The report of the Amazon outage led me to reflect on the Internet and other things.

The Internet was devised to be resilient, hence its decentralised design, and its multi-path topology. DARPA (the Pentagon’s research & development branch) paid for it. Then (of course) the private sector took it. Now we have Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc violating the principle of decentralisation. That clearly makes the internet less resilient. The outage occurred in one of Amazon’s server centres, but if affected all of its network, and caused problems to millions of its customers.

The outage demonstrates the weakness or flaw of centralised control. Yet humans repeatedly strive to achieve just that. The ultimate centralised control in politics is totalitarianism, usually realised in a dictatorship. But oligarchy serves the purpose well enough that it’s the most common form of polity. Democracy touted as a system of voting for the leaders hides that unpleasant fact.

I think that democracy is better defined as a system of reaching consensus. Such systems have existed on the tribal and village level. At the tribal level, centralised control is reserved for war, when reaching consensus would take too long, and so the efficiency of a war chief as leader is worth the sacrifice.

Control is about information. Democracy as the method of consensus attempts to gather and disseminate information from everyone. When everyone listens to everyone else, there is an automatic error-correction. The best available information will usually determine the consensus. Usually, because values and desires also play a role, and we are willing to put up with less than the best in order to preserve our values or satisfy some desire.

Totalitarianism strives to concentrate all information in one person or small group. Since that means constant cognitive dissonance for most people, I wonder why it’s accepted. It seems we can tolerate a certain amount of cognitive discomfort. When too many people reach an uncomfortable level, there will be agitation for political change. So the aim of totalitarians is to keep cognitive dissonance within tolerable levels, and to deflect the inevitable anger onto some easily identifiable target. Orwell showed how that works in 1984. It seems the people behind Trump have understood his explanation, and are trying to install a self-perpetuating system.

Footnote: More on the development of the internet here: Arpanet Etc

165 years ago (Essays From The Times, 1860)

(The Times), Essays From the Times. (1860) I received this collection many decades ago while researching Swift’s literary reputation as part of my work on his satiric poems. Like most critics of his verse, the anonymous essayist reprinted in this collection fails to notice that Swift used impersonation in his verse as well as in his prose. Very few readers have believed that the supposed author of A Modest Proposal is Swift himself. The suggestion that the poor should raise their children to be tasty dishes for the rich is ascribed to the supposed author, a practical man of business suggesting a solution to poverty. But the uncritically accepted Romantic notion that a poet expresses his most authentic self in his verse prevented Victorian and later critics from realising that Swift used the same method in many of his satiric verses. The speakers of Swift's satires are not Swift, but various personages. Some are people of sense, others quite the opposite.

The Romantic poets were disingenuous in their claims. The speaker of a Wordsworth poem is an idealised version of himself. The Romantics would have you believe that this idealised version is the real thing. I don’t think so. In fact, I think all writing is a kind of impersonation.

This time round, I read all the essays. What struck me most was the writers’ blithe confidence in the correctness of their judgements and censures, especially of their subject’s morality. People of every age tend to believe that their judgements on their forebears are correct. But it seems that the Victorians were the first in many centuries to believe that their judgments were final. As such, they are a cautionary example: The current wave of belief that we have reached a pinnacle of moral and ethical righteousness is as misplaced as those of every earlier age. If anything, we repeat the errors of our ancestors, technologically enhanced. Human progress is a circle dance.

These essays are essential reading for any student of the 19th century. The essay on Swift’s life and works found its place in the bibliography of my thesis. ***

Dyer foresees the Future (Future: Tense, 2004)

 Gwynne Dyer.  Future: Tense (2004)

I’ve watched a video of Dyer making the same points as he makes here: Terrorists cause very little damage compared to other risks, but because they choose their targets carefully, they get an enormous amount of publicity. They also get a disproportionate response. These two effects make terrorists seem more dangerous than they are, help spread their ideologies. and lend legitimacy to their claims of political importance. The ripple effects are increased risks of wars between nations.

The context of Dyer’s remarks is the Middle East, the economic and political decline of the Muslim world, and the rise of the West. (An irony he doesn’t emphasise is that the Islamic terrorist groups are incapable of making the weapons systems they use, which they buy from Western sources).

Dyer makes a few predictions, which have failed only in details such as timing and who did what to whom. The general forecast, that the Middle East is the most likely place for triggering a world-wide war, seems at present only to prescient. He also called for a stronger consensus that such a war must be avoided. We can only hope that such a consensus will stop and reverse the current escalation of the quarrel between Israel and Iran.

Dyer says that the Israel helped Hamas establish itself, calculating that political rivalry with the PLO would prevent the Palestinians from achieving their goal of nationhood. The Wiki article on Hamas does state that “Numerous Islamist leaders, including senior Hamas founder Mahmoud Zahar, met with Yitzhak Rabin as part of "regular consultations" between Israeli officials and Palestinians not linked to the PLO.[27]”, which supports Dyer’s claim.

The “new world order” foreseen by Dyer is a shifting in the economic and military balance between the US, Russia and China, expressed in part by proxy wars and skirmishes. Most of those will be in the Muslim world. Terrorism will continue to be a useful bogeyman for any politician who needs some street-cred. In other words, business as usual. Dyer did not foresee Putin’s rise and his goal to Make Russia Great Again.

Dyer is a dispassionate observer of power politics. Power hunger is a widespread human trait. There’s an equally wide-spread hunger for rule by a powerful leader, arising from the mistaken belief that only a strong leader can protect the tribe and keep order. That is one of the main drivers of war.

A book worth reading. ***

Reporter or influencer? (Hillerman, The Fly on the Wall, 1971)

 Tony Hillerman. The Fly On The Wall (1971) My copy is a well-read 1979 paperback reissue of this novel, reprinted about 1982, when The Dark Wind (No. 5 in the Navajo Police series) was published. The hero is John Cotton, political reporter for the afternoon Tribune in Capitol City. MacDaniels, a colleague elated that he’s uncovered a story that will cap his career, dies a few minutes after telling Cotton he‘s looking for his notebook. Cotton finds the notebook (of course), and begins to decipher a story of political corruption. He nearly becomes a murder victim himself, pieces the story together, and goes to see Korolenko, a former State Governor, to tell him what he’s found.
     But if the story is published, a corrupt opportunist will win the next election. Should Cotton withhold the story? Should he publish? Is he really the fly on the wall, seeing all, feeling nothing, utterly objective? Read the book to find out.
     By bibliography dating, this is Hillerman’s second novel. In style and pacing not up to his later standard, it’s still a very good read. The descriptions of political shenanigans and calculations show that politics hasn’t changed much since the 1970s. It’s maybe more openly vicious than it was back then. As a story about journalism, it’s become a historical novel with the ring of truth. Hillerman was a reporter for several years before he became an academic and a novelist. It took me a while to read this book. It’s a must for the Hillerman fan, a good read for anyone who likes crime stories, and a nostalgia-inducing experience for anyone who remembers when newspapers mattered more than any other medium.
     Recommended ***

Maliick's Pillow Book: Random musings and barbs.

     Heather Mallick. The Pillow Book of Heather Mallick (2004) Mallick was still writing for The Globe and Mail when she published this book. The Globe eventually dismissed her because of her caustic remarks about rich twits who think they’re the Universe’s gift to the rest of us. She titled this collection of notes “Pillow Book” in homage to Sei Shonagon. Like a commonplace book, a pillow book is a collection of quotes. Like a journal, the quotes are written by the collector.
     Mallick is about as open a writer as I’ve ever read. She seems to hold nothing back. I’m sure she’s left out some of her rawest bits, after all, one’s readers’ sensitivities must be respected. What she’s included adds up to a portrait of a person on whom nothing is lost, one who finds nothing human alien to her. But Mallick does show her distaste for the detestable. Fundamentally, she’s a satirist in the Juvenalian tradition, which means she’s a moralist. Her morality is simple: Don’t hurt people. But otherwise, you can do (and say) what you want.
     As you might guess, I enjoyed this book. Even the bits that annoyed me. Mallick’s sharp eye is matched by a clear style. Recommended. ****

Freedom: We don't agree (Lapham's Quarterly 25 01)

Lapham’s Quarterly 25-01 Freedom (Spring 2023). This collection shows that there has beenprecious little consensus on what  freedom means. Most of the pieces assume a political context. Some discuss the moral meanings, usually in contrast to licence. There’s a good deal of story-telling about the effects of oppression, of the struggles for political freedoms. There’s some discussion of self control versus external control. But most of the pieces explicitly or implicitly assume that freedom means the ability to do what one wants to do, with as few constraints, limits, or consequences as possible. Some think that freedom means no consequences whatsoever. But most writers recognise that, since we live with other people, our freedoms and theirs may conflict. Freedom has limits.

    None of the writers refer to the engineer’s concept, which (briefly) refers to how much the design parameters may vary. In practice, it means that the fixing of some variable limits the range and even the availability of some other variable(s) in the design problem. Decide X’s value, and Y’s value is limited, or fixed. Or Y may be impossible to include.  That’s an operational definition, one that I see applicable to politics, social relations, career decisions, and so on. For example, if you decide that a free market means minimal regulation by the government, then only customer demands or preferences will influence such things as a business’s labour or waste disposal practices, etc. In short, you can’t have it all. Exercising your freedom to choose X limits or prevents your freedom to choose Y.

     Many people believe that unpleasant consequences of some choice are limits on their freedom. That belief animated the protests to the covid-19 pandemic measures imposed by governments and businesses. Taken to its logical conclusion, that belief implies that the criminal is an oppressed victim of unjust law, a conclusion that the protesters would not, I think, accept. Thus, reasoning about freedom becomes a nice example of why reason isn’t always reasonable. That also explains why people have disagreed about the concept. Every definition of freedom implies unreasonable conclusions.

     A good collection, as always. ***

Orwell's last words:The Decline of the English Murder.

George Orwell. Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (1965) Posthumous selection of previously uncollected essays. Orwell laments the banality of mid-20th century murders compared to the ingenuity of late 19th and early 20th century ones. For example, the desperate attempt to combine respectability and middle-aged passion as seen in the Crippen case.

     Most of these pieces discuss literature and art. Orwell observes the  political and social links between novels and the author’s life and times. Thus, he notes that Dickens accurately diagnoses the harms done by the mercantilist economics of Victorian Britain, but doesn’t see them as any more than the failings of individuals to exercise the common human virtues of empathy and generosity. Orwell doesn’t use the word “systemic” but the concept is implicit in all his social and economic critiques. He knows that any system makes some behaviours easy and others difficult. Change the system and some behaviours will increase and others decrease. To put it another way: We can choose only from what’s available to us; and we will tend to choose the easier or less costly alternatives.
    Orwell’s writing, as you can see, prompts rambling and ruminative responses. He’s also a pleasure to read. Recommended. ****

Politics As Usual (Lapham's Quarterly 05-04)

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly 05-04: Politics (2012) As far back as we have written records, we have politics. Politics certainly predates writing, since it meets two human needs: The communal need for social regulation; and the individual need for social structure and  influence. That means politics is about power, which means it conflicts with the human needs for freedom and autonomy. There’s a tension between the need for amicable social relations with one’s neighbours and the need for non-interference by one’s neighbours. This tension creates all the problems that politics is intended to solve. Unintended side-effect: Politics affords the power-hungry the opportunity to satisfy their powerlust. As humans combine into ever larger groups, the result is ever more powerful government.

     In short, politics is a mess. Thoreau considered it a necessary evil. Others have proposed ideal states in which everyone is happy and free. These fantasies are derived by more or less rigorous logic from some set of premises that the proposer believes are self-evident. Circular logic and question-begging abound.

     An excellent collection, as usual. May still be available from LQ’s stash of back issues.

     Recommended. ****

Fear and its effects (Laphams's Quarterly 10-3)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 10-3: Fear (2017) Fear messes with one’s brain. Attempts at rational thought fail. Individually, we may panic, and fail to do what’s needed to avoid danger. Socially, we may turn on those we believe endanger us, and commit the most appalling cruelties. Politicians know this, and stoke fear in order to achieve power. Create an image of some danger, then present yourself as the only one that can and will defend against it, that’s a sure way to impose one’s will on others. This collection is heavy on the political, but includes phobias, superstitions, and fear as entertainment. The latter may help to inoculate against panic, but the data are ambiguous.
Another fine collection. ****

Class war? Yes, always.

NYT comment 2020-01-17 on “The Bernie Sanders Fallacy”, by David Brooks, in which he argued that there is no class war.

There has always been a class war. Rulers and ruled do have common interests, nicely summarised in the Canadian triplet of "peace, order, and good government." But they also have different interests, and these sooner or later lead to more or less open conflict.

Nevertheless, I think Brooks is correct: Values matter more than economics. Economics is a means, not and end. We want a strong economy not because a strong economy is good in itself but because it enables us to achieve our non-economic goals.

It seems to me that two of the central values of all human societies  are fairness and justice. Capitalism as it is practiced these days is unfair and unjust. The irony is that Trump's promise to "drain the swamp", to  punish China for stealing jobs, to restore good old American manufacturing and mining jobs etc, all these promises appealed to these values. That's why so many centrists and independents voted for him. That's why the Democratic hopefuls have to emphasise fairness and justice. E.g., the present tax system is unfair to the 99%. Dumping pollutants into the air, earth, and water is a form of freeloading, which is unjust. And so on.

The Dems' campaign is at bottom about fairness and justice. The leftist term "class war" is a distraction, especially so in a country where a sizeable minority freaks out at any hint of "socialism."

Political Satire. It's a page-turner! (The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis)

 

Terry Fallis. The Best Laid Plans (2007) Who’da thunk a political novel could be a read-through page-turner? Well, almost, I don’t set aside enough time to read through the whole book in one sitting. I did anticipate the pleasure of taking up where I left off, which was always rewarded.
     Daniel Addison leaves political hack work when he discovers his lover in the House Leader’s office having a non-political encounter. Broken-hearted, he retreats into academe. But one last political job must be done before he can relax and enjoy teaching and research. He must find a Liberal who is willing to stand in a riding certain to be lost to one of the most popular Conservative Finance Ministers ever to wear shiny new shoes on Budget Day. He manages to find one, his landlord Angus McLintock, an engineering prof doomed to teach English For Engineers. Daniel proposes a deal: He’ll teach the course if Angus will stand for the Liberals. Assured that he will lose, Angus is happy to oblige.
     And so begins an engaging story of how McLintock wins (what else did you expect?), Addison heals his broken heart (ditto), and various other characters receive their just poetical desserts. Not quite as funny as I expected from a book winning the Stephen Leacock Award, but slyly satirical, robustly indignant, sappily romantic, unobtrusively informative, with enough witty asides to satisfy my taste for irony. It was also the 2011 winner of Canada Reads, a CBC-sponsored competition in which miscellaneous celebrities argue for their book. I’ll add my recommendation to whoever promoted this one. ****

Glossary: Riding = electoral district. Shiny new shoes = Canadian political tradition, the Finance Minister wears brand new shoes when introducing the Budget. CBC = Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Two by Feynman: Occasional pieces add up to an autobiography

 

Feynman explaining one of his diagrams, and a couple of helpful hints for his students

Richard P. Feynman. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? (1985) Feynman’s memoirs, recorded, assembled and edited by his student and friend Ralph Leighton.

Feynman is one of my heroes. Ever since I heard his anecdote about how his father showed him the difference between knowing words and knowing things, I’ve been hooked on his straightforward common sense. I don’t understand his contributions to quantum mechanics, because I can’t do the math of quantum mechanics. But I understand that his approach to making sense of the world works.

He was an intensely curious man. If he came across something he didn’t understand, he tried to figure it out. The puzzles that he loved most were about physics, but he also strove to make sense of art (he learned to draw, which trained his perception well enough that he could tell the difference between a Raphael and painting by one of Raphael’s students). He wanted to understand dreams, and how we can make images when we don’t have sensory stimuli to prompt perception (he died before fMRI scans provided the basis for an answer). He wanted to understand hallucinations, and spent several sessions in Dr Lilly’s sensory deprivation tanks.

He liked mastering gadgets, earning pocket money as a boy by fixing broken radios. He wanted to master drumming, so he practiced, practiced, practiced. He did the same with combination locks used on file cabinets at Los Alamos when he worked at the Manhattan Project, demonstrating how insecure they were, which eventually prompted the authorities to buy better safes. (He tells how a big-wig colonel who wanted the best safe for himself didn’t bother resetting the combination from the factory setting, thus proving well before computers that the greatest weakness in any security scheme is the human being). When he discovered something that mattered to him, he changed his behaviour: when he was still a young man he stopped drinking because he didn’t want to screw up his thinking machine.

He didn’t suffer fools gladly, especially when they came on stage with pompous claims to scientific rigour. His Caltech commencement address dissected “cargo cult science”, of which he found depressingly many examples in the social sciences. He didn’t like what receiving the Nobel Prize did to his reputation: he found his fame was used by many institutions to attract audiences. To have a Nobelist as a guest speaker reflected glory on the sponsor. Feynman hated that.

I’ve heard Feynman speak on recordings and in videos available on YouTube. Reading this book, I heard his voice again. A wonderful book by a wonderful human being. ****

Richard P. Feynman. “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” (1988) More memoirs, lectures, and anecdotes, as well as letters, sketches, and reports. Part 1 includes the title piece,  Feynman’s memoir of his first wife Arlene, who died of tuberculosis of the lymph glands. Part 2 is a dossier of his participation in the Challenger investigation. His key insight, that the rubber sealing rings in the booster joints could not adapt to cold temperatures, was prompted by his Pentagon minder, a General Kutyna, who was savvy in the ways of Washington, and so was able to give Feynman the hint that set him on the trail. The book also includes photographs, badly printed, but good enough to get an impressions of people and the occasion.

Two things stood out for me. First, that Feynman was a private man, who took great care in showing only what he wanted to show of his inner life. His love for his wives and his family nevertheless comes through, as do his essential playfulness, and his fierce love of the truth. Then there’s his integrity. He won’t fudge the truth as he sees it, nor will he pretend certainty where there is none. A remarkable man. ****

Update 2026-05-11: I've come across a video supposedly showing Feynman explaining why getting to Mars is impossible. It was generated using AI.  Th explanations are valid, but they're not quite in the style of Feynman. "Feynman" is shown in colour, but his facial expressions are limited, and he doesn't move around like Feynman actually did. Beware: there will be many more of these.

 

Cicero didn't say this, but it's still worth a comment or two.

 

A statement allegedly (1) by Marcus Tullius Cicero (January 106 – 7 December 43 BC):

The Budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, the public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome will become bankrupt.
People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.

Cicero lived in an empire, which was rich enough to pay the costs of military occupation and administration of the (ever longer) supply chains that sustained Rome. Whoever put these words in his mouth thought as if Cicero lived in a subsistence economy, one that's barely able to meet the needs of its citizens. They were wrong. (2)

We live in an economy capable of even greater over-production than Rome. We make too much, but we still think about our economy as if we can't make enough (3). That causes a lot of stupid decisions, whose effects are now becoming clear: Too many people (4), too much production and consumption, too much exploitation of natural resources (5), etc, all of which are the causes of the climate crisis, the ecological crisis, and the many sociopolitical crises around the world. The only question left is which crisis will destroy our way of life first, and just how bad it will be. If we don't learn to think differently, we won't adapt fast enough to survive in anything remotely like our present way of life (6).

Having made such gloomy pronouncements, I still wish you a good day. :-)

Footnotes:
1. From https://checkyourfact.com/2019/08/19/fact-check-cicero-quote-budgeting-treasury-public-debt/
“The quote does not appear in any of Cicero’s surviving works. It actually comes from best-selling author Taylor Caldwell’s novel about ancient Rome.”

2. Any empire capable of maintaining itself for any length of time clearly was capable of producing far more than its citizens needed. Rome had about three times as many “statutory holidays” (several of them lasting two or more days) as we have, thus a much shorter working year. Even slaves got some time off on those holidays.

3. The USA spends over a trillion dollars per year on its armed forces and the wars they fight.

4. In my lifetime, the Earth’s human population has grown more than fourfold. 1940: about 2 billion.  2021: over 8 billion.

5. It’s likely that there won’t be enough food to feed all humans being sometime between 2025 and 2050.

6. Just how different will it be? Best case: Something like a medieval life-style for the survivors: small farms producing enough food to sustain the necessary artisans and traders in the settlement. Worst case: back to the stone age, with perhaps some of the survivors being able to scavenge useful materials like iron from the ruins.

Update 2021-09-23: Typos fixed, and a couple of clarifying edits.

Government ain't easy: Democracy (Lapham's Quarterly XIII/4)

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly XIII/3 Democracy (2020) Though most of recorded history, “democracy” was a word and concept that struck terror into the hearts and minds of the rulers. Forgive the cliche, but when it comes to politics, it’s all cliche. Such as the equation of democracy with mob rule, which will destroy peace, order, and good government as certainly as the most heinous of tyrannies. And despite the example of Athens, that’s what democracy tends toward.
     Athenian political theory is quite clear: Oligarchy will give way to democracy, which will morph into mob rule, which will attract a tyrant or king to restore order. The king may found a dynasty, but the next phase will be an oligarchy, and so the whirligig of politics will bring in its revenges. History doesn’t suggest easy way to escape this cycle.
     This collection does have a few surprises, however. For example, the Haudenosaunee or Five Nations Confederacy, which pre-dated European contact, operated on consensus. (It comprised the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga and Mohawk.) No decision was made until a consensus had been reached, even if it took days of talk. There is documentary evidence that democracy in the modern sense owes much to this model, for the American Revolution contained two strands, the one urging democracy, the other frankly oligarchic. Oligarchy won, and ever since the USA has been attempting to create the democracy that the Declaration of Independence aspires to describe, and which justified the Revolution.
     I think the inference from the evidence is that democracy is possible, but it requires constant effort, and constant re-invention.
     I’m puzzled that this collection omits what I think is the best comment on the whole business of government, Thoreau’s first two sentences of Civil Disobedience:
 

I heartily accept the motto,— “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,— “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
     

In the meantime, we must make do with whatever governance we are able to tolerate. As usual, an excellent collection of word and image. ****

"Let's Talk About Biden and Oil Jobs...." (link)

Title of a talk by Beau, was sent to me by email. I think Beau's blunt talk is worth a listen. Click here.

 

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is gone

 

Trump left the White House an hour or two ago. So he's gone.

The Wizard of Oz ends with the assurance that once the Wizard is exposed as a fraud, the world will be set to rights. Eventually, everything will be as it was supposed to be. Dorothy will get back home.

But this wizard has left behind a mass of Munchkins that still believe there's a Wizard behind the curtain. What would L. Frank Baum make of this awkward reality?

Plagues and the Fall of Empires

 

 Plague in Marseilles, 1720

Yesterday (November 2nd), I read an article in Junior Skeptic (included in Skeptic Magazine). It told the history of plagues, of epidemics, of pandemics. How an unknown disease killed upwards of 20% of the population of Athens (404 BCE). How a plague during Marcus Aurelius’s reign (161-180 CE) killed 20% or more of the citizens of Rome. How the first wave of bubonic plague killed somewhere between 25 and 50 million people in Europe (it reached Constantinople in 542). The second plague pandemic killed about 1/3rd of the European population, and some settlements were wiped out completely. (The last plague epidemics occurred in the 1600s and 1700s.) How smallpox ravaged Europe. How the Europeans brought smallpox to the Americas, killing up to 90% of indigenous populations.

In every case, major political and economic change followed. Athens lost the Peloponnesian War. Rome became weak, and finally lost its hegemony a couple of centuries later. The bubonic plague finished off the western Roman Empire. And so on. A little extra research showed that the second and third waves of bubonic plague caused Europe-wide wars and re-arranged the remnants of the Roman Empire. Even the Spanish Flu of 1918-19 caused disruption: the Roaring 20s were as much a reaction to it as to the Great War.

And generally speaking, people forgot the great plagues almost as soon as they fizzled out. School histories tend to ignore them. In fact, I didn’t know about the Athenian epidemic until I read this article; and I thought I had learned a pretty good overview of ancient Greek history.

We don’t want to be reminded that we are subject to the random appearance of pathogens. Even now, when SARS-COV-2 is infecting people, there are many who claim it’s a hoax, or no worse than the flu, or caused by G5 phone towers, or whatever. Anything, it seems, rather than face up to the terrifying truth: we have no defences against new pathogens. And another, much less convenient, truth: that these new pathogens transfer from animals to us. Which means that as climate change alters ecosystems, it also alters the interactions between humans and other animals, and so increases the odds that a new pathogen will emerge.

One of the factors in today’s US presidential election is covid-19. Mr Trump persists in downplaying its severity and perils. Mr Biden persists in using covid-19 as a symbol for Mr Trump’s failures as a President.

We shall see what happens. But in any case, the American Empire has begun its downward trajectory.

See Wiki’s article on SARS-COV-2

Hong Kong should be independent

Hong Kong

From a NYT piece by Samuel Chu, who is a U.S. citizen, a pro-democracy activist and wanted by the Hong Kong police.

I had violated Article 38 of the new law, which states: “This Law shall apply to offenses under this Law committed against the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from outside the Region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the Region.”

This law violates all standards of international law. No country may extend its jurisdiction beyond its borders without a treaty. (A treaty is a mutual recognition of some limited jurisdiction.)

I think the Chinese Government has over-reached. It has violated the treaty which granted it jurisdiction over Hong Kong. It has violated international law with this unilateral claim to jurisdiction outside its borders.

I think the citizens of Hong Kong have every right to protest this law, to agitate against it, and to advocate democratic freedoms for Hong Kong. If the Chinese Government is unwilling to accept these rights, then Hong Kong citizens have the right to secede.

I support the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. I oppose the Chinese Government’s attempt to reduce and eliminate Hong Kong citizens’ rights and freedoms. I advocate for the independence of Hong Kong as a sovereign state.

Oh dear, it seems I may have broken the law. So under article 38, the Chinese Government will have to issue an arrest warrant for me.

Financial Crimes

Arianna Huffington. Pigs at the Trough (2003). Here it is 17 years later, and the game continues. Some of the star players have been retired (some via criminal indictment), the rules have been tweaked to benefit the cheats more than ever, and the referees no longer pretend to control the game.
     Huffington’s book is a detailed overview of the financial scandals of the early 2000s, with names like Enron and Andersen showing up in several chapters. Lessons learned? Just keep on buying the most complaisant legislators available. Five years later, we saw the financial meltdown of 2008, in which the rescue money went to the perpetrators instead of their victims. Business as usual. If the bail-out money had been credited directly to the borrowers’ accounts, most of them would have become home-owners pretty quick, and the decade-long limping towards recovery would have lasted maybe three years.
     History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but humans solve problems in much the way as their ancestors did. These solutions toss up the same problems as before, and the cycles continue. If you find a copy of this book, read it. It will help you recognise the players on the current teams of malefactors. ****

Mathematics and the News

 

 

John Allen Paulos. A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995) I bought this book because I’d read Paulos’s Innumeracy, a seminal book that I think every teacher should read. This book extends one of his themes, that the media are a prime source of innumeracy, and so tend to distort and misinform. Each section corresponds to a section of the paper, News, Sports, the Arts, etc. The misuse or misreporting of statistics features in all sections, but the unwarranted surprise at coincidences, and confidence in economic and sports forecasts, together come a close second.
     Once again, Paulos muses on the vagaries of voting. Every voting system ever attempted has produced results that annoy a large section, sometimes even the majority, of voters. If he were to write today, he would note the vacuousness of political polling, which always produces more or less misleading results.
     But mathematics is about patterns and processes, so even the society section, with its reports about charity balls, the doings of famous people, etc, gives opportunity for mathematical musing about relationship networks, and the interconnectedness of our social circles, which Facebook et al have made more obvious than ever in the 25 years since Paulos wrote the book.
     This was a re-read, I enjoyed the book, but not as much as Innumeracy. ***

     Update 2020 08 13: Percentages are real problem.
     One of the most common errors is to report a percentage change without reporting the base rate. For example, "XYZ increases the cancer of some obscure organ  by 150%". True, it increases the rate from 1 per 100,000 per year to 3 per 100,000 per year.
     Another egregious error is to confuse percentage points with percentages. Thus, "Unemployment rate increases 2 %". Yup, it rose  from 5% to 7%, which is an increase of 2/5, or 40%.

   Update 2020 12 22: Raw numbers vs Rates: How to misreport covid-19

     Every day now we hear the number of new cases and deaths from covid-19. Almost never the rates. For example, Ontario reported some 2100 new cases the other day, while Alberta reported about 1800. But Ontario has roughly three times the population of Alberta, so the rate in Alberta is about three times higher.

     The mistake is to treat every jurisdiction equally, which hardly ever makes sense. The same error shows up when reporting miscellaneous numbers about cities and towns. Such as crime rates. Small towns naturally have fewer crimes, but related to population, the crime rates are usually higher than in the large cities.

     Related to time, the rates are of course lower. Hence the pained astonishment when a neighbour murders his family. This suggests that we pay more attention to events along our individual time-lines, and less to events within the communtiy at large. Our preception biases mislead us.

     Rule of thumb: Do The Arithmetic! Always calculate the rates.