How to Misunderstand Physics

 On Metaphor and Misunderstanding
Why physics is misunderstood

Originally part of  Usenet post Re: Empirical Utility of Dualism Posted: Dec 2, 2005 11:01 PM . Wolf Kirchmeir said: [...]
The three types of quarks could've been called anything at all. The terminology was preceded by the mathematical models that confirmed and predicted observations. The theoreticians could have used Greek letters, like they did for the tau, the mu, etc. Or Egyptian letters (which IIRC was actually suggested.)

Hint: learn the math.

"Quark" is borrowed from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Joyce borrowed the word from the German, wherein it refers to a kind of cottage cheese.

Me, I'd've proposed "flush" and "skint"; "womble" and "gronk"; and "tvepji" and "bsanji".

But nobody asked me. :-(

[A response to this post implied that naming the flavours of quarks up/down, top/bottom would lead to a “more interesting understanding” than the terms I suggested. “Flavours” is of course another metaphor. My comment on that post follows:]

The terminology was chosen to be deliberately arbitrary. The intent was to avoid what was called "a more interesting understanding," since quarks of all three types simply aren't like anything we can understand. Only the mathematical models make true sense of the phenomena they refer to. Ordinary-language accounts are metaphors, and like all metaphors they obscure as much as they illuminate.

It's somewhat like reading music. Some people can "hear the music" when they read the score, others (like me) can more or less accurately sing or play it, but for many a written score is just so many black spots, and they can't even "follow the score" when they hear the music played. When it comes to the mathematics of sub-atomic physics, very few of us can even follow the score, let alone pick out the tune or hear the music just by looking at the score. The physicists, bless their hearts, try to make their theories understood, but what their well-intentioned attempts actually do is foster a great deal of misunderstanding.

Addendum 2015-06-02: I think the misunderstanding applies to the physicists, too. I don’t think it’s useful to say that photons are waves or particles. All we know is that in some situations, we can use wave equations to describe their behaviour, and in other situations we can use particle equations. To say that the “wave function collapses” I think merely means that the probabilities described by the wave function are replaced by certainties when we observe/measure the consequences of some interaction. To refer to entities that interact as some entities that exist in and of themselves apart from the interactions is I think a mistake. All we can ever know is the interactions.

GMD-1 locomotives in southern Saskatchewan

R. W. Zimmerman & Blake Kiviharju. Prairie Branches (1980) A compilation of photos, some maps, and time-tables, with a few paragraphs of comment here and there. Self-published in the days before it became easy, printed before digital scanning and printing raised the quality of photo-reproduction, this pamphlet is a record of CNR branchlines in Saskatchewan. These radiated from Regina, and represent Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific attempts to compete with the CPR. Most of these lines have been abandoned in the 40 years since publication.
     The locomotive of choice for these lightly built and travelled lines was the GMD-1, which was essentially a stretched SW1200 locomotive with a low short hood added at one end. Built for the CNR and Northern Alberta Railway, it’s a surprisingly elegant design. Like the GP7/9 it looks like what it is: a locomotive made to do serious work. They lasted a long time, too, with a dozen or two still in service as of 2019, most on the CNR and in Cuba, one owned by Cando, and one on the Oregon Pacific.
  A valuable little book. It would be nice to republish it with modern technology, in a larger format, with larger photos. **½

Suppose God wrote a memoir....

     David Javerbaum. The Last Testament: A Memoir by God (2011) 1. In the beginning, I took a lunch with Daniel Greenburg of the Levine Greenburg Literary Agency. 2.For the future of print was without hope, and void; and darkness had fallen upon the face of the entire publishing industry. (Prologue, 1-2) Thus begins this Memoir; and if you have a good knowledge of the Bible, you will recognise allusions to its contents not only here but throughout the book.
     The God who writes this memoir is the God of the Bible, as understood by Javerbaum, and probably others, since he was a writer for Saturday Night Live at the time this book came into being. It’s a well-done and often subtle satire of those who believe in a God that resembles a human being, a conclusion that follows from the assumption that humans are made in the image of God.
     Certainly, the more literalist believers will find much to be offended by, but I think for those who understand that the Bible is one of many attempts to make sense of the astonishing creativity of the Universe that brought us into being, this book will be at least as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. If you have wrestled with questions of creed and theology, this book may suggest that most of those questions are unanswerable in St Augustine’s sense. The trick is to recognise which are mere verbal puzzles, which are matters of substance, and which are the consequence of ill-understood and mistaken assumptions.
     Recommended. A keeper. ****

Bernstein on Science and Scientists

     Jeremy Bernstein. Cranks, Quarks, and the Cosmos (1991) Bernstein wrote for The New Yorker and other magazines for many years. I liked his pieces then, and I like this compilation now. He’s a bit prissy, expressing doubt that “the merely personal” should be remarked in biographies of Schroeder, for example. Schroeder was a notorious womaniser. Bernstein’s modest about his insights into matters he doesn’t get, but very good at explaining what he knows. He’s a working physicist, and as such is careful to keep within his limits.
     He began his scientific career before the vastness of the Universe in space and time was understood. Cosmology was almost a fringe science, burdened with ignorance and poor data. It was the accidental discovery of the cosmic background radiation that shifted scientific opinion. This led to radio astronomy, and now the whole electromagnetic spectrum is exploited to make sense of what’s out there. Cosmology is a nice example of how better instruments lead to better data, and so not only lead to  confident insights, but also to answerable questions.
     His essays on the great physicists of the late 19th and early 20th century reminds one that quantum theory was accepted before there were good data to support it. It began with Planck’s quantised model of light. Now, its insights have become engineering principles.
     In one of his last pieces, Bernstein mentions global warming, and, touchingly, infers that we will change our way of life to avoid the worst effects. I think he would be appalled at the concentrated efforts to deny and distract from the threat.
     The compilation amounts to a history of science in the 20th century. Worth reading. ***

Canadian Politics in the 80s: cartoons by Wicks

Ben Wicks. The Second Ben Wicks Treasury (1987) Wicks invented Mavis and Bill, an Ottawa couple with political connections and insight, with a more or less cynical take on current Canadian political events. For example:

Mavis: How does Chretien feel about taking Turner’s job, bill?
Bill: Keen.
Mavis: How do you mean?
Bill: He’s not saying anything.
Mavis: Wow! He wants it as bad as that.
Bill: In the worst way.

At it best as good as Yes Minister, and a good primary record for a grad student aspiring to write the definitive history of Canadian politics in the 1980s. I enjoyed it, but I won’t keep it. **½

Offloading the Risk III: ARAMCO IPO fails to reach target

The New Yok Times reports that the ARAMCO IPO fell short of Saudi expectations.

"Investors balked..."

It seems that my assessment of the viability of the oil industry is more widely shared than I thought.

Am I a cynic? Sure. Ambrose Bierce's definition: "Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be."

Update 2023-03-03: Putin's War against Ukraine has upset earlier calculations about the fate of fossil fuels. In the long run, the war will delay the final collapse of that industry. Whether that collapse will take the form of a phasing out or just another part of a  general collapse of our civilization remains to be seen.

Offloading the risk II: Oil is cheaper than ever

 The Guardian published a report today on possible further cuts to OPEC oil production.

The 2019 oil prices varied from $55 to $75. (1) The 1950 oil prices were about $28. In 2019 dollars, that’s $300. So the 2019 prices are between 1/6 and 1/4 of the 1950 prices.

Verily, “oil is sloshing around” the world (See Offloading the Risk). No wonder ARAMCO is going public. At such low prices their profits must be tanking.

And with such cheap oil, the incentive to convert to renewables is reduced. That’s not good.

(1) See this page on Macrotrends.  Since the latest prices is shown in current dollars, the chart is not adjusted for inflation. The highest price shown is $164.64 in June 2008, or $18 in 1950 dollars, about 65% of the 1950 price.

The cost of externals: An accumulating debt

Steel, concrete, and climate change: the cost of zero-priced externals

New Scientist (November 16-22, 2019) has published an article showing the high carbon cost of making steel and cement, the two raw materials that make our techno-civilisation possible.

The article reports several projects to reduce the carbon cost. One is to use hydrogen instead of coal in blast furnaces. “If the economics work out”, that is. All these projects are priced at the actual costs of development and deployment. This makes them look expensive compared to traditional methods of making steel and cement. (1)

Steel and concrete are a prime example of how traditional economics has misstated the costs of our life style. Neo-liberal (Chicago school) economics prices externals at zero. Thus steel and cement have seemed to be cheap materials for making the things we want. In fact externals do have a price. We just haven’t bothered to work out good methods for pricing them, still less for paying them. (2)

As a species, we have evolved to use our environment as a freely available resource for making what we want, eg, spears. The cost of making these tools was the labour of making them. The cost to the ecosystems was ignored. Our ancestors didn’t notice or care that the tree they destroyed to make sticks for poking game animals to death meant that the ecosystem had to make another tree. As long as humans were a small component of the ecosystems, the long-term effects of our use of natural resources were minimal. (3)

However, the costs of externals accumulate. If we don’t pay them, they become a debt. Mother Nature always collects her debts. We either spend our resources now to mitigate and if possible reverse climate change, or we will pay with the loss of property and life.

(1) Concrete is made by using cement to bind the sand and gravel particles together. This process requires CO2, so some of the CO2 used to make cement is recovered from the air.

(2) Zero-priced externals mean that the goods are under-priced. The market works efficiently if and only if prices express costs accurately relative to each other. Mispriced goods distort the market, which leads to market failure.

(3) Human effects were actually not balanced by ecosystem recovery: archeologists have found evidence that agriculture began the climate warming cycle at least 7,000 years ago. Also, many local or regional extinctions of animals were caused by humans.

Gary Larson. The Far Side Gallery 4 (1993) Another lovely collection of Larson’s cartoons. Two samples below. ****

Creepy Cartoons by Gahan Wilson

Gahan Wilson. Playboy’s Gahan Wilson (1973) Gahan Wilson died a week or so ago: see the New York Times obit. So I took out my copy of this collection, and spent a pleasantly lugubrious hour enjoying his work. I like his mix of the macabre, satirical literalism, and insight into the dark paranoia that terrorised our childhoods. Like cartoonists in general, his work is underrated. Here’s one of the many cartoons that stuck with me. Its riff on the brain-in-a-jar hints at the terrifying truth better than most: The brain needs a body in order to generate the conscious self. The speech of this one is beginning to fracture: The doctors...say...they’ve never... seen...another case...quite...like...it. This brain will not be sane much longer.
    I think that any collection of Wilson’s work is worth more than a cursory look. ****

R. Cobb. Raw Sewage: Unprocessed Cartoons (1970) No longer in print, but worth searching for, this collection reminds us of several things: The Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The increasing damage caused by our overproduction of material goods. The tight grip that unexamined ideas have on us. The morphing of political principles into religious dogmas. And so on. And while some details of Cobb’s cartoons  fail to foresee the future, the theses are as valid today as they were fifty years ago. Our consumerist capitalism will destroy us. A bleak vision, but a necessary one. ****

Cobb died recently. New York Time obituary here.

David Feldman. When Do Fish Sleep? (1989) Second in Feldman’s series of “imponderables”, which attempt to answer those nagging questions that  our high school classes didn’t cover. Such as the title question. Do fish sleep? Well, they do exhibit episodes of near-zero activity, which I suppose could be seen as sleep. Wrasses cover themselves in a thick blanket of mucus, not to keep warm, but to obliterate their odour, which would attract predators.
     A nicely done potato chip book, with an index, which makes it a useful reference for the times when you can’t be bothered to start up your device and search online. Online searching for fishes’ sleep patterns offers so many hits that deciding which one to open may be more trouble than opening the index in this book and finding the answer on page 161 to 162.
     I like these books (and many others like them, for example the urban legend compendiums), hence ***

Offloading the Risk: ARAMCO goes public

 

Observing when private companies "go public", I've come to what (I think) is an obvious conclusion:

No one sells a business if they expect it to provide risk-free cash for the foreseeable future.

Update 2019 11 15: CBC's The Current a few minutes ago aired a panel discussion about the ARAMCO IPO. One of the panelists pointed out that oil prices are depressed, and likely to remain so. He used the phrase "oil sloshing around".

Another thought (2019 11 22): If we manage to convert to non-fossil fuels in time to prevent our civilisation's collapse, demand for oil will collapse. If our civilisation collapses, demand for oil will collapse (and the  oil-transport infrastructure will cease to function). Either way, there will be no more profit for ARAMCO. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia has a lot of sun-soaked desert, ideal for solar power arrays.
     The only question left to answer is how fast the oil industry will decline to near-zero. That answer is included in the answer to how fast the climate will change, and how fast we can reduce the effects.

Update 2020 03 17: David Olive writing in the Toronto Star points out that oil is a dying business, and that it's past time for Alberta to diversify its economy. About a year and  a half ago, I said much the same thing on Facebook, and was attacked for "hating Alberta." And on this blog, I made the same points as Olive three years ago: https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com/2016/12/pipelines-and-alberta-economy.html

See also my comments on the cost of cleaning up Alberta's oil and gas wells: https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com/2019/04/alberta-and-oil-or-subsidies-forever.html

Curious buit rarely useful advice

Ian Pindar, ed.  How to Cook A Hippopotamus (Folio Society, 2006) A collection of advice and instruction, ranging from how to cure a cold to how to practice ventriloquism. As for cooked hippo, you boil the chunk you want to eat, then “souse it in vinegar, with chopped onions and cayenne pepper.” In short, as with any wild meat, overwhelm its flavour with strong spices.
     Advice books are older than the Bible (which is a compilation and redaction of many earlier works). Following Gutenberg’s (re-)discovery of printing with movable type, one of the earliest international best-sellers was Castiglione’s The Courtier (1508-1529, yes, it took 20 years to write), which was translated into all the principal European languages, and influenced a slew of successors. That is, imitators shamelessly stole from it. That’s been the method of composing advice books ever since, and next to cookbooks, they form the most reliably profitable product of the great publishing houses of the Galaxy.

    This compilation will save the reader the tedium of searching for useful tidbits, and for that reason alone is worth seeking out. I received it as a gift, and have consulted it several times. I have, however, followed none of its advice. ***

Innumeracy rampant: Suppose average class size were 25

Innumeracy 2: If average class size were 25 students

Let’s suppose the Ontario Secondary Teachers took the Ford government at its word, and negotiated an average class size of 25 students. (1)

Given a high school of 1120 students (the number I used in Innumeracy 1).
Number of classes would be 1120/25, or 44.8, or 45 in round numbers. So we would need 45 teachers for those classes.

But in any one period, 1 in 5 teachers has a prep period (also used for “standby”, or emergency supervision). So we would need 45 x 1.25 = 56.25 teachers to cover a full timetable. We would also need a principal, a vice-principal, and three guidance counsellors. (2)

That comes to a total of 61.25 teaching staff. (The 0.25 teacher would be one hired to teach one class.)

That results in a student-teacher ratio of 1120/61.25, or 18.3:1. That’s well below the 22.5:1 that the Ford government decided to raise to 28:1. (3)

Footnotes

(1) In the past, school boards have resisted average class size numbers. They did the arithmetic, and understood what it actually meant.

(2) Some school boards would add a half-time vice-principal, which would bring the staffing total to 61.75, and a student teacher ratio of 18.2.

(3) Because some classes will be capped around 22 to 24 because of safety or limited facilities, the larger classes would be over 30.

Innumeracy rampant: Student-teacher ratio and average class size

Innumeracy 1: Why the Student-Teacher ratio is not the Average Class Size.

The Toronto Star and the CBC constantly use “average class size” when reporting education news. For example, the Toronto Star recently reported that the Ontario Minister of Education was offering to reduce the average class size from 28 to 25. He did no such thing. He offered to reduce the student-teacher ratio, which is something quite different.

Here’s an example showing the difference, using the 28:1 ratio that the Ford government initially mandated.

Given: A high school of 1120 students.

At 28:1, this school will be assigned 1120/28, or 40 teachers.

Of these 40 teachers, one is a principal, one is a vice-principal, three are guidance counsellors (1).

Thus there are 35 teachers available for classroom teaching. A teacher is assigned 4 teaching periods in a 5-period day. Therefore at any given time, 28 teachers are in class, and 7 have a preparation period (2). This means that the average class size is 1120/28, which is 40 students per class, not 28. (3) (4).

The 22.5:1 ratio that existed prior or the Ford government’s changes came about because of attempts to keep average class sizes below 30. Even so, class sizes above 30 were common.

Footnotes:

(1) The Provincial average is 396 students per guidance counsellor. In larger schools, there will be two vice-principals.

(2) If an emergency absence occurs, a teacher may have to do a “standby” during a prep period.

(3) Special education classes are capped at 20 students. Safety regulations limit lab and shop classes, generally around 24. Some other classes (music, arts) are limited by the available space and supplies, generally also around 24. Thus, the remaining classes will be well above 40 students per class.

(4) Senior students may qualify for “spares”, but these days most opt for taking additional courses instead, so as to be better perpared for university or college.

Error corrected 20191102

Anonymous. The First Country Life Picture Book of Britain (Revised third Edition 1953) Ninety superbly printed photographs, illustrating mostly towns, villages, and landscapes. Large format, technically excellent and well composed photos, which don’t pretend to do anything other than show you their subjects. First published in 1937, and by that date already more of a nostalgic record of the Britain that was. About ten years earlier, Roye England had arrived in England from Australia, and was horrified that the English didn’t value their rural heritage. His nostalgia for an England he never knew resulted in Pendon, one of the best public model railways anywhere.
     The magazine Country Life celebrated the upper middle and upper class county. Up to half of its pages were given over to real estate adverts, many half page, also superbly printed, which extolled the properties as ancient infrastructure ideal for supporting the country gentleman’s lifestyle. My grandparents “took it”, as they said, in large part I think because Grandpa was a realtor and needed to know the market.
     I thoroughly enjoyed this book. About half a dozen of the photos showed places or buildings that I visited when my Uncle took us on extended Sunday drives in search of surviving royal arms in Midlands country churches. ***

Post 2019 election comment

The election confirmed regional divisions. Alberta especially feels aggrieved that the rest of Canada doesn't want to bail them out. Yet Alberta is still better off than the rest of Canada, despite its oil-patch downturn. It also has a far more diversified economy than the oil-funded spin doctors will ever admit. It has reliable wind power, the knowledge base for a thriving high-tech economy,  and oil capital sloshing around looking in the wrong places for investment. Its agriculture thrives. In other words, Alberta is well-placed to lead Canada in the conversion from oil to renewables. It should begin to do so.

Quebec's Bloc will push Quebec interests and priorities. Quebec like Ontario, has a nearly green electric grid. both export much of their electricity, and could export more. Both  have a sound manufacturing and service economy. Both have the knowledge base, and Ontario the resources,  for a high tech sector that could compete internationally. IOW, these Provinces could co-operate wth Alberta in rebuilding Canada's economy. They should begin to do so.

Is the above image of a rosy future justified? Objectively considered, yes. However, regional grievances could, I fear, prevent the inter-Provincial co-operation that would heal those grievances. I hope  that co-operation and healing will happen. All it takes a few people to start talking to each other instead of past each other

 William Cole, ed. The Punch Line (1968) A collection Punch cartoons from the 1960s. Funny, wry, satirical, humorous, allusive, straightforward, in short whatever your desire in a cartoon, you’ll find some here. The book shows off twenty-five Punch regulars, many of whom also drew for The New Yorker. Cartoons are and odd kind of art: they rely on cultural knowledge, sometimes esoteric. Much of their meaning is contained in the bits and bobs included in the drawing, and even in the shapes of the lines used to mark the expression on a face or the attitude of a body. Words point the point of the drawing, but often aren’t needed. Stereotypes abound: gardeners wear shabby pants well past their best before dates. Racy women have almond eyes and lush lips. Snooty people look down their noses. Husbands often cringe. And so on. In fact, cartoons remind us that stereotypes are used to signal status, character, personality, life-style, and so on. They often don’t work as intended, or even do harm, because they simplify, and because they change more slowly than the culture that made appropriate sense of them in the past.    
     In their use of cultural signals cartoons resemble Medieval and Renaissance pictures, which were made for people who could read the symbols included in the image. How much contemporary cultural knowledge do we need to understand the art of our own time? I’d say, a lot. We don’t realise how much until we see the art of a generation or two past. Art marks generational change as much as fashion does, but fashion lags, and usually has to catch up to art. I liked all the cartoons in this book, but some more than others. Here’s one of my favourites. The caption reads "Come back - I haven't finished with you yet! "

The hidden expense of private sector bueaucrats

Hershel Hardin. The New Bureaucracy (1991) A thorough account of the state of bureaucracy in the private sector, where its malign and expensive effects are well hidden. The private sector strenuously denies the existence of its bureaucracy, successfully diverting attention and anger to government, which actually costs us a lot less. Chapter 1 reviews the escalation of CEO and other senior management pay. Nowadays, almost 30 years later, Hardin’s figures would water eyes even more. The rest of the book surveys the structure and operation of the bureaucracy piece by piece. By turns amusing and appalling.
     I encountered the private bureaucracy in one of my first summer jobs, but I didn’t realise it at the time. I worked for Linde Gases, then a subsidiary of Union Carbide (which was done in by the release of poisonous gases from its plant in Bhopal, India). I discovered that each invoice or “gas shipping order” cost the company about $8 from placing an order for a new batch until its eventual destruction. Every day, I wrote up several of these GSOs for customers buying about $6 worth of oxygen and acetylene. I suppose the company thought that the information was worth $2. I began to wonder about the cost of moving information within a corporation, and concluded that beyond a rather small size, an organisation spent more of its resources moving information than providing goods and services for its customers.
     A worthwhile book. Read it. ***

Four puzzles for Nero Wolfe, Two books.

    Rex Stout. Three Witnesses (1956) Three short stories, Goodwin does his usual good work reporting the investigation step by step, but this time the reader figures the plot well before he does. Nero Wolfe also seems a bit slow on the uptake. In one of the stories, Wolf and Goodwin are possible witnesses. Wolfe figures that the prosecution is wrong, but their case rests in part on his testimony. He doesn’t want to contribute to a miscarriage of justice, so he absconds and within about 36 hours produces the real culprit, a feat that also renders moot the charge of contempt of court.
     One attraction in Stout’s books is the careful adherence to law and process. Goodwin and Wolfe skate on pretty thin ice sometimes, but their knowledge of the rules helps them avoid falling through. I have no idea whether their ploys would work in real life, but they do raise the entertainment value. I’m a fan, so my rating may be higher than yours. ***

   Rex Stout. And Be A Villain (1948) Wolfe’s bank account is low, so he offers to find the murderer of a radio talkshow guest. A nicely complicated plot, including unusual co-operation with the police, and miscellaneous digs at the publicity racket, advertising, the effects of fandom, etc. We don’t learn much more about Wolfe and Goodwin, but since the secondary characters are as well drawn as these two, we hardly notice the cardboard. Not up Stout’s usual standard, I think. **½

Does God Exist? (Hitchens on God and religion)

Christopher Hitchens. God is Not Great (2007)
    Search online for “unanswerable questions”, and you’ll find many websites. You’ll also find a lot of nonsense. Many unanswerable questions are merely badly phrased. Or the asker doesn’t understand its terms. For example, Thomas Frey asks Why do logic and reason fail to explain that which is true? Let the confusing use of “explain” go, and parse the question as about the failure of logic to guarantee truth. Then the answer is that logic can guarantee only that a conclusion follows validly from its premises. Logic cannot tell you that the premises are true. Hence it cannot tell you that a conclusion is true. And that, to make a rather large jump, is why God’s existence is unprovable. So is God's non-existence.
    Does God exist? I don’t know what that question means. Does the Christian god exist? Which Christian god? What about the Muslim god? Again, which one?
     The question may seem clearer if we ask about the gods of polytheistic religions. Does Zeus exist? Aphrodite? Hermes? Etc? And what about Thor? Osiris? Believers in these ancient religions certainly believed these gods existed. Like believers in the monotheisms, they also believed that their god(s) could and would intervene in the natural world, and to one’s advantage if properly propitiated. It was very handy to have some god on your side.
    I think these days most people assume they are referring to the same entity as anyone or everyone else: a nature- or reality-transcending entity which caused this limited reality to come into being. Presumably, we all have the same concept in mind when we ask the question. That’s clearly not so. If it were, there would be no arguments about what "god" means, still less about what "god" wants us to do.
     It looks like the only answerable form of the question is Does this god exist? And the answer to that question is always the same: No. Because if God is transcendent by definition (as theists claim), and if you admit (as theists do) that God is beyond human understanding, then your and my concepts of God are so far from anything resembling adequacy that they are not even wrong.
    Which in turn means that any discussion about God's existence will be about the inadequacy of someone’s concept of God. This is the task that Hitchens has set himself, and he succeeds brilliantly. His discussion implies that what matters is not whether some god exists, but what your concept of God leads you or permits you to do. He notes the sad fact that religious people generally conceive of a god that allows (or more commonly commands) them to act on their worst impulses to exert power and control over other people. In a word, to commit evil.
    There is a difference between faith and religion. Faith (as its root meaning in Latin should remind us) is trust. Trust in what? In the most abstract and general terms, trust that our lives have meaning because we live them with our loved ones, and because we can understand and delight in the world. This faith implies, I think, that we ought to do all we can to prevent evil, and to comfort and help each other when natural catastrophe overwhelms us. How you express that faith is up to you. Most people prefer to express it in religious terms, and that's why faith is too often replaced with religion. We make idols of our beliefs.
    Hitchens uses “religion” throughout. I prefer “religionism”, by which I mean the attitude that one’s religion is the only true and complete account of who and what "god" is and what he/she/it wants from us. That attitude is the pride of a very clever animal asserting that it has god-like knowledge of good and evil. Hitchens might have parsed the Genesis story of the Fall as agreeing with his critique of religionism. Since he didn’t do so, I’ve done it for him. I’ll also note that Pride is considered the first and greatest of sins, which encompasses all others. Would that the religionists understood this.
    Worth reading. ****
    Footnote: Unanswerable questions are everywhere. Here are 60 of them. Some edits for clarity made 2019 11 15.

David Howarth. 1066: The Year of the Conquest (1977) Howarth wants us to understand how William the Bastard’s invasion of England came about, and how the pre-Conquest way of life was changed. The Conquest was not a sure thing: the odds were against William. He didn’t win the Battle of Hastings, Harold lost it, along with his life. What sources we have of the country’s mood after the battle suggests that it surrendered rather than resist William’s demands. Resistance might have worn William down.
     Howarth has read the sources, and the attempts by historians to tease out the facts from the contradictory and propagandist accounts of William’s life. He suggests that understanding the psychology of the antagonists is key to understanding why William succeeded despite the odds against him. He believes that Harold lost his will to fight when he saw that William was carrying the Pope’s banner, and learned that the Pope had ruled in favour of William’s claim. This is I think as plausible an explanation of Harold’s failure to rout William’s troops, despite several chances to do so.
     Horwath mourns th Anglo-Saxon polity that might have been, thus illustrating the persistent English nostalgia for an England that never was. Here it is 40 years later, and the same nostalgia, now crossed with a virulently anti-foreign strain, has given us the faux-memory of Empire that drives Brexit.
     Well done, and enjoyable, not least because of its non-academic tone. ***

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. (2015) When to Rob A Bank A collection of blog posts. If you liked Freakonomics, you’ll like this book. The posts cover a few of the same patches as that book and its successor Superfreakonomics, some new ones, and adds random personal musings. They also often ignore non-monetary incentives, even when the data makes it plain that money wasn’t the only or even the primary attractor. That is the only (and major) failing of this entertaining and enlightening collection.
     Oh, about bank robberies: Per FBI data, there are about 20% more bank robberies on Fridays than Mondays. Make of that what you will. And embezzlers don’t dare take vacations, because their scams would easily be discovered by whoever covered their job. So a zealous bank employee who never takes vacations is likely on the take.
     An index makes this a handy reference work when you want to refresh your memory of some oddity niggling away at the back of your memory. ***

Provocative entertainment: Hitchens arguing

Christopher Hitchens. Arguably: Essays (2011) Published the year before his death, the book is a compendium of pieces Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair, Slate, Newsweek, and other periodicals. Hitchens doesn’t like humbug, stupidity, fraud, cruelty, and other evils. He likes compassion, art, sense, democracy, peace, food, friends, literature, and other good things. He rails against the evils done in the name of religion, distrusts and hates all ideology, despises weakness that arms itself with a gun, and the British royal family. The latter was surely the deciding reason to migrate ot the USA and become a citizen. His love for America gave him reason to point at and criticise its failures to live up to its ideals. He was a journalist, and saw many of the horrors of the 20th century firsthand. His education at Oxford (he read philosophy, politics, and economics) gave him the habit and skills of thorough reading. He was a lifelong socialist, and hated both left and right ideologies.    
Despite his rage at the cruelty and folly of humankind, most of his writing is witty and engaging. If you find this book, read it. ****

Some ruminations about school

People who find school easy (roughly the top 10%) often have trouble at college and university, even if they've had to do homework. I was one such (in high school, I did all my math homework between classes), and had to take a year off after my 2nd University year. That also gave me some time to reflect on what I really wanted to do. It would have been better to have taken that year immediately after high school.

School is easy for some people because (even when the program is "streamed" by ability) the curriculum has to be aimed at the average student. But there is huge variation in both age (hence cognitive development), and innate and acquired abilities. In addition, human development is not a nice steady progress. It's extremely variable, both over time and in physical, cognitive, and emotional qualities. What a kid cannot learn in February, they may well have been able to learn in September, and vice versa. Not to mention that family life, socioeconomic environment, random crises, etc increase already existing differences among students.

The surprising thing is that the schools do as good a job as they do. In my experience that has more to do with the student-teacher relationship than anything else. If you like kids, like teaching, and like your subject, the students will co-operate with you and learn as well as they can.

Politically, the biggest problem IMO is that people seem to think "teach" is a transitive verb, like "paint". It ain't. If you paint a wall, it's painted, and it stays painted. If you teach a kid, they may or may not learn, and will probably forget most of what they've learned anyhow.

IOW, "teach" is what a teacher does and "learn" is what a student does. These two verbs together describe a complementary, symbiotic almost, relationship. If that relationship fails in some way, you have a problem. However, the critics of schools apparently want some kind of people-proof method, that, if applied correctly, will turn out the widgets, er, sorry, _graduates_ they want.

Based on a Usenet post 20190908; edited 20190910 and 20191015

Gladwell on misunderstanding strangers

Recently, The Guardian and the CBC both had interviews wth Gladwell about our difficulty communicating with strangers. One of his theses is that we can’t reliably tell when someone is lying.

I think our inability to perceive lies comes with a matching skill: the ability to hide the truth. Gladwell points to our need to trust each other. It seems to me that this requires the ability to hide anything that might cause distrust. So we have evolved the ability to hide large swaths of ourselves.

All human societies operate on codes of courtesy. To be polite is to pretend that what we see is what we get. It's a mutual acceptance of privacy: I won't try to find out what you're hiding if you don't try to find out what I'm hiding. We wear masks, the masks of respectability and trustworthiness. Gladwell explores how those masks differ from one society to another, and the inevitable misunderstandings caused by those differences.

Politics as it Might Be: Political Science Fiction

     Martin Greenberg & Patricia Warrick. Political Science Fiction (1974) A college textbook, complete with introductory notes to each story, designed to guide the student through the difficulties of unfamiliar ideas. Ignore those bits, and you have an interesting and sometimes entertaining collection of short stories. The ideologies of the Cold War intrude on some of the stories, which makes them not only dated but silly.
     A handful of classics redeem the collection, such as Gordon Dickson’s Call Him Lord, in which the Emperor's eldest son visits Earth to be tested, and fails. Or Alfred Bester’s Disappearing Act, a nicely done satire on the futility of practical solutions. Or Isaac Asimov’s Franchise, in which a single, statistically normal, citizen is selected, whose answers to questions will determine who is elected President.
    All in all, an entertaining read. Out of print of course, but worth picking up if you find a copy. ** to ****

John Allen, the Genius of Monterey

     Linn Westcott. Model Railroading with John Allen (1981) The first few signs of Allen’s genius were few and hardly noticed: a few photos, and a couple of articles in the model railroad magazines in the 1940s. Then people took notice, and editors solicited more photos and manuscripts. By the early 1960s, John Allen was famous among model railroaders. His Gorre and Daphetid demonstrated what Frank Ellison had pioneered in America: that a well-designed layout was a combination of visual and operational concepts whose purpose was to provide the operator (and casual visitor) with the impression of a complete world. The goal was plausibility. Layout designers have taken this principle to heart ever since, whether the layout was based on the owner’s imagined fantasy or on some slice of actual railroad.
     The Gorre and Daphetid is a fictional bridge line across the Akinbak mountain range, somewhere in western America. It provides vital local transportation in an area with few and dangerously steep and winding roads. It’s not much of a money-maker, and its management has bought most of its rolling stock secondhand. Passenger traffic serves mostly tourists who appreciate the spectacular bridges and scenery.
     Westcott gives us a history of Allen’s layouts, an overview of the final version, information about rolling stock and operations, and a glimpse of Allen himself. Allen was friendly and enjoyed showing off his work, but he was an intensely private man. His work must represent the person.
     Allen died in 1973, and his house burnt down a few days later. Little of his work was salvageable. It lives on in his photographs and a short film. Westcott himself died in 1980 while editing the final version of his book. Bob Hayden led the editing team that put Westcott’s manuscript into print.
     The production standard is very high. Westcott’s style is clear and conversational. The book is out of print, but is worth a search. ****
    There are several websites devoted to John Allen and the Gorre and Daphetid. A search will find texts, pictures and the short video. George Sellios's Franklin and South Manchester was inspired by John Allen's work. Through his Fine Scale Miniatures company, Sellios offfered several kits based on the GD, beginning with a wood water tank. 

Reaility: It is what it is.

Do We See Reality? By Donald Hoffman
(New Scientist, Vol 243, Number 3241, pp. 34-17)

Of course not. As Hoffman is at pains to point out, we see an image constructed by our brains. But in his discussion, I think he mistakes image for object.

“Reality is virtual” reads a subhead. No, it’s not. Reality is what it is. Our image of it is virtual. More precisely, our experience of reality is virtual. And what exactly is this virtual image? It’s patterns abstracted from the flood of data we take in with our senses.

Abstraction begins with the senses, which filter the data. We sense a very narrow band of electromagnetic radiation as light. We sense an even narrower band as heat. We sense a small fraction of the compounds that impinge on our noses and tongues. We sense our bodily movements with varying degrees of precision. And so on. More tellingly, we do not consciously perceive most of the sensory data transmitted to our brains. Hoffmman is right: our images of the world were and are constructed to foster survival. But that doesn’t mean the images are false. They are merely differently incomplete, and abbreviated. They consist as much of tokens as of representations, maybe more. They are simplified versions.

In attempts to understand “what reality really is” (what an odd collocation of words!), we use the methods of science. And here, something strange happens. We take our built-in facilty of abstracting patterns from the data as a method of arriving at “deeper truths.” Physicists claim that the most abstract patterns, the ones describable only in mathematics, are more true than any others. It’s obvious, I think, that what we perceive of the world is a highly edited, multi-level collection of not too carefully constructed represenations of reality. The notion that the most highly abstracted ones are the most true is, to my mind, exceedingly strange.

The fact is that abstraction occurs at many levels. It begins with sensation, which becomes perception, which becomes data. Data are organised into information. We combine information into knowledge, and knowledge affords insight. Insight permits understanding, which enables theory. Abstract the patterns of theory, and you may gain wisdom.

That chain of abstraction levels is what make our grasp of reality human. It’s what has enabled us to alter and exploit the environment to suit ourselves. That none of us achieve more than a modest level of wisdom may be our undoing: it’s difficult to accept that we must deny ourselves so many of our achievements if we wish our species to survive.

A haiku

Haiku
Words float on the air
like smoke and dry leaves.
Memory fails me.

Also posted on the Poems page.

Trump the Real Estate Guy Part 2

The Guardian reports that Trump cancelled his Denmark trip after Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Prime Minister, said Greenland was not for sale. And after all the nice things Trump said about them, too

Update:
The Danes aren't happy about Trump's actions.

Stalingrad: The Pity and the Terror

     Antony Beevor.  Stalingrad (1998) One of my uncles went missing at Stalingrad, so my reading of this book was coloured by that knowledge. What stands out most to me is the appalling mistakes made by Hitler, and the toadying of the careerist generals who put their careers ahead of their loyalty to the Nation. And of course there were generals who believed the Nazi race theories. They were Prussians; the Prussian military caste was supposedly raised to put the Nation first.

     The other take-aways simply make that military betrayal all the more poignant. The siege was a battle of attrition. The Russians won because they could support their supply lines better than the Germans could; because they produced more materiel (a fact that the Nazi-imbued command couldn’t believe); because they were willing to sacrifice their men; and because Hitler and his general staff understood neither the sheer size of Russia, nor the violence of the Russian winter. Like Napoleon’s, their conception of the battle field was limited by their circumscribed European experience.
     In the end, the battle cost about one million lives, most of them soldiers. The city was reduced to rubble. And Hitler, supported by a general staff and  Nazi hierarchy that would not disobey his increasingly crazy commands, prolonged the war and the slaughter for another two years.
     Beevor tells his story clearly, but it helps to have the maps at hand while reading. It would also help to have coloured maps, and more of them. Still, the shape of the battle and siege are clear enough on a first reading.  I won’t read this book again, though. Beevor includes many verbatim reports gleaned from written records and interviews. These, even more than the accounts of the troop movements, bring the waste of Stalingrad to vivid life, and death.
     I don’t want to think about what happened to my uncle. He was a Lutheran pastor, who volunteered as a private because he didn’t want the officer rank of chaplain to come between him and the men he expected to serve. Less than 10% of the 5th Army eventually returned. These men brought what news they could, but much of it was garbled, or incomplete, or little more than a name. My uncle may have survived the siege. If he did, he did not survive Siberia.
     Recommended. ****

Rumpole's Creator

   John Mortimer.   Clinging to the Wreckage (1982) A re-read, and just as exhilarating and moving as the first time. Mortimer’s style is anecdotal: he’s a story teller, but an artful one, who knows how to bring the story to a point, a punch-line, or a twist that recasts the whole meaning of what he has told. The ambience is wry amusement at the follies of being human, and melancholy regret for the losses that make up our lives.

     The reminiscences about his father were made into a TV show, Voyage Round My Father, which I’ve seen, and recommend. Available on Youtube.
     Mortimer was apparently a good lawyer. His practice clearly informed Rumpole of the Bailey, which has the same combination of amusement and regret as this book. He was married twice, and had four children. He’s reticent about the details of his private life; the impression is of the same mix of joy and frustration that most of us know. Wikipedia gives more information.
     This book is worth reading in part because it’s a witness to England as it was between the world wars and after the second one. For Rumpole fans, it’s worth reading in any case. ****

Trump the Real Estate guy

So Trump has confirmed he's considering buying Greenland.

ROTFLMAO.

He's become the master of unwitting self-mockery. Really, you can't make this stuff up. Nobody will ever take him seriously again.

Update 20200728: I have underestimated the, um. loyalty of his followers.

Need to tweet? No phone? No problem: Use the fridge.

The Guardian reports that a teen's tweets from her smart fridge went viral.

If the fridge can be used to send tweets, you can bet that it's being used to monitor the family's refrigeration habits. That data is valuable to advertisers, which can use it to "suggest" that some supplies need to be replenished....

Because you see, tweeting requires a link that works in both directions. So if the frdige can be used to send data out, it can also be used to send data in. And that, my friends, is the real purpose of smart devices.

Say Hello to Alexa..

Update: This news item has been  outed as fake. As you can see above, I was fooled, too. The effect of too much confidence in my expertise,

Mother and Child Reunion: Dactylografies

  

     2019-08-08 Dactylografies (Timber Village Museum, Blind River. Until September 3, 2019) Jonathan Brodbeck saw his mother Isabelle Michaud using her typewriter (she likes the tactility of the machine). He decided he wanted to use it too, and began writing notes about his daily life. He’s on the Asperger’s spectrum, and expressing himself was highly unusual. Isabelle, with his permission, began making abstract paintings incorporating his typewritten notes.
     She uses acrylics on 2ftx4ft mahogany plywood intended as floor underlay. She likes the texture created by the interaction between brush, wash, paint, and wood. So do I. Some of her paintings include organic forms based on the typewriter: beasties with scrawny necks and round, blank heads, like typewriter keys transformed and given life. Most of the paintings use colour fields, some randomly shaped, some rectangular, some indefinite, made with wash or paint. The colours somehow relate to Jonathan’s words, an effect I can’t account for.
     I liked the show. We met Jonathan and Isabelle there. They are interesting people. Recommended ****

Why Crack Dealers Live with Their Moms (Freakonomics, 2006 edition)

     Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner. Freakonomics (2006, expanded edition). A re-read, and just as much fun as the first time around. Almost in one sitting, it's that good. This edition is the expanded one of 2006, with the original New York Times Magazine article, a handful of columns written by Levitt and Dubner, some blog entries, and extensive Notes.
     I was again impressed by the way Levitt was able to find data that would answer his questions. However, most data out there can't be used the way Levitt uses it. Just because the data is related to a question doesn’t mean it can be used to answer it. I was a teacher, and the perennial question is how to evaluate students. For example, how would you prove that an objective test measures insight and understanding? What scores would show mastery of content? Are essays a better instrument? Is it meaningful to compare students to each other? Etc.
     Some of those questions are matters of principle. I don’t think comparative grading tells you much, but that’s what teachers do. Claiming that a student’s performance is measured against some expected standard just interposes a layer of obfuscation, which may soothe the teacher’s conscience, and certainly reassures parents. But grades merely quantify two features: the student’s stage of development; and their family’s socio-economic status.
     Other questions are worth asking, but answers require data sets that are hard to come by. For example, it’s fairly obvious that the test questions must relate to the insights we wish to measure. It’s not obvious how such questions should be framed. Nor is it obvious how to determine whether the results tell us anything useful about anything else, such as the student’s future performance. What data we have show that test results correlate most strongly with postal codes, which in turn identify neighbourhoods, which in turn correlate with socio-economic status.
     As you see, Freakonomics prompts musings and questions. That alone makes it worth reading. It’s well written, entertaining, and mind-stretching. ****
     Footnote: Many years ago, I administered a series of vocabulary tests to my classes. I found that my students consistently picked the same "incorrect" answers for some words. The reason? Subtle differences between the regional dialects spoken by my students and the test makers.

Memoirish Stories by Mantel

Hilary Mantel. The Assassination of Mrs Thatcher (2014) Hilary Mantel’s reputation rests on her novels. Wolf Hall was adapted for television, see my review elsewhere on this blog. I read nothing by her until I found this book in our Food Bank Permanent Yard Sale. Mantel is very good at creating character. The first story was first published at a memoir, which I suppose trained her skills at (re-)imagining the first person narrator. Her plots have endings rather than resolutions. They feel like memoirs.
      Even the title story doesn’t get anywhere: it stops just before the assassin squeezes the trigger. But the banal details (he asks for a cup of tea) of everyday life create a sense of reality that any writer would be happy to achieve. The collection provided a couple of hours of entertainment, worth well more than $1 I paid for the book. ** to ***

Poems

I see no one has visited the Poems page. I added several poems today. Go have a look. Comment if you like (or don't like) them.

2019-08-18: OK, I've added this collage (it's an ATC). Maybe it relates to one of my poems, maybe not. Check for yourself. 

 

Truth and Memory

"Truth" is a slippery concept. How do you know the photo you're looking at shows your Auntie in her wedding dress? Mostly because the face resembles the one you recall. IOW, your mental image of her matches the photo well enough that you are willing to accept the photo as described by your family. Your memories of her make the photo a true image.

Truth isn't "out there". It’s "in here". It's a property of representations of the world. Pictures, descriptions, theories, etc. How do you know one such is  true? Because it matches what you imagine to be reality. That image of reality is created from your memories of your experience.

Does that mean you can't rely on what you read and see in the media? No. It just means you need to think slow and analyse. That's a difficult habit to acquire.

2019-08-03

Climate is a chaotic system

     Climate is a chaotic system. It consists of a web of interconnected feedback loops. This makes it difficult to model precisely, since some feedback loops cancel the effects of other loops, and some feedback loops enhance the effects of other loops, and all of them are entangled with two or more other feedback loops. Chaotic system are characterised by non-linear relations between causes and effects. Small (sometimes very small) changes in some factor can become magnified into huge effects.

Some chaotic systems cycle through a series of states ("the seasons") that vary within some range but average out over time (number of cycles). This average is called the attractor. "Regression to the mean" is a common effect: Think of a baseball pitcher's performance over time. Pitching is the influenced by many factors, most of which affect each other. The pitcher's performance is a chaotic system: sometimes he's hot, sometimes he's not, most of the time he performs near his average level.

However, if some factor or factors exceed some limit (too much or too little) the whole system will shift into a new series of states, some or all of which are radically different from the previous ones.

There is no question that burning fossil fuels has increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, now approaching double the concentration of pre-Industrial Revolution levels. This is having an effect on climate (ie, on annual weather cycles). The important questions IMO are:
a) How fast is this happening?
b) Is it happening faster in some climate zones than others?
c) How far will it go?

Answer to a) Unknown, but climate models so far have understated the expected changes. This is shown in:

Answer to b) Yes. For example the Arctic: Predictions of the extent of summer seas ice (the extent of summer sea ice melting) have underestimated the melting. The general trend is faster melting than predicted by the models available at the time.

Answer to c) Nobody knows for sure how far climate change will go. Models are continually updated and tested with new data (both historical and current). Reserach uncovers new feedback loops. As these models get better they imply several (from my POV) important conclusions:

1) Climate can change very rapidly from one normal limit to the other (look up Little Ice Age).

2) Seasonal weather patterns can change in opposite directions;

3) Seasonal weather patterns can go from one extreme to the other within a year or two.

3) There's a lag between the warming effects of CO2 and climate change because of heat-sinks (chief of which is the ocean: over half of the recent rise in ocean levels is caused by the expansion of water as the oceans warmed up).

It's true that climate models aren't good enough to satisfy the popular yearning for "near certainty" in their predictions. But the certainty is higher than required in a civil law case ("balance of probabilities"), and IMO close to that required in a criminal case ("beyond reasonable doubt, emphasis on "reasonable").

Folly in high places: Lews Lapham's Age of Folly

     Lewis Lapham. Age of Folly: America Abandons its Democracy (2016) Lapham’s deep knowledge of literature and the Classics enable him to see below the surface of things as they seem. His writing informs, educates, delights, and annoys. Sometimes it infuriates, as when he recounts his interview with a CIA hiring board of three young Yale  men who asked him about tennis and a well-known debutante. These were the people who messed up the USA’s international politics in the last century, and their heirs are doing a fine job of emulating them in this one.
     Lapham was born into the American aristocracy, which has given him an intimate and personal knowledge of the oligarchy that has come to rule that unhappy land. For example, in chapter 22, Propaganda Mill, he outlines the history of the right-wing conspiracy to shift US politics away from its centre to the right. We live with the results. Will American democracy survive? Right now, I think the odds are against it.
   Much of the book is commentary on the Bush years. 15 to 20 years later, Lapham’s observations have the aura of prophecy.
     No matter what your politics, you will be offended. I think that’s the highest recommendation for a book about contemporary life. ****

Boris Johnson

Britain has becone a Monty Python skit.

Murder in the graveyard: Innocent Grave by Peter Robinson

     Peter Robinson. Innocent Graves (1997) The vicar’s wife, drunk on wine and guilt, talking to the angel on the mausoleum in the graveyard, discovers the body of 16-year-old Deborah Harrison. Owen Pierce, a stranger seen nearby, becomes the prime suspect. Banks’s work is complicated by class and privilege, a status-conscious Chief Constable, witnesses whose personal problems fracture their evidence, the arrival of a new Detective Inspector who has every qualification except a sense of what people are really like. A second murder complicates the case even more. The usual obstacles.
    
     Robinson handles the linked plots with his usual skill. This is a series I’ve been enjoying. I’ve found not quite half of the books here and there, and am reading them in writing order. Well done. ***