Tom's Topical Topics, Etc

2011-12-19T05:52:00.000-08:00

God stop me before I write again.

(pause)

ok...

Is this gutted, trash-filled Winnebago ordered or disordered?

It seems disordered (possibly disturbed).

It also seems complicated. It requires a particular description (windows broken, door gone, mattress on floor, etc.). It is not like every other Winnebago of the same vintage. They've all aged. A common description no longer works.

But in a previous piece of semi-psychotic rambling I said people become more ordered as they age. Responding to experience and failing parts they (we) become structured and rigid. Set in our ways. Inflexible.

Which is it?

Maybe I confused order and complexity.

Like the Winnebago we lose order. Things fall apart.

And like the Winnebago we become more complicated. Common definitions no longer work for us either. We've got broken windows, sagging mattresses. We each have our own story.

Some of us do become inflexible, set in our ways. But we all become more and more unique. Although neither we nor the Winnebago might generate much new surprise, our existence is a surprise. (How did the Winnebago end up parked in a yard in Delight NC? And what is the story of that mattress? )

We may or may not write lengthy new stories (maybe the Winnebago will get hauled off to suffer the next stage of thermodynamic entropy). But our complete messages - our life stories - well they are something else.

updating the entropy metaphor

2011-12-16T06:02:00.000-08:00

(Claude Shannon, inventor of information entropy)

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that over time systems go from lower to higher entropy, from order to disorder. The Entropy Metaphor (EM) says that people do the same thing, going from order to disorder, from life to death.

...there is a lady
who lives down the hall
who dances
with her little dogs
like a toy top
spinning alone
beneath the quarter moon
fingers held out
dreaming of her dead husband
a recessional processional
into entropy

But maybe the EM is wrong, or at least incomplete.

What about information entropy (which I understand even less than thermodynamic entropy)? Invented in 1948 by Claude Shannon, it keeps popping up. Information entropy seems to measure randomness, the non-structured content of messages, the part that you could not compress with an algorithm. Getting a little metaphorical, it seems to measure surprise.

How does this jibe with the EM?

Certainly thermodynamic disorder is our ultimate fate. Our atoms will become scattered. Our order as living creatures will cease. And, in my case anyway, there seems to it seems a lot of disorder right now - lost names, hesitant awkward conversations, etc.

However, in some ways aging people seem to become more ordered - more rigid and structured - mentally and physically. In terms of information entropy our "messages" become predictable, tedious. We could be easily represented by an algorithm.

Accommodating ourselves to failing parts and accumulating experience we become complex (not simple - simple people are spontaneous, ready to go one way or the other).We bend, stoop, limp. We develop elaborate theories to explain ourselves, others.

("I am miserable - because I neglect myself to help other people and they don't appreciate me - because the people here are not as interesting/good as the people where I used to live - because the people here are obsessed with their families and ignore me - because my mother resented men and took it out on me and I got stuck, etc etc etc.)

We become set in our ways. We are less able to handle change, less able to surprise and be surprised.

Although I certainly don't know this for sure, maybe the fibrous plaques in an Alzheimer's brain provide too much structure, rendering the brain rigid and incapable of handling new data. Even cancer, which at first seems to be a product of disorder could be viewed as excessive order, cells stuck in the wrong way of doing things.

Maybe until the end we lose entropy, sucking in order until one morning we give it all up.

Maybe we slide into order and on that great getting up morning explode into entropy.

Maybe I am full of shit (it has been suggested).

Anyway, Merry Christmas.

Asides...

OK - it is Christmas.

Some kids are very rigid, becoming less structured as they age (until at some point they become rigid again). Allie likes maybe four foods.

Some old people stay loose and flexible until the end.

In On Being (a discussion of science and religion) , Peter Atkins says that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is his favorite law.

In The Upside of Down, Thomas Homer-Dixon says that societies inevitably tend toward thermodynamic collapse, becoming more complex and rigid, less able to respond to change. There will be a Fall. But we can minimize the effects by developing "prospective minds", moving beyond consumption, embracing change.

In Collapse, Jared Diamond describes society after society that fails to change - ignoring the past, repeating the past - falling apart. But some don't.

Not counting some sociopathic, paranoid tendencies, I like krav maga because it is without rules. The goal is to be flexible - to respond to threats anytime, anywhere. To anticipate everything and nothing.

Complexity and People Plates

2011-12-06T11:26:00.001-08:00

excerpts from Upside of Down section of "EDGE of the Apocalypse"...

Complexity

Breakdowns and collapses happen when societies become rigidand fixed – unable to change. They are unable to respond with complexsolutions.

Wars and social disruptions happen when people are no longerable to talk. When positions become intractable and people are stuck in simple,unyielding positions. Until then the answer to stress is increasingcomplexity.

We develop increasinglyelaborate solutions.

But at some point the complexity gets too convoluted – ittakes too much energy to follow and maintain. We fall back into the comfort ofsimplicity – and we sometimes fight.

The Mad Max post-apocalyptic world is ultimately verysimple. Haiti is simple. So is Somalia. Hitler and Stalin wanted to create simple societies.

But complexity cannot increase forever. It always falls apart.

A gun is very simple. So is death.

Weathers’ Aside - People Plates

Perhapspeople could be regarded as having psychological plates - like the earth hastectonic plates.

Peopleplates correspond to likes, dislikes, desires, fears. Everything that makes aperson. Just as tectonic plates slide around in response to pressures - somefrom within some from without - people plates move around. When the plates(either kind) slide past easily the crust remains undisturbed. When there isfriction, pressure builds up until finally released as an earthquake (or aperson quake).

Stretchingthe analogy...

Bothtypes of plates float on a fluid inner layer (mantle, subconscious). Sometimesthe inner layer erupts into the surface (as volcanoes, dreams, fits, blurts,poems). The inner layer not only supports the plates, it is a source ofdestruction and construction. It destroys old plates and creates new ones.

Stretchingthe analogy even further...

Thepower of the inner layer comes from energy within which comes from energywithout - gravity, dark matter, dark energy, cosmic biology, cosmic history -who knows. So long as there is energy, the inner layer stays fluid and theplates continue to move. The inner layer supports, destroys, and rebuilds.

But aftera time - billions of years or sevendecades, the energy runs out - or has been so altered by entropic flow to beunusable. The clock quits. The plates stop moving, crack - turn to dust.

Thesystem dies.

Thenthe whole thing falls back to a universal center, explodes and does it allagain.

(Accordingto some theories.)

EDGE of the Apocalypse (Preface)

2011-10-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

Inspired by …

The Black Swan - Nassim Taleb

The World is Flat - Thomas Friedman

Collapse - Jared Diamond

The Upside of Down - Thomas Homer-Dixon

The Great Disruption - Paul Gilding

Something Is Coming

You can smell it. We are approaching an edge which overlooks an apocalypse. A sulfurous odor comes from below.

If it were just me it would not be a big deal. Old people like to celebrate their own mortality with tales of doom and gloom. We associate our demise with the demise of the world – which from a certain perspective is truth.

However, it is not just me. Jared Diamond, who won a Pulitzer Prize says there might be a societal Collapse. Paul Gilding a respected environmentalist says there will be certainly be a planet-wide Great Disruption and if that is not preceded by a Great Awakening there will be a Great Collapse. Thomas Homer-Dixon another respected environmentalist says a Fall (what he calls a “pulse”) is likely but there will be an upside. Homer-Dixon also says there will be an upside if there is a Great Awakening first.

Diamond, Homer-Dixon and Gelding have written books explaining what will happen. Taleb and Friedman, although it was not their intent, have written books that explain some of the factors behind the disruptions and collapses.

All these books get below the surface of common assumptions, revealing obvious truths that aren't all that obvious. They shift our point of view, forcing us to regard emperors without clothes and unseen elephants in the corners of rooms.

Everybody should read these or similar books (there are a lot).

Of course not everybody does.

Some people just don’t like to think about these things. They are in one of the phases of denial described by Homer-Dixon and paraphrased below…

Existential Denial – We say the problem does not exist; it has been manufactured by eco extremists and anti-capitalists.
Consequential Denial – We say the problem has been exaggerated and the problems that do exist (e.g., loss of artic ice) do not really affect us. It’s too bad for the polar bears.
Fatalistic Denial – We say there is a serious problem but we can’t do anything about it so we might as well live as we have been living all along.

Some people simply don’t care.

Some people simply don’t read.

And some people do care and do read and aren’t in denial but simply don’t have the time.

My book is for the latter group. By distilling the main points of these books, reducing over 1,000 pages of others’ words to 200 or so pages of my words, I hope to appeal to those who don’t have time. Perhaps after reading my book they will find time and go out and buy the other books.

I also hope to promote awareness of the issues.

Book Inspired by Books

Here is a brief summary of the books discussed in this book inspired by books:

Paul Gilding – The Great Disruption. Gilding says that we are about to be seriously disrupted. It won’t be a once-in-a lifetime, or even once-in-a-century event , but something that happens once-in-a-civilization, something that defines an era – like the Renaissance, Enlightenment, or the Dark Ages.

(It might be even bigger, redefining us at the evolutionary level. People with certain propensities might breed more. Those that survive might think and behave differently. )

Why? The earth is running out of room. There are too many people consuming too much stuff. The planet cannot replenish itself. It is like a global Ponzi scheme driven by the momentum of economic activity. It is just a matter of time before the game plays out.

Most people don’t know an end is coming. But soon everyone will. Gilding calls this the Great Awakening.

Jared Diamond – Collapse. Diamond has written a book about societies that have collapsed – ancient and modern – and a few societies that did not collapse. The book notes various factors contributing to collapses, but tends to focus on environmental issues. He lists a “five-point framework of possible contributing factors”:

Environmental damage caused by people.
Climate change – today caused by people in the past by natural factors.
Hostile neighbors who prevail when a society becomes weak – maybe because of one of the other factors.
Friendly neighbors who become unfriendly or weak and no longer support the society (maybe the formerly friendly society has been weakened by other factors)
A society’s responds to its problems. Are its people smart, perceptive, honest – or the opposite?

Thomas Homer-Dixon – The Upside of Down. Homer-Dixon says that human societies are threatened by interrelated stresses:

Population – growth rate is different in rich and poor societies, has peaked in some rich societies – the poor flood into rapidly growing megacities (e.g., Dhaka in Bangladesh)
Energy – high quality energy (oil) that fuels growth has peaked – we are now scrambling
Environmental – natural environment is being destroyed
Climate – atmosphere is changing, planet warming
Economic –gap between rich and poor is widening, societies becoming unstable – prone to revolution, terrorism

These conditions are like tectonic plates bumping into each other building up pressures which ultimately must be relieved.

Nassim Taleb – The Black Swan. Taleb believes the world is much more unpredictable than we pretend, beset by black swans, and unforeseen (and unforeseeable) events. Tricks for getting by include learning to ignore people to who claim to predict the future and learning to recognize and run with good luck when it happens.

The main words to remember from Black Swan are non-linear and chaos. Environmental changes which bring about a collapse or disruption will not proceed in a regular, straight-line fashion but in a non-linear, chaotic manner.

Thomas Friedman – The World is Flat. Friedman says the world is smaller than we image, flatter. Everybody is connected to everybody else. Barriers between trade and communication have come down (been flattened). The playing field on which people, companies, and countries compete and play has been leveled. The people on the playing field are just as likely to be brown and Eastern as they are to be white and Western.

The main point to remember in the Flat World book is how an event in one place, can, because of globalized connections, rapidly have repercussions across the entire planet. The repercussions feed back into the original event which spreads outward again, then feeds back, then out, then back in a loop, every iteration reinforced and stronger. It is how non-linear chaotic systems develop. How a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can cause a tornado in Kansas.

Caveat

This is my book. Although inspired by the words of others, these words are mine. Also, in some odd sense the ideas are mine. After all the rewrites and edits I own what I say – even though I am “only” interpreting the ideas of the smart men listed above. Consequently the mistakes and the misinterpretations are mine. If you have a problem with something, bear in mind that you are reading me. That’s who you have an issue with – not with the smart men.

C14 of Collapse - Disastrous Decisions

2011-09-15T07:32:00.000-07:00

Diamond’s college students always ask how could societies make the disastrous decisions that allow a collapse to happen?

In other words...

Why don’t societies anticipate problems (are the people just stupid)?
Why don’t societies recognize problems even after the situation becomes obvious?
Whey, even after the situation becomes obvious, do some societies, (or the people who could do something) not even attempt a solution?
And why do some solutions fail (again, are the people stupid)?

Note: The people generally aren’t stupid – maybe venal, maybe short sighted, maybe besotted by religion or tradition – but not stupid .

Problem Not Anticipated

Sometimes people just don’t see a problem coming. There is a failure of imagination. British colonists in Australia did not imagine what would happen when they introduced foxes and rabbits. The foxes killed off smaller native animals and birds (none of whom had genetically coded experience with these foreign predators). Rabbits ate everything and even though the foxes ate the rabbits they couldn’t keep up. Another example is kudzu –which was introduced in the southern U.S. to control erosion and ended up covering a lot of landscape.

Sometimes societies don’t remember past problems. Non-literate societies can lose information from generation to generation. Literate societies can simply forget what has been written. For example just after the 1973 oil crisis Americans briefly switched to more economical cars. After a few years they returned to gas guzzlers.

Sometimes people draw false analogies to past problems. Remembering apparent lessons of WWI, the French developed the Maginot line – a series of fortifications positioned to repel likely German infantry attacks. Unfortunately the Germans bypassed the Maginot line with masses of tanks – which had only been used individually in previous war. The French generals were stuck in the past and failed to anticipate the future. They learned the wrong lessons.

Problem Not Recognized

Sometimes people don’t see a problem even after it arrives.

There are at least three reasons for such failures of perception…

Imperceptible

The problem is literally invisible to the naked eye. For example, a region’s soil nutrients – invisible to the eye – might be missing. Native plants growing in such soil can appear lush, disguising the fact that all the nutrients are locked in the plants. When settlers, not knowing any better, cut the plants down the nutrients go away. Crops planted by the settlers won’t grow.

Or, consider greenhouses gases. They are generally invisible. So are pathogens.

Distant Managers

Decision-makers might be somewhere else. They don’t know when things go bad. Diamond notes that Tikopian and the New Guinea highland societies were successful – at least in part - because everyone involved was there. The bosses knew what was going on.

Slow Trends

Slow trends can be hidden in up and down fluctuations. Noise obscures signals. Consider global warming. One year the temperature is up; another year it is down. Much data had to be collected before scientists agreed that global warming is real.

(Weathers’ aside: Even after long-term temperature increases were accepted, a few scientists argued - and still argue - that the increase is due to natural climate fluctuation and not human activity. Only recently have most scientists concluded that the rapid – geologically speaking – increases of recent decades are not likely natural trends. Natural trends typically don’t work that fast.)

Creeping normalcy (landscape amnesia) can hide trends. When things happen slowly enough we might not see the changes. Over the years an untended field becomes overgrown and nobody notices until one day somebody says didn’t that used to be a field? Or a slum happens. Or a town becomes gentrified. Or a stream gradually becomes filled with silt from runoff. Or gradually all the trees in a forest are cut down and only the old people remember back when.

Solution Not Attempted

Sometimes solutions might not even be attempted - for various rational and irrational reasons.

Rational Reasons for Not Attempting Solutions

People or groups often don’t do anything because rationally (ignoring any moral issues) it is not in their interest to do so. Diamond cites the polluting company who leaves an area before the damage affects them. They take the money and run.

This type of issue is sometimes referred to as the “tragedy of the commons”, “the prisoner’s dilemma”, and “the logic of collective action”. Generally it means (again ignoring any moral issues) that when people can – with little penalty - gain an advantage by behaving badly it makes no sense for individuals to behave well.

For example…

If everyone is waiting in a line (vehicular, pedestrian) and you have an opportunity to cut in then why not do it before other people get the same idea? (You might be especially inclined to cut in if you don’t feel anything for the other people – or, better yet, if you resent them because of social difference – in that case cutting in provides positive satisfaction.)

Or if everybody shoplifts, maybe you should as well – before the store packs up and moves out of your neighborhood.

Or if your local economy depends on an ecologically damaging industry (logging, mining, etc.) why should your town pay the price for a national concern?

There are two obvious answers to such problems.

One is to force people and groups to do the right thing by regulating their behavior. Such regulations are typically backed by people with guns.

The other answer is for people to police themselves. Diamond says that this can only happen in homogeneous populations where people share common community values. One class cannot feel especially estranged from the class above it. And it helps if people care about something larger than themselves.

(Weathers aside: This is the top-down versus bottom-up approach to government that divides liberals and conservatives. Top-down advocates accept that many people will not do the right thing, either because they have no free-will – they are basically animals, idiots, whatever – or because they are selfish and don’t care. Bottom-up advocates argue that might be true, but everybody should be free to do the right thing and government should get in the way. People should look after themselves.)

Irrational Reasons for Not Attempting Solutions

In previous examples, no solutions were attempted because inaction made rational sense at least to some people. Irrational inaction happens when there is no rational reason for anybody to maintain the status quo but they do it anyway.

Religious convictions sometimes prompt irrational behavior. Diamond offers as an example the Easter Islanders who cut down all their trees to get logs to transport statues – objects of religious veneration. He also mentions the Greenland Norse whose shared Christian values helped them survive for centuries then prevented them from adopting new lifestyles needed for continued survival.

Secular beliefs (often held in conjunction with religious beliefs) can also get in the way of survival. Sometimes these beliefs start as a rational behavior and over the years became irrational. Sometimes it is not clear when or if there has been such a shift. The self-reliant, go-it-alone pioneer spirit which helped found the U.S. might not make sense in a complex urban society where people must live and work in close proximity. Many people – especially the people who believe in bottom-up control and free will would disagree. Top-down people – many of them – would regretfully agree.

Irrational reluctance to solve problems can also result from a focus on short-term issues at the expense of long-term views. The current willingness in Washington to sacrifice environmental regulations for a possible short-term bump in employment might be an example.

A final example cited by Diamond of irrational reluctance to solve problems is psychological denial. People just don’t want to face issues. It is too painful. He notes a study of the attitudes of people who live below dams. People who live farther away from the dam were more concerned about dam failure than people who lived closer. Diamond contends that those people – looking up at the dam every day – professed that they were in no danger in order to stay sane (by being irrational).

When The Solution Doesn’t Work

Sometimes people try to do something but the solution fails - for various reasons.

The solution might too complex at the present time. People might not be smart enough – may never be smart enough. For example we may never eradicate kudzu. Or maybe science can never get to the very moment of the Big Bang (our Big Bang anyway) or find the God Particle or figure out Dark Matter.

The solution might be perceived as being too expensive. For example all kudzu could pulled up by a huge labor force. But that would be very expensive. (Some environmental problems viewed today as being too expensive might later be viewed differently.)

Some solutions might be too little to late (or just too late or too little).

Some solutions might be just wrong, the result of ignorance. Forest service policies that allow undergrowth to build up result in more and hotter fires. (This solution was once the result of ignorance, now it is more likely economic – clearing out undergrowth is too expensive.) Dunking and burning purported witches is generally wrong and ineffective.

Conclusion

Like other writers on this subject, Diamond does not want to say societal success or failure is random - or determined by environmental or other factors. He prefers to cite courageous and/or farsighted leaders and courageous and/or farsighted people – leaders and people who can learn from history and face the future.
Maybe so.

Prologue of Collapse

2011-08-29T05:48:00.000-07:00

Collapse

Penguin Books 2005

ISBN 978-0-670-03337-9

Jared Diamond

This is a book about societies that have collapsed – ancient and modern – and a few societies that did not collapse.

Diamond claims that these collapses are relevant today.

He notes various factors contributing to collapses, but tends to focus on environmental issues. He offers a “five-point framework of possible contributing factors”:

1. Environmental damage caused by people.

2. Climate change – today caused by people, in the past by natural factors.

3. Hostile neighbors who prevail when a society becomes weak – maybe because of one of the other factors.

4. Friendly neighbors who become unfriendly or weak and no longer support the society (maybe the formerly friendly society has been weakened by other factors)

5. How a society responds to its problems. Are they smart, perceptive, honest – or the opposite?

Diamond notes that there are two principal techniques employed by science to study societal problems – comparative method and natural experiment. The former technique compares similar aspects of societies; the later changes limited numbers of variables while holding others unchanged. Diamond employs the comparative technique.

The book is divided into four parts.

Part 1 consists of a single chapter that examines present-day Montana.

Part 2 examines ancient societies that failed and a few that succeeded. They include:

· Easter Island – ecological and population collapses caused by isolation and inward directed competition.

· Pitcairn and Henderson Islands – collapsed when environmental problems caused collapse of friendly trading partners (islands also had environmental issues)

· Anasazi and Mayan societies – collapsed for a variety of interrelated issues - environmental problems, population increases, climate change.

· Three societies that did not fail – Tikopia, New Guinea highlands, and Japan.

Part Three examines four modern societies - Rwanda, Dominican Republic/Haiti, China, and Australia.

Part Four sums up lessons and examines reasons. He lists four reasons why societies fail to solve problems…

1. Failure to anticipate problems

2. Failure to perceive problem once it arrives

3. Failure to attempt a solution

4. Failure of solution

In this part he also notes 12 aspects of environmental problem, examines the roles of big business and globalization.

C20 of The Great Disruption - Guess Who's in Charge

2011-08-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

(Obviously we are in charge.)

This is the final chapter in the book.

It starts with a story.

Gilding imagines he is sitting in a cafe in Amsterdam in 1938 with his friend Pieter. Across the canal is the Frank house where Anne is now nine years old. Pieter, echoing the opinion of other smart people of the time, says that he believes in a few years Germany will violate Holland's neutrality, occupy most of Europe, kill maybe six million Jews (including the little Frank girl across the way) in a war that will eventually claim fifty million civilian and military lives. He further speculates that the US will not get in the conflict until the last moment - when the issue is very much in doubt.

Although Pieter feels the danger is obvious he doesn't see the possibility of any action taken anytime soon - even in Europe which will be affected first. The political leadership is not there; neither are the people.

As the now depressed 1938 Gilding cycles home, he wonders what he should do. That night he discusses the situation with his wife. They agree; it can't be that bad. Surely the leadership would do something. They decide to wait and see what happens.

Modern day Gilding's point is that the leadership is us. Business leaders (many of whom Gilding regards as smart, moral people) are limited. Political leaders (many of whom who are smart and moral; many of whom who are idiots and immoral) are also limited.

It's easy to give up. Gilding quotes this from the poem Common Sense by Paul Williams...

On the edge of the dream
we face our deepest doubts.
Now that it all is almost real
a terrible fear of success takes hold
and we grab desperately, uncontrollably, for failure.
One last chance to get off easy.
Who among us really wants to save the world,
to be born again into two thousand more years
of struggle?
How much sweeter to be the doomed generation,
floating gently on the errors and villainy of others,
towards some glorious apocalypse now…
Hallelujah! It's not my fault --
Bring on the end times!

Gilding's final point is this.

We need to get past stuff. We need to live happy, meaningful lives, not lives dominated by empty consumption.

Further, we need to talk and act - to get involved, even get mad - but as Gilding notes (maybe hard for some of us) not to get crazy. We need to follow the examples of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King.

C14 of the Great Disruption - Elephant in Room

2011-08-24T16:01:00.000-07:00

The elephant is growth.

The Great Disruption is just the beginning.

Even after we have...

awakened to the climate crisis
gotten on a war footing
fixed the climate crisis (because we are good at war)
suffered the disruptions caused by shifting to renewable energy sources (necessary to fix the climate crisis)
reaped the economic opportunities created by shifting to renewables
celebrated the cool new technologies invented to implement the shift

...we will still have to deal with material growth.

The climate crisis is only a symptom of the underlying problem. We live on a finite planet with finite resources. We can have spiritual growth, intellectual growth, moral growth - but not unlimited material growth. Physics doesn't work that way.

Gilding acknowledges that...

The transition from material growth will be very painful. Economic growth is the foundation of our market-based system. It is the standard by which we judge our economy and our governments.
For most of the 20th century our market-driven, growth based system did work. A lot of poor people moved into the middle class. A lot of middle class people became rich. (And a lot of poor people stayed poor or got poorer.)
Even today the market based system still seems to be working. But this is a mirage. As our visible wealth increases, our hidden social and environmental costs increase even faster. At the macro level we are losing rather than gaining wealth. Like the overextended homeowners of the 2008 financial crisis we are living in the midst of a giant Ponzi scheme that is about to go bust.

However, even if we could have unlimited growth (which we can't) it would not make people happy. Over a certain level of income (about $15K/year for individuals, $60K/year for families) studies indicate that additional income does not correlate with increased happiness. There is passing satisfaction at the moment money is spent but no lasting pleasure. The new thing becomes the old thing. People do get satisfaction from making more money than their peers but it is not the absolute income that matters only the difference compared to somebody else.

And although some rich people claim that raising the wealth level for rich people also raises the level for poor people - at least allowing them to move into the 15K "happy bracket", research shows that increasing inequity within a society degrades the quality of life for all citizens. Gilding will elaborate on this in a future chapter.

C13 of The Great Disruption - Shifting Sands

2011-08-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

Gilding says change is coming and we'd better be prepared and resilient. This is true for individuals and institutions - private and public.

He notes four aspects of change to be especially aware of...

1 - Physical impacts of climate change on security and economy

There will be food shortages, supply shocks, price volatility - regardless of our response. Contributing factors include:

Industrial agriculture. It depends on nitrogen fixation which depends on carbon which is nonrenewable. It can run out.
Integrated, just-in-time food chains. Although efficient - delivering low-cost food across the globe, such systems are also vulnerable. Transportation failures, terrorist attacks, etc. could leave some ends of chain with only four days of food on shelves.
Increased competition for food as countries like China and India become more wealthy.
Less land available for farming.
Competition between crops gown for food and for biofuel and other industrial uses.

Shortages and disruptions will create unrest and instability, especially in poorer countries. (Weathers' note: I think this has already happened - playing a role in Arab Spring. See http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/food-price-threshold/)

2 - Shifts in economic competitiveness

There will be winners and losers as The Great Disruption occurs and countries put their "war plans" in effect. If what Gilding says will happen, happens, the oil producing countries and the oil industry will be losers. So will the coal industry. Generally all those who deliver carbon based energy will suffer. However, those who develop and provide energy from renewable resources (solar, wind, hydro, etc.) will prosper.

Gilding sees the most interesting competition taking place between the US and China. The Great Disruption is closer to happening in China due to the greater environmental damage that has already taken place. Consequently China is closer to implementing it's own war plans. It is hitting the "physical limits of its economic growth model". Gilding quotes Tom Friedman (the Flat Earth guy):

"Yes, China's leaders have decided to grow green - out of necessity because too many of their people can't breathe, can't swim, can't farm and can't drink thanks to pollution from its coal- and oil-based manufacturing growth engine. And, therefore, unless China powers its development with cleaner energy systems, and more knowledge-intensive business without smokestacks, China will die of its own development."

China is seriously pursing a low-carbon economy. So are India, Brazil and South Korea.

Gilding thinks China might win the competition with the US because it is not wedded to a market-based economy. Further, its government, less burdened by the need to observe Western democratic freedoms, might be more efficient. It might respond faster to the problems.

3 - Loss of moral authority

Countries, systems and economic models that win the economic war started by The Great Disruption will have increased moral authority over those who don't. For the latter two thirds of 20th century that war was won by the West - by the US in particular. This might not be true in the 21st century.

4 - Reaction of "victims"

Some small low-lying countries and some entire regions will cease to exist - disappearing under water or sand. Even if the causes of global warming were ended today, the effects have momentum and will continue for decades. Gilding sees reparations being sought by individuals, groups, regions, countries. Some redress will be pursued in courts of law. Some in the streets.

C12 of The Great Disruption - Creative Destruction on Steroids

2011-08-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

In this chapter Gilding attempts to answer those who ask, "How will all this happen? There is so much cheap coal in the ground, so much natural gas - even petroleum - how could people simply give that up?"

His answer is that he doesn't know exactly how it will happen. But he is certain that it will happen because it must. There will come a time in the not-to-distant future when it will become obvious that we cannot continue down this same road - that something must be done to stop the slide past a one or two degree C rise in temperature over pre-industrial levels.

Confession - Reading my own views between Gilding's lines I thought he meant that there would be an ecological/economic Pearl Harbor that would force people into action the way the real Pearl Harbor forced people into action at the start of WWII. This event - I reasoned - would almost but not quite push humanity over the brink. I was wrong. What Gilding seems to be saying is that government (or at least The Market) will take action simply because it must, because the science will become so obvious. Businesses that takes action will prosper; those that don't will fail.

Gilding says, "... it is clear government has to act, so they will. That action must result in dramatic reductions in CO2 emissions, and the science says that must result in the decline of coal and oil, followed soon after by gas. There are no realistic scenarios where this can be achieved if we wait past 2015-2020, unless we decide to go past two degrees (centigrade) of warming. Given that all the world's major governments have agreed not to, the logic of the economic risk flows pretty easily."

One can only hope that this circular chain of cause and effect actually transpires.

Gilding himself seems unsure because he says the future will characterized by by "dramatic and discontinuous change" (implying non-linear events - Black Swans) - whether we go over the edge or just get close. The difference seems to be the kind of planning we can do. If we go over the edge and "the economy collapses under the weight of climate and sustainability impacts" no planning will be possible - the level of chaos will be too great.

However, given that the latter scenario means things will pretty much go to hell anyway, Gilding doesn't dwell on it. Instead, assuming that government and/or business will pull us back from the brink, he talks about what will happen to various industries, especially coal and oil.

It is a near certainty he says that in a new economy dedicated to limiting global temperature rise to 1 (or even 2) degrees C above pre-industrial age level, coal and oil will be out. According to the German government funded Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in 2024 we will have dumped all the CO2 in the air we can. Any more CO2 will increase the risk of going over the edge of climate disaster to greater 20% - one in five.

So, assuming governments and business act, such a catastrophe will not be allowed to happen, which means that fossil fuels can longer be burned after a few more years. (He discusses carbon-capture and storage - CCS - as a way to continue to use coal. Although he sees no reason not to investigate this technology he doesn't think it will prove economically competitive compared to renewable energy sources.)

It is less certain what fuel or technology will replace fossil fuel. Gilding doesn't think it will be nuclear because of problems with waste, terrorism and supply limits. He thinks it will be some combination of various renewable energy sources - hydro, solar, wind, geothermal. Right now, except for hydro, none of these technologies is much beyond the prototype stage. He believes that the economics of one or a combination of these approaches will be proven.

However, in the end, he points out, it is not about economics. Things will change. We will either go off an ecological/economic cliff - in which case, the change will happen to us. Or we will become the active agents of change.

C11 of The Great Disruption - Austrian Economist

2011-08-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

Point One - If you believe that The Great Disruption will really happen and that a "one-degree war plan" is necessary then you should do something - should get started with the war.

Point Two - According to the Austrian economist Joesph Schumpeter, markets are engines of creative destruction - "a process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one."

Although Gilding compares The Market (my emphasis) to a rain forest he doesn't extend the metaphor to explicitly say that markets are instruments of economic natural selection. Therefore, making the analogy for him - companies, like living organisms, change in response to changes in the environments in which they function.

However...

In natural systems changes are due to random DNA mutations - which either provide advantage or disadvantage in constantly changing environments. If an advantage is forthcoming the organism survives to pass on its DNA; otherwise the organism fails and becomes an evolutionary dead end.

In economic systems changes are made more-or-less consciously by business people in response to changes in The Market - the business environment. When changes work, the business makes money - it prospers. When changes don't work, the business loses money - it fails.

Point Three - Given Point Two, the way to change business and fight the one-degree war is to change the environment in which business operates. Change The Market and at least some businesses will implement the changes necessary to make money. Businesses that adapt will prosper, those that don't will fail.

In the case of the one-degree war, the aspect of The Market most subject to change and control is the regulatory environment. Change that in ways that favor the war and business will follow; it has no choice - like any organism, living or otherwise, business has to play by the rules of the environment.

Of course the present national environment of which the business environment is a part is decidedly anti-government, anti-regulation. That will not change until The Great Disruption creates a wake-up Black Swan event.

(What if Rick Perry is President when the Black Swan event happens?)

C10 of The Great Disruption - The One-Degree War

2011-08-06T13:56:00.000-07:00

Accepting the belief (the hope?) that a Pearl Harbor level ecological/economic event will cause The Great Awakening (without triggering disastrous climate feed-back loops), the next step is come up with an action plan. What should these newly agreeing parties do?

Gilding and his friend Professor Jorgen Randers, one of the authors of the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth (and recently The Limits toGrowth: The 30 Year Update) propose an action plan for the next 100 years.

The first action - likely undertaken with or without a plan - will be to reduce greenhouse gases. Climate warming will probably be seen as the cause of the Pearl Harbor style ecological/economic event. Given that the definition of this event includes the capacity to rouse the old order to action it therefore follows that the old order will be roused and will act.

Since greenhouse gases are responsible for warming the question arises: how much warming can be allowed? What should be the goal? The current consensus is that two degrees centigrade rise over pre-industrial revolution levels can be allowed - not because it is "safe" but because it is the best we can do politically.

Gilding disagrees. Quoting Winston Churchill, Gilding says we must do "what is necessary" - not just what is politically expedient. A two degree rise is likely to produce great damage and disruption. A one degree cap is safer. Gilding thinks this will be politically feasible given the impact of The Great Awakening (that results from The Great Disruption).

Estimates are that the Great Awakening Event will occur sometime around 2018 (no one knows for sure - it could be next year in 2012 or it could be 2028 - although if the latter, even more damage will have been done). In any case, using a 2018 as an arbitrary starting time, Gilding says that the following actions need to occur in the time frames indicated...

Years 1 -5 (2018 - 2023) Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50%. Not only will this begin to clean up the atmosphere and start the cooling process it will shock our political and social systems into action. Following are some specific goals recommended for the first five year period:

Cut deforestation and other logging by 50%
Close 1,000 dirty coal power plants
Retrofit 1,000 other coal power plants with carbon capture and storage
Ration electricity and increase gas mileage
Erect a wind turbine or solar plant in every town (if only for psychological boost)
Create huge wind and solar farms in suitable location
Ration use of dirty cars to cut transport emissions by 50%
Strand half of world's aircraft
Capture or burn methane
Move away from climate unfriendly protein
Bind one gigaton of CO2 in soil
Launch a government and community-led "shop less live more" campaign (hard to imagine old order sanctioning this)

Years 5 - 20 (2023 - 2038) Move world to net zero climate emissions. Requires technological and social innovation

Years 20 - 100 (2038 - 2118) Achieve a stable climate and a sustainable economy. Reverse emission; remove CO2 from atmosphere.

Obviously all this seems impossible. Gilding says to look back the changes brought about WWII. (One struck me. Four days after Pearl Harbor the government ordered a halt to the production of private vehicles. )

C9 of The Great Disruption - When the Dam of Denial Breaks

2011-08-06T05:10:00.000-07:00

In the last chapter Gilding moved from despair to hope by believing that we have the power to prevent The Great Disruption from becoming The Great Collapse.

He believes that in the near future, an ecological/economic Pearl Harbor will break us out of denial and despair, move us to the Great Awakening.

Note: Re-reading this and other chapters I see that it is I who predict an ecological/economic Pearl Harbor, not Gilding. The response by people and government that he believes must happen will result from a tipping point of awareness - when it becomes obvious (to intelligent people of good will?) that we are heading toward a cliff and something must be done. He thinks that after-the- fact this awareness might be attributed to an economic Pearl Harbor - a single black swan event - but probably not at the time. That will be magic.

The implication is that this black swan event must be bad enough to convince even anti-government conservatives that action is necessary. It will require death, destruction and economic disruption. But it must stop short of triggering ecological feed-back loops that result in total climate collapse.

In other words we will have to be lucky - if you can call a Pearl Harbor style event luck. That is what Gilding requires you to believe.

So, in this spirit of belief...

After the event occurs (maybe it will be a series of lesser events symbolized by one dramatic Pearl Harbor event) the "dam of denial" will break. We will move to a war-time footing.

Action will take place on two fronts. The old economy and systems will react first. Driven by a vested interest in maintaining established ways, yet aware now of the extent of the problem, this part of our society will fight the initial tactical battles. Spending great sums of money, expanding the power of government, the old order will attack the problem of greenhouse gas emission, or whatever it was that pushed us to the edge. Such actions might even create a period of financial growth.

Gilding believes that in this war-like atmosphere, almost anything can be accomplished - at least in the short term. However, he thinks that the old order will not willingly give up the idea of continued growth. The old order will accept that continued material consumption cannot go on, but will believe (as it believes now) that material growth itself can continue - maintained by new technologies and efficiencies. The old order will argue (as it argues now) that we are basically a greedy, competitive species and that this style of economy suits us best.

This is where the second front of the war comes in. Knowing, as Gilding knows, that the laws of physics do not allow unlimited material growth in a finite world, some people will coalesce around a new economy and style of living. This new order will fight the strategic long term battles - over a period of 40 or so years. It will move us past consumerism and stuff.

C8 of The Great Disruption - Are We Finished?

2011-08-02T05:42:00.000-07:00

In this chapter Gilding turns a corner, moving from despair to hope. But it is not an easy move to make.

Our attitudes have to change. According to Gilding, we must...

Accept that things are going to get really bad. People are going to suffer. (The "new normal" unemployment rate of 9% is just a start. So is $3.50 gas and $10 dinners.) People will die. We have to prepare ourselves - physically, economically, psychologically. It will be like a world war.
Drop our old ideas about how change occurs - understand that change generally does not happen slowly, in a planned manner, but fast - in this case, as a series of really bad black swans.
Evolve a new set of values, politics, personal expectations. We have to shed our ethic of consumerism. (See asides below for Homer-Dixon's views on values.)
Accept the idea that we are not saving the planet, only ourselves - our species. Although we might wipe out 50% of present day biodiversity, in a 100 million years (a moment in the life of a planet) Earth will have long moved past us. It will get along just fine.

Gilding says that despair is a legitimate reaction to what is going on. He notes that some experts in this field - including James Lovelock author of The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning and Clive Hamilton who wrote Requiem for a Species - believe we are not smart enough to come back from the Fall, that it is too late.

Gilding does not agree. He believes that the despair and hopelessness evidenced by the writers above (and until 2008 by himself) is step two in a three step process...

The first step is denial which itself has two substeps. Initially we don't believe what is happening. Then, we enter what Gilding calls "denial breakdown". We more or less believe the science, acknowledge that it makes sense but do not believe the full implications. Or, we accept the implications but do not yet feel the impact - do not move from intellectual understanding to emotional understanding. (Gilding says climate deniers and antiscience skeptics can be ignored; they will be overcome by events.)
The second step is despair. We begin to sense what is really going on. We see the species lost - the animals starving, dying - children starving, dying. We see a generation of underemployed, drifting young people (our children, grandchildren?) every one a potential Mad Max - and us the wandering guy in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
The final step is acceptance,what Gilding calls the Great Awakening (a term coined by Professor Jorgen Randers). This happens when we move past grief - when we start to do something - when we understand that many of the drifting young people mentioned above can be productively engaged in saving our species. Stuck as we are between denial and despair there is nothing practically we can do to prevent The Great Disruption. But we can change what happens on the other side - whether we collapse, as described in Jared Diamond's Collapse, or whether we transcend.

Gilding says that the trick to moving past grief into acceptance and action is the belief that we can actually solve our problem (again, not prevent the Disruption but manage what follows). Although it might seem that we are doomed, Gilding points to our history of waiting until last moment to act in the face of imminent disaster.

He uses WWII as an example. Although there were clear indications in 1933 that Hilter was a threat to world survival, people in the US and Britain remained in denial and despair until the last minute. The crisis was well underway before leaders like depressed Winston Churchill, grandiose Franklin Roosevelt, and monstrous Joesph Stalin finally rallied their people into action unimaginable before the war. We did not prevent the war but we did save civilization from Hitler. Gilding sees that same level of action in response to The Great Disruption. We can't stop the war but we can win it. (The recent last minute resolution of the debt crisis could be viewed as another example of a last-minute save.)

Gilding says that a single event might be viewed (at least in retrospect) as the ecological/economic Pearl Harbor that calls us to action (an ad hoc black swan).

ASIDES

Military people already warn about the risks of collapse...

Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni said, "The 2007 report concluded that climate change would act as a threat multiplier by exacerbating conflict over resources, especially because of declining food production, border and mass migration tensions, and so on - increasing political instability and creating failed states - if no action was taken to reduce impacts."
Thirty three retired generals and admirals wrote in April 2010 report to the Senate, "climate change is threatening American security... it exacerbates existing problems by decreasing stability, increasing conflict, and incubating the socioeconomic conditions that foster terrorist recruitment. The State Department, the National Intelligence Council, and the CIA all agree, and are planning for future climate-based threats."
A secret 2004 Pentagon report noted, "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life... once again, warfare would define human life."

Paraphrasing Hunter-Thompson on values in The Upside of Down...

We need to move beyond strictly utilitarian values which only express our likes, dislikes. This gives rise to our consumer oriented culture. Consumed by consumerism, we become less resilient, more vulnerable to unexpected non-linear events.
We also need to move beyond the unthinking, politically oriented notions of fairness, right and wrong which often passes for spiritual belief. This too leaves us rigid, vulnerable to non-linear events.
We need to move into the realm of spiritual and existential values that are “compatible with the exigencies of the natural world”.
According to Homer-Dixon, such values recognize that

Energy and the laws of thermodynamics play a key role in our survival.
Certain kinds of connectivity are dangerous.
Many natural systems (including all adaptive systems) behave in a non-linear manner. In the words of Nassim Taleb we live in Extremistan.

We need to move from a growth imperative to a resilience imperative.

Signs and portents seen late at night on CNN

Drought is killing people in the Horn of Africa. Thousands of people are on the move. Last night I had to turn away from a picture of starving child held by its mother. The mother was dressed in a dirty robe that had once been colorful. The child was a skeleton covered in skin, a delicate little drum, its ribs a marimba. Although it certainly doesn't matter to the mother and child if the drought is the result of climate change, maybe it is. Maybe an obscene black swan waddles among the corpses.
Big Oil is digging oil sand in the Canadian wilderness. Tremendous amounts of energy are needed to extract the oil from the sand. Tremendous quantities of greenhouse polluting gases are being released. The landscape looks like the surface of the moon. Maybe Hunter-Dixon is right. Maybe Peak Oil has happened and we are now forced to the bizarre and extreme in our search for energy.
Jabbering crowds throw bodies off a bridge in Syria - the bloody corpses whirling gaily through the air to flop in the water beside their dead companions. The Arab Spring moves into late Summer. I once read or heard somebody say that rising food prices had something to do with this.

C7 of The Great Disruption - The Road Ahead

2011-08-01T10:33:00.000-07:00

Although details of the future can't be predicted, Gilding thinks the outline is clear. Our complex, growth-addicted culture cannot survive as is. The end might have begun in 2008 or it might not happen until next year in 2012. But it will happen. Growth will stutter to a stop. After that civilization will either...

Stabilize and evolve to a higher plane (Gilding's belief).
Or become much much simpler (e.g., it will collapse like the cultures described in Jared Diamond's book Collapse).

The fall of a system (ecological/economic) resembles the end of a human life. Gilding's friend Dr. John Collee describes it this way...

"Every patient with an incurable illness will ask how long they have to live. The answer goes something like this: 'No one can say how long you may live, because every individual is different, but focus on the changes you can observe and be guided by those. When things start changing for the worse, expect those changes to accelerate. So the changes that have occurred over a year may advance by the same degree in a few months, then in weeks. And that is how you can judge when the end is coming.' "

"Planet Earth, being a web of complex self-regulating systems, operates very much like a human body. Terminal illness gives us the template for most forms of ecological collapse. One set of changes initiates another, and so on in a downward cascade of negative feedback until the whole system falls apart."

Like the terminal patient we must look for certain signs. Gilding says to look for an accelerating cascade of...

Ecological, social and economic shocks driven by climate change.
Increases in food prices due to demand and lower output.
Diminished water supplies, fisheries, agriculture resulting from damaged ecosystem - further increasing prices.
Increased oil costs as peak oil happens (if it has not already happened).
Falling stock markets driven by fear and uncertainty.

Does all this mean the world is coming to an end? Gilding says not necessarily - but it does mean we (or the children and grandchildren of those of us approaching senility) are in for a ride.

Weathers asides

A theme in Gilding's book and in other recent books read by the semi-sober Thinking Men's book club and social organization is the nonlinearity. In the real world events are not neat. They start slowly and end fast - stuttering to a stop. This was the theme of Nassim Taleb's Black Swan book, which I obsessed over in...

http://bookreportz.blogspot.com/2009/05/black-swan-impact-of-highly-improbable.html

A less obvious theme but one that seems obvious to me is complexity. In the process of getting where we are we have become complex. According to Thomas Homer-Dixon in his book The Upside of Down, complexity has left us rigid. In another fit of obsession I wrote this...

(Regarding us - Homer-Dixon says human societies adapt to resource scarcity by becoming more and more complex, more connected and interdependent. We squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of our systems, until there is nothing left to squeeze. In the process we loose resiliency, become fragile, subject to disruption. )

in this...

http://bookreportz.blogspot.com/2011/04/upside-of-down.html

C6 of The Great Disruption - The Year That Growth Stopped

2011-07-30T15:49:00.000-07:00

In this chapter Gilding argues that 2008 was the year that The Great Disruption started - that these two "crash" indicators occurred...

Resource limitations forced prices up
Ecosystem hit tripping points

He also recounts reactions to his arguments.

Ecosystem tripping points

Melting of northern icecaps accelerates, exposing dark blue ocean which heats faster which accelerates ice melting.
Melting of frozen tundra accelerates the release of large quantities of methane which is a greenhouse gas which traps heat which accelerates release of methane.
Ocean acidification increases which reduces the ocean's ability to absorb CO2 which prevents shellfish from forming shells and coral reefs from growing and heats the atmosphere.

Prices Going Up

Oil becomes increasing difficult to extract - easily accessible oil has all been found, is being used - meaning "peak oil" has or soon will happen. Oil price goes up. (The "new normal" for gas is well over $3 gallon.)
Global food prices go up (the "new normal" for a meal in a decent dinner is now $10) - because...

Reactions

When he first started presenting his story to social and business leaders Gilding was regarded as "intellectual entertainment" - written off as an "extremist and merchant of doom". Gilding's theory is that these are good people who have invested their professional and personal lives in the notion of growth. It had become a given, a fact of life not to be challenged.
After the crash of 2008 was well under way, Gilding got different reactions. The same leaders mentioned above felt that something was going - some change had happened. Many agreed in principle with Gilding - in the direction that things were heading, but were more optimistic that something could be done to forestall the ultimate collapse.
Gilding quotes Thomas Friedman (Flat Earth guy)... "What if the crisis of 2008 represents something more fundamental than a deep recession. What if it's telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall - when Mother Nature and the market both said, 'No more.' "

Personal aside

I wonder if the current debt ceiling crisis is not a semi-unconscious reaction to the start of The Great Disruption. Both sides still talk about maintaining growth. Liberals say that we can spend our way back to 2.5% GDP growth and 8% unemployment. The semi-crazy tea party people claim that halting the growth of government will foster economic growth - maybe even a return to a pre-modern utopia where Billy Grahm and The Beaver reign supreme. However I get a sense that the craziest tea party people, the ones with the wildest eyes, those willing to go to the wall know in their non-sentient souls that more going on.

Related books

The smart systems at Amazon tried to sell me these books...

Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson
Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella Meadows
Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development by Herman Daly

C3 of The Great Disruption

2011-07-30T11:07:00.000-07:00

In Chapter Three of The Great Disruption, Paul Guiding notes that people have trouble understanding dire forecasts of global ecosystem studies because for the most part things look pretty good - at least in the developed part of the world. We are biologically programmed to respond to immediate threats. We don't naturally have the mental equipment to understand anything not happening in front of our noses; such insight has to be acquired. Guiding concludes the chapter by nothing that if we don't accept the science (which is about as unanimous as science gets) and wait for evidence that we can see it will be too late. The great disruption/collapse whatever will be on us. I think he will say in Chapter four that it almost is.

C4 of The Great Disruption

2011-07-30T11:04:00.001-07:00

Changing economic/environmental practices has always been framed as a choice. If we change this thing we will avoid that thing - cause something else to happen. We always had a choice. Gilding's point is that the time of choice has passed. We didn't choose and now the results are on us. The changes required at this time are too great - the inertia of systems against change cannot be practically overcome. He says, "This means any hope that we can mobilize the massive intervention required to avert the crisis is a false hope. In combination the evidence all points to one conclusion. We cannot now avoid the the crisis of the Great Disruption."

C5 of The Great Disruption - Addicted to Growth

2011-07-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

Gilding quotes a professor named Tim Jackson....

"The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100."

(Yesterday, Bruce the leader of The Thinking Men - our semi-sober book club - and the voracious reader who suggested The Great Disruption sent around one of those email lists comparing things then and now. No air conditioning then, one or two lights per room, one car, no clothes dryer, manual push mowers, one small TV, etc. That's how it was a half century ago.)

Gilding's point is that such expansion cannot continue. It will hit the wall - several walls - the walls of finite reality. (In the last chapter Gilding cited a study which says that we are presently consuming resources at the rate of 1.4 planets.) The underlying issues are the loss of global biodiversity and changes to the global ecosystem. But the one that will grab us (by throat or crotch - pick your sensitivity) is the end of growth.

We are wedded to growth and its paired drivers, consumerism and stuff. Stuff, in quantity and quality, defines us. It is how we judge ourselves and other people - the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, where we eat, where we shop (Harris Teeter -vs- WalMart!). Growth is key to economic policy. An economy that does not grow at least two percent a year is a failed economy. Business is predicated on ever-increasing demand. Expanding populations require growth to create new jobs for new entrants into the workforce. But the demands of efficiency push automation which reduces the available jobs.

It is like a giant, system-wide Ponzi scheme that is about to collapse. It will probably go down in a non-linear fashion (maybe precipitated by a "Black Swan" event - maybe what is going on right now in Washington is that event) because that's how the curve goes - slow on the way up and fast on the way down with random stutter at the end - not a neat bell shape at all.

The other point Gilding makes is that none of this will be easy. He says that we are essentially addicted to growth and that like any addict will not willingly give up our drug. We will lie, fight, deny the reality in front of our noses. We will have to hit the walls of finite reality several times, really mess ourselves up before the truth penetrates our bloody, battered, dim-witted heads.

Multiple studies have shown that after basic needs are met (about $15K Per capita) increased wealth does not buy happiness.

A British study indicates that the "loneliness index" goes up with increased wealth.

Founders of economics did not propose continual growth. John Stuart Mill said that a "stationary state of capital and wealth... implies no stationary state of human improvement". John Maynard Keynes thought that the "economic problem" would be solved and that society would then "prefer to devote further energies to non-economic purposes".

And some quotes from Homer-Dixon's Upside of Down (another book read by the semi-sober Thinking Men - a much more elegant book in my estimation - the language of which makes you wonder where Gilding got the idea for The Great Disruption):

"Despite the fact that our lives are saturated with stuff, that we've already reached a level of material abundance unimaginable to previous generations, and that more money and possessions add little to our happiness, we must be made (by business) to feel chronically discontented with our lot."

"Our economic role in this culture of consumerism is to be little more than walking appetites that serve the function of maintaining our economy's throughput."

"Our psychological state is comparable to that of drug addicts needing a fix: buying things doesn't really make us happy except perhaps for the moment after the purchase. But we do it over and over anyway."

"Why? There are many reasons. But the central and often overlooked one, I think, is that consumerism helps anesthetize us to the dread of empty lives - lives that modern capitalism and consumerism have themselves helped empty of meaning."

old women

2011-06-09T05:10:00.002-07:00

I see old women...

One running

a lawn mower

at 7:30 AM

to beat the

encroaching heat

stringy arms

tossing the machine

here and there

waving gaily

as I walk by

Another

bent down

arranging mulch

in her

already

immaculate yard

Two more

striding

side by side

arms swinging

short hair

sprayed into neat submission

cute

after all these years

greeting me

with wary smiles

Another

giddy

gone wild

with incipient dementia

tending two small dogs

straining into a bush;

she says in a wondering voice,

"They just have to smell everything."

To which

I reply,

"It is a grand adventure"

I only see

one other

old man

Where are the rest?

Do they sit inside

watching TV

eating entropy

getting fat on death?

Stuff

2011-06-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

48 x 12

48 x 32

63 x 84

21 x 16

28 x 18 (approx 300 lb)

18 x 18

38 x 36

36 x 30

44 x 17

Dream

2011-02-26T05:07:00.000-08:00

No attempt to make sense of this - more of a documentary effort, capturing images, impressions.

I was in a northern country, maybe Sweden. An indifferent intelligent place. I might have been with criminals, people who didn't belong here, who were up to no good.I might have one of them.

I met a girl in a public place, maybe a gallery that featured sparse bloodless art. She was thin and blond - pretty - not exactly friendly or inviting. She seemed bothered by something and suspicious of me. But she came with me anyway - as if I offered unlikely hope.

We were in a room and I noticed the ocean beyond the window. The water was covered in snow and ice but people played in it, swimming in paths they cleared through the snow and ice. They seemed to have fun, not to notice the cold.

I was asleep and she was nearby. I became aware that it was the most restful sleep in a long time. I savored that, at peace. Then I peered in the half light at the girl lying beside me. I saw her cat eyes looking back at me, amused but sympathetic.

Evan Birthday Pics - 2011

2011-01-30T14:40:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving, 2010

2010-11-26T14:27:00.000-08:00

Other Worlds

2010-10-10T11:45:00.000-07:00

We talked about other worlds.

(Bob was told by a close relative who once worked in a criminal law office that two inches below the surface there is another world the rest of us don’t know anything about.)

I still think about it.

The place where they sold roasting hogs was another world.

Crossing the mountains into Burke’s Garden was like entering another world. In places the mist was so thick you could barely see the road, just hear the gravel crunch and feel the ruts, knowing that on one side the mountain loomed, unseen but felt, and on the other side the edge crumbled off into nothing. The road could have forked, gone somewhere else, and we would have not known it.

It was another world on the Appalachian Trial where I walked out to pee (knowing that I would write “I pee in the mist on the Appalachian Trial”). After a few hundred feet I could not see Bob or Big Boy (the Land Cruiser). There was just the sound of my own water splashing on the already wet ground and the whisper of wind in the trees, like the sound of old hymns. I could have gotten turned around and gone the wrong way into the wilderness.

The Burke’s Garden Café and General Store was another world.

We had crossed the last mountain and were in the valley, driving down a narrow paved road past well-kept farms. The mist had lifted but the sky was still overcast. At first the building seemed abandoned. There were no vehicles visible. But going past, lights shone from behind chintz curtains on the front windows. There was a sign. And in the parking lot on the other side, we saw an old Mercedes diesel sedan with a sooty rear bumper and a faded red Subaru Outback.

I said, “Let’s stop here and eat lunch.”

Bob said, “Sure” and turned around.

We parked beside the Subaru (it had a Vermont tag; the Mercedes was from Virginia) and walked around to the front. I pulled back an unpainted screen door. Hinges creaked. Inside the place seemed bigger than outside. That might have been because the rear was filled with cases and shelves illuminated by a few dim lights. I could not see the back wall, just those individual pools of clarity.

But it was cheery up front, six tables on one side and a counter and small grill on the other side. A couple sat at one of the tables, heads inclined toward each other talking in low voices. They seemed middle aged. He was balding. She had short blond hair, suggesting a recent bout with chemotherapy. They were dressed in clothes that might have come from LL Bean, but not this year.

A tall woman wearing jeans and a baggy blue sweater stood at the grill, facing away from us. Her black hair was fluffy and streaked with gray. There were holes in the elbows of her sweater. Her jeans were snug but not tight. The left back pocket was frayed. When the screen shut she spoke over her shoulder, “Sit anywhere you like. I’ll be over in a minute.” She had high cheekbones like an Indian or a Russian. Her eyes were green. She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

Bob and I took the other table by the front window. Down the road to the left was an old white frame church. A rock wall bordered a large graveyard. Tombstones gathered on the hill like curious children.

Bob nodded toward the people at the adjoining table. “Good morning folks.”

The man glanced up; his lean face breaking into smile. “Morning.”

The woman nodded and smiled but didn’t say anything. Her thin face was pretty; her skin was translucent.

I said, “Interesting place. Unexpected.”

The man looked around as if he was just now aware of his surroundings, “Yes it is interesting.”

The woman spoke. Her voice had a fragile bell like quality. “But not unexpected.”

The brunette woman came out from the behind the counter. She placed plates in front of the couple and leaned over and patted the thin woman on the shoulder, her hand lingering like a caress. Then, walking over to our table, she pointed to a chalk board on the wall. “Gentlemen, my name is Grace. That’s what we have for lunch today. Drinks are tea, homemade cider, lemonade, coffee. Do you need a minute?”

We glanced at the board.

I said, “I see something. Let me try the scrapple sandwich. And I’ll have tea.”

The woman laughed, a throaty, rich sound. “Do you know what scrapple is?”

“Like North Carolina livermush, right?”

“You do know. Ours is home grown, put up right here in the valley. In the sandwich it’s fried with a slice of onion, cheese, mayonnaise and mustard. The bread is homemade, sliced thick.”

Bob snorted. “Thank you Grace. I’ll stick to the BLT. And I’ll have tea.”

The couple at the next table resumed their low conversation. Occasionally there was the sound of a fork striking a plate. They did not seem hungry. At one point the man reached across the table and touched the woman’s hand. I imagined that it must be like silk or parchment. She patted his hand on top of her hand.

Paws. That’s what Brenda and I called hands.

Bob and I talked about this and that. About the ghost town of Thurmond where we would go this afternoon. About Beckley where we had reservations tonight in a Hampton Inn and where tomorrow we would visit a coal mine.

In 10 minutes or so Grace brought our food. I was right. Scrapple was like livermush, but not quite as rich. Bob said his BLT was good.

Leaving our table Grace disappeared into the back of the store. She walked like a ballet dancer or an Indian. The couple stared into the shadows. In a few minutes Grace came back out. Looking at the thin woman, but speaking to both of them, she said, “Would you like to look around?”

Before the man could say anything the thin woman said, “Yes.”

They all walked to the back. The thin woman moved carefully, as if she might break. I heard voices then it was quiet.

Grace returned. Stopping at our table, she said, “Would you like a fried apple pie? The church ladies made them last night.”

Two Encounters

2010-09-19T07:46:00.000-07:00

Story from trip described in travelblog, Big Trip Up North.

The Frenchman.

It was at the start of our day trip along the Cabot Trail around Cape Breton. We stopped at the Gaelic College gift shop, one of a dozen or so modest structures dedicated to the culture of the settlers of this part of Nova Scotia.

Out front, a boy wearing kilts played bagpipes in the misty rain. Later when I encountered the Frenchman I tried to imagine the music was martial but really it was just sad noise played by a wet kid. (Bob said the boy tried to get out of the rain but the big jolly woman who ran the gift shop made him stay out front where he could be seen and heard by potential customers.)

Bob went to the other end of the store looking for gifts which he would ask the gift shop to mail home to his family. I looked at smaller items that I could fit into my side of the BMW's trunk.

I was standing in line waiting to check out my few purchases when the Frenchman came in. I assumed that's what he was. A big handsome fellow with a roman nose, he had the same proud manner that I had come to associate with the French Canadian motorcyclists we encountered throughout Nova Scotia. Not exactly looking at anybody he seemed to offer to fight every man in the place. Standing up a little straighter, hearing the kid's bagpipe music, I imagined strutting over to the big man and saying something insulting to see what he would do. I could imagine getting in a lucky punch.

But I didn't start anything. Smiling at the puzzled man, who frowned then turned away, I paid for my items and went outside to wait at the car for Bob. I snorted to myself, at myself.

The woman and the old couple.

It was a modest place, probably depending more on locals than tourists. It's atmosphere was no atmosphere. Bob thinks it was below Digby, where the ocean-going ferry deposited us after our passage across the fog-bound Bay of Fundy. I think it was somewhere north of Halifix. (Where the previous night we had stayed in Sherborne NS at the Cape Cod Motor Inn - where Bob's TV didn't work and my commode quit at 2:00 AM.)

That doesn't matter. We stopped for lunch.

Our hostess told us we could sit anywhere. We picked a table at the front with a view of the parking lot. An old man and woman sat nearby. Across the room a group of women gathered at another table. One of the women was in her mid-forties. She wore a low cut sun back dress. Her skin was dusky smooth. Her eyes were big and her hair was curly and dark.

Breaking over from my vegetarian regimen I ordered a roast beef sandwich. It had thick slices of beef on white bread slathered in mayonnaise and mustard. I chewed the meat and every time I looked up the woman was there smiling at something one of her friends said. Twice she glanced at me then turned away.

Nodding toward the old couple at the other table, Bob mentioned that the man was certainly colorful. I agreed. I don't remember the exact colors - pastels, maybe a yellow shirt and blue pants. He also wore a fisherman's cap; it too was pastel. But his face was weathered and red, either from being outside or from drinking. (Bob figured both.) Obviously this was not the man's normal attire; that was probably a real fisherman's smock. Today he was dressed up to go somewhere.

When they rose to leave, the old man had to help the woman. He supported her as she shuffled out the door and down the steps to the parking lot. He was patient. She was dignified and accepting. I speculated that maybe they were driving from one of the smaller towns to a medical facility in Halifax, or some other bigger place. It was the sort of trip I was familiar with. Bob said maybe so and we both tried to see the car and the tag but there was a distraction and we missed it.

When it was time for us to go our waitress/hostess asked us if we were ready for our "slips". We were in a foreign country.

Leaving the restaurant I glanced over to the pretty woman. She did not look up, but I got the impression she had only just turned away.

It was my turn to drive. Perhaps I sauntered a little walking over to get behind the wheel of Bob's expensive little convertible, wondering if the woman could see me.

Then I remembered the old man.

Girl Who Looked Like Brenda

2010-08-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

Story from trip described in travelblog, Big Trip Up North.

Both Bob and I thought that the young waitress at the Chili’s in Bennington, Vermont looked like a youthful Brenda - creamy tan, high cheekbones, serious manner, cat eyes, blond hair hanging in a loose braid off one shoulder. Like Brenda, she resembled the actress Kim Novak. When we returned to the Hampton Inn a few miles down the road I got the key to the BMW and went back out.

She had not been our waitress before. I said to the hostess, another pretty young woman, “Remember me?"

She claimed that she did.

Putting on my best Big Daddy manner, I asked, "Would yall please seat me at a table waited on by that lovely girl with the long blond braid?”

The hostess frowned. I waved my hands and added, “No, no child; don't get the wrong idea. I know I'm old enough to be her daddy.” Leaning forward I added in a confiding manner, “That’s who she reminds me of. My own little girl. I just had to get a closer look.”

The pretty hostess snorted. “This ought to be good. Sure. Why not. I’ll put you in Abbey’s section.”

She seated me in a booth separated from the bar by a Tiffany-style stained glass (plastic actually), partition. By this time the dinner crowd – family locals – had been mostly replaced by the bar crowd – single locals, their nasal New England voices getting loud and good humored just beyond my low wall.

Abbey showed up in a few minutes. She stood well away from the table. Her cat eyes were narrow; her full mouth neutral. Up close her skin was even smoother. I felt ancient. She said, “Yes.”

Big Daddy died. I managed to get out, "Ah, just coffee and dessert please. Apple pie."

Her face softened. She must have felt sorry for the old man who looked at her then looked away. "You asked for me?"

I said in my usual voice. "Yes, you remind me of somebody. You have heard that before?"

The corner of her mouth lifted a little. "Sure. " - she hesitated - " I am supposed to remind you of your own little girl. Right?"

I peered at her more closely. "Well actually you might look a little like her. But that is not who I had in mind. It's my wife."

She laughed. "That's familiar too. And where is she now?"

"Ah, she is dead."

Abbey's face dropped. "Oh". She added, "I've heard that one too. Yes, well, I'll get your order." As she walked away, I noticed that from the rear she was a little sturdier than Brenda, more like the real Kim Novak.

She returned in a few minutes with the pie and coffee, which she placed on the table before me. As she started to walk away, I said, "I am sorry if I made you uncomfortable. But you do look like her. I was in here earlier with my travelling companion - we are staying at the Hampton down the road - and both of us commented about the resemblance. I had to come back."

The girl hesitated. "When did she die, your wife?"

"About nine months ago."

"Where are you from?" Her smile now was friendly. "Somewhere south I know."

"North Carolina, near Charlotte. Have you ever been there?"

She shook her head, "Nope, never have."

As she stepped away again. I said, "You ever hear of Kim Novak? That's who you look like - who Brenda, my wife looked like."

She turned around and stared at me. "My mother told me that. I've seen some of her old movies. Picnic and Vertigo. It's sort of freaky. Your wife - Brenda - she did too?"

"Yep."

The girl looked at me closely. "You are not like that guy in Vertigo are you?"

"James Stewart?"

"Yeah the man who was trying to turn the second girl into the first girl - the one that drowned ."

I laughed. (My heart skipped a beat. Literally. That's what it does.) "No. I'm harmless. Just an admirer."

The girl smiled. "Well I've got to go back to work. " She reached down to touch my arm. Her hand was smooth. She smelled like fresh soap.

She said "Thank you for dropping by - ?"

"Tom."

"OK Tom."

"OK Abbey."

She walked off.

Later when she brought me the check and I left her a good but not immoderate tip she said, "Take care of yourself Tom."

I said, "You too Abbey."

It wasn't that night in Bennington but the next night, in Altoona, that I had the dream and woke up not knowing who or where I was - not remembering the dream except that it might have involved another woman and another life that was more real than where I was.

I say sir, who are you calling a bat?

2010-08-15T13:33:00.000-07:00

Story from trip described in travelblog, Big Trip Up North.

(Tour bus - old people in distance)

The blind man with the cane started it. But the other was not blameless.

It was near Pleasant Bay on Cape Breton Island. One of those impossibly beautiful places where the land drops into the ocean. We had pulled off at an overlook, hoping that the sign was right and that we would see whales.

The first tour bus was already there when arrived. It had deposited about 30 - 40 seniors. Most stood at the rail looking out at the gray water. Some, pushing walkers or thrusting out with canes, roamed the parking area. Everybody seemed in good spirits.

No whales were in sight.

The second bus pulled in a few minutes later. The driver maneuvered around the first bus, tapping his horn to clear wanderers out of the way.

(Several of the wanderers seemed offended, which might explain what happened happened a few minutes later - the ferocity of it.)

A lady wearing a baseball cap and a blue wind breaker muttered "Asshole" as she scuttled to one side. A man, moving just enough to let the large vehicle creep by, said, "Stuff it." He carried his walking stick like a weapon . He might have been ex-military or police. Probably an NCO.

After the passengers from the second bus disembarked, the overlook became crowded. People bumped into one another. Walkers got tangled up. There wasn't enough room at the rail. There were muttered apologies and and a few complaints. ("Sorry". "You stepped on my foot." "Watch it." "Be careful." "Ouch.")

The last person off the second bus was a blind man. He seemed especially disturbed. He swung his white cane in wide arcs as he moved around the parking area. His ashen face was contorted in a grin or a grimace. I don't know where he was going. Nobody looked after him; his companions from the second bus stood out of the way. It was only a matter of time before he hit somebody.

As luck would have it his cane slapped the the leg of the man who had made the "Stuff it" comment.

The man bellowed, "Eooww! Watch what you are doing you blind old bat!".

The blind man stopped, pulled himself erect, and, turning in the direction where the other stood, said in a precise British accent, “I say sir, who are you calling a bat?”

The “Stuff it” commenter stepped closer. “You. You blind bat.”

The blind man cocked his head and seemed to concentrate. Then he swung his cane precisely in the direction of the “Stuff it” man’s cranium. However, “Stuff it” must have been anticipating the move because he raised his own stick to block the strike. He pulled his stick back, preparing a counter blow, but the blind man maintained contact between his cane and the other’s stick.

They moved around the parking lot like that, grunting, mouthing breathless curses. Occasionally the blind man would pull his cane back and take a swing which the other blocked. “Stuff it” never managed to get his stick free for a blow.

Members of the two groups offered encouragement, riders from the first group shouting, “Go Fred!” and those from second group yelling, “Whack him good Nigel!”

The two tour bus drivers tried to break it up but seemed reluctant to get in too close. (The driver of the first bus was tall and skinny; the driver of the second bus was short, fat and red-faced.)

After several minutes the participants were gasping for breath and the fight appeared to be winding down. That is when the driver of the second bus, angling into position to grab the blind man thrust his large butt into the stomach of the woman in the baseball cap and the little blue jacket. Screeching "you bloody oalf" the woman flailed out with her hat. Turning away from the flurry of blows, the driver stumbled over another woman from the first bus. She hit him in the crotch with a large handbag. He went "oof!" and staggered into another man - also from the first bus. This man, pink cheek and merry, pulled a canister of pepper spray (the Mace brand I think) from his pocket which he emptied into the fat bus driver's eyes.

The fat bus driver screamed.

Passengers from the second bus joined in to rescue their hapless driver. Insults were offered. Blows were exchanged. A general melee ensued. The parking lot was a sea of thrashing old bodies. Walkers were used as battering rams, canes as swords.

Bob and I managed to sneak away without getting involved. But as we were pulling off, a man, false teeth grinning through the sheen of blood that ran down his face leaned over the door of our open car and said, "I saw you two in Sydney. You really out to join us. It's loads of fun."

In the Gorham Cemetery

2010-08-02T11:44:00.000-07:00

A story taking place in Gorham New Hampshire, near Mt. Washington, proud home of "the worst weather in the world." See the travelblog, Big Trip Up North.

Walking back down US 16 at 5:30 AM from McDonald's to the Gorham Motor Lodge. Not a serious walk; I was wearing my Crocs.

I stopped by the cemetery for a closer look at one of those vaults where they used to put people in the winter when the ground was too hard to dig graves. Like other vaults we saw throughout New England this one had a heavy metal door and was covered in earth and grass (Whitman's "grave hair"). The structure resembled a bunker that seemed designed not only to protect the inside, but the outside , as if the dead might spontaneously explode. (I can imagine them going off in late winter or early spring with a muffled "Whump!" and locals proclaiming, "Eh ah, waited too long on old Fester.")

Sipping coffee from my insulated McDonald's cup I wandered past the vault toward the back of the cemetery. The main drag was no longer visible and I was not surprised to hear a voice say, "Hello."

It was a man sitting on the edge of a large rock outcropping. He seemed to be wearing leather clothes. I took him to be one of the French Canadian motorcyclists who frequent this area. Beside him sat a huge dog - something like a Sheppard. The dog stared at me with yellow eyes. I could see no leash or collar.

I said, "Hello, how are you?"

The man said, "Just fine. Out for a morning stroll?"

His accent was not French Canadian - but something from further down the Appalachians. "Yeah. I was walking by, thought I would look around. Interesting place." I glanced at the dog. "You and your friend also out for a stroll?"

The man stood. It was odd. He didn't lean forward, use his hands to push up from knees. He just straightened up. He was big. At least six feet six inches tall. His hair was long and white. His motorcycle garb, if that is what it was, was brown and appeared to be hand-stitched. The dog also rose. The dog was not a dog but a wolf.

"You could say that."

"Your friend is a wolf I think."

The animal loped over to me. I held out my hand. He touched it with the tip of his nose, wagged his tail and stepped back.

"Yep, Sam is pure timber wolf. He likes you. I'd take that as a good sign."

"I do."

I had seen several motorcycles with side cars and persisted in the idea that this man and his friend were bikers. Gesturing toward the road, I said, "You and Sam ride in, stay at one of the motels in Gorham?"

The man gestured with a turn of his chin to the mountains behind us. "No, Sam and I are from up there - south of here. Sam likes cheeseburgers so we come into town every now and then. That crazy guy at McDonald's - you probably met him - brings them out back. " The man laughed. The wolf seemed to smile. "He thinks we are spirits."

"I saw that man. He was mopping the lobby. Are you? Spirits?"

"John - that's his name - has consumed too much weed. Messed up his mind. He thinks there are spirits up and down the Appalachians, on the ridges, in the woods. A 2000 mile wilderness filled with ghosts." The man laughed again. The wolf still smiled. "He sees yellow eyes whenever he drives through. He thinks we hide in the undergrowth, watch people go by."

"No wonder John is crazy."

"No wonder."

"Anyway, it would be boring - just watching."

"You can see a lot watching. And of course there would be other things to do."

"Of course."

The man turned and headed toward the shadows behind the last graves. He said over his shoulder, "Well, Tom, we have to go."

"How did you know my name?"

"A lucky guess. You look like a Tom. Come see us sometime."

He and the wolf disappeared into the woods. I walked back to the front. Bob rumbled by in the BMW. I walked to McDonald's for another cup of coffee and an orange juice.

John was putting out napkins.

I said, "Hello John."

He looked at me with crazy eyes.

The Execution

2010-07-31T12:57:00.000-07:00

Story from trip described in travelblog, Big Trip Up North.

It was the damnest thing, when the reenactors grabbed that old man, him yelling in Japanese. I suppose it was our fault.

Bob and I had stopped at the Halifax Citadel, which is an old fort in the center of the city, strategically overlooking the harbor. We had time because the ferries from North Sydney to Port Aus Basques were all booked up by old people in campers and the trip to Newfoundland was out.

(When pausing too long at a complicated intersection we were yelled at by a young man in the traffic behind us. "Just go, go - sir!" Maybe that prompted Bob to drive up to the fort.)

We parked the Z4 in a lot at the top of the hill and walked through a passage in the wall to the interior. Bob said it reminded him of the fort in Puerto Rico near where he had been stationed in the Army. He was an MP. I think the fort was El Morro.

Inside was a large white gravel parade field, old barracks and other structures, including a gift shop where some tourists were gathered. Cannon emplacements were located around the top of the wall. A squad of reenactors, dressed in military kilts practiced drills. They'd march a couple of hundred meters this way, then do a turn or a wheel and go the other way. Their rifles seemed real.

I said to Bob, "I bet I could still march those men." and muttered, "hup thrup threep four, left,left, left right left."

Bob drawled, "Well you go ahead."

An old Japanese woman who was with an old Japanese man and several generations of family frowned at me. She wore a sky blue golfing hat with just a brim. Their little boy screamed like a samurai and went running off, crunching in the gravel.

The young man calling cadence for the squad of reenactors had a voice like a bull. He was accompanied by another pretend NCO who walked alongside the squad telling them to dress up the line, to straighten up, not to bounce. The boys, red faced and serious, seemed to get into it and for a time I thought they might be the real thing, maybe soldiers on loan from a local garrison. Bob thought they were silly.

Bob and I climbed to the top of the parapet, looking back down on the parade field and out across the city. The walk was about the same height as the town's taller structures. My friend Max once said he'd like to live here and I tried to figure out what made the place appealing. Maybe because it is a nice size and picturesque.

A boy wearing kilts and a khaki shirt was standing by one of the gun emplacements. At this point I still thought the reenactors might be actual military and asked him about that. He said, "Not really. Although some of us were in the Army. I was for instance."

Then I asked him if this fort had ever repelled American invaders. He grinned, "No, the Americans never got this far North."

Bob, who had been standing to one side, leaned over and drawled, "You know son, you could make these reenactments a little more exciting."

The boy said, "How's that sir?"

Bob pointed to a long brick wall at the base of the opposite parapet and casually advised. "Well you could stage a mock execution."

"Eh, an execution you say."

"Sure just grab somebody - a tourist even - and drag them over to that wall and pretend to shoot them. Don't even tell the person what is going on. Just take them kicking and screaming. It would be fun."

The boy said, "Uhm."

We walked on, continuing our tour of the parapet. Another group of pretend soldiers, dressed in different uniforms, were running signal flags up what appeared to be a ship's mast.

We were back on the parade field when the yelling started. Stepping around the barracks we saw four members of the reeenactor squad dragging the old Japanese man over to the wall. The remainder of the squad, led by our friend from the parapet, were forming into a line. The old man yelled and kicked. The old woman screamed and beat at the young men with her sky blue cap.

But the reeanactors, faces fixed into polite smiles, persisted and got the old man placed against the wall. Two held him more or less in position while the rest ran back to join the firing squad.

While the other tourists, including the remainder of the old man's family watched, the reenactor NCO quickly yelled, "Ready, aim, fire."

At "Ready" the squad brought up their rifles; at "Aim" they pointed them at the old man, (who now faced his executioners with stoic composure), and at "Fire" the group yelled out "Bang!"

After a moment, the onlookers, including the Japanese applauded. The old man's son, who was carrying an expensive looking Nikon, said, "Again please. I want to shoot a picture."

He said something to the old man who did not have to be restrained this time. The old woman still seemed mad. But at the command of "Fire" everybody yelled "Bang!".

Everyday Epistemology #2

2009-12-23T05:57:00.000-08:00

(Second post trying to figure out how to figure stuff out - or something like that.)

I know this nice young woman with an improbably exotic name who is a fan of Libertarian Ron Paul. A few months ago she expressed concerns about pressures to force her children to have the H1N1 vaccine. She cited experts whose views contradict the establishment opinion that the vaccine is a good thing. We are not close friends so I don’t know if Libertarian principles influenced her opinions but based on what she wrote in FaceBook I’d guess so.

I also “know” (in the cyberspace sense) another nice fellow who owns a liberal political blog. He writes a lot so I can’t find the particular post, but he said something about “anything being possible”.

Then there is the debate over climate change which is now heating up (having never cooled down) at the Copenhagen Climate Conference. The proponents and deniers of global warming/climate change are trotting out the same old arguments, citing the same old experts.

So, you ask, “What’s your point?”

Well, I think it’s pretty obvious. Stuff has gotten out of hand. It’s too hard to figure out. We often have to depend on experts; but, we don’t know which experts to trust. And sometimes to defend an unlikely position or just because we don’t know, we’ll proclaim “Anything is possible.”

It’s bad.

I think (for what it’s worth) that this is THE issue of our age. It’s not the questions we ask but how we figure out the answers.

People being people, this has always been a problem. However, I think it is worse today because so much is so complicated. Many of our questions are linked with technical issues about which even the experts disagree. The layperson has little hope of getting much more than a superficial understanding and that often comes from biased sources. What seems reasonable and true often isn’t.

So what’s a poor truth seeker to do? Other than be aware of the problem and sensitive to bad thinking (ours and others) I am not sure. However, I have written some things which may or may not be helpful.

The Freedom vs Fairness blog tries to tease out the roots of political biases. Although my liberal bias certainly shows, I think the underlying premise is correct - that liberals are more motivated by issues of fairness and that conservatives are more motivated by issues of freedom. Knowing where arguments are coming from might promote not only understanding but sympathy - maybe even empathy. Since doing these posts I am less likely to dismiss conservative positions out of hand.

The Nassim Taleb Black Swan post in the Book Reportz blog (better yet, read his book) examines wrong logic and the way of empiricism. In the interest of explaining the black swan phenomena, he rips apart all kinds of faulty thinking.

Regarding the problem of finding experts, consider these posts in Tom’s Topical Topics blog:

Everyday Epistemology # 1

Getting Ready For The Great Climate Change Debate

SECULAR FAITH IN A SANE UNIVERSE

I try.

Context #1

2009-11-16T10:57:00.000-08:00

I have always been interested in the notion of context - how things get meaning from their surroundings. (Is meaning absolute/transcendent or relative/subjective? You know, existential shit.)

The latest round started when a friend complained that there were no overview manuals at her new job, just a lot of detail documentation. She was having trouble figuring out how stuff fits in. She needed a big picture, some context.

That reminded me of something I had read and blogged about a few weeks earlier, about how cell phone users create their own private conversational context and lose contact with their immediate physical context - which can cause problems, say, when driving a car.

After that, examples of context (or the lack thereof) kept popping up.

More-or-less randomly…

Columnist David Brooks wrote an article about how some psychologists believe that behavior traits change from context to context - e.g., that we are different people for different situations. We don’t exist in one big context but a lot of little contexts, each of which defines us.

Brooks wrote another article comparing dating habits of people in the “Happy Days” era to the extreme daters in the cell phone/computer era. The former met in the larger context of schools/churches/workplaces whereas the later interact in the smaller contexts of self-defined social networks.

Back at Cardinal doing training films, we always preceded tight, detailed pictures with wider, establishing shots. This was to provide a visual context. Otherwise the close shots would make no sense.

Working as a tech writer at IBM in 1989, there were no overview guides for the documentation I was updating. Just a huge collection of detailed reference guides. The user was expected to provide his/her own context to the material.

I have read (and probably written) many wordy introductions over the years when all I or anyone wanted was simply to find directions for getting the job done. There are times when the big picture is too big - too abstract.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) standard for documentation seems task oriented rather than concept oriented. This latest scheme for organizing technical information is about doing the job rather than explaining the larger context of the job. Although DITA includes a concept category, the descriptions I’ve seen don’t seem especially interested in providing larger context.

And on and on.

I am not sure what any of this means - if anything. But in my own search for context, I wonder of I have discovered something about context itself? I wonder if technology and human inclination are moving us into more narrowly defined contexts - maybe more subjective?

I don’t know. More on this later. (I am plagued by other possibilities. What about modern science? Does the subjectivity of quantum uncertainty and relativity represent a narrowing of context? What about modern philosophy? There hasn’t been any grand shit philosophy since Kant. Aside from the post-Kantian sputters of the 19th century it's been narrow and technical and just weird - context writ small. Are we getting smaller while the universe gets bigger?)

Disliking Other People's Cell Phone Conversations

2009-10-16T10:24:00.000-07:00

It's probably an age thing.

But I dislike being around people using cell phones. It isn't just the voices - loud and oblivious; it's the generally distracted air that envelops such people. The sense that they are somewhere else. To me, cell phone users look vaguely foolish - sort of the way people look when having sex. (Somebody - Chris Rock, Richard Pryor did a piece on that.)

I'm sure part of it is simply resentment. (I refuse to text. I will not tweet. And sex... well.) However, based on something I read, my bias, although still mostly an old person's nattering, might have some scientific justification.

My active interest (more than just vague annoyance) began with recent stories on TV citing studies about how dangerous it is to drive while using cell phones (to text or talk). Apparently driving while using cell phones ranks right up there with DWI and DUI (although I suppose the latter could technically include any sort of influence).

What surprised me was that it is not just the mechanical difficulty of simultaneously handling a cell phone and driving a car. Even using a hands-free device is dangerous. It is something about the cell phone conversation itself.

This led me to wonder if talking on a cell phone is more dangerous than talking with someone who is physically present in the car? Which led me to a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology .

The study shows that talking on a cell phone is more distracting (and dangerous) than talking with someone who is physically present in the car. The difference is context. People in face-to-face conversation share a physical context. When in a car, both people are aware of their surroundings, of the traffic. The surroundings can become a part of the conversation.

People in cell-phone conversations do not share a physical context. They don't even exist in the current physical reality. Each speaker, withdrawn from the here and now, exists in a third reality of the conversation itself. There is only the other person's voice. It is another world. No wonder technology that enables such escape sells so well.

It easy to see why being oblivious to physical surroundings would make cell phone users so dangerous behind the wheel.

It might also help explain why cell phone users are so annoying. Being oblivious and indifferent to one's physical context means being oblivious and indifferent to the people who share that context. It seems rude. Maybe when we withdraw into cell phone conversations we violate basic protocols that define how strangers share space. Perhaps a minimal awareness is required (not eye contact at least not in urban environments - maybe just a sense of others presence).

Then again we the offended might simply have personal boundaries issues, be paranoid, - be old.

(And yes, I do have a cell phone and I use it.)

Relativity

2009-09-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

In “Descartes’ Bones”, the book we are reading for this month’s meeting, the author seems to blame Descartes for moral relativism which makes me nervous because I figure that an assault on secularism is coming next - and I have been enduring that crap all my adult life.

However, it is interesting, the relativity thing.

Galileo posed the first scientific theory of relativity. He said that all uniform motion is relative - no absolutes. For example, if you’ve got one spaceship in an otherwise empty universe there is no way you can say the spaceship is moving or not (unless it is moving in a nonuniform manner). If you add another spaceship moving relative to the first, the only thing you could say is that there is relative motion between the two - not whether one or both are moving or one (but not both) are standing still.

Another example is when two trains pass one another on nearby tracks. If the motion is smooth and uniform you have a hard time telling if it’s your train or the other that is moving (or if it is both).

Not having a fixed frame of reference can be pretty disorienting which might explain why some people are so disturbed by moral relativism. However it should be noted that Galileo’s relativism was part of a theory which said that if the laws of mechanics are valid in one coordinate system (stuff moving together in uniform manner) they are also valid in another coordinate system (other stuff moving in a uniform manner in another direction or speed). In his theory Galileo preserved a larger absolute - the laws of mechanics. He ensured that the universe stayed sane.

Einstein did the same thing when he extended Galileo’s theory to include all the laws of physics - including electromagnetic phenomena like light and radio waves. The problem was that in the decades prior to the time Einstein wrote his Special Theory of Relativity, the speed of light had been proven to be the same regardless of the motion of the source. In some clever thought experiments Einstein showed that this meant that no object could be measured exceeding the speed of light.

That’s when things got weird. Replacing the simple Galilean formulas used to transfer measurements between coordinate systems with more complex transformation rules, Einstein described a strange new universe. Relative to an outside observer, the faster you go, the more your clock slows down, mass increases and length shrinks.

However, like Galileo, Einstein was ensuring that the universe stays sane. If objects could exceed the speed of light, events could precede causes and things could get seriously out of whack. Both men restricted personal claims to knowledge in order to preserve larger, universal absolutes.

I don’t know if this has any bearing on Descartes and moral relativism - but it is an interesting point. Maybe next time.

Here are a couple of crude little videos illustrating some of these points:

Other such videos can be see on the bog "Einstein - Evolution of Physics".

Everyday Epistemology # 1

2009-08-03T06:43:00.000-07:00

How do you know what you know?

If you don’t know what you know, can you trust anybody else to know it for you?

Be very suspicious.

Everybody is biased - coming down on one side or the other of various issues. For instance there is the freedom -vs- fairness divide . Liberals want everything to be fair - treatment of the planet, treatment of poor people, treatment of threatened species, treatment of rats if you belong to PETA, etc. Conservatives want to be free to do whatever they want to do. They don’t want anybody telling them anything. They don't care if the world goes to hell in a hand basket so long as they get to own the basket.

Everybody is scripted - unwitting players in the family and class dramas by which we view the world and organize our biases.

“I worked hard for my money and now YOU want to give it to THOSE people.”

“Hey man, you know THEY will always keep a brother down.”

Everybody hates - something or somebody. If opposing sides didn’t exist we’d invent them based on our biases and scripts. Although we are a cooperative species we are also a combative species (can’t have one without the other). We need villains.

So, who can you trust?

Not those with biases, not those with scripts, not those with hatreds. Their opinions and ideas are tainted.

(And as I have noted in a previous post, you also can't trust passionate people, people who seek credibility by citing lone-wolf PhD's from MIT, people who place too much faith in single subsets of data, and conservatives with ties to the fossil fuel industry.)

Who does that leave?

Something seems wrong here.

(More to come.)

Getting Ready For The Great Climate Change Debate

2009-07-01T06:15:00.000-07:00

A Lincolnesque Moment?

The debate over climate change legislation is coming this summer to a congress, cubicle, bar, and blog near you.

You don't hear a lot now, but it could be pretty big stuff. After all, if the global warming people are right, the fate of the planet could be at stake. (I like to think of the debate as a little black swan being trailed by bigger, nastier swans.)

Given that this might be a Lincolnesque moment (but probably without a Lincoln) it behooves us to get ready - to figure out what we believe so that we can send emails to congresspeople, argue with friends, etc.

Who Not To Trust

Because the subject is so complicated, for me it is mostly a matter of figuring out who to trust and not to trust. Should I trust liberal Paul Krugman, conservative George Will, somewhat conservative David Brooks - or the sincere lady down the hall who says she gets her answers from an MIT PhD?

I have come up this personal checklist regarding who not to trust.

I tell myself to:

Watch out for really passionate people. As the poem says, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity". They often confuse certitude with rectitude, and like the guests on Dr. Phil and Jerry Springer are inclined to drama.

Be especially wary of passionate people with distinct conservative or liberal biases. As argued in my Freedom -vs- Fairness blog, both sides can be tainted. Conservatives, who value economic freedom above all else, resist restricting anyone's freedom to make money - even if that freedom does damage to others. They cannot even admit the need for restrictions. Liberals, having extended the notion of fairness to include equal treatment of the planet itself (not a bad thing) can also be suspect. Even if it were proven that there is nothing we can do to counter climate change, I expect that some liberals would want to enact punitive legislation just for the damage already done.

Be alert to those who seek credibility by citing lone-wolf scientists from MIT (or Harvard, Yale, Cal Tech - wherever). They can be very seductive. Enough PhD's have been produced by prestigious schools to support any position imaginable. Because these people are crazy does not mean that they aren't smart or smart sounding. Even legitimate scientists are not to be trusted individually. That's not how the process of public prediction and confirmation works.

Try not to place too much faith in any single subset of data. In a field as huge and complex as climate change it is possible to find observations to support any position. Those crazy PhDs noted above are not without their empirical evidence.

Be very very dubious of conservatives - passionate or otherwise - with ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Who To Trust

So, who do you trust?

Some people argue that you should study the subject and become sufficiently well versed to have your own legitimate opinions.

I don't think that's possible, even if you have a PhD from MIT. As proposed in the SECULAR FAITH IN A SANE UNIVERSE post in this blog, I think that complex issues are best answered collectively by the largest creditable community you can find. That's how science works. The weirdness gets averaged out and what's left is the best opinion at the time.

Based on my web browsing (if you trust me), the best consensus on climate change comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cited on EPA's Climate Change web site.

State Of Knowledge

So, what do we know?

Quoting the State of Knowledge, from the EPA and the IPCC:

Scientists know with virtual certainty that:

Human activities are changing the composition of Earth's atmosphere. Increasing levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times are well-documented and understood.
The atmospheric buildup of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is largely the result of human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels.
An “unequivocal” warming trend of about 1.0 to 1.7°F occurred from 1906-2005. Warming occurred in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and over the oceans (IPCC, 2007).
The major greenhouse gases emitted by human activities remain in the atmosphere for periods ranging from decades to centuries. It is therefore virtually certain that atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will continue to rise over the next few decades.
Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations tend to warm the planet.

What's very likely...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations" (IPCC, 2007). In short, a growing number of scientific analyses indicate, but cannot prove, that rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are contributing to climate change (as theory predicts). In the coming decades, scientists anticipate that as atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to rise, average global temperatures and sea levels will continue to rise as a result and precipitation patterns will change.

What's not certain...

Important scientific questions remain about how much warming will occur, how fast it will occur, and how the warming will affect the rest of the climate system including precipitation patterns and storms. Answering these questions will require advances in scientific knowledge in a number of areas:

Improving understanding of natural climatic variations, changes in the sun's energy, land-use changes, the warming or cooling effects of pollutant aerosols, and the impacts of changing humidity and cloud cover.
Determining the relative contribution to climate change of human activities and natural causes.
Projecting future greenhouse emissions and how the climate system will respond within a narrow range.
Improving understanding of the potential for rapid or abrupt climate change.

What Next?

Given the State of Knowledge quoted above, doomsday seems possible but not inevitable - at least not yet. Therefore, when I write my emails and present my arguments, I'm going to propose that we do something but not everything - holding out the possibility of doing more should accepted science indicate that the doomsday scenario is more likely.

A cap and trade system seems fine, or maybe a straight carbon tax. Because there is no doomsday consensus yet, there is probably not the political will for really effective action. But a public policy tipping point might be possible. And regardless, "going green" seems like a good thing. Although nobody knows for sure (that's how black swans work) it seems reasonable to believe that the various green initiatives might develop new technologies that could actually spur the economy rather than drag it down.

Link Summary

Global Warming Stobz (a graphical topic map of main issues with links to sites of interest)
Freedom -vs- Fairness blog (finding core differences between liberals and conservatives)
SECULAR FAITH IN A SANE UNIVERSE post(what Tom trusts)
EPA Climate Change web site
IPCC report
Black swan stuff

Affirming Taleb-Style Skepticism in Scientific American

2009-06-18T11:44:00.001-07:00

(Michael Shermer's , author of "Skeptic" column in Scientific American)

Although Nassim Taleb would be the first to point out that he did not invent the principles of skeptical empiricism described in his Black Swan book, it is interesting to see some (but not all) of those ideas affirmed in the Scientific American (July 2009 issue). It makes me think that those "ah hah!" moments I had when reading the book were legitimate.

One affirmation occurs in Michael Shermer's "Skeptic" column. Arguing that science is the best avenue to the truth, he describes the "null hypothesis, which assumes that the claim under investigation is not true until proven otherwise." Basically this means that in science (unlike law) a statement is presumed to be wrong (guilty) until it proven right - and even then you can never really be sure.

This is akin to Taleb's notion of negative empiricism (as taught by Karl Popper). Quoting my Black Swan Book Report... although you can never be absolutely sure that your theory or proposition is true, just one negative result can prove it wrong. That's where truth comes from. Evidence is asymmetrical. One piece of negative evidence can offset a lot of positive evidence. We should regard all theories as provisional. Don't look for what will prove you right but what will prove you wrong; it's a faster more certain process and you'll learn more.

The other affirmation is in "The Science of Bubbles and Busts" article by Gary Stix. He describes built-in biases which lead humans to make financial mistakes that in aggregate result in economic bubbles and busts. He says that we have...

A confirmation bias which prompts us look for evidence that confirms ideas we already have.
A herding bias which leads us to agree with everybody else.
An availability bias which leads us evaluate information based on context rather than merit.
A bias toward overrating our own abilities.
A bias to engage in heuristic-based intuition when we should be trying to think rationally.

These are the same biases and tendencies cited by Taleb as reasons for our inability to properly understand black swans. Taleb also notes our tendency to prefer a good narrative to the facts.

I think Taleb would disagree with the premise of the article that once these biases are understood that tools can be devised to predict economic bubbles. He would probably say that insofar as these events are true black swans (not gray swans) they are inherently unpredictable.

Ain't That Some Shit, Nassim Taleb? (Video)

2009-06-05T13:24:00.000-07:00

Another attempt at this video...

Phase Space in Extremistan?

2009-06-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

A series of accidents ...

A recent Black Swan presentation where I tried to make a connection between Nassim Taleb's Mediocristan/Extremistan idea and several other attempts to categorize the known/unknowable - Kant's phenomena/noumena thing, Castaneda's tonal/nagual concept, etc.
A slide in that presentation noting that "gray swans" are products of non-linear chaos.
A dusty clipping from the June 1994 issue of The Economist offering the best explanation I've ever read of the term "phase space".

...leading me to wonder if phase space is part of Extremistan.

Aside 1 - Is synergy a black swan? Maybe.

Aside 2 - What is phase space? It is a mathematical view of action in the "real" world. Consider the example of the pendulum described in the Economist article. The pendulum swings back and forth; its position and velocity constantly changing. In the real world the action of the pendulum is an arc. In phase space, the action is represented by a two-dimensional chart showing changes in position and velocity. An ideal pendulum with no friction would appear as a circle in phase space.

Non-linear chaos refers to fluctuating phenomena that appear disorderly in the real world but display order in phase space. As the article notes, "populations of animals, bubbling pots on a stove or measles epidemics" are all examples of non-linear chaos.

Patterns traversed in phase space are sometimes called "strange attractors" (one assumes because the behavior of systems is strangely attracted to these patterns). The picture below is a two dimensional view of the three-dimensional Lorenz attractor.

It describes the chaotic behavior of weather patterns - leading to the so-called butterfly effect meaning (more or less) that a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can cause a hurricane in Florida. There is order here - constrained by the strange attractor. But within that order is infinite disorder.

Strange.

So, returning to my original question - Is phase space in Extremistan?

Extremistan is supposed to be the real reality underlying the man-made view of Mediocristan.

So, where does phase space belong?

Which is more real - the confused real world, or phase space which reveals the underlying order in the real world?

Is phase space real?

Does one peer through/past the behavior of the world of appearance to the underlying truth of phase space?

I suppose Taleb might say it doesn't matter. In the real world, the swans are definitely black. In phase space, they are gray. In the real world, you don't know the swans are coming. In phase space, you might know they are coming but you can't know when or where.

Orgasms and Black Swans

2009-05-30T16:39:00.000-07:00

The other night the Group discussed Nassim Taleb's Black Swan book. I furnished the pizza and beer and moderated (?) the discussion because it is a known fact that I am a little obsessed with the whole Black Swan business. I printed out a Power Point that I prepared for the occasion and we managed to get through maybe 10 of the 25 slides - which was probably eight more than I thought we would do.

The digressions stayed pretty much on the subject. Descartes only got brought up because I tried to squeeze in Kant's phenomena/noumena thing (which I likened to Taleb's Mediocristan/Extremistan idea). Several wondered if an event (like Pearl Harbor) that was anticipated by some but a surprise to most everybody else was really a black swan. The general consensus was yes.

The most interesting digression was when somebody wondered if his first orgasm (at age 12 I think he said) was a black swan. Interrupting the guffaws that ensued, he insisted, no, he was serious. At that point in his life the event was an outlier - unexpected and unprecedented. It was significant and life altering. And, after the fact it was inevitable.

Given his explanation, we all had to agree that he was right.

Black Swan Summary

2009-05-24T12:38:00.001-07:00

Posts relating to Black Swans and Nassim Taleb...

(They tell me I am a little obsessed with this.)

Faster Than Light With the Point-Of-View Drive

2009-04-21T10:06:00.000-07:00

Einstein's prohibition in his Special Theory of Relativity is not exactly against exceeding the speed of light, but being measured exceeding the speed of light - or, more specifically, against conveying information at faster than light speeds. As explained in this video narrated by Professor Ennui Pidawee, it's possible to exceed the speed of light so long as you use your own clock and your own subjective point-of-view.

Aside 1 (First Law of Universal Sanity) - Having a fixed speed of light keeps our universe sane. For example, if a spaceship approaching Earth at a speed faster than light sent a message, the spaceship would arrive before the message. Effect could precede cause. From the perspective of our hunter gatherer-derived nervous system, it seems weird that yardsticks shrink and clocks slow down the faster a thing goes. From the perspective of the universe, it is the price we pay for preserving causality. It is as if Einstein really discovered The First Law Of Universal Sanity - e.g., that the messenger shall not precede the message.

Aside 2 (other faster-than-light examples) - There are other examples of exceeding the speed of light. For instance, beyond the observable horizon of our ever expanding universe, bodies recede from each other at faster-than-light speeds. Here on Earth we are moving faster than light relative to unseen planets in distant parts of the universe. However, that's OK. Not only are those planets unseen, they are unseeable. Because the universe is expanding faster than light there is no possibility of messages being exchanged.

Another example of "superluminal" speed happens when "entangled" quantum particles, such as the particles produced when when radioative elements decay, are separated. These particles remain connected in some weird way, no matter how far apart they are. Measuring the property (say spin) of one particle instantly (and opositely) affects the corresponding property of the other particle according to the Heisenberg Uncertainy Principle. The distance between the particles has no affect. However, Special Relativity (and the sanity of the universe) is supposed to be preserved because (it is claimed) that no information can be conveyed in this manner.

Aside 2a (EPR Paradox) - The entanglement phenomenon prompted Einstein to join with scientists Podolsky and Rosen to propose the EPR Paradox. They said that because faster-than-light speeds were involved, the underlying Heisenberg Uncertainy Theory was wrong. This is in keeping with Einstein's statement "God does not play dice with the universe." Unfortunately, tests have demonstrated that the entanglement phenomenon is real. I don't know what this says about God - maybe that He has a mean sense of humor.

1 - Is order necessary?

2009-04-01T14:09:00.000-07:00

Seems to be necessary - on personal and universal levels.

We’ve always needed order to make sense of stuff. Where does the tiger hide? Which berries are edible? What causes this and that? Because information never stops, we’ve had to organize it into manageable chunks - to reduce it to categories, collections, rules, laws, theories, algorithms, etc.. We had to invent the forest to avoid being overwhelmed by the trees.

As creatures who contemplate death, we also try to make sense out of that.

At the universal level, the constituent stuff of the external world (assuming a sane world exists outside of our heads) requires rules in order to get along. Unregulated stuff would bump into other stuff and make a mess. It would be chaotic, whimsical stuff.

Assumptions
Some question whether order is real, or an artifact, imposed on physical reality by human need. This series (although perhaps an example of imposed order) assumes that order is a necessary quality of a sane universe existing outside our heads. Others ask the opposite question - is order something more real than physical reality? (It’s the question asked by Plato when he talked about perfect forms - the “trees” vs “treeness” thing.) This article doesn’t truck with such semantic nonsense - but the notion of system-level order might come close.

2 - Where does order come from - from inside stuff or outside?

2009-04-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

That is the question.

Does order come from the outside or the inside? Do rules emerge from the bottom or pour/trickle down from the top. Conservatives say one thing, liberals another. Capitalists and socialists are conflicted. So are popes and mystics. Scientists have issues. Philosophers and pundits argue endlessly.

The question has started wars, including the one that founded this country and the one that four score and seven years later threatened to tear the country apart. In 1917, the question did tear Russia apart. In 1546 Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of the Wittenburg church because he really disagreed with the pope about whose rules were right.

In the movie Braveheart, Mel Gibson, full of righteous defiance, shouts, “Freedom!”. In To Kill A Mockingbird, Gregory Peck, full of passionate reasonableness argues, “All men are created equal.” These are two views of order.

The list could go on and on but we won’t do that.

3 - Stuff-level order

2009-04-01T14:06:00.001-07:00

The properties of subatomic particles determine the behavior of atoms which determines the behavior of molecules which determines the behavior of mixtures, aggregates, etc. Order seems to come from within, except for the weird extremes.

At the quantum extreme, looking at stuff makes it a wave or a particle. Measuring one property (say, spin) precludes an observer’s ability to know other properties (say, position). Does that mean the order comes from the observer or the observed?

At the cosmic extreme (and the middle too), there are fields - gravitational, magnetic, electrical. Although existing because of stuff, fields affect stuff. Do the fields cause order?

4 - System-level order (emergence)

2009-04-01T14:03:00.000-07:00

Complex collections of stuff become organized into systems - weather systems, climate systems, geological systems, ecological systems, evolutionary systems, etc.. The stock market is a system. So is the economy.

Systems exhibit order (otherwise, they wouldn’t be systems). Where does this order come from - from the stuff which make up a system or from the system itself?

The organized behavior of local weather patterns can be traced to atmospheric conditions which can be traced to the properties of gaseous stuff. This order seems to come from within. The behavior of global weather patterns is trickier - seeming to be controlled by semi-random, Mandelbrotian chaos (a butterfly in Africa causes a windstorm in Kansas). Do these rules of non-linear dynamics derive from the gaseous stuff or the system?

The science of complex systems (of which my understanding is not complex) says that some system-level order comes from the system itself. The system is self-organizing. It makes its own rules. From the standpoint of the stuff which makes up the system the order comes from the outside.

A characteristic of these complex systems is “emergence”. Among other things, this is defined as order that arises spontaneously from a system. It is unexpected, novel.

Evolutionary Aside
In particular cases, the validity of the order might be questioned. Is it real or imagined? Is a system really present? Is emergence real?

For example, evolution produces changes in animals and plants in response to changes in the environment. The result is an ordered system of life, neatly divisible in various taxonomies and categories. Is this order the product of an external evolutionary system (maybe even a Higher Power), or is it an ordered inner response to random external changes?

Some say that the general thrust of evolution is from the simple to the complex, from lower order creatures (like bugs) to higher order beings (like us). It is a progression of order. This suggests that a system (or Higher Power) imposes rules from the outside.

Some, like Jay Gould (evolutionary biologist, author of Full House), say that such a progression is illusory. Gould says it is a statistical artifact based on the fact that the only direction available for evolution to proceed is from the simple to the complex.

Some say that the orderly nature of the living products of evolution could not be due to random processes. Religious people claim this is the result of a Higher Power (upper case). Scientists of complex systems also say it is a result of a higher power - but this one is lower case. These scientists say that evolution is a complex system whose inner rules dictate the occurrence of non-incremental changes (new species, types of organs - the emergence of life itself).

5 - Social order (animal)

2009-04-01T14:01:00.000-07:00

Some animals exist primarily as individuals, never interacting with other individuals except maybe for reproduction or food. Other animals exist not only as individuals but as members of social groups.

Individual behavior is managed by internal controls, instinctual and/or learned.

Group behavior is managed by internal controls operating within the individuals doing the behavior, and by external controls imposed by other individuals (leaders) - or by the group itself (when the group is a complex system).

In invertebrate groups (insect colonies, etc) individuals relate to other individuals according to built-in rules. No leader directs the activities. The group itself does not exercise control over individuals.

Lower-order vertebrate groups also operate according to built-in rules. A school of fish swims this way or that, a flock of birds flies one way or another in response to internal controls possessed by all members of the group. There is no head fish or head bird.

Control is imposed from the outside when relationships between individuals become more complex. Typically in animal groups this control is exercised by a dominant individual. The leader might determine who has sex, who eats when, who grooms whom, etc.

Even a herd/pack/mob/tribe of higher order vertebrates might respond collectively to individual impulses under certain circumstances (wildebeests flee when the lion is spotted; humans run when someone yells, “fire!” )

It does not appear that animal societies rise to level of complex systems, where order emerges from the system itself.

6 - Social order (human)

2009-04-01T13:55:00.000-07:00

Human social order begins where animal social order leaves off. The difference is complexity.

Large complex groups whose members interact in complex ways cannot always be controlled by a single leader. Some control must be delegated (which some animals also do). Power must be shared.

Various arrangements exist…

Rigid leadership hierarchies are imposed (for example by the Catholic Church and the military).
Teams tried
Committees coerced
Congresses convened
Collectives conceived
Councils elected
Matrix-style organizations attempted
Democracies born
Republics seized
Constitutional monarchies grudgingly allowed

And so on.

Sometimes the power sharing arrangements are reduced to formal rules. These rules are called laws, bylaws, regulations, constitutions, covenants, protocols, contracts, etc. The constituent parts of the society (individuals) establish an order which exists independently of individuals. There is a rule of law, not of men.

The arrival of formal rules might signal the existence of a complex system in the sense defined previously. The society, through its rules, has a life of its own. However, it is not clear whether such rules are “emergent” - arriving spontaneously out of the system. The Declaration of Independence might be emergent, but probably not Roberts Rules of Order.

7 - Political order

2009-04-01T13:48:00.000-07:00

Politics is the art and practice of power sharing in (human?) social groups.

Progression
At the tribal level, human societies tend toward the strong leader model (although a hunter gatherer group might have both a hunting leader and a religious leader). As societies become larger and more complex, groups arise within groups - each subgroup with its own leader. Collections of groups become systems. The strong leader (king, queen, emperor, etc) can longer manage everything. Power sharing arrangements emerge.

In recent centuries, there has been a progression toward representative democracies of elected leaders. Power is pushed further down in the system, moving closer to the individuals. Does this progression represent an emergent response to increasing complexity? Did the United States come into being because its people demanded to be free? Or was it because a self-governing federation of states could manage things better?

Which Power Sharing System Is Best?
Most modern political systems (other than strictly authoritarian regimes) try to strike a balance between the need for control at the upper levels and the need for autonomy and flexibility at the lower levels. Lower levels need freedom to act - but their actions must be balanced against the needs and actions of other groups.

Politicians ask where does (or should) control come from - from the top, or from somewhere lower down? Who tells whom what to do? Who knows best, the government or the citizen?

Answers come from the liberal-left and the conservative-right with infinite shades of opinion in the middle.

There are several ways to categorize these groups. Some of the categories seem to work better than other - all might be examples of bogus order invented by humans looking for organization.

Notes: In the following, I present differences and positions as being obvious and self-evident - in keeping with the approach mentioned at the first of this series. But, maybe I’m wrong. Also, I thought I invented the freedom-vs-fairness thing mentioned below. But now I remember how the conservative columnist George Will sneers at liberal’s love of fairness. And I found this piece on the web by libertarian Charles Barr - http://libertyunbound.com/article.php?id=100.

Big Government -vs- Little Government
Government size is often used to categorize the liberal-left and the conservative-right. According to conventional wisdom, the liberal-left favors centralized control, the conservative-right decentralized control. However, when examined more closely, this division yields inconsistent and confusing results. For example:

The liberal-left favors a stronger central government for managing public policy (finance, health, commerce, business) but weaker authority when dealing with private policy (religion, morality, reproduction).
The conservative-right favors a weaker central government for managing public policy and stronger authority for managing private policy.
The liberal-left distrusts power wielded by groups within the system (by business, local government, military, religious political structures, etc.).
The conservative-right protects the power wielded by groups within the system.

Freedom -vs- Fairness
Another way to characterize the differences between the liberal-left and the conservative-right is how they view power sharing at the individual level. One side seems to emphasize freedom, the other fairness:

Freedom
The conservative-right believes everybody should be free to pursue power (money, fame, etc.) with as little interference as possible from big government. How power is ultimately distributed depends on the individuals. Some will always end up with more power (money, fame, etc) than others. Inequities happen. The subgroups distrusted by the liberal-left will always be controlled by the richest, the smarted, the most aggressive, the strongest. For the conservative-right, this is a natural process, not to be messed with.

Fairness
The liberal-left believes not only in fairness of opportunity (like the conservative-right), but in fairness of results. No one individual should be allowed to have undue power over another individual. Inequities should be minimized. The power of central government shall be used to restrict the power of some to protect the power of others. Although not always acknowledged, the liberal-left believes that strong individuals, if left alone, will always get an unfair advantage over everybody else.

Freedom -vs- Fairness Corollaries
The freedom-vs-fairness division yields some interesting fall-out:

Correctness
There are correct expressions, utterances, views. Both the liberal-left and the conservative-right have notions of correctness that arise (or not) from their core positions. For the conservative-right, religion is often viewed as correct because it stems from individuals in the pursuit of freedom. Gun ownership is correct for the same reason. The liberal-left is concerned with speech; it should be fair and correct. Unfair speech is incorrect. Certain community esthetics are also subject to correctness (public art, landscapes).

Unfairness and Loss of Freedom
In the pursuit of fairness for all, the liberal-left is unfair to some (graduated taxes, business regulations, trade rules, etc). In the pursuit of freedom for all, the conservative-right allows individuals at the bottom of the heap to be dominated by those at the top. Only freedom of opportunity is equal.

Both sides impose order (and sacrifice freedom and fairness) in the name of correctness. For example, the conservative-right might censor speech and freedom in order to preserve a particular hierarchical structure (resulting from some individual’s exercise of freedom). The liberal-left might censor speech in order to ensure that one group does not speak unfairly about another group (this is “political correctness”).

At the extremes, both the liberal-left and the conservative-right can result (and have resulted) in totalitarianism. The unfettered liberal-left tends toward communism. The unfettered conservative-right tends toward dictatorship.

Hubris of the Left
When devising rules of fairness for the operation of a political system, the liberal-left must presume to understand the operation of the system. Those devising the rules of the liberal-left must assume they know better than those for whom the rules are being devised. When exercising power in the name of a public esthetic the liberal-left must assume that its esthetic is correct.

Free-Will and Responsibility
To the conservative-right, being free means having free-will. Individuals are free to choose between right and wrong. They are presumed to know the difference. They are responsibility for their acts. The liberal-left might acknowledge the free-will of others, but not their correctness. According to the liberal-left individuals don’t necessarily know their own best interests. They need to be helped, guided (or managed) - in the name of fairness and correctness. Free-will for some is limited - illusory. Such people might be held accountable for their acts, but not responsible.

Celebrations of the Right
The conservative-right with its emphasis on individual power favors hierarchical organizations. It celebrates the strong man, the tribe, the team. The conservative-right loves competition, aggression, dominance.

Symbols of the Right

Mel Gibson shouting “Freedom” in Braveheart.
Charlton Heston holding a musket in front of the NRA giving his “cold dead hands” speech.
A flag (especially the Confederate battle flag).
Patrick Henry shouting “Give me liberty or give me death.”
A lion.

Symbols of the Left

Gregory Peck arguing, “All men are created equal.” in To Kill a Mocking Bird
Martin Luther King saying “I’ve got a dream”.
Abraham Lincoln saying “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
A bonobo mokney.

Religious Orientation
The religious orientation of the conservative-right is toward Jehovah and Allah. The religious orientation of the liberal-left is toward Jesus and Buddha.

Economics
Positions on economic issues can also be grouped along fairness -vs- freedom lines.

The conservative-right believes in the freedom of individuals to pursue wealth without interference from central authority. The inequalities that result when stronger, smarter, more aggressive people rise to the top of the economic heap are to be tolerated. Unfettered capitalism - without external controls is the most efficient system for managing goods and services.

The liberal-left believes that unfettered capitalism will result in an unfair concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. It also believes that in a managed economy where everyone gains wealth, the total wealth in the system increases. Even if the slices of the pie remain unequally divided, the total size of the pie gets bigger.

Capitalism, even when somewhat managed, seems to be a system of emergent rules - where the order springs from the system itself.

8 - Religious order

2009-04-01T13:41:00.001-07:00

Religion seems concerned with three categories of order:

Cosmological - explaining how we got here, where we are going.
Pedagogical - instructing us in proper behavior (morality)
Political - regulating the business of the church

In a religious context, the final (or first) authority always comes from the top - from God. The question is how does God make His will known - from within or without?

To the unaffiliated mystic, the experience of God (or Higher Power - whatever) is completely personal, completely subjective. God reveals his rules, wisdom, insights, love, etc. from within. The experience of God is not subject to external interpretation.

To the scientist who believes in an impersonal, objective God, the experience of God is impersonal and objective. God’s rules are the laws of nature.

To those who belong to religious groups, some level of authority always resides outside, in the group.

At the minimum, a religious group has a teaching. It might be a sacred text or myth. The sacred teaching is usually said to be God’s Word as related by somebody inspired by (or in conversation with) God. Depending on the religion, the text might be taken literally or symbolically.

Teachings are usually interpreted by teachers - e.g., priests, preachers, rabbis, ministers, shamans, mullahs, gurus, etc. Some teachers are conduits for God’s word - Catholic priests for example. Some teachers are facilitators for subjective religious experience - shamans, Zen masters and evangelical protestant preachers who lead their followers to the salvation experience. (Quakers and others believe in silence.)

The Protestant Reformation was a conflict about whether the power to interpret God’s will comes from within or without.

9 - Artistic order

2009-04-01T13:39:00.001-07:00

Art is a more-or-less orderly representation of experience - showing the order in experience or imposing order on experience.

Some art is an expression of intellectual order, some art is an expression of emotional, psychological, and religious order. (Some art comes from the head, some from the gut and crotch.)

The order of some artists seems external and obvious …

Normal Rockwell
Jackie Collins
The Monkees

The order of other artists seems internal and barely there…

Jackson Pollack
William Faulkner
Thelonius Monk

SECULAR FAITH IN A SANE UNIVERSE

2009-03-11T07:19:00.000-07:00

(How do you know what you know, answer the holocaust deniers, and decide who’s right on global warming? ANS: You can’t - absolutely.)

Origin of Idea

It came to me at a recent meeting of the Thinking Man’s Club. I leaned across the sofa and said to the Grand Poo Paa, “It’s all a matter of faith. You just have to pick one side or another and have faith that they are right.” He laughed and replied something. But I didn’t understand because everybody, including Kris the nice young woman at the other end of the sofa, the person who prompted my comment, was trying to be heard over everybody else.

The meeting was about food. After feeding us fantastic home-cooked lasagna prepared strictly with organic ingredients, Kris lectured about the dangers of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). In particular she warned about a plot by Monsanto to use the US Patent system to control our food supply.

My problem wasn’t so much with what she was saying (although some of her rhetorical methods were suspect). It was her appeal to science. I didn’t like being drawn into yet another argument where both sides cite “scientific evidence” to support their positions. Despite my certainty (at the time) on such issues as global warming, evolution, etc, I have never been happy with my answers to the blank-faced assurance of those who say it isn’t so. I resisted being seduced into a new realm of uncertainty.

That’s when it struck me that maybe nobody really knows anything - not absolutely for sure. Maybe all knowledge (except for what's inside our own heads) is a matter of faith, even scientific knowledge. Maybe uncertainty is faith based.

Rhetorical Device

How would that work?

Here is a rhetorical device.

Assume that our knowledge of stuff occurs on a certainty scale - from the “I’m really sure” at one end to “I’m pretty confused” at the other end.

Starting at the silly end of the scale (necessary, because it is a rhetorical device), I am really sure that it snowed the other night in Mount Holly. I touched the white stuff, walked in it, felt it fall wet and cold down my collar.

I have faith that it snowed.

What, you ask, does faith have to do with it? Well, how do I know that I didn’t manufactured the experience, or that someone didn’t manufacture it for me in a Matrix-style universe? There is no test. That’s why, for me, believing it snowed is a matter of faith. It follows from believing that the universe is basically sane. It is my secular way of agreeing with Descartes who said that, “God would not deceive me.”, or, Einstein who said, “God does not play dice with the universe.” It seems more practical to believe in an objective universe based on rational rules than a subjective universe that has been manufactured (by me or somebody else) where anything is possible.

(I still believe in my subjective reality - just not in yours.)

Moving down the certainty scale, I am also pretty sure it snowed in Charlotte that same night. I saw the pictures on TV and in the newspaper. Again, how do I know? The experience was not direct. It was based on reports, which could be lies, part of a grand conspiracy. As before, I have faith in a practical and sane universe. Only a crazy universe would go to the trouble to trick me about snow in Charlotte. It doesn’t make sense.

Travelling further down the certainty scale we come to a place where craziness does seem possible. This is where some people ask, did the holocaust really happen; did men really walk on the moon? Is the earth really 5 or 6 billion years old (and not 5 or 6 thousand years)? Did Dick Cheney’s agents fly those planes into the World Trade Center? Is Barak Obama a sleeper agent for a vast Muslim conspiracy? Is evolution real?

I happen to believe that the holocaust did happen, that men did walk on the moon, etc. How do I know? At this point on the scale, there seems to be the possibility of introducing evidence into arguments. Both sides can cite “facts” to prove their positions.

For me it is still a matter of faith - not faith in evidence (which as David Hume suggests can never be sufficient), but in shared objective experience. The body of shared objective experience (objective, because it is available to everybody) seems to favor some conclusions and not others. Except for the small core of deniers, “everybody knows” that the holocaust happened, that men walked on the moon, that Mohamed Atta and his gang flew those planes into the World Trade Center. We have seen the pictures and read the articles. In my sane universe, if something seems too weird or unlikely to be true it probably isn’t - even if there is evidence to “prove” it.

Of course, there are always exceptions and qualifications.

Before the recent economic collapse, everybody “knew” that Lehman Brothers would be around for a long time, that Citibank was a good bet, and that house prices would continue to climb. These shared experiences were misleading. Therefore, I restrict my faith to shared experiences that stand the test of time. Like the scientific theories discussed next, the conclusions drawn from shared experiences are provisional - not to be immediately trusted. How long does it take for trust to happen? Ten or twenty years, never? I don’t know. As Nassim Taleb says, not everything is confined under a neat bell curve. Black swans can happen. But nobody knows when. Sorry.

(One of the tenets of my secular faith is that you can only know so much.)

Conventional wisdom also has problems with phenomena that fall outside the scope of our hunter-gatherer nervous systems. Consider the two remaining questions from the previous list - about the age of the universe and the reality of evolution. These issues cannot be resolved by appealing to shared public experience. We have no direct experience of age outside our own lifetimes. Although evolution happens all around us, we don’t see it. Even our shared experiences of the “rising” and “setting” of the sun would lead us to believe that the sun circles the earth. Until you see a tall ship emerge, top mast first, over the horizon, you would be perfectly justified in concluding that the earth is flat.

This is where science comes in. Science is formalized shared experience - experience that follows the rules of the scientific method. Science lets us construct theories to answer questions that lie outside our direct experience - where everyday common sense cannot go.

Scientific theories depend on experimental evidence for verification. The theories make predictions which are tested in verifiable, repeatable experiments. That constitutes scientific proof. However, scientific proof is provisional. Sometimes new experiences happen that cast doubt on existing theories. Therefore, like the conclusions of shared everyday experiences, the conclusions of scientific theories are tentative and provisional. The main difference is that the provisional nature of science is built into the system. Nobody expects absolutes.

But, also, like the conclusions of shared experience, not all theories are equal. The more a scientific theory endures the attacks and criticisms that are part of the process, the more credible it becomes. Long-standing scientific theories are hardly ever thrown out completely. For example Einstein’s theories of relativity did not disprove previous theories, but expand on them to cover new classes of phenomena. Newton’s and Galileo’s equations still work after Einstein. Einstein’s equations just work in more places.

Returning to the two issues cited on the certainty scale, both the theories of evolution and the age of the universe have been around a long time. Although change and scientific disagreement have nibbled around the edges of these theories, the core conclusions remain untouched - forming the basis for all modern life science and geology.

(You don’t necessarily believe me? Good. That’s the point.)

Where does that leave faith? If a sane universe favors objective shared experience (with the exceptions and caveats noted), then that same universe favors science, which is formalized shared experience. Faith in a sane universe requires faith in science. In a Matrix-style subjective universe, the hero can will himself to fly, to walk on water. Anything is possible. Not in a sane universe.

Finally, we arrive at the other end of certainty scale, where “unproven” scientific theories are found. Although not an expert, I’d guess that Kris’ Monsanto conspiracy theory resides here - plus theories that explain dark matter, dark energy, the causes of autism, etc.

How do I know? I don’t. But faith in a sane universe leads to me doubt theories that haven’t been beat up long enough. How long is that? Again, I don’t know.

Unfortunately, writing this piece has also suggested to me that theories about human contribution to global warming might also reside at the unproven end of the scale. Al Gore said peer-reviewed scientific articles agree that humans have contributed to global warming. However, I have also read other reports claiming that peer-reviewed articles say the opposite thing. Both sides cite evidence to prove their points. So, I don’t know.

Note 7/3/09 - I've updated my thinking on global warming. See Getting Ready for the Great Climate Change Debate.

Summary Claims

In conclusion…

There exists two realities.
There is an interior subjective reality inside our individual heads. The existence of this reality is a matter of personal fact.
There is an external objective reality, outside our individual heads. The existence of this reality is a matter of faith.
The truth of our internal reality is whatever we want it to be.
The truth of our objective reality is limited by our common shared experiences. Objective reality must operate according to shared rules, not the rules of individuals. If something seems too weird or unlikely to be true, it probably isn’t true. The experiences of the majority trump the experiences (or the evidence) of the minority.
By this definition, objective reality (the external universe) is sane.
Subjective reality is generally neither sane nor insane. It’s ‘a’sane. (However public expressions of subjective reality can be regarded as insane.)
Conclusions based on experience are provisional. Experiences can change or can be inadequate (due to the limitations of our hunter-gatherer nervous systems).
With the caveats noted, the most reliable conclusions are likely to be those based on the most enduring experiences.
The scientific method is a formalized means of stating and validating objective experiences.
The most reliable scientific theories, like the most reliable conclusions drawn from shared everyday experiences are likely to be those that have endured the longest.

FAQ

In order not to disrupt the narrative flow along my rhetorical device, I have lumped this stuff here (assuming that there are any frequently asked questions)…

What Is God’s Place in a Sane Universe? (Who Manages the Matrix)?

In a sane, faith-based universe, God is not a problem - so long as He obeys His own rules. No miracles, virgin births, etc. Sorry.

What About Scientific Weirdness (Nonlocality, Relativity, etc)?

Science has allowed some serious weirdness to creep in around the edges of the sane universe. Maybe these are God’s Little Jokes. Maybe God does play dice with the universe. Here are some examples:

Quantum stuff is both wave and particle and neither here nor there until you look at it.
When you look at entangled quantum stuff, the effect is instantly registered - even if the stuff is on opposite sides of the galaxy,
Relativity says (and proofs show) that the faster you go the heavier you get, the thinner you become, and the slower your clock runs.

Is There Objective Verification of Subjective Reality?

Yes. According to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, you can’t exceed the speed of light. However that only applies to the viewpoint of an objective observer. From your own subjective point-of-view you can exceed speed of light. That’s because relative to an objective observer your clock slows down the faster you go. If you travel faster than a certain speed (relative to an observer) and use your own clock to time the trip, your calculated (not measured) speed will exceed the speed of light. See Ennui Pidawee’s video for more.

Can You Win an Objective Argument With Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh?

No. These folks don’t do objective arguments. They combine subjective and objective tools to defend subjective positions. They use emotion and intimidation (and maybe sex in the case of Coulter - or Limbaugh?) and pseudo logic. If you believe in a sane universe, you’ll stay away from such people.

What About UFO’s?

The shared objective experience of UFOs seems true. There are photographs, verified reports. The “unidentified” part of the conclusions from these experiences also seems true. Beyond that? Who knows.

What About Angels, Ghosts?

According to something I read, most Americans believe in angels and ghosts. Does this belief constitute a shared reality - either subjective or objective. No. The reports of the belief constitute a shared objective reality, not the belief. Do similar reports of internal states make the internal states objectively real? I don’t think so - such a reality would conflict with the requirements of sane universe.

What About Dreams?

Everybody reports having dreams. Do dreams constitute a shared objective reality? The reports do, so do the physical measurements (REM, brain waves, etc.) that coincide with the dreams. But the dreams themselves are not shared objective reality. They are private and subjective - definitely neither insane nor sane, simply ‘a’ sane.

What About Esse Est Percipi?

Bishop Berkeley, the 17^th century Irish philosopher said “Esse est percipi” - to be is to perceived. His point was that you could only be sure about sensations and ideas - e.g., what goes on in your body and head. Samuel John said, “I refute it thus” and kicked a rock. Who is right? The good Bishop I think. The rest is faith.

What About Trees Falling in Forests?

There is the old saw (hah hah) that says, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Some attribute the statement to the Bishop above. The reality of distant falling trees is like snow in Charlotte - you have to believe if you have faith in a practical and sane universe. Anything else would be crazy.

Vibrational Electrical Generators (VEGS)

2009-02-26T14:41:00.000-08:00

VEGS turn wasted vibrational energy into electricity. Every swaying tree, bouncing roadway, turbulent stream, vibrating bridge and seismic shake becomes a source of power.

The VEGS idea was born in 1980, died shortly thereafter (not because it was bad, but because I had lost my will) and has now been reborn (maybe).

Then…

It started with the automotive textbooks that Claud Hunter and I coauthored for Prentice Hall. Several of the books described automotive electrical systems, including alternators and ignition coils.

Alternators convert rotational energy supplied by engines into the continuous electrical current needed to operate vehicles. Ignition coils use collapsing lines of magnetic force to “induce” sudden bursts of high voltage current that cause spark plugs to ignite air and fuel.

Although I don’t remember the details, the idea for VEGS probably had something to do with combining the operation of alternator-type generators and coils - using vibrational energy to generate movement between conductors and lines of force.

In 1980, when the VEGS idea was discovered, I was already a “mature” inventor. I had conceived of airplanes without wings, spaceships without visible means of propulsion, upside down ketchup bottles, and a modular building product, called the Tetra Triangular Building System, which replaced bricks and blocks with triangles. By now, I understood that inventing something is easy, but that developing an idea requires certain knowledge and skills. In those previous pursuits of grandeur, I had ignored such practical considerations. Now, for some reason, I could not.

So, this was my next-to-the-last invention of a physical thing (as opposed to metaphysical, metaphorical and software things - which I still pursue up to this very moment). After creating a Record of Invention and contacting, half-heartedly, a few companies, I buried the small VEGS corpse in a dusty cardboard box beside the remains of the Tetra Triangular Building System.

Note: The last physical invention was a non-obvious variation on VEGS, creating a different sort of VEG which can double as a motor. I’m saving that one, just in case.

Now…

VEGS was resurrected in 2008 in response to Google’s Project 10^100 initiative. Celebrating Google’s 10^th anniversary, the initiative is described as…

“A call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible”

Reading the part about the 10M seed money (but not the part that said my reward would be good karma - for the next life I guess) I thought, “What the hell. Maybe I can still get rich and save the world.”

Following are excerpts from my Project 10^100 proposal. After that is the original VEGS Record of Invention.

Excerpts from Project 10^100 Proposal

Description of VEGS…

All generators transform moving energy into electrical energy, converting the motion of stuff (air, water, steam, etc) into relative movement between magnetic fields and conductors. The result is current flow in the conductor.

The difference between conventional systems and Vibrational Electric Generators (VEGS) is the source of the energy. Conventional systems can only use energy from regular, unidirectional motion (flowing water, steam, air).

VEGS capture energy from irregular motion. The energy of every swaying tree, tower or building can be converted directly into electrical power - as can the surge of surf, the undulation of river rapids, the movement of road pavement caused by traffic, the bouncing of cars on those roads, the vibration of strings in wind, the seismic activity of the earth itself.

Whereas conventional generators have stators and rotors, VEGS have stators and vibrators. The vibrator can be the magnetic field-producing element or the conductor. In either case, relative motion is derived directly from energy source. No intervening, energy-wasting mechanism (windmill blade, turbine rotor, impeller wheel) is needed to convert straight- line motion into rotational motion. Minimal alteration of the environment is required. VEGS are inherently clean.

The system can be illustrated by a bell, clapper and rope. When pulled, the rope becomes a vibrational energy source. This energy is transferred to the bell. Viewed as a VEG, the bell becomes the vibrator and the clapper becomes the stator.

Output from VEGS can be directed to a power grid, or to batteries, or other storage devices. Solid state components can be used to modify output as required.

Addressing the Energy Crisis…

VEGS address the three main aspects of the energy crisis — availability, cost, and environmental impact. Depending on how well the technology works and on how widely it is adopted, VEGS could significantly alleviate the energy crisis.

Availability. Vibrational energy sources used by VEGS are available in every county and region. The reliance of one country on another for power is minimized.
Cost. Vibrational energy sources are free for the taking. The only costs are the VEGS themselves.
Environmental Impact. Except for their presence, VEGS do not alter the environment. Well-designed VEGS could harmonize with their surroundings.

Benefiting Developed and Undeveloped Countries…

VEGS would benefit people in developed and undeveloped countries.

In developed countries with established electrical grids, VEGS could be used to feed power back into the system. Everyone with access to sources of vibrational energy (which is virtually everyone) would become producers of electricity. Using free energy sources would reduce cost. Using local energy sources would reduce reliance on foreign suppliers. In emergencies, stand-alone VEGS could supply power independently of the grid.

In undeveloped countries without grids, stand-alone VEGS could reduce the need for a national grid. Tapping local sources of vibrational energy, regions could supply their own minimal (or maximal) power needs. Everyone could have at least some electricity. (Toss pendulum generators in the surf off Tierra Del Fuego and potentially you’ve got lights and computers.)

Record of Invention

Click pictures to enlarge.

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Getting Around Einstein's Limit - Prof Ennui Pidawee

2009-02-25T06:07:00.000-08:00

Professor Pidawee says that you can exceed the speed of light - if you are tricky and use your own clock.

Second Black Swan – Bursting the Great Stuff Bubble

2009-02-24T07:44:00.000-08:00

Whenever I see a holiday ad (say, for Chia products), or hear about the current economic mess, I think about Nassim Taleb. He is the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. This prompts me to think about our most recent national Black Swan, which prompts me to wonder if a second Black Swan is waddling in the wings.

The recent Black Swan is pretty obvious. Everybody knows we are in a recession. Most experts seem to agree that the crisis was triggered by the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble. This fits Taleb’s description of a Black Swan. It is an event of great impact, unforeseen beforehand, but appearing afterward as obvious and inevitable.

The second Black Swan that I wonder about is the bursting of the Great Stuff Bubble. Unlike the bursting of previous bubbles (the Tulip Bubble in 1630, the South Sea Bubble in 1711, the Stock Market Bubble in 1929, the Dot Com Bubble in 1999, etc.), which involved particular kinds of stuff, the Great Stuff Bubble would affect all stuff. Black Swan poop would cover everything.

(I also wonder if the Great Depression resulted from a pair of Black Swans, the first being the Stock Market Bubble burst, the second being a Great Stuff Bubble burst, not recognized at first, but monumental and devastating in its impact.)

Although Taleb says you usually can’t predict Black Swans (or extrapolate from history), consider this hypothetical chain of events:

Suppose…

Because of the recession, the country buys half as many Chia pets, ties, gloves, scarves, socks, sweaters, George Foreman grills, big screen TVs, etc as it did in previous holiday seasons. After the holidays, some people discover they don’t miss this stuff. Some people say, “Well, who needs all that stuff anyway?”

The drop in stuff-related sales further weakens the economy. There are more layoffs. People, who can buy even less stuff, begin to rethink the difference between necessary and unnecessary stuff. Although many people still cling to their stuff, many others, especially those who discovered they really didn’t need Chia pets and big flat screen TVs decide that stuff isn’t everything.

Society changes. Forced by circumstances, thrift becomes a virtue, at least among a big segment of the population (old hippies, real Christian conservatives, Unitarians, all libertarians). People hang on to old cars, old clothes, old appliances. Big houses are regarded by some as obscene. Lavish displays of wealth seem tacky. Donald Trump is sillier than before and Ralph Nader is sort of chic. Excess is out; moderation is in.

In this hypothetical scenario, we enter a new age of stuff awareness. Of course, this is when the second Black Swan becomes obvious, when the Great Stuff Bubble bursts. That is because all of the world’s industrial economies are based on the movement of stuff. Necessary stuff, unnecessary stuff – it doesn’t make any difference to the economic system.

However, the difference between necessary and unnecessary stuff is important to struggling consumers. A combination of ethical and practical considerations compels most people to cut back on what they perceive as unnecessary stuff. This varies between consumers, but the results are the same to the economy. Companies that make unnecessary stuff, whatever it is, go out of business or scale back.

At this point the story is almost over. The Black Swan, having pooped, moves on. The economy spirals downward, trying to find a new floor based on new distinctions between necessary and unnecessary stuff. We enter a second Great Depression.

What happens after this depends on the next flock of Black Swans, circling even now, invisible yet ominous. One could expect social unrest, perhaps wars. Perhaps a war brings us out of this Great Depression, like WWII brought us out of the first Great Depression, curing us of our consumer malaise, and reinvigorating our taste (and capacity) for stuff.

Sloshing Toward Main Street

2009-02-23T07:18:00.000-08:00

This is prompted by recent events (Oct 08) and by the term "slosh" used by David Brooks, Fareed Zakaria and others to describe the movement of capital around the globe. Quoting Brooks...

"We’re living in an age when a vast excess of capital sloshes around the world fueling cycles of bubble and bust. When the capital floods into a sector or economy, it washes away sober business practices, and habits of discipline and self-denial. Then the money managers panic and it sloshes out, punishing the just and unjust alike."

(with apologizes to WB Yeats and Alan Greenspan)

Turning and turning in a dance gone awry;

The politico cannot hear the politician;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere money is loosed upon the world;

Red-dimmed ink floods the marketplace, and everywhere;

The ceremony of civility is drowned;

The best know nothing while the worst;

Know everything;

Surely The Big D is at hand.

The Big D! Hardly are those words out;

When a vast newsreel image;

Troubles my sight; somewhere in the Great Heartland;

A shape with a bull’s body and the head of man;

A gaze blank and pitiless as Alan Greenspan;

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it;

Swarm angry eagles.

My vision fades but now I know;

That eight decades of stony sleep;

Have been vexed awake by the sound of anxious capital;

Sloshing toward Main Street;

Waiting to be born.

Evan Alexander - January 2009

2009-01-24T06:23:00.001-08:00

Nothing fancy here, except the boy - who is fancy enough.

Season's Greetings From Times Gone By

2008-12-25T02:01:00.000-08:00

Sloshing Toward Main Street - Short Video

2008-12-19T14:03:00.000-08:00

Short video version of poem.