In Sputnik’s Orbit

A few thoughts to tide you over…

 

The Mother Creator

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A snippet from “Doomsday”

The ice was patient and inexorable, and whatever civilization could develop during the interludes was quickly consumed on its return. But The Way was the only civilization needed for the edification of the soul, and the flock was well adapted to the cycle of ages. During the warm times, towns and institutions were rebuilt, libraries were refilled from the vaults of the Archive, and new generations were inculcated into The Way and felt the loving presence of The Mother Creator in their lives. And so they lived, generation to generation, through peace and adversity, until the signs foretold the returning ice, and some unlucky generation began the preparations for the cycle to begin again.

And when the ice was at hand and bounteous Nature could no longer support Her flock, the masses prepared for the ancient ritual — known to all through the faith — in which the living sacrificed themselves to produce sustenance for their posterity. The caretakers, selected and instructed each by his role in the divine calling, saw this manna stored in the warm moist depths of the hibernacula amongst the egg cases of their brethren, and then entered the temperate waters themselves and slipped into the deep, unencumbered slumber of hibernation.

The culling was a brutal affair for those submitted to it, but it was a joyous rebirth they bequeathed, and a solemn duty for all. Those who strayed from The Way, either in action or in spirit, could hope for no better alternative, and were soon blotted from history along with the crops and the weeds and the trappings of material wealth, leaving no heir and no memory of their passing.

And so the world had been, carefully in balance but forever afoot, since the Mother Creator had wrung its germ out from the void, fertilized it with the scattered seeds of night, and molded it into the abode of life upon which to host Her flock. It was a cruel and a wonderful world, and the one could not be separated from the other. The world provided for the body, The Way provided for the spirit, and death made way for renewal.

“Spring bloomed not amongst the weeds of ancient summer”, lamented the poet, “and wretched frost, her cold entreaty, did till upon Creation.”

Dylan & Kat — A Preview

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“Where the hell have you been?”

Dylan was nonplussed. “I had a few errands.”

She seemed groggy, but coherent — still lying in the course gray sand, but propped up on an elbow. Dylan knelt before her and cradled her face between filthy, gritty hands, assessing her condition. He pushed her eyelids up roughly with his thumbs, her head back and to the side, first one way, then the other — pupils reacting to the brilliant sky.

“I didn’t know you loved me,” she sassed.

I will always love you, snapped his dialogical inner voice. He had told her that once, but she didn’t understand what he meant by the words — could only guess what they might have meant in a different life. They didn’t bear repeating now.

Probably a concussion, he thought, though the pupils seemed normal enough. He released her and turned his analytical assessment elsewhere.

“Name?” He asked without matching her gaze.

“Katerina Duncan.” She rolled the “r” in proper Russian form. “But those who want to live call me—”

“Rank?”

“Civilian you dumb-ass. What’s wrong with you?”

“You may not remember this, but you just fell off a mountain. Head trauma is a common complication.”

“I feel fine. Well, no. I feel like shit. What do you mean ‘fell off a mountain’?”

“Well, technically I dropped you. Are you going to throw up?”

“Not if you don’t tell jokes. Are you— What do you mean you dropped me?”

“You fell and hit your head. The sniper was about to shoot you. I dropped you so you’d be safe. What’s pi?”

“You dropped me so I’d… What?”

“What – is  – pi?”

“Apple or—”

“Mathematical.”

She looked at him for a moment.

“3.14159…265. The mean gravitation on this planet is 9.67 meters per second per second. I measured it on my way down. Avogadro’s number is 6.022 times ten to the — ”

“That will do. Is anything broken?”

“I don’t think so. But I feel like a veal cutlet.”

“Good. I mean, roll over.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “My shoulder hurts like hell and I could have a fracture here.”

She winced as she lifted her left arm for inspection. He took her hand in his bear-like palm.

“Squeeze my hand.”

She grinned — the sheepish look of a girl being talked into something improper.

“Squeeze my hand. I need to know if you can hold on.”

She did.

“Harder. Does that hurt? Do you think you can hold on to me?”

She waved the arm around experimentally. “I think so. It hurts when I lift it. I think I can hold on though. Where are we going? There’s no way you can carry me up these rocks with this equipment.”

He walked over to the water and washed his hands as best he could. “I could — if I had to. But we don’t have that kind of time.”

He retrieved the canteen from his discarded harness and brought it over to her, squirting water into her open mouth.

”We’ve been on this island for three months and had no contact. Then you and Murph have your run-in— Roll over.”

She swallowed pensively, and gingerly did as he asked.

“—and today three guys are out for a stroll and try to kill us.”

“Three guys?”

“Yeah. Coughlin was one of them. Something has changed. We’ve been all over this rock and found no sign of them. Now they’ve landed a force and are done playing.”

The hip has bloody. He worked the torn fabric loose from the clotted blood, ripping the seat enough to access the wound.

God she has a nice ass.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Looks like shrapnel, maybe a bit of stone or a bullet fragment.”

“Well it hurts like hell.”

”It looks like the impact tore your skin.”

“Tore?”

“Yeah. You might even have a little scar.”

“Great. Just what I need.”

“Scars give you character. Perfection is not attractive.”

“Oh thanks,” she said sarcastically and then, deconstructing the remark, blushed a bit and softened her tone.

“Thanks.”

The Hitch List

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I attended the 2011 Texas Freethought Convention in Houston this weekend, and while I was not able to spend as much time gathering viewpoints as I might have liked, I did attend the awards banquet in which noted writer and activist Christopher Hitchens was awarded the Richard Dawkins Award for  outstanding contributions to freethought.

Whatever you may think of the views and positions of these two men, they are both unquestionably among the most erudite and gifted writers of our age, and it was a privilege to see them both speak. More than that, it was a wonderful illustration of the civility and compassion to which humanity aspires, and so seldom attains.

Mr. Hitchens, who has not been able to make a public appearance for some time due to his on-going cancer treatment, was most eloquent and giving in his willingness to entertain questions even in his obviously and admittedly weakened state. At one point, a little girl asked him what authors he would suggest for her education, and he told her that he would be happy to meet with her mother and write down some recommendations.

I was planning to sneak out and get home to the babysitter, but when I left the hall I found Mr. Hitchens sitting down with the little girl and her mother.

He sat and talked to them for about ten minutes. It was very sweet. After he left for his car, I asked the mother if she would send me the list, which she very graciously agreed to do, and so here it is, from his notes and their conversation:

The Magic of Reality- Dawkins
Greek and Roman myths- especially those complied by Robert Graves
Shakespeare
Chaucer
Other satirical works ( Montesquieu, Voltaire)
David Hume
Dickens- all, but especially a Tale of Two Cities
Ayaan Hirsi Ali- especially the beginning of Infidel where she speaks about her childhood
P.G. Wodehouse "just for a bit of fun" especially "Sunset at Blandings."

She promised to revise it with more details from the conversation when she gets home, and if she does, I will share it with you.

I will say that I do not agree with Mr. Hitchens in many regards. It is difficult, after seeing him speak, not to suspect that this may be in error. His is a formidable mind and talent, and the whole experience put me rather in mind of Franklin’s letter to a  nephew in which he gives his recommendations for a leaned man.

A most moving evening.

Postscript

 

Mrs Crumpacker sent me a link to her very moving account of the evening.

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/mason-crumpacker-and-the-hitchens-reading-list/

P.Z.Myers on Combating Pseudoscience

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I had the opportunity today to ask noted biologist and anti-creationism lecturer P.Z.Myers his opinion on the oft-repeated position that credentialed scientists should not confront creationists and other self-appointed science deniers on the theory that doing so only lends these people a facade of undeserved legitimacy.

He protested that this only applies to debate, and that it is the act of appearing on a stage with these people that creates an appearance of equality. Of course, if more of the population has a basic scientific education—that is to say, a basic understanding of the world they inhabit–then it would be the quality of ideas rather than the appearance of authority that would sway them—and there would be no creationists.

Was Einstein Wrong?

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Physisists at CERN have spent 2 years trying to discover what went wrong. Neutrinos fired about 400 miles through the earth appears to have arrived 60 nanoseconds too fast — faster than the speed of light!

Aside from this startling result, the Neutrinos appeared to travel faster than the speed they were accelerated to. That’s actually far more intriguing, and it ultimately may point the way to an explanation. One such possibility is that some sort of stimulated emission is going on, that by interacting through the weak nuclear force, neutrinos are triggering neutrino emission a little ahead of where they are, and that little lead adds up. Since we know that the spatial position of a quanta is (to us at least) a probability function, and we know (from Young’s dual slit experiments) that these wave functions can interact across space, such a phenomenon is not unlikely. It would be cool, and it might allow information to travel a tiny, tiny, tiny bit faster than light, but it would not exactly overturn relativity.

Other possibilities:
1. Neutrino flux from the sun is interfering with the CERN beam.
2. The motion of the solar system is skewing the measurement (they probably already ruled that out)
3. As yet unidentified instrumentation problems.
4. Something is consistently disturbing the probability function all along the line.
5. Something neither I, nor anyone at CERN can even imagine. And that would really be cool.

We will see. Results like these are why we do particle physics.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

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A forum that I frequent has polls and a neat little demographic feature that lets you see how different people answer a given question. Recently, the following demographic breakdown caught my eye:

This was a question about whether the wealthy engage in class welfare, so you might reasonably expect a shift in opinion based on education. Sample size is 41. Here, the actual answers aren’t as interesting as the distribution. With educational attainment, diversity of opinion increases.

I often argue that the truth is nearly always more nuanced than political polemic can accommodate. If we accept the notion that, on average, increased education correlates with increased knowledge of the world, then this supports my thesis.

Unfortunately, it also supports what the pundits and politicoes know so well–oversimplification sells.

What Would Jesus Think?

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Continuing our theme of contrary conclusions from the same data, I recently ran across an interesting online debate between a Christian and a skeptic over the meaning of a passage from the book of Mark.

In Mark 7:7-8, Jesus tells the Pharisees that the washing of hands before eating is “the tradition of men”, not “the commandment of God”. He says that a man is “defiled” not by what he puts in his mouth (dirty hands) but by what comes out of his body (godly, actions). To modern ears, this seems like a rather mixed metephor,  because in 7:18-19 he specifically says “whatever thing entereth into the man, it cannot defile him, Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats”.

The skeptic paraphrased it this way:

“Got that? Eating filth does not make you a bad person because food cannot reach your heart…and because it will only be pooped out with the rest of the filth anyway.”

The Christian had, of course, been arguing for the traditional interpretation, the spiritual lesson of admonishment to follow God’s law over the traditions of man, and therefore to follow Jesus. This was, after all, long before germ theory, when the heart was held to be the seat of reason, and when both illness and insanity were widely viewed as the work of demonic forces. So it makes sense that someone living in that age would confound spiritual and physical “defilement” in this way.

But of course, as the skeptic points out, Jesus is claiming to be or to speak for the creator who knows everything and is not limited by the ignorance of the Iron Age. Surely, having warned his people against eating pork (a carrier of parasites) he would not so blithely dismiss gastronomic hygiene. And further, while on the subject, wouldn’t he have taken a moment to admonish his followers against eating improperly stored grain (with its incumbent risk or ergo-induced-lunacy, which due to further misunderstanding of the mind, was a cause of cruel execution all the way up to the enlightenment)? No. He wouldn’t, the skeptic asserts, because he was a man living in the Iron Age and, like Moses before him, had no access to any divine wisdom that might have raised him above the ignorance of the age.

Of course, none of these passages appear in any copies of Mark older than about 390 AD anyway, so no one really knows what Jesus did or did not say. Perhaps he taught a course in pathogenic mycology at the local extension office and it’s all just gotten lost in translation.

Equity in Wealth

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“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory…You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God Bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” Elizabeth Warren

This is not a political blog; it’s a blog about reason. I am not Republican. I am not a Democrat. I have voted for both. I have an MBA and know a little about economic theory.

Captialism works. Government should indeed be very sparing in interposing itself into markets. But as the robber barons taught us, unrestrained capitalism is at least as inefficient and corrupting as unrestrained socialism. There are those who wish us to see a simple, direct, and inverse correlation between taxation and prosperity. Reality is more nuanced. A wealthy man will spend just as much, and invest almost as much, whether he is taxed at 1% or 90%. A poor man CANNOT.

Yes, all things being equal, taxation reduces the money available for spending and reduces marginal return. But all things are not equal. And anyone trying to elicit your vote on the basis of this argument without considering elasticity is a propagandist who is not after your interests, but his own.

Laptop Lifts

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It’s 11pm. Do you know where the feet off your netbook are?

When the engineers scaled down from laptops to netbooks, they forgot to account for scaling of the glue surface on the foot pads. You can use any adhesive known to science, they’ll fall off. Laptop lifts solve the problem.

I Know What I Know

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Watch the following in its entirety before reading further.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY&feature=related]

In debates over belief, people often assert “I know what I know, and you can’t tell me I don’t”.

But do you? I–personally–have heard this odd sort of skepticism used to defend gnostic faith in phenomena as diverse as God, ghosts, UFOs, groundwater pollution, and Chupacabra. Don’t get me wrong, I am not asserting that any of these beliefs were wrong—but they were unfounded, at least on the grounds given.

Given what we now know about the functioning of the brain, it is clear that all experience is an illusion, or more accurately, a simulacrum, a shadow of meaning woven together from what the brain thinks is important. The video illustrates this in a fun way (concentrate on counting passes and you may miss the gorilla) but it’s much deeper than that. Right now, part of what you think you see is faked by your brain to cover the rather large blind spots in your field of view. A good portion of the peripheral vision you actually DO see is never consciously accessible, but IS available to help you avoid stumbling in the dark. Based on these revelations, can you really be sure of anything you observe?

The answer, flatly, is “no”, but returning to our theme of contradictory views, what are we to make of this new understanding? Some will assert that, since we cannot trust our observations, we cannot trust science to reveal the truth, since it is ultimately based on observation. But we have no other source of information except for observation. If you believe in God, you do so because you read of him in scripture, because you were told of him, because you intuit his existence, or because he speaks to you or makes himself known to you. These are all observations. All start with electrochemical potentiations within the brain, all are subject to comprehensible bias and distortion.

Given that the brain is clearly hardwired to find patterns and look for boogiemen, what are we to make of perceptions of ghosts or icons burned into toast or the cloud I recently saw, clearly “flipping the bird” at the one area of town that has gotten rain all summer long? And given our fear and our foibles, how are we to evaluate our experience of God or other intangibles against the claims of others?

Ultimately, the answer can only be careful observation. Call it science, call it prayer, or call it existential metaphysics. “Knowledge” not tested against the measuring stick of reality is sure to be mistaken, and prophets claiming knowledge “beyond measuring” are invariably false.

The theological implication, of course, is that belief in the truth should neither require nor admit of faith, and this runs in stark contrast to what many people have been taught. Still, we should not be bothered by this. God understands. He made us this way.