An Exercise in Sanity

After doing some additional reading about various fusion projects (as a follow up to this article on Michio Kaku’s book), I’ve uncovered my own misunderstanding. I’ve always taken “cold fusion” to mean “controlled fusion”; that is, I understood “cold” to essentially mean “not a bomb”. But I was wrong. “Cold fusion” actually refers to room-temperature fusion; Prof. Kaku was clearly referring to “controlled fusion at high temperatures” as being possible within a few centuries. I’ve made edits to my original article to rectify this.

On the other hand, I’m glad for my mis-labelling, because it seems to have attracted an actual cold-fusion crank, Jed Rothwell, which has been an interesting diversion. While I am no where near qualified (as evidence I give you the first paragraph of this post) to judge the scientific merits of the research he is propagandizing, I can still point out several characteristics that smack of quackery to me.

Continue reading ‘Crank Physics’

If only the government didn’t need warrants to search people’s houses, we’d all be safer. I, for one, would welcome our new jack-booted overlords. If the police didn’t need probable cause, or a judge to sign off on a search, they could go into anyone’s home and search for anything questionable. How many murders could we stop this way? School shootings? Indecent acts carried on behind closed doors? How dare people! Government agencies and police cannot be slowed down by always needing a judge to authorize their actions and having to present hard evidence. It would dampen their effectiveness too much. Won’t someone please think of the children?

If the above paragraph made sense to you, what the hell is wrong with you? If it didn’t make sense, how is the above “logic” any different than the “logic” of this piece about Mukasey and warrantless wiretapping? This paragraph is particularly absent of logic:

As reported by the New York Sun, he also offered a perspective, partly personal as a former Manhattanite, on the necessity of warrantless antiterror surveillance. Before 9/11, Mr. Mukasey said, “We knew that there had been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went. We’ve got” – here the Attorney General paused with emotion – “we’ve got 3,000 people who went to work that day, and didn’t come home, to show for that.”

non sequitur much? He’s jumped from arguing that we need better surveillance (which is probably true, as long as it’s legal), to “we need unlimited authority to conduct any antiterror operation we deem necessary”. And the author continues and says this is not “fear-mongering”. Riiiight.

I really enjoyed Michio Kaku’s other books, especially Parallel Worlds, so I had very high expectations for Physics of the Impossible. To side track a bit, and to show why I appreciate books like these: I get annoyed when someone proclaims that something is “impossible” (this comes up more than I expect). I have friends either pursuing a science Ph.D. (including physics!) or already graduated with one who have argued that some things, such as faster-than-light travel, will forever be impossible. The reasoning is that we’ve discovered basic laws that indicate these things are impossible. It’s arrogance to assume that we, in all of history, have some things figured out definitively.

This kind of reasoning is on the opposite end of the spectrum from another position that I find ridiculous — that we can’t trust any scientific conclusions because science has been wrong in the past. It’s just as stupid. Isaac Asimov analyzed this kind of thinking in a book called The Relativitiy of Wrong. What we consider scientific facts or laws now may be wrong — no scientist would say that anything is “100% proven” — it’s not how science works. But it’s unlikely in the extreme that what knowledge we have now will be completely overthrown. New science that comes along is a refinement of previous theories. For example, relativity didn’t discard Newtonian mechanics, it just augmented it. Relativity may be wrong, but it is more correct than clasical physics. The neo-Darwinian synthesis may be wrong, it is certainly more correct than Darwin was in 1859, and is far, far more correct than Creationism.

So, while it is arrogance to assume that we will not discover new “laws” and open new possibilities, it is facile to take the opposite view and say that science offers nothing. I love theoretical physicists that happily consider how some things might be possible even though they seem impossible now. Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, and Stephen Hawking are all good reading for this kind of thing. Back to the book at hand: amusingly, Kaku quotes many scientists from the late 19th century who thought they had defined the limits of the possible. The book was fun. Kaku divides “impossible” things into three categories: types I, II, and III. Type I impossibilities are things that are possible within the boundaries of what we know now, but we lack the technical sophistication and/or theoretical details to implement them. This includes such things as controlled fusion, AI, and, yes, even teleportation. He expects that these technologies would be developed in the one hundred to one thousand year timeframe.

Type II impossibilities “sit at the very edge of our understanding of the physical world” and might be “realized on a scale of millenia to a million years”. He puts time travel and faster-than-light travel in this category. Type III are things that are in direct contradiction to the currently known laws of physics, and “surprisingly, there are very few such” things.

Aside from the overall content of the book, I think Kaku really needs a better editor and to be more precise with language. I know I’m picking nits, but I really believe that a popularization of science can be simplified, that’s not a license to play fast and loose with language. Many times in the book, he’s just … terribly imprecise. In discussing the possibility of extra-terrestrial life, he states on page 142: “huge creatures are probably not possible because of the scale law, which states that the laws of physics change drastically as we increase the scale of any object”. That’s just absurd. I know what he means (and he does spend some time explaining it) — you cannot scale an ant up to human size and expect it to work (he also uses King Kong as an example). But the laws of physics don’t change; the laws of physics gave us the scale law! The applicability just changes.

Another example of imprecision is when Kaku is discussing perpetual motion machines (free energy, a class III impossibility for sure), and applying the second law of thermodynamics (2LOT) to biology. He writes:

Biologists tell us that the aging process is the gradual accumulation of genetic errors in our cells and genes, so that the cell’s ability to function slowly deteriorates. Aging, rusting, rotting, decay, disintegration, and collapse are also examples of the Second Law.

Gah. It’s not that he’s said anything explicitly wrong, but he’s implied several things that are wrong. Many people fall into this same trap when discussing biological systems (notably moronic Creationists). It’s not that biological systems don’t obey the 2LOT, it’s just very hard to apply the 2LOT to living organisms. He seems to imply that immortality would violate the 2LOT, when it most certainly wouldn’t. Living organisms take in far more energy than they need to overcome the 2LOT, it’s just that our cellular machinery isn’t perfect (not designed) at maintenence. Further, rotting and decay aren’t spontaneous processes; they are the result of other living organisms eating dead ones. To reiterate, it’s not that Kaku is wrong, it’s just a gross oversimplification.

To quibble some more (I enjoy doing this, despite having enjoyed the book), Kaku needs a better editor. There are numerous pop culture references that are just wrong. He says that in Star Trek IV, the Enterprise crew goes back in time to the 1960’s, when every geek knows that it was the 1980’s. His description of Asimov’s Foundation series was also laughably wrong. To wrap this up, the book is well worth reading, but I thought that Krauss’ two books on this topic were better.

Clearly, the current housing crisis is due to people like this lady (and her crazy lenders). Apparently, this is supposed to be a heart-wrenching story and you’re supposed to be sympathetic, since CNN is running this as a front-page panic story.

My first thought when reading this story was “Wow, she’s getting what she deserved”. Maybe that’s harsh, and I’m cold-hearted, but here are the facts: she had an income of $70k, 2 kids, and $2500/month interest-only mortgage. What’s wrong with this picture? Does anyone really think it’s feasible to raise two kids and own such an expensive house on $70k/year? Fiscal responsibility has to start at home. Tough nuts.

In what is very convenient timing, MarkCC has an introductory post about game theory here, and it looks like part of a series he’s starting. Very good. I’m going to be reading a couple books on game theory and politics very soon (they are sitting on my nightstand), but I wanted to order my thoughts before being educated. What I’m interested in is how to establish both economic and political systems that encourage and reward people for acting in a globally optimal way instead of locally optimal. At the same time, I value personal liberty above almost all else. Are both of these goals possible or forever contradictory? This is a common theme for me: balancing personal freedoms against enabling long-term thinking. For this post, I’ll talk about the simplest game I know of, and then apply two other games to politics and society. Continue reading ‘Game Theory, Politics and Society’

Jason Kuznicki has a yet another very good post up at positiveliberty.com. This time, it’s about how societies determine value. In general, I agree with the post, but I wanted to quibble about one thing (and I made a comment to this effect):

I’m skeptical of a carbon tax in particular because even if we could determine the properly discounted value of the amount of social harm that global warming will do to the largely unknowable preferences of our descendants, it hardly follows that paying money to our current government will make things any better. We might be able to inhibit the market preference for carbon-based fuels, sure. But does the government really deserve to be the beneficiary here? By my way of thinking, a larger government is likely to be a drain on our descendants, and not a help at all.

Continue reading ‘Libertarians and the Environment’

I just read this article at Time.com about Ron Paul, and I’m still baffled about the mainstream media’s confusion about Ron Paul and libertarianism. In the strictest sense of the word, Ron Paul is not a libertarian.

…he is an extremist — partly in the Barry Goldwater extremism-in-defense-of-liberty-is-no-vice sense of the word, but also in the wacky let’s-relitigate-the-currency-debates-of-the-1820s sense of the word…

Sorry, but Ron Paul doesn’t really stand for liberty, and doesn’t have a “real ‘freedom agenda’”. He’s an anti-federalist, as true libertarian commentators have pointed out multiple times (here, and here for instance). That means he’s only interested in restricting the federal government; he essentially is for “states rights”. He’s perfectly okay with a state government infringing on personal rights, as is shown with his stances on abortion and gay marriage (wants Texas to ban both). Many of Ron Paul’s supporters scare me while many are true libertarians who overlook his anti-federalist stance. Yet he does stand for many things the GOP has abandoned under Bush. Go figure.

I’ve recently criticized McCain and Obama, so here’s something about Hillary. Ed Brayton has a video and blurb about her recent lie about her trip to Bosnia. Wow.

She’ll say and do anything. I can’t figure out what appeal she has at all. It’s unfathomable. McCain and Obama, I understand the appeal, and I actually like both of them, in a kind of “I don’t think I’m going to vote for this guy, but he seems decent enough” way. But Clinton? Really? What we really do not need in American politics right now is to tack on “Clinton” to the recent chain of presidents that already looks like this: “Bush, Clinton, Bush”. The notion that we are descending into an heriditary presidency is silly, but it would be very clear that the electorate has lost it’s imagination if Hillary wins. Can we please do something different?

This is an appalling story of an infringement on free speech. A Dutch law maker has had his website where he intended to publish an anti-Koran movie shut down by his provider (seeminly under pressure from the Dutch government). The provider is a U.S. company, however, and it is simply appalling that they would cave in such a fashion. Their usage policy apparently contains a clause prohibiting “objectionable material of any kind or nature”.

That’s absurd – almost anything is objectionable to someone. Muslims who are protesting this movie and website are providing plenty of ammunition for critics of Islam. Get real, people. It’s the 21st century.

I just finished reading the book by David Holmes, and I thought I’d post some thoughts. From a scholarship point of view, the book was pretty good, but was quite boring at times. Definitely worth reading if you’re interested in a thorough analysis of … what the title suggests. Most of what follows is summary from the book; some of it is my thoughts. I hope it’s clear which is which.

First, a quibble. Throughout the book, Holmes refers to the religion (in some cases, more broadly, belief system) of founding fathers as Deism. Yet, clearly, many of the Founders believed in a personal God (Holmes reiterates this many times), which I’ve always found to be contradictory to Deism. Everything I’ve read equates Deism with an impersonal God (see a dictionary, the wikipedia, britannica). While there were many Deists during the time (Thomas Paine was an outright Deist), the FF were more accurately general Theists. Holmes breaks down the beliefs into three categories: Deism, Christian Deism, and Christian. He generally means “real” Deism by the first, but what he calls Christian Deists would more accurately be called either rational theists (on the Deist side of the spectrum) or Unitarians (a la John Adams). Anyway, I think it’s a pretty semantic issue, and maybe I’m misreading, but the other terms seem more accurate.

In the first section, Holmes analyzes the religious beliefs of the colonies as a whole. Although much of the general population was unchurched, religious belief was quite high. Coupled with this, there was a large amount of religious intolerance in much of America. Excepting for Pennsylvania most of the colonies had at least a few laws criminalizing or marginalizing some faiths (atheism was way out). So, yes, there was a lot of religiosity in early America.

What the Dominionists¹ today don’t understand is that the leading intellectuals who would become the founders were exactly opposite of this. While several of founders (Adams and Washington) believed that religion was necessary for the common man to be moral, they believed that any religion was an equally valid way to find morality and that religion was good for the common man. Christians today may point to this ideal and say “Look, even these great men believed in religion itself.” Yet, this doesn’t make the opinion valid. At the time, many rational people still fell back on religion as an explanation for the universe — science was yet in its infancy. We should judge these men not by the common shortcomings of their time, but by how much they transcended those shortcomings. After all, we do not reference their views on race; while Adams was a staunch abolitionist, we would (hopefully) find his thoughts on the inferiority of non-white races abhorrent today. Yet, for his time, he was far ahead of the curve.

Yet another fact that ought to have Dominionists shaking in their boots is that prior to the American Revolution, many of the colonies had state-sponsored churches, and these were dismantled in the time span around the Revolution. On what basis then do they argue that the Founders wanted a “Christian Nation”?

Next is an analysis of Deism and its roots in the Enlightenment, and the impact that Thomas Paine had on many of the founders. Holmes points out how much Deists, and the intellectuals of the time in general, valued reason over all else — this led them to abandon much of Christian orthodoxy. Critical to his later analysis of individual Founders’ beliefs is a careful examination of what language Deists of the time used to refer to God:

In place of this Hebrew God, Deists postulated a distant deity to whom they referred with terms such as “the First Cause,” “the Creator of the Universe,” “the Divine Artist,” “the Divine Author of All Good,” “the Grand Architect,” “the God of Nature,” “Nature’s God,” “Divine Providence,” and (in a phrase used by Franklin) “the Author and Owner of our System.” The Declaration of Independence displays precisely this kind of wording and sense of a distant deity.

Far too often I run into someone who presents a random quote from Jefferson, Franklin, or whoever, that refers to God in this way; this is offered as conclusive proof of our country’s foundation in Christianity. This is a way to quickly identify someone who needs to read more American history.

… Deists despised political and religious despotism. Their fundamental belief in reason and equality drove them to embrace liberal political ideals. In the eighteenth century, many Deists advocated universal education, freedom of the press, and separation of church and state.

(emphasis mine)

The next few sections are an in-depth analysis of the religious views of Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe. Holmes has gone through much of these men’s correspondence and compiled an excellent overview of their belief systems. Next is a look at the wives and daughters; excepting for Abigail Adams, most of the Founders’ wives were far more orthodox than their husbands. In a later section, Holmes discusses why Deism failed in the U.S., and this turns out, at least in part, to be that because while Deism took hold among the men, it failed to gain traction with the women. Children were almost exclusively raised by their mothers, especially during the Revolution. Of course, there were orthodox Christians in the revolutionary movement, and Holmes takes a look at three — Samuel Adams, Elias Boudinot, and John Jay. Holmes closes the main sections with a few pages looking at how the past is different; included in this is:

Today many Americans are concerned that their presidents be sincere men and women of faith. These founding men and women were often sincere believers. But their faith differed — often markedly — from that which many Americans have held in later centuries. Writers need not revise history to align the founders’ beliefs with their own. Americans can tell their story unhesitatingly, warts and all.

The implication here seems to be that the Founders’ religious beliefs are a wart — something I’d take issue with. The epilogue is then a depressing illustration of recent presidents’ evangelism and how much religion has played a role in presidential elections. Today, American politicians pander to the religious crowd. We’ve come far since the Revolution, but in the wrong direction.

I was hoping for a more direct analysis of the “Christian Nation” nutjobs, and I’m always on the lookout for a comprehensive book on the subject (instead of random snippets around the web). This book makes a strong and convincing positive argument for the U.S. being founded on secular principles, and a positive argument is critical to any position — an opinion cannot be formed on a negative argument alone. Yet, reading a negative argument against a position you disagree with is so much more fun.

¹ I’m going to commit my own nomenclatural blunder here, and use the convenient term “Dominionists” even though there are clearly people in the U.S. today who do not necessarily want an all-out theocracy, but still believe in the “Christian Nation” concept.