic, a reliable person, a caring father and husband, someone who is supportive, someone who is respectful, and on and on.

If a woman had a man like this, and conversely if a man had a woman with the same attributes, everything would work out.

But no longer...

So today we live in a world where largely the men no longer have these attributes - mostly because they are raised by women because their fathers have long ago left their mothers.  Of course there are remarriages and so forth but the strength of family has been violated by fantasy.

This fantasy is reenforced in a variety of common entertainment media: you see no traditional families, only unlikely and bizarre collections of individuals and perhaps children struggling for some unclear goal of happiness and wonder which they never reach.

Of course modern business is populated today largely by women, as is the US educational system (some 60% of the workers are women according to this US Dept of Labor site).

So could men be propagating the idea that women should no longer be focused on men?

I doubt it as there are simply not enough men in the workforce to do this today.  While nearly half of older women are married another quarter live alone or are heads of households.  Again, since more women than men work women dominate the financial picture.

So it seems as if women are creating these fantasy worlds where women live and where women are unhappy.  Yet they are the ones complaining.

And they should complain.

Women who head households or dominate the financial aspects of a marriage have to do more work: not only raising children and taking responsibility for much of the household work but also for working.

Effectively double duty.

You have to ask are we, as a society better off?

Certainly as men in a world where women expect far less of them I would guess the simple, unthoughout answer is yes.

All men have to do is live in the basement with video games, porn and weed and loaf all day.

Women, on the other hand, have to go to college - there are far more today in college than men - and take on the debt and pay it off while raising children and working.

One imagines that they are becoming increasingly responsible for the vast trillion dollar educational debt out society is saddled with.

And, I suppose, also are demeaned into acting like porn actresses in the bedroom when the day is done.  (At least that would be what any men they would find would expect - because that's all the men know.)

So to me it seems as if the women are forced into the same fantasy world as the men - accept that this one seems far worse than that of males.

Of course you can argue that the women are "free" today of men - free to pursue lives of their own choosing (is living under a massive debt freedom?)

But is today's situation really better?

Certainly not from my perspective as a father - my working daughters have to work far harder than those that do not work outside their homes.

As a society we are making very foolish choices and choosing to believe that the life we see on TV, internet and video - the life manufactured for us by actors and writers and filmmakers - is the one we should believe we are living.

I guess as long as we continue to "believe" this we will be okay...

Warp Drive or Warped Experimental Results?

Dr. Martin Tajmar

About fifteen or twenty years ago I had a buddy named Frank.  Frank was my landlord and he had a problem with inertial rotation.

We would often talk about physics; Einstein's ideas in particular.  A favorite topic was the notion that Einstein had said that standing on the surface of planet was, from the perspective of gravity, the same as riding in an elevator rising at a constant speed.

So what is it that "sticks" you to the surface of the planet in the first place?

Gravity, of course.  But little is really known about the details of the physics behind the operation gravity and, to this point, no one has figured out how to manipulate gravity.

At the same time, most of us have experienced riding in a high-speed elevator.  You get in at floor one or two and ride up to floor sixty.  Usually these elevators, at least the new ones, are pretty fast so as they accelerate from a stop you feel "squashed down" as if you weigh more; which from the perspective of you mass in the elevator is true while the elevator accelerates.

So Einstein basically said that from your perspective standing on the earth or riding in an infinite elevator at a constant 1g (gravity) treats you the same - you feel the effect of one gravity.

But we also talked about rotation.

Most people have seen images of space stations where there is a central core with spokes out to the rim and the "living quarters" along the outside rim.  (This is also the case with the old Larry Niven "Ringworld.").  The idea here is that the rotation of the space station creates a force that wants to launch you off tangentially.  But since the rim is smooth and continuous the effect on you is that you "stick" to the floor - just as with the case of the elevator.

On these things Frank and I always agreed.

But Frank never liked the idea that the rotation itself relative to the gravity was given a "pass."  That is, something like the space station, or a bicycle wheel, should be creating some sort gravitational interaction (outside the basic tangential effect of centripieal force).

At the time Frank was never able to convince me that there was a problem - not that his arguments weren't persuasive - just that there was no physical evidence to back him up.

Today, however, things are somewhat different.

In 2007 an Austrian physicist named Martin Tajmar describe what is today known as the Tajmar effect:  The idea of placing an electronic gyroscope over a rotating supercold ring and noting that the gyroscope is affected by the the rotating supercold ring.   This effect was not duplicated until recently (2011).

(Note: So far there is not a lot to convince me that these are not "unreproducible results" I have written about before, e.g., cold fusion and all the rest on the medical side.  Sadly, to read much about this you have to pay for access to documents you tax dollars funded which I am not about to do until this blog can generate enough revenue to cover the cost.  Please click on ads if you'd like this to happen.

It often seems like someone discovers an "effect" and rather than reproduce it people begin to extrapolate what the effect might mean before reproducing it.)

But, as far as Frank and his problems with inertial rotation it would seem that were the Tajmar effect real the supercold rotation ring would have to be somehow "dragging" space-time, i.e., the fabric of space, around to some degree with its rotation in order to affect the nearby laser gyroscope.

So, the extrapolation goes, if the rotating ring is dragging space-time around with it (imagine this kind of like an electronic mixer - as the mixer spins around the bowl containing the cake mix, if on a set of loose bearings, will begin to rotation along with the contents of the bowl) then we can talk about warping space-time.

In the case of the mixer/cake mix the rotational energy of the blades is transferred via the cake mix to the bowl.  For the rotating supercold ring the cakemix is replaced by Unruh radiation, at least according to the theory described here.

So if we imagine beings living on the blades of the mixer (like us living on the surface of a rotating earth) we would not perceive any motion.  And being living on the bowl would also not perceive rotation.

But relative to each other (and instead living on the supercold rotating ring or "inside" the gyroscope we would perceive a twisting or spinning of space-time.

Now note that we are not somehow transferring rotational force  but actually rotating space-time.  So each relative observer would not notice that they are being rotated but in effect would be to an outside observer.

Which brings us to warp drives.

The Tajmar effect claims to effectively be warping space near the rotation of the supercold ring.

So, while the speed of light is constant within space-time theoretically we could move space-time (as in the case around the ring) so that the light moving within that space-time plus the movement of the space time would result in an observable movement showing the light moving from point A to point B faster that the speed of light in an non-moving space-time frame.

Which all leads to article like this and this.

Is it possible this is all true?

I suppose that depends on the reproducibility of the Tajmar effect which seems suspect to me (though there are claims it has been reproduce (Droscher & Hauser) there are others who are unable).

It seems that such an effect would have a dramatic impact on physics so one imagines that it would be important to determine if its real.  Something I would think well within the capabilities of many university-level physics labs.

At the same time its quite possible that Tajmar's effect is simply one of the 19 in 20 "failed to reproduce" experiments that happen all the time.

However, given such a flimsy set of proof, why are Fox News and other sites releasing information on possible "warp drives?"

One imagines this is because there is nothing else interesting to write about...

Richard Feynman once said that understanding the "two-slit" experiment was really all you needed to grasp what quantum mechanics was about.

It would seem this effect would be as profound were it true.

(Note: There are other things like the "Cashmir effect" which are also mysterious and offer such consequences are unlimited energy from "nothing.")

So who knows...

Agile Cyberweapons, Genesis 2:19

I have been reading about Flame, another middle Eastern-targeted computer virus along the lines of STUXNET.

Since I wrote about STUXNET the NY Times has reported that STUXNET was the product of a US-Israeli collaboration to attack Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

Flame, apparently, is related to STUXNET according to this post.  The claim is there is common DLL code shared between the two as well as other aspects of operation, e.g., similar temp-file names and similar mutex names.

All-and-all pretty convincing evidence that the at some level the two shared common authors.

Using this analysis researchers have concluded that its likely Flame was created first and possibly used to gain information about how to build and target STUXNET.

There are some interesting side elements to these stories.

For one, the fact that Iran stole Siemens controller software (Windows-based) to drive their centrifuges.

Two, that government cyberweapon developers made use of a two-phase approach using standard Windows exploits, e.g., various 0-day exploits and exploits to use USB-drives to spread the virus, to attack these systems.

Now what do these points imply?

For one, Iran is unable or unwilling to develop their own controls for centrifuges.  I think this is an interesting point.

Clearly they are off on their own developing nuclear capabilities.  But they are not really doing so independently.  They have to rely on standard US cyber infrastructure technology to do it.

So just what else might be going on inside Iran using computers that are not home-grown and hence vulnerable to attack by the west?

Missile guidance software, command and control (mission control) software, software for calculating targeting and flight plans?

Viruses like Flame seem to be designed to capture what people working on these types of systems might be doing - surfing the internet to US sites to find key information (hence the ability of Flame to snapshot screen surfing to .gov-class sites).

So is Iran simply stealing these critical technologies from US?

Its hard to say.  But it certainly seems like Windows is the common element to all of this - both on the side of the attackee (Iran) and the attacker (US).

One imagines, for example, the their missile guidance software cannot be 100% home grown - clearly their missiles must be made from standardized parts to some degree - otherwise it would take too long to develop.  Look at how long it took the Germans and the US (Goddard) to develop reliable launch systems.

While I think its unlikely that Windows is flying along on these missiles my guess is that the software used to build, test, and simulate flight control is probably Windows based and therefore a likely target to something like Flame.

I think its also likely that there is exposure inside Iran to the outside world via the internet, e.g., Flame returning data to its controllers via internet connections.

So one imagines engineering folks inside Iran basically Googling for technical information from western web sites.

My, but don't we all rely on the internet a bit too much....??

Flame is basically a tool for visualizing the computational infrastructure inside Iran.

And with the knowledge it brings it allows US to devise counterattacks...

So given this kind of knowledge and tools one wonders how software is developed and tested in Iran?

My guess is that they use modern Agile-like techniques to work with stolen technologies.  Clearly they are stuck at least in part developing from scratch in areas where they cannot buy or steal components - both hardware and software.

But clearly even I could find a substantial amount of rocket science (as I have posted here) freely available.  No doubt with a bit more effort I could find substantial software and technical data freely available.

A state like Iran probably has its own cyberweapons coders who could likely penetrate US and western rocket sites to capture more design and technical data.

My guess is that Israel does not feel that this alone is sufficient to stop Iran.  Certainly they can slow them down and cost them a lot of money in purchasing replacement centrifuges (STUXNET was designed to damage centrifuges beyond repair while displaying GUI information indicating that everything was working at 100% of capacity).

It probably gives them and US a precise tools for viewing their progress.

So why is there no action?

In the region only Israel is a nuclear power currently and I believe they plan to keep it that way.

A nuclear Iran is a very scary scenario that I believe no one wants to see - at least no one rational.

But sadly our US policy seems more or less ambivalent and perhaps too reliant on high-tech spook tools.

Cyberweapons are not a substitute for actual weapons or military superiority.

However the current administration seems to believe otherwise.

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Iran's president, seems quite focused on creating another Holocaust in response to the biblical exploits of Abraham, Jacob and Ishmael (Genesis 2:19).

Its a wonder that this conflict is still today at the forefront of the best technical minds in Iran and is the basis for mass destruction.

Its also a wonder that the US administration seems at best distracted from campaigning by this issue.  One which, if improperly handled, will change forever the face of the plant.

Mother May I... (Sugar Drinks, Foreign Riots)

"Mother" - Pink Floyd - The Wall

As children we played a game called "Mother May I..."  The idea was simple: you found a large area, like a playground or turnaround on a driveway.  One person was designated "Mother."  Mother turned her back and all the rest, the "children" lined up at the starting line.

In turn each child would ask "Mother may I ____" where the ____ was "take two steps forward" or something like that.  Mother would agree or disagree and the "child" would have to follow along.

Periodically Mother could survey the children to see if any were cheating by moving more than Mother allowed.

When someone reached Mother they then became Mother.

As the Nanny state Mother of all New York City Michael Bloomberg declared today no one is to purchase a sweetened soda drink of more than 16 oz.

This is like saying we'll no longer sell cigarettes to minors - it sounds good but it doesn't stop minors from smoking.  Now drinking larger quantities of soda will become enticing simply because its forbidden.

I suppose that NYC will have to hire "drink police" to come around and measure everyone's serving size.  For example, in a bar if I order, say, a "Captain and Coke" will I be allowed to have a large glass?

Mother may I have a large glass of an adult beverage?

Free speech is also moving into the realm of "Mother May I..."

Apparently this YouTube video trailer for "Innocence of Muslim's" by "Sam Baclile" has caused the deaths of US Ambassador to Libya along with several people in his entourage.  The real filmmaker is thought to be Nakoula Basseley Nakoula according to this article.

Who ever the producer and director are of this film we know it was produced in the United States.

This fact makes it an expression of free speech.

Just like other anti-religious, satirical films such as Monty Python's "The Life of Brian."  In 1979 this was considered by Christians as a religious outrage and even blasphemous.

Yet no riots ensued after its release in the US (it was produced in the UK).

No members of the UK's US embassy were murdered in cold blood.

However, yesterday it was revealed that the US government is "looking into" the affairs of Mr. Bacile/Nakoula in this WSJ article.

According to this article Mr. Bacile/Nakoula is a convicted (2009) felon (no, not for making movies) for defrauding banks.  He served about 21 months in prison.

Part of his parole agreement is that he may not use the internet.  So the US seeks to punish Mr. Bacile/Nakoula by using indirect legal means to silence him and his film: basically by showing that in order to make the film he used the internet and hence violated parole.

Mother May I make a satire?

Satire has been a mainstay of American journalism for hundreds of years and is explicitly protected by the US Constitution (Amendment I): "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Now some have made the argument that a movie like this is akin to yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater.  However, in this case, as with many other unpleasant forms of speech (such as that of Klansmen and various white supremacy groups) the government can only suppress it in very specific circumstances, e.g., the incitement of an illegal overthrow of the government.

The quality of this trailer (I have not seen the entire movie) as comical.  The quality is what you might expect from a student satire film.

And certainly free speech in the US is not bound by the laws of other countries nor is there (or at least in the past there was not) any limit on films against violent regimes.  For example, here is a list of several dozen anti-Nazi films produced in the US.

Apparently according to various articles Mr. Bacile/Nakoula is a Coptic Christian.

A religious group which in Egypt is noted by Human Rights Watch as targeted for "growing religious intolerance."

Perhaps US officials should investigate Human Rights Watch?

Mother May I cover up the lack of security at my Embassies?

The embassy attack was known to the US administration at least 48 hours in advance.

More than likely all of this noise about this film in the US is to simply cover up that fact that Embassies have poor defenses, e.g., no ammo loaded into their guns, as a result of US State department or other current US leadership bumbling.

Mother May We ALL take two steps backward.

Climate and Financial "Models" - The New Pornography?

Yesterday I wrote about pornography and climate change.

One of the often cited reasons that we should all "believe" is that the climate models tell us things are our fault.  (This aside from the fact that the mere fact climate disaster is presented in video form is suspect.)

Climate models are computer programs into which people put all the data they have as well as various computational rules to apply to that data.  The model then produces "predictions" based on the data.

These models are always present to the great unwashed as "supremely accurate" in their predictions.

But are they?

It turns out they are not as accurate as we might think or believe.

First off there are many climate models, in 2007 as many as twenty or more.

Secondly, and more importantly, there are questions being raised about the accuracy of these models (see this as an example).

From this site for example:

and

Now these types of plots showing the discrepancy between the model's prediction and reality have been around for some time.

Yesterday I found this interesting quote: "...that models can capture all necessary information and then accurately predict future risk."

However, this is not from a climate discussion but from a financial discussion (see this).

It turns out that government uses models for other things besides the climate.  In this case predicting the soundness of financial institutions.

In a discussion about the Basil II banking standards designed to protect investors and the public from bank failures the notion of "models" is discussed: "A deadly flaw in financial regulation is the assumption that a few years or even a few decades of market data can allow models to accurately predict worst-case scenarios. The authors suggest that hundreds or even a thousand years of data might be needed before we could trust the Basel machinery."

Now financial markets are not as complex and planetary weather.  After all, at least theoretically one could capture (in today's computer driven trading world) every transaction associated with a given market.

However, my guess is that government regulators cannot manage this amount of data, nor can industry provide it.

So instead, like climate scientists, they use a model.

A flawed model.

Why is it flawed?  Who knows.

But the issue is that the modeling process is a failure: To wit, the investment bank Bear Stearns, which was in compliance with all regulatory models, failed during the financial crisis of 2008.

Now a financial system has a finite number of data points, unlike a climate system which has an infinite number.  Similarly since all the trading transactions occur on computers one imagines that there is a complete set of written rules to describe that system.

A planetary climate system, on the other hand, has an unmeasurable number of interactive rules and elements: plants, animals, humans, the sun, the orbit of the planet, gravity, the makeup of the planet, the atmosphere, solar flares, and on and on.

And these things do not occur in one spot where they can be accurately measured.  Instead there are some 510 million square kilometers of earth surface to think about and measure.

So even measuring each thing once per square kilometer requires 510 million measurements.

Take each measurement once per hour and you have 12 billion measurements per day.

But we don't have sensors all over the ocean, for example, so we can't accurately do even this much.

So we have to estimate.

No doubt like they have to do on the financial side...

And things break down.

But today's folks get locked into "believing in the model" - whether it works or not apparently.

Why?

Like pornography the model creates a focus point where believers can find comfort.  It takes their minds away from the reality that have a real scientific theory of weather with measurable prediction is well beyond what humanity is capable of at this point.

But models, like pornography, appear to be nice substitutes for the "real thing" that are easy for people to believe in.

The only problem would appear to be that they don't always work...

The Power of Video: Hard Core Pornography and Climate Change

Cindy Gallop Speaking on the effect of video

There's been a series of articles at ArsTechnica on global warming over the last several months.  As ardent believers that man in destroying the planet they often produce articles that support it.

Most recently they talk about an "unpublished article" in Psychological Science claiming "a strong free-market ideology correlates with a lower acceptance of climate change" and "... among readers of popular climate blogs, a tendency toward conspiracy theories plays a role in fostering doubt of the scientific community."

The article goes on to describe "... a laissez-faire attitude and conspiracy tendencies separately predicted the rejection of a variety of other scientific findings, like the fact that HIV causes AIDS, or smoking causes cancer."

This last underlined section is interesting.

In point of fact smoking does not cause lung cancer.   It is one of many risk factors and in some cases a significant risk factor.  Many people smoke their entire lives and do not suffer from cancer.

Here''s an example of the actual truth about smoking and lung cancer: "Smoking Does Not Cause Lung Cancer."

Is smoking  bad?  Quite certainly.  Does it act as as a risk factor in other health problems?  Of course it can.

But causality is a bit of a stretch based on actual statistics.


Look down about seven or eight paragraphs and you find this:

"As ludicrous as that is, the medical and lay press is littered with such pabulum and gobbledygook. Even as web literate physician, it took me over 50 hours of internet time to find enough raw data to write this article.  I went through thousands of abstracts and numerous articles, only to find two articles that even questioned the degree of correlation between smoking and lung cancer (British lung cancer rates do not correlating to smoking rates)^19,20 and another two articles which  questioned the link between second hand smoke (passive smoking) and lung cancer.^21,22 Everywhere I looked, the information was hidden in terms like "odds ratio," "relative risk," or "annualized mortality rate." Most doctors probably could not accurately define and interpret them all these terms accurately, let alone someone outside the medical profession. The public relies on the media to interpret this morass of data, but instead they are given politically correct and biased views."

What's interesting here is that the dogma of the evils of smoking and lung cancer is so strong that actual factual data are simply ignored by virtually the entire medical community.

Therefore I must be a kook and conspiracy theorist if I don't believe the dogma.

Science, wrong?

Professional communities don't spout dogma...

Or do they...?

In 1887 the world of science was shaken to its core by the Michelson-Morley Experiment.

Prior to this experiment it was believed that ether formed "an absolute reference frame with respect to which the rest of the universe was stationary. It would therefore follow that it should appear to be moving from the perspective of an observer on the sun-orbiting Earth. As a result, light would sometimes travel in the same direction of the ether, and others times in the opposite direction."

Everyone in the scientific community believed in ether prior to this.  But they could not prove that it existed.

Michelson and Morley proved it did not.

They did not publish a psychology article about what they thought must be true.

They attempted to show physically it was true and, as a result, discovered it was false.

So perhaps Michelson and Morley were conspiracy theorists?

I doubt it.

What the ArsTechnica article does show, however, is how strong dogma is.

Particularly in the minds of young people today.

People no longer seem to be able to distinguish reality from fantasy: I saw it on YouTube so it must be true.

An example of this comes from a TED talk in 2009 by Cindy Gallop (see this NY Times Article).

Cindy as come to believe that young males in our society today are unable to distinguish normal sexual behavior from hard core pornography.  Her premise is that young people, both male and female, observe so much hard core pornography that they are literally unable to function normally in a sexual situation.

There is an explicit language video of her talk at TED2009 on this topic here.

What does this say about our culture and how it influences people's minds today?

Apparently video imagery is so strong that it literally overwhelms people's ability to distinguish natural behavior from fantasy.  (These videos affect young men directly and, in turn, because the men's partners wish to please the men with what the men want, women indirectly by causing them to act out the men's fantasy.  Effectively causing the women act like porn actresses.  Hardly something that empowers women in general.)

And it would seem to me that this spills over into this Psychological Science type gibberish being posted on ArsTechnica.

I must be a "conspiracy theorist" because I don't believe in their version of "science."

No, not at all.

I am a skeptic.  Just like Michelson and Morley.  I want scientific proof.

I don't want to know about consensus because Michelson and Morley concretely demonstrated that consensus is not trustworthy.

Unfortunately for the folks at ArsTechnica there aren't any simple experiments that can be conducted to "prove" global warming climate change science one way or the other.  That's because there is no scientific theory of climate change.

At least "ether" had an actual theory and Michelson and Morley could attempt an physical experiment that would confirm or deny it.

Not so with climate science.

And then there is Cindy Gallop.

Basically her premise is that consequence on the mind of viewing videos is so strong that it literally changes people's behavior in a very powerful way.

So in her population of "young males with which she has sex" none understand how to have sex in any way other than what is common in hard core pornography.

Does Al Gore's video "An Inconvenient Truth" fall into this category?   Having a powerful and irrational effect on those that view it?

Influencing minds in a faux reality?

One reason that I do not post videos here (very much) and none made by me is exactly for this reason.

If you read it you have to think about it.

Videos appeal to aspects of the mind that demote "independent thought" and replace critical thinking with a complete, pre-packaged reality.

What's interesting is that none of Cindy's partners were even aware of their lack of knowledge about normal sexual behavior.

The author of the Ars article, John Timmer, seems to believe that those who do not believe in "climate change" must somehow be "conspiracy theorists."  At least, that's what his Ars article implies to me.

Being a conspiracy theorist, in his mind, is the only reason someone would reject dogma.

I think that, instead, we "non-believers" are simply skeptics.

Skeptics who can distinguish reality from what videos tell us must be the dogmatic truth.

Without concrete theory and experimental evidence such as the Michelson-Morley experiment smoking causing lung cancer and climate change are simply relegated to the heap of other undocumented video concepts like aliens and JFK's "knoll commando."

Coding: Where is the Future Taking Us?

Over the last decade or so there has been a tremendous change in how software is developed - at least from my perspective.

A decade ago you had to purchase a package like MSDN or set of books on the Apple programming APIs in order to access the knowledge you would need to write code.

For example, the AFS (Apple File Sysetm) interfaces where complicated - there was both synchronous and asynchronous I/O, various B-tree based operations for directories, and so on.  I remember owning this particular document and studying it intensely to perform even the simplest of file operations.

At that time MSDN was a bit better - a dozen CDs that you loaded into your computer - and there was some kind of web-like interface that allowed you to search through the various documents.

Operating system APIs like Windows and OS 9 changed very little from release to release - and then only by fairly straight forward additions for better/faster/new hardware.

Major changes, like the introduction of Mac OSX took years.  The various Apple shows I recall had whole large sections of trade show booths dedicated just to introducing the new UI.

Production of these documents in those days, like MSDN, were significant efforts - more so for Apple with its printed documentation (there was an electronic versions as well but I recall it being quite tedious to use).

Writing, proof reading, printing, binding, distribution, and so on ensured that the cycle between changes was long.

There were also fewer coders in those days and I think, on average, they had a lot more experience as well.

Today things are very different.  I think that in a way there is a lot of negative impact with the new model which is not totally obvious on first inspection.

Today everything is on the web - everything - source code, examples, MSDN, knowledge bases, APIs, new OS releases - everything.

And from a purely developer perspective this is great - when you need info, say how to open a file with stdio/fopen you just go to the web browser and type "fopen" and the answer appears.  Need example code, type "fopen sample code" and it appears.  Ditto for virtually all .NET and Objective-C-based API operations.

Much of this is supported beyond basic API questions (XML, OS issues, handling complex application issues like color, performance, etc., etc.).  For example both www.codeproject.com and www.stackoverflow.com offer free developer environments where you can ask questions about APIs as well as various technical issues and have other developers help you or provide solutions.

But there are some disadvantages as well.

For one companies like Microsoft and Apple create tools to push API changes out the web automatically I am sure.  The problem is that usually not everything that needs to be updated is.  Apple is notorious for this.  Sample code is outdated, won't compile or doesn't use the latest blessed API functions.

API documents can become "out of sync" with each other - document A describing document B which is outdated, and so on.

Again codeproject and stackoverflow are huge helps in these situations.

Another disadvantage is that this allows APIs and hence OS and other things to change more rapidly.  Instead of months of writing, testing, printing and publishing about iOS 3.1 to 3.2 I basically just push a button and out goes everything to the web.

But there is no longer any "inertia" in the API.  All the old costs, time invested and difficulty in changing things a lot more dicey.  "Do we really need to add this or can we just add a new option to that?"  So things change more rapidly than ever.

And this can make your investment in code obsolete more quickly.

Another issue is what was once the domain of a third-party application, say file compression, is replaced by OS integration.  So the OS is easier to expand over time - adding in convenience for users at the inconvenience of third-party customers.

Easier advancement of the OS APIs creates more backward compatible versions to test.  (In the Wolf household we have iOS devices that are operational going back to version 3.X.)

So far a company like Apple, with its so-to-be-release iPhone 5 all of this baggage is following along behind the train.  The faster the train goes the more baggage is swept up into the backdraft behind the train.

If the train ever starts to slow down the baggage will catch up and wreak havoc.

In the mean time what can a developer do?

For one thing I think you need a domain where mastery gives you technology well outside what the codeproject's and stackoverflow's give away for free.  Many of the comments there say things like "I am writing an app to do X..." where there are thousands of apps already doing X.

So basically you have to do something hard - that no on else is going to likely do anytime soon.

Often combining features in unique was to steer you clear of the me-too developers.

It's also best to use core API functions that have been around a long time rather than iffy ones at the "edge" of the API.

In any case I think that there is a high price for all this - one that we are going to see "come due" in the future.

I am also troubled that none of what I do with iOS, for example, could be done without the internet.

Until recently MSDN still provided disks so if your internet went down you could still work.

No longer.  No internet no programming.  (Though other things I do don't require as much internet and I can review my own code base for example code as well.)

We have become, at least on the programming side, so dependent on the internet that I am quite sure 90% of what is done could not be without the internet.

To me this is also very troubling...

Education, Software and Agile Failure

It started out simply enough.  A problem on a grade school paper:

Put in alphabetical order:

   ___ Grape

   ___ Bread

   ___ Soup

   ___ Apple

So most people would, as the teach expects, do this:

Put in alphabetical order:

   _3_ Grape

   _2_ Bread

   _4_ Soup

   _1_ Apple

Meaning that Apple is first, Bread second, Grape third, and Soup fourth.

How do most people accomplish this?  Usually by scanning the list looking for the "lowest" value first, then the next lowest, and so on marking each as you go.

Is this the only correct answer?

As it turns out no.

You could say:

Put in alphabetical order:

   _4_ Grape

   _2_ Bread

   _1_ Soup

   _3_ Apple

But that's wrong, you might say, how does that work?  For one thing, there's no description of exactly how to put these things in order.

The assumption is that we number each item with its position.  But that's just one option.

In the second option we simply put the number in the first slot of the position of the item that goes in that slot: so first is "Apple" so "4" - the index of Apple goes first, "Bread" is second, so "2" goes on the next line, and so on.

Why write about this?

Well it goes back to the "I Hate Algebra..." post I wrote about a year ago.

Its another example I think of how the US educational system is failing our children.

In particular I find that today school is all about the notion of "conformity."  In this case I am using the first example above.

The real instructions should read "In ascending numerical order, starting with one, mark the ordinal of each entry's final position in an alphabetized list."

But this is not what's stated.

An equivalent version of what's to be done is "Mark from top to bottom the ordinal of the position of each entry in an alphabetized list."

Now without some domain knowledge and instruction how is that we are know which of these two descriptions are the correct one to follow?

Further, if someone views the world differently, via a dyslexia or from their "own perspective" without instruction I argue that its simply impossible to say one or the other model of alphabetizing is wrong.  There is no clear instruction on what to do and the only result that's required is that the list end up in alphabetical order.

But there's more.

There is also the process of arriving at the list.

The first method I described - scanning the list for the lowest item, then the next lowest item and so on is the most inefficient means to sort the items.  The process is called a "bubble sort" and requires us to pass through the list of n items n/2 + 1 times (assuming integer division).

For example, if there are five items I have to go through the list of five once to the find the lowest (I must inspect each entry once).  Now four remain.  So I have to go through four items to find the next lowest, and so on.

So I pass through the list five times, then four times, then three, then two and finally one.

But I can match up the four and one times, and the two and three times for a total of three times through all the entries, or 5 / 2 = 2 + 1 or three times.

There are many sorting algorithms like this that are much faster.

Of course, this assumes that you go through the list linearly - that is, on thing at a time.

But some people's minds may not work that way.  For example, in the movie "Rainman" there is a scene were the protagonist - a man with autism - observes a pile of toothpicks on the floor and blurts out a number.  His brother, a "normal" person, does not grasp that his brother has simply looked at the pile of toothpicks and counted them up instantly (as opposed to, as you or I might, counting them individually).

In the case of "Rainman" presumably the autistic brother's mind works somehow in parallel to convert the view of the toothpicks into a count.

From the perspective of software develop or mathematics its clear that both linear algorithms I describe to alphabetize the list are equivalent because at the end the list is ordered.

But in the context of a classroom or computer program we have to think about what happens next, i.e., how will the list be processed subsequently because {3, 2, 4, 1} and {4, 2, 1, 3} are not equivalent though they can both be interpreted by different algorithms to convert the list to alphabetized forms.

Some children might simply look at a list like this and operate on it to produce an answer.

If the answer does not follow an unwritten set of rules and yields the correct result can it still be wrong?

Yes.

And this is where the notion of teaching begins.

Someone might be quite brilliant but unable to function in the "read world" because the see things differently.

But differently, as I show above, doesn't mean wrong with the specification for what's required is unclear.

So in this case someone would require additional information and perhaps instruction to understand the alternate means of alphabetizing such a list.

There may be even more ways that what I describe to do it, I really don't know.

Another issue is the means of communication.

There's an old riddle:

There a city of liars and a city of truth tellers.  In the city of lies people tell only lies.  In the city of truth they only tell the truth.  There is a fork in the road you are on.  One fork leads to the the city of lies, the other to the city of truth.  A man from one of the two cities, though you don't know which one, stands at the fork.  You are allowed to ask him a single question to determine which road leads to the city of truth.

What question do you ask?

[ SPOILER ]

You ask him to point to "where he lives."  The liar will only point to the city of truth as will the truth teller.

So in the case of alphabetizing you can determine the right order by asking someone to point out the first entry.  Regardless of the algorithm they might use you will get either the right answer ("Apple") or the wrong one.  Similarly they can point out each sequential entry.

By "pointing out" the entry we eliminate the need to use written language and the need to express the algorithm used in the process.

This makes the communication process much simpler.

So the question becomes if someone can produce the right answers by a non-written means but not by a written means are they wrong?

Or is the educational or specification process wrong?

I think that teaching involves two things: 1) understanding what someone sees about a problem, i.e., what do they natively understand and 2) how do they communicate about the problem.

The first item, #1, has do with understanding: do I understand the notion of alphabetizing?  Basically can I put things in order according to some rules.

The second item, #2, is a question of communication.  Certainly a I could understand the notion of ordering things but be unable to communicate effectively about that order.

This is similar to specifications for problems in engineering and software: do I understand what's needs to be done and can I send and receive communications about that effectively?

Often in the software industry the answer is no.  Particularly in the context of the keyhole problem I describe in "Through the Keyhole..."  I might easily delude myself - either as an instructor, or as someone specifying a project, or as a programmer that I understand what's required and I can communicate about it.

Today both education and software development has "gone off the rails" in this regard.