Bill's Comments

I am on the road starting tomorrow until Saturday. I will not be able to deal with mail from my blog until then. I also have a broken PC, and unless I can get the repair parts sent to me in Canada, will be offline this week as well. I won't even be able to keep up with anyone else's blog or news. If the world ends, I will be the last to know.

I have been thinking further about the power of prayer. I know from personal experience that prayer has power. (And no, this could not be described to either coincidental occurance of a desired happening nor to psychological suggestion. I am enough of a skeptic to check for these first.) Some questions occurred to me today.

1. Is prayer more powerful spoken or silent?
2. Is prayer more powerful when spoken with a group?
3. Is prayer more powerful when the group speaks the prayer?

Here are some approaches to answers, based on my earlier comments (can't provide the link, my main PC is broken.) that prayer is powered by our internal emotional state.

1. Spoken prayer is more powerful when we are alone, because the act of speaking focuses our thoughts and reveals any conflicts. As evidence I claim that part of the value of confession or therapy is that whatever is troubling has to be spoken openly for forgiveness or progress to be made. If we can say the prayer openly it is real.

2. Only to the degree that the members of the group are in harmony with the prayer and in a prayerful emotional state.

3. The group speaking the prayer should be more powerful, BUT, only if it is not as a rote recital of liturgy. Meaningful recital of liturgy is powerful. or meaningful recital of original prayer is meaningful.

Just as a side note, I do not give any credence to Buddhist prayer wheels as providing effective prayer. It qualifies as magic or superstition. This is not to condemn the rest of Buddhism, but that particular behavior is valueless, according to my theological views.

Ally Eskin at Who Moved My Truth? has been especially eloquent these last couple of days. See what she has written on education, here and here, and also here comments on teenage sexual behavior, here.

When the arguments for the Constitution were being conducted Alexander Hamilton wrote this:

"We may safely rely on the disposition of the State legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority." --Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 85

Sometime later after the ratification of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote this:

"The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone." --Thomas Jefferson

And it continues so today.

The SoDAkMonk has posted a reply to my comments of disappointment on his post on Intelligent Design Theory. I perhaps wasn't sufficiently clear. Though I do not subscribe to Intelligent Design Theory, I was not disappointed in his presenting it. He made some specific statements that I quoted that I did not think were of the same quality as his usual thinking. His comment on Genesis being true and accurate when properly understood has underneath it a circular argument, because "proper understanding" makes Genesis true and accurate. I do not disparage the Bible, Old or New Testaments, and am in an interim during an intense study of the last days of Jesus as reported in the Gospels. Genesis is myth and useful myth in that it provided a grounding of man's relationship to God in the early days of Judaism. I have,in the past used the exact same arguments as the SoDakMonk to rationalize Genesis with my scientific knowledge, though I no longer believe them.

Fr. Kowalsk makes this statement:

"Science and religion are both subject to philosophy, it is true, but there is one important exception. A religion that was revealed by the God who is the personal, transcendent creator of the universe is based on the human experience of that revelation. This experience, if accurately passed on to succeeding generations, is intrinsically different from any other religious beliefs, and not subject to philosophy."

He is right in that the belief is not subject to philosophy. However, I would consider the results of that belief as revealed in action in the world to definitely be the subject of philosophy. Philosophy cannot attack any belief in God as a belief. The belief is a starting point of any analysis or discussion. It can however determine if the results of the belief are consistent among themselves and with the belief.

Reading his final comment, "In any case, I'm surprised someone dead set against ID would have ever liked this blog," I feel sad. Belief or non-belief in ID or any other theory of God, or for that matter any particular theory of anything, is not a litmus test for accepting or rejecting someone's sincere writings. Though my blog is conservative/libertarian in flavor, and certainly non-traditional in its theology, that does not mean I reject ideas that are not totally in agreement with mine. Nor does it mean I cannot appreciate the quality of an argument or discussion even if I do not agree with the conclusions or the viewpoint. I have only unlinked from one website, and it was not because of the liberal politics. In fact, I had linked to it because it appeared to be a fairly rational exposition of the liberal point of view. My reason for unlinking was that the expression of that viewpoint became particularly personal and nasty towards the President and Secretary Rumsfeld, with attendant irrational comments. I didn't wish to indicate approval of such.

I read daily every blog on the list to the right. I do not agree with everything I read, but I enjoy reading it because it is well stated. When I post expansions on what I have read or disagreements with an idea, it is not with a view to attack the author, but simply to raise a discussion point. I am more than willing to continue a discussion as long as it appears fruitful. As evidence I would suggest that SoDakMonk look at the beginning of my April Archive and read the exchange with Dr. Carrier.

The SoDakMonk offers an insight into an otherwise unknown territory, that of the Roman Catholic Benedictine Order and its view of he world, and in this alone he provides great utility in his blog. That it is clearly written and interesting to read adds further pleasure. I hope that he and I will have other dialogs in the future.

For all the baseball fans, especially the AnalPhilosopher, here is an interesting article that states and explains why, more home runs are hit on curve balls than fast balls.

(Link via Sigma Xi's daily email, "Science in the News")

I just read this .in the 04-22 Brief from the Federalist.

""You've probably seen the bumper sticker somewhere along the road. It depicts an American flag, accompanied by the words 'These colors don't run.' I'm always glad to see this, because it reminds me of an incident from my confinement in North Vietnam... Then a major in the U.S. Air Force, I had been captured and imprisoned from 1967 to 1973. Our treatment had been frequently brutal. After three years, however, the beatings and torture became less frequent. During the last year, we were allowed outside most days for a couple of minutes to bathe. We showered by drawing water from a concrete tank with a homemade bucket. One day, as we all stood by the tank, stripped of our clothes, a young naval pilot named Mike Christian found the remnants of a handkerchief in a gutter that ran under the prison wall. Mike managed to sneak the grimy rag into our cell and began fashioning it into a flag... He made red and blue from ground-up roof tiles and tiny amounts of ink and painted the colors onto the cloth with watery rice glue. Using thread from his own blanket and a homemade bamboo needle, he sewed on stars. Early in the morning a few days later, when the guards were not alert, he whispered loudly from the back of our cell, 'Hey gang, look here!' He proudly held up this tattered piece of cloth, waving it, as if in a breeze... When he raised that smudgy fabric, we automatically stood straight and saluted, our chests puffing out, and more than a few eyes had tears... Now, whenever I see the flag, I think of Mike and the morning he first waved that tattered emblem of a nation. It was then, thousands of miles from home in a lonely prison cell, that he showed us what it is to be truly free." --Leo K. Thorsness, recipient of the Medal of Honor"

"Greetings!

Read your post on Intelligent Design...

You state,
"My first question is, 'OK, suppose there is a designer. So does He do anything else? Is there any reason to worship him? Do we have to take Him into account now that the design is up and working?' "

Slightly more on point for science is:
If there is a designer, how does this designer implement his, her, or its design? By what processes is this design carried out?

Where can we see these processes in action today?

Can we find any evidence that such processes ever took place in the past?

Then there's the issue of falsifiability. Scientific theories are never proven true -- merely shown able to explain all the available observations. An observation that doesn't fit the theory will cause the theory to be modified, or in extreme cases, junked altogether. (They may still be kept for some uses. Newton's laws of motion have been superseded by Einstein's theory of relativity, but Newton's equations are still used for practical purposes, up to and including the calculations that send space probes bouncing around the solar system.) "Falsifiability" means the theory sticks its neck out. There is some observational consequence -- some possible observation that follows from adopting the theory as a premise in a deductive argument -- which can be either true or false. If this observational consequence is looked for and not seen, either we didn't look in the right place after all, or the theory
-- used as a premise -- is false.

What possible observation could conceivably prove Intelligent Design Theory false?

(Answer: There is none. Therefore, Intelligent Design Theory is not
science.)"

The Maverick Philosopher has provided an indepth commentary on the ACLU suit concerning the cross on the Seal of Los Angelos County, that I posted on a few days ago. His comments are certainly better. Go read them.

If you don't read Texas Conservative every day, you should. The link is in this post and to the right. In the last two days, he has linked to some great sites, and pre-empted a link I was going to post. The breadth of his coverage is awesome.

An article in the Washington Times is an excellent post script to my post on Privacy.

Thanks to Drudge for the link.

Due to customer work and travel, I was unable to even check news or other blogs yesterday, much less post to my own blog. Of course now I see that all sorts of things occurred and I have much to catch up on. Somehow it figures....

Greta Van Susteren, the legal commentator that made her name analyzing the OJ Simpson trial, and now comments for Fox News has written an excellent book, "My Turn at the Bully Pulpit."* Tonight I offer her thoughts on zero tolerance in the schools. It says some things I haven't seen or heard before.

"Who suffers when the school community becomes a virtual police state? We all do. The biggest casualty will be education itself. Say goodbye to excellence. Zero tolerance, by definition, is not a preventative; it’s a reactive measure. Zero tolerance does not ensure education or guidance. It does not support better teachers or foster opportunity for kids to build relationships with positive role models. It does nothing to assist kids in dealing with unsupervised free time. At the end of the day, it encourages kids who misbehave to get a whole lot worse, to have more opportunity to hang out with other “bad” kids, and to model their behaviors in increasingly antisocial ways.

Zero tolerance tells kids, “Do as I say, not as I do.” But everyone knows kids watch what we do more than what we say—they model themselves after us. Kids will, in essence, do as zero tolerance does and become better bullies. They will learn that justice is meted out by force. They will learn to avoid authority. They will not struggle to form their own values. They won’t learn how liberty come in the asking of questions, and they won’t strive to be entrusted with that liberty." P 122-3


"Education reform won’t happen by trying to restructure school bureaucracies and by getting tough on students. It will happen through teachers’ and parents’ fierce advocacy of better education. School administrators and parents have to give teachers support, government has to give them the resources, and all of us have to care." P 123-4

*My Turn at the Bully Pulpit, Greta Van Susteren and Elaine Lafferty, Crown Publishers, New York, New York, 2003. (I bought it on a remainder table, so it would most likely be available used or at the library)

Gosh, Norm, I thought it was shaped like a cross between a doughnut and a pretzel!

John Ray in his PC Watch blog, has posted an item on the Canadian Parliament's passing of an increase in the scope of anti-hate law. It resonates with my earlier post this evening on tolerance of religious belief.

The Maverick Philosopher (Dr. Bill Vallicella) has posted a long and excellent review of a new book supposedly refuting this idea. The reviewer did a better job than the book.

It takes great courage of one's convictions and a belief in the rightness of honest discussion to do what my friend Keith Burgess-Jackson, aka AnalPhilosopher, has just done. He has started a new blog on the Ethics of War and invited Dr. LS Carrier to participate. My hat is off to Keith and I wish him every success in this new blog. I will be looking forward to all the posts, his and Dr. Carrier's. I had my own exchange with Dr. Carrier, and though we arrived at no common conclusion, I will be very interested in what he posts as well as Keith. I also like the appearance of the blog -- it has the proper gravitus, parchment, old books, and serious discussion. Good luck Keith!!

I am not a standard Christian, nor even a standard theist. But I firmly believe in tolerance of all peaceful forms of religion, agnosticism, and atheism. Like I said in an earlier blog, I don't think God cares whether you believe in him or not, he simply wants us to be good to one another. So this mention on Fox News of the ACLU suing Los Angelos County because a small cross appears in the seal (here) smacks of intolerance and persecution. The County replies it is a reflection of the heritage of the area. This is true the entire Southwest was colonized with Spanish missionaries. It is ridiculous when the so-called separation of church and state leads to distortions of history.

While looking for my birth certificate for this trip I am on, I found a partly read, year-old copy of Scientific American. I brought it with me and continued reading. One of the articles was by Robin Marantz Henig called Pandora’s Baby. It was a combination of the history of in vitro fertilization and the coming techniques in cloning.

The author describes the hysteria that accompanied the first IVF, the result of which is now a 26-year old woman. She goes on to say that it is estimated that a million babies have been born this way. After a bit on the controversies, she states:

“And so many newer, more advanced methods of assisted reproduction have been introduced in the past decade that the “basic IVF” that produced Louise Brown now seems positively routine.” Then she states, “…the way of IVF, which has been a hodgepodge of unregulated activities with no governmental or ethical oversight and no scientific coordination. Ironically, the reason IVF became so ubiquitous and uncontrolled in the U.S. was that it opponents, particularly antiabortion activists, were trying to stop it completely. …Accordingly they thought that their best strategy would be to keep the federal government from financing IVF research. … This lack of government involvement—which would have served to direct the course of IVF research [emphasis mine, bk]—led to a funding vacuum, into which rushed entrepreneurial scientists supported by private money. These free agents did essentially whatever they wanted and whatever the market would bear, turning IVF into a cowboy science driven by the market place and undertaken without guidance.” (Enough at this point, her Leftism is getting blatant)

Notice that in twenty-five years this is routine with major advances, yet she doesn’t see that there is a correlation with no government involvement and its success. In fact she then on the next page that IVF children are at greater risk for birth defects and possible genetic problems. No numbers given, and she of course doesn’t deal with the fact that these are children born to parents that would otherwise never have children. If they can provide the necessary extra care then this is no worse than a child born with these problems that was not IVF.

She tries hard to be “reasonable” but basically she is adopting a watered-down version of the Precautionary Principle, with government oversight as the “protector.” The lesson was in plain sight and she missed it. She was blinded by her own ideology.

My sincere apologies to the Maximum Leader. As he noted, I did not have a link to his blog, Naked Villainy. It was once there. It was one of my earlier links. However, in my zeal to add to the list, I must have inadvertently copied over his link. I have just corrected this. I beg his forgiveness. At the coming of the Mike World Order, I do not want to be on the Maximum Leader's S* list.

(Thanks for calling it to my attention)

The SoDakMonk posted another statement in favor of Intelligent Design, this time quoting the work of Dr. J Shapiro of the University of Chicago. Dr. Shapiro is using data from genetic alterations with retroviruses and viruses and additional work to argue against Darwinism. SoDakMonk uses this as well as some selective extraction and quoting to defend his view.

"I've read the most diehard Darwinists admit that natural selection appears "counterintuitive", which is a fancy way of saying it doesn't make sense. Another slogan of the Darwinists, when they try to explain the absence of transitional forms; "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". A wonderfully circular argument that could be used by creationists or even UFO cultists to defend whatever they cannot prove."

I disagree that the second statement is a circular argument. It is an exact logical conclusion. As for the first, counterintuitive does not mean, not making sense, and for that matter, not making sense is not the equivalent of falsity.

His reason for following evolutionary biology:

"My interest is more than a hobby:a popular misunderstanding of evolutionary theory has done much to undermine religious faith since the 19th Century....The Book of Genesis is true, and accurate, when properly understood. []emphasis mine, bk]...The concept of God will forever be outside the realm of science. And science will always be subject to philosophy, because a scientist's philosophical beliefs will always shape his science."

God is outside the realm of science, but just as science is subject to philosophy, so is religion. I continue to read SoDakMonk. He has much to offer. It just is disappointing to see the loss of criticality in his thinking.

This is most useful and I strongly recommend following this link. Thanks to Old Benjamin at Advisory Opinion for the link.

This post was to have been my Sunday Theological post. I am running a day late it seems.



In a post over the weekend, Matthew, the SoDakMonk, discussed the Intelligent Design Theory of the creation of the Universe. Of all the theological theories on the origin of the Universe, this is the most common and the most persistent. Most of the scientists who support or are supported by the Templeton Foundation ascribe to this theory in some form. In a nutshell, the theory says that since every thing is of such complex and exquisite design, there must be a designer, since it could not have arisen spontaneously.

My first question is, “OK, suppose there is a designer. So does He do anything else? Is there any reason to worship him? Do we have to take Him into account now that the design is up and working?” As I see it, the first problem of the argument from design is that it leaves no reason to have any religion. All it does is push one step back the answer to the question, “Where did the Universe come from?” “It came from God.” “OK, and where did God come from?”

There are some less theoretical arguments against it as well. There are papers on the self-organizing of collections of molecules. I have seen the results of the Urey and Miller experiments that create amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars from carbon dioxide, methane, water, and ammonia, by passing an electric arc through mixtures of these gasses or heating them or both. As early as the 1930’s there were observed coacervates, protein shells in water that behaved much like modern cells. Experiments are continually on-going that demonstrate the potential chain of events that could lead to living organisms from inanimate chemicals.

If one looks at the scientific believers in a God, they are almost always physicists, mathematicians, or social scientists. Chemists, and even more so biologists, tend to be atheists. That is because the chemists and the biologists see the steps that the others are not aware of. From before I was in graduate school, I thought that once a living cell was formed, the rest was easy. I have no problem at all mutating a single cell into the full panoply of living creatures today. The issue is getting from inanimate chemicals to living things without invoking vitalism or an external director.

I have spent years following the progress in this field. Lately there has been little published, because our current funding priorities are in neuroscience and health science. But from what I have read, and given the number of years available (which is actually incomprehensible though we can talk about it), it is conceivable that the steps are there. What we need to realize is that arrival at where we are today on this planet took 4.5 billion years. That is really a long time, and the first organisms probably appeared over 4 billion years ago.

Much as there is an appeal to the argument from design, I reject it. I would rather simply say, I don’t know what occurred before a certain point in time, or say I don’t know where the Universe came from, than to say, I know, and then give a made-up answer.

Yesterday I said I would discuss Ally Eskins post in response to my post on having children and the rights and obligations related to it.

Ally argues quite compellingly for sterilization of proven incompetent parents. I fully understand and appreciate her thoughts on this. However, I would propose that rather than sterilization, which I consider too fraught with potential evil, let us incarcerate these people that have children after proving they cannot care for them. Once they are convicted of negligence, BY A COURT OF LAW, NOT A SOCIAL WORKER, they should be monitored and incarcerated if pregnant to assure proper prenatal care. The child is to be put up for permanent, anonymous adoption, and the mother to remain in prison for a set period of time. I think five years is appropriate. After that the same cycle starts again. I personally would rather pay for their incarceration than to take the risk of laws allowing sterilization.

Ally's points are well-taken. In this case I am concerned with the protection from the government as well as protection of the unborn and new-born child.

Naked Villiany is a most interesting blog. A joint effort of a group of friends, it has a broad political spectrum, and covers areas of interest to me that don't show up anywhere in my usual reading. One exception, Smallholder posts on animal ethics which my friend Keith Burgess-Jackson does also. Today I am specifically thinking of the multiple posts on alcoholic beverages. I love wine, beer and distilled beverages (That pretty well covers it doesn't it?) I will need to remember to refer back to this blog for new distillations and beers to try.

When I lost my son, my whole world and attitude changed. I was devasted by the loss of life in the WTC destruction. I am devasted every time I read about Iraqis finding the bones and bodies of loved ones killed by the Butcher of Baghdad. I know what it feels like for a loved one to be killed. And I tell you that all it does is reinforce my opinion that we need to completely remove (translation: kill) all the slimy bastards that think the wanton killing of innocents will accomplish their aims. Grief like money makes a person more of what they really are. The 9/11 widows were unprincipled money and attention grabbers before they lost their husbands in the destruction of the WTC. It just gave them an opportunity to be more of same. I still am what I was before my son was killed, but like a Samurai warrior I have lost my fear of the trivial. All my feelings and thoughts are intensified. I am more of what I am, and less afraid to show it. What can the world do to me that is worse than what has happened? I am too old and fat to be a soldier, but I would be a good one. I am calculatedly fearless. I am not reckless with my life, but if I had to sacrifice it, I'd have a payoff. I'd be with my son.

The problem with liberals is that they imagine what life is like and then make claims to know someone's pain. If they would get a life they would shut up. Try poverty, try welfare, try really having to work for a living. It opens the mind. They are weak, and their stridency reveals their weakness. If this country succombs to the liberals in November, it will be as T. S. Eliott said, "So the world ends, with a whimper not a bang."

If you don't read anything else from a GI in Iraq, read this.

Thanks to Old Benjamin at Advisory Opinion.

I am on the road until late Thursday evening. Until that time I will be unable to answer email to the blog. However, please do not let that discourage you. I will read and answer my mail when I return.

Texas Conservative has posted an extract of and a double link (part 1, part 2) to an essay entitled "Strength" at EJECT!EJECT!EJECT!. It is long but well worth reading. I have read part of it, will read the rest later.

Since I have taken a stand on this issue, it behooves me to report important posts I read on it. The Weekly Standard online edition has a report today on the impact of same-sex marriage on the number of children born out of wedlock and the apparent collapse of traditional marriage in the Netherlands. It presents a very detailed history of the issue and shows the arguments that created the situation. It does not sustain what I have posted, but I recommend reading it.

Way back, when the Supreme Court declared a stripper was practicing her First Amendment rights, there was a lot of ridicule on the decision, especially from the right side of the political spectrum. That decision could play a part in protecting our right to political speech. WSJ Opinion Journal has an essay on the FCC and the clamp-down on "indecent" speech over the radio. The article spells out a very plausible link between this clamp-down and regulation of political speech. Read it and see. I believe it requires registration.

Having just posted my essay on fuel efficiency last night, the WSJ Opinion Journal publishes an editorial on gasoline prices and availability. Some quotes:

"And in spite of what you read in the paper--outrageous gasoline prices entered into Google gets you 15,000 links--its current inflation-adjusted price of $2 a gallon is about its median price over its 85-year existence, and with the exception of the 1980s spike, it has been steadily declining over the decades. "

"The bad news is that the number of refineries producing petroleum products has dramatically declined...."

"Worse, America built its last oil refinery in 1976, and there are no current plans to build more...."

"The reason no new refineries have been built is the burden of regulation,...

"

Read the whole thing. I believe you have to register.

I was talking with some acquaintances and the topic of the current cost of fuel came up. One of them said that the automakers had acquired patents on special carburetors that could get super economies of fuel and buried them. He also said that we needed to develop new sources of energy and use hybrid cars.

There are four errors here, of which I dealt with three at that time. However, I realized that these ideas are very widespread, and much of it is due to lack of knowledge of economics and science. I’ll deal with the economic issues first because they are fairly straightforward and fairly easy to see. Then I will discuss the science of fuel economy. (Besides, it is more fun for me to talk about)

There is a pervasive urban myth that some technology or other that is expensive is that way because those in control have purchased and suppressed superior technology in order to prevent their current scheme from losing money. To my mind, that plain doesn’t make sense. If I had a superior way to do something, in this particular case improve fuel efficiency, I would market it, cut the bottom out of my competitors and laugh all the way to the bank.

If alternative forms of energy are desirable, why aren’t they here? It’s because they are uneconomic. The energy cannot be produced in sufficient quantities, cheaply enough to make them competitive. For that matter, hybrid cars have been in the news recently, and they don’t deliver as promised, and cost far more besides. Anyone owning a hybrid car has a higher price tag, despite the $4000 subsidy on every car from the government, higher maintenance, and they don’t get the supposed economies projected. Besides that, I think they are ugly, which is important in marketing.

Having dealt as much with the economics as much as I want to, let’s get into the science. Actually, the issue on carburetors is an engineering issue. A carburetor is simply a way to convert liquid gasoline into a fine mist that will burn rapidly and efficiently inside an internal combustion engine. (There are no carburetors on diesels.) It also meters the amount of gasoline so that it is as close to optimal for the load as possible. New cars don’t have carburetors, they have electronic fuel injection (EFI). EFI calculates the exact amount of fuel needed for each piston stroke, and injects it as a fine spray just as the intake valve for the cylinder opens to pull it in. This calculation goes on for every stroke of a piston and leads to the new fuel efficiencies we are seeing today. It can also lead to more powerful engines for a given amount of fuel and engine size with the optimizing of the mixture for power.

But carburetion is the icing on the cake. It is the last thing dealt with in tuning a car and has the least impact on running efficiency. When I was an auto mechanic, I became a top trouble-shooter with a high success rate with a very simple formula. Until the valves are right, don’t bother with ignition. Until the ignition is right, don’t bother with carburetion. Only when there is nothing else to be done, deal with carburetion. This is true whether the car has a carburetor or fuel injection. Without going into the details it can be fairly easily shown that the later items have no impact on the former, but the opposite is not true. The former do affect everything later.

The most fundamental constraint on fuel economy is tied up in the physical chemistry of the internal combustion engine. There is only so much energy in gasoline when it is converted to carbon-dioxide and water. This is theoretically easily provable, or experimentally easily provable. The total available energy is the heat that is released when all of the fuel is converted to carbon dioxide and water. The challenge is to convert that heat into usable work.

What occurs inside the cylinder of an internal combustion engine (ICE) is an adiabatic system. Adiabatic systems are ones that effectively do not exchange heat energy with the outside environment. [Nuclear explosions are an example of adiabatic processes, but that is for another post ] In the case of an ICE it is because the processes are too rapid for effective heat exchange. The isolation is not perfect, that is why there must be a radiator and cooling system, but for purposes of our discussion we can ignore those losses. The whole process is explained by the relationships in the ideal gas equation, PV=nRT, where P is pressure, V is volume, n is the quantity of gas, R is the gas constant (a proportionality constant) and T is the absolute temperature. It is important to note that it is the absolute, not Celsius or Farenheit temperature. Absolute temperature is measured from absolute zero (273 degrees, Celsius) in the same increments as Celsius temperature. The equation says that if Temperature is constant, for a given quantity of gas, Pressure goes up as Volume decreases, or vice versa. If Volume is held constant, Pressure goes up and down with Temperature. If volume is held constant, Temperature goes up and down with pressure.

Now we can describe what happens inside an ICE. The piston moves upwards inside the cylinder after a mixture of air and fuel has been introduced. The temperature remains essentially constant, so the pressure goes up. The fuel is ignited, and the flame quickly passes through the mixture. It is sufficiently faster than the piston movement so that we can say that the volume is constant while the temperature climbs rapidly. This leads to a great increase in pressure. The pressure pushes against the piston when then moves downward converting the pressure into physical work via the crankshaft and transmission. As the pressure decreases and the volume increases, there is a slight cooling of the waste products. Once the spent gasses are exhausted and the new fuel-air mixture is brought in, the process repeats. The only difference between a two- and four- cycle engine is that a four-cycle engine has a separate up and down movement to expel exhaust in bring in new fuel-air mixture. On the two cycle the exhaust occurs at the end of the power stroke, and intake at the beginning of the compression stroke.

The amount of effective work that can be gotten from this process is determined by the temperature at which the fuel burns and the compression of the engine. Higher compression engines are more efficient and more powerful than lower ones – ask any hot-rodder, or former one. Diesel engines at a 23:1 compression and using higher energy fuels, get far more work from a gallon of fuel than an automobile at 10:1 compression ratio. (compression ratio is the ration of the full stroke downward volume of the engine cylinder to the full stroke upward volume). The compression of the engine determines the efficiency of converting the heat in the fuel into work, and there are theoretical limits on the process. Most automotive engines have long ago approached the limit as closely as possible. This is why every time the EPA mandates better gas mileage, the power of the engine goes down and the weight of the body goes down. (And cars become less safe).

At this point someone will say, “Yes, but, increasing the compression ratio increases the power, which should reduce the amount of fuel required for a workload and therefore increase gas mileage.” Absolutely right from an engineering standpoint. And that is how the muscle cars were built in the 50’s through 70’s. But this is the world of political wishes as dictates, and there is a problem here. It is true that the higher the compression ratio, the more power is obtained from the fuel, and not only that, the more completely the fuel burns. Great! We can solve pollution problems and fuel efficiency at the same time. One kink in the works – the hotter the temperature of combustion the more oxides of nitrogen occur. Huh? At high temperatures, nitrogen which is normally very stable and forms 80% of our atmosphere will burn, producing nitrous oxides. The EPA in its wisdom has decreed that nitrous oxides are a major cause of smog, in particular, photochemical smog, and are to be minimized. This means backing off the compression ratio. At the same time the amount of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons emitted from the vehicle is supposed to go down. The lower compression ratio increases them. Thus we have catalytic converters to reduce them as well as exhaust gas recirculation, timing changes, and very lean burning engines. All of which reduce available power.

Now it can be seen why carburetion is not the biggest concern. However, there are improvements in burning to be made with better dispersement of the fuel and better metering of the quantity of fuel. Thus has arisen electronic fuel injection.

Now if the politicians would just let gas prices stay high, they would get their wish, fewer “gas guzzlers”, less gasoline consumption, and less pollution, because people would buy smaller cars to save on fuel costs. But they will insist that the high gas prices are hard on people. So are politicians that want to violate the laws of physics.

Peggy Kaplan has replaced an outdated link in her post on having children as a right or privilege that I used as the starting point for my post on Friday.

My ox is gored. I have been found out. I will confess -- I am guilty of sloppy writing. The AnalPhilosopher's Peeve #6 lists my errors. I shall attempt to mend my ways.

AnalPhilosopher just posted an entry in the Encyclopedia of Ethics on the difference between ethics and morals. It would appear that I do not have it right in my statement of the difference. I implied that morals were more general, but the article indicates that ethics is more general. So the question becomes whether my usage is more common or the usage presented in the article. It was based on the literature in this area rather than usage. Something else to consider in my spare time :-)).

Steve at JusTalkin, has posted an excellent expansion on my discussion of removing children from inadequate homes. Ally Eskin at Who Moved My Truth? has also posted a thoughtful response, which I will discuss further tomorrow. I thank both of you for your responses.

I was unable to make a post yesterday. We had company last night, and too much preparation had to be done to make the time to blog. However, I was able to begin these comments on privacy.

The latest issue of “Reason” magazine had 40,000 custom-printed covers were created for the run of 60,000 issues. My cover had an aerial picture of my neighborhood, the inside had some statistics about my community, the inside back cover had a plea to write to my Congressman by name who had voted no on the medical marijuana bill, and the back cover had a bulldozer with the caption “condemned” with my address. The point was to make visible the amount of information that was available publicly about me. The theme was that the loss of privacy was good. I think there is an internal contradiction here, with libertarian philosophy, and I want to expand on the types of privacy and who should or should not have access to information.

First of all there are two types of information gatherers, commercial/private and government, and they must be treated separately. Much of the press condemns private information and then accepts government information when they should be doing the opposite. The crucial difference is that private information is gathered from voluntary submissions and generally is used only for the purpose gathered. On the other hand government information is gathered under law (ultimately this means at the point of a gun. A topic for another post sometime), and there is only the choices of providing it or going to jail. Oversight of private information is relatively easy, if it is misused, lawsuits result. Oversight of government information is next to impossible. Security concerns, bureaucratic delays, and the general acquiescence of Congress guarantee that government information will be used arbitrarily in addition to the proposed uses.

The remainder of this essay is at Bill's Big Stuff, due to its size.

friend, Peggy Kaplan, at What If?, posed a difficult question earlier this month: “Is the ability to procreate a right? Or a privilege?” Just to quibble a bit with the English, what I think she is asking is, “Is having children a right or a privilege?” I posted some related material on this back in April.

As best as I can deduce from her post, which uncharacteristically did not give a link, a couple addicted to cocaine, and ordered to counseling, had conceived another child, with three at home, all testing positive for cocaine, and the judge jailed the mother, stating, "This court believes the constitutional right to have children is overcome when society must bear the financial and everyday burden of care."

Peg’s well-placed concern is for the rights of the children and the unborn child. This is quite a can of worms, but I think an interesting can of worms. We have the rights of the children, who are innocent, conflated with the crimes and sins of the parents.

An underlying assumption in all the following discussion is that abortion as an option has either been refused
or is not to be considered. This discussion deals with full-term babies. Abortion does an end-run around all this, but it has so many difficulties that I want to leave it alone for now. Also I don’t think the state has the right to command a woman have an abortion – it would be state sanctioned murder to too many people, myself included.

Ultimately the question becomes where does the ability of the state to protect the rights of the defenseless, in this case unborn and born children, end and the right to have children begin? I am not sure there is one single answer to fit all situations but I think there are some possibilities to discuss.

The remainder of this post is large and can be found here in Bill's Big Stuff.

The Maverick Philosopher has classified linkage patterns. I think I am a partially reflexive, non-symmetrical linker. I got a great chuckle from this. Like the AnalPhilosopher says, "Who says academics don't have a sense of humor."

Chalabi's arrest is generating a lot of comment, most of it negative. How quickly we forget that Chalabi was not a particularly favorite person of the Iraqis at the beginning of the war. WSJ Opinion Journal essentially considers his arrest a big mistake. The US knew the possible repercussions going in. There must be serious evidence that he was spying for Iran. Even the conservative press can act like liberals sometimes. Let's see what develops before taking a stand.

Donald Luskin has a great post on the economics of gasoline and the actual situation.

I highly recommend the last three days' of posts by JoanneJacobs. Education is her specialty and this group of posts is particularly interesting.

Soundfury has posted his Carnival of the Liberated. It is a good overview of Iraqi thought and also provides links directly to the blogs for those who want more. Thanks to Begging to Differ for the link.

Dr. Rusty Shackleford over at mypetjawa has published an extensive answer to the critics of his proposal to implement wartime censorship as was done in WW II. Whether you agree with him or not, the post has a lot of additional arguments worth reading and he does a very good job of making his point. He has a link to the original post which you should read first.

Texas Conservative has the funniest post I have read in a long time. Go see it. Telling would lessen the impact.

One of the pleasures of browsing the web for news is to read Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review Online. He writes clearly and logically. His views are definitely conservative, but never unthinking. Read today's essay on Apologies.

I heard yesterday that four people had been arrested in connection with the murder of Nick Berg. Now it has disappeared off the radar. Chalabi was arrested yesterday, but more press is still being given to other things.

For once someone wrote something very nice about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Go read it. It reflects well upon the man and also upon President Bush who appointed him.

I just read the first item in the "Grapevine" page from Fox News. Senator Ernest Hollings stated that he believed we went to War in Iraq so that President Bush could steal the Jewish vote from the Democrats by securing Israel. He was immediately described as "crude, ugly, and classically anti-Semitic" by the Anti-Defamation League.

I just read a blog post, (sorry, I can't find it now) discussing that a way to stifle dissent is to accuse some one of being a *phobe (* in computer text is a wild card that means any text is an automatic match).

This is one more example of the behavior described in the post I can't find. What's more, it is incorrect. Senator Hollings made a political assessment of President Bush's motives, not a denunciation of Jews. I don't agree with the Senator, but he has every right to say what he did. It certainly is far less rabid than the garbage the liberal left puts out daily and think they have a right to say.

An item in today's Fox News web page makes a very focused example of the problems with encouraging multiculturalism. Essentially it isolates everyone from everyone else and destroys any sense of unity in this country. Note that this trend is being pushed as a liberal idea that is supposed to show sympathy and "understanding" to immigrants.

First of all manny immigrants push their children to learn English as early as possible and in some cases take difficult emersion courses in English themselves. As far back as 1965, Dr. Hayakawa from the University of California at Berkeley was warning against bilingualism. The province of Quebec is constantly torn because of the creation of French (Quebecois version) as an official second language.

As for the cultural aspects, if the culture was so important, why did immigrants come to America in the first place, and who says that they have to abandon their culture just because they have to speak English? If over time they drop their culture and assimilate to the general American culture, that is their choice. The old culture must not have been that important.

I see multiculturalism as another way for the liberal elitists to remain aloof and able to patronize someone. Basically underneath it all they want immigrants kept down, not brought into our society. In the meantime, employers hire people who can't communicate with customers because they 1) can't get Americans to do the job, and 2) they are afraid of some do-gooder coming down on them with a discrimination suit.

This country has been a melting pot, and in the process the things that have lasting value have remained. We can trace much of popular music to Latin and African rhythms and harmonies; we have St Patrick's Day Parades; there are Polish festivals, Lithuanian festivals, etc., etc. Isolating us from one another in pockets of cultural uniformity is a good way to destroy this country.

I wanted to add some further comments to my post on gay marriage. Specifically I would like to look at civil marriage a bit more. One of the common objections to gay marriage is that it starts down a slippery slope to allowing the return of polygamy, the introduction of polyandry, the condoning of incest, and so-called marriages between humans and non-humans and even dead people. If the states are allowed to define marriage without falling under the full faith and credit provisions, then much of that can be prevented.

One way to define marriage as a legal, civil marriage would be to define it as the union of two persons, a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a woman and a woman. All other constraints would still apply, with respect to age, etc. By requiring that both be capable of swearing before an official their agreement to the civil marriage provisions, such things as marrying dead persons (supposedly occurring in France) or animals, or minors, who cannot legally swear would be prevented. Any other loopholes could be plugged as well. The whole point is that marriage would be what the people of that state wanted it to be. Over time we would find out whether the supposed problems with homosexual marriage are real or not.

I also wanted to comment on a Libertarian position I saw in Reason magazine or from one of the Reason contributing editors. They explicitly stated that all the various feared forms of marriage were alright and to let them happen. I would hope this was simply for shock value and not a serious position. If it were a serious position, then it does make a mockery of all the marriage stands for. In my earlier post, I admitted homosexual marriage as a civil ceremony justified for romantic reasons. In that, it is parallel to the marriages between men and women that do not procreate.

(I know my friend, the AnalPhilosopher, has posted an excellently nuanced and reasoned essay on why he thinks only a man and a woman constitute marriage (Sorry, I don't have the link). I may yet come to his position, but for now I am staying with allowing homosexual marriage)

However, “marriages” between people and animals or people and dead people are one-sided and do not have the aspect of romantic love and mutual and equal adoration that a marriage is to recognize. Marriages between adults and minors, fall into the same category. A minor simply does not have the life experience or the ego development to be able to love in the same way as an adult. The risk of mental or physical abuse is great. In the case of incestuous marriage, humans long ago realized that that lead to serious problems over the long haul. In fact, biologically there appears to be some inborn resistance to this idea. Though the Pharaohs formalized incest as the only legitimate method of succession, there are suspicions that a number of them were not really the offspring of incestuous relations. Incest is a crime independent of marriage, so that would automatically protect from such marriages.

The only potentially difficult issue is polygamy, polyandry, and group marriage. We can eliminate group marriage as a civil marriage and binding on employers and public services for married couples, because there is no defined responsibility relationship. If it is truly a group, then all are responsible for all, or else, no one is responsible for anyone else and why have the “marriage”? Part of marriage law is the definition of new legal responsibilities, each partner being equally responsible for the other. In a group of four, it would not be feasible to say each is 33% responsible for each of the others. What constitutes each 33%?

I do not think that polygamy and polyandry fit the romantic definition of marriage. At one time when women were worked to death and spewed out babies from menarche to menopause, there might have been some survival advantages to polygamy. Basically it was a group of women who were interdependent for help and totally dependent on the husband. It did apparently work in some environments. Willard Marriott, the older, in his autobiography revealed that his father had three wives and families. They all interacted, but I had the idea that one wife was favored emotionally over the others. In a description of a polygamous South Pacific culture, the headman had a favorite wife. To me this indicates that for polygamy and by implication polyandry is not romantic in nature. Only the relationship with the favored spouse has any resemblance to romance.

If a Constitutional Amendment removing the full faith and credit requirement for marriage between the states is passed, I don’t think many states will allow homosexual marriage. The few that do will be watched carefully. I think that when all is said and done it will be seen as a tempest in a teapot, and little was gained that was not already had.

Many blogs have open comments. Radly Balko today showed the upside of this. Right Wing News showed the downside today. To avoid the downside I would either have to moderate the comments or not have them. I do not have the time to moderate the comments so have chosen not to have them. However, the email link is just to the right, under the site counter.

I will read all email and will post the most notable of those discussing one of my topics, whether with me or agin me. If you do not want your name mentioned, say so and I will be glad to oblige. The default is to leave the name on.

I will answer all sincere email. (Flames, unreasoned attacks, and things such as RWN showed will be treated as spam) It may take a while. When I am on the road, I cannot receive email from my blog. I will post when I am on the road so there will be reasonable expectations.

Hello from the Land of the Pharaohs has just posted a very eloquent message. Well worth reading, especially since it comes from the Middle East.

I have just put three new links to good blogs on the right. Thanks to AnalPhilosopher for them.

Old Benjamin of Advisory Opinion
Donald L. Luskin of The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid
Dr Bill Vallicella of Maverick Philosopher

It finally struck me why the press and the liberals cannot let go of Abu Ghraib, when so many other more important things are going on. Their minds are too small to grasp the reality of a beheading, or of 9/11, even when they see it. It is beyond their comprehension so they block it out. They can carry on about Abu Ghraib, because they know it is something they are capable of, not that they would necessarily do it, but that they can conceive of doing it themselves. Beheading someone, killing in self-defense, dying for a cause are all beyond them. Coupled with this limited mental capability is the full-blown, unrestrained emotional state of the spoiled, as Keith Burgess-Jackson so well exposed yesterday in TCS. So they pounce on the only victims they can comprehend, President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, the troops, etc. And apologize for that which is beyond them -- "It can't possibly be that bad, and besides they have a reason."

It really is pathetic. It is like hyenas snarling over a left-over carcass because they are incapable of obtaining their own food.

This is the second in the series on foundations of our society. The first post discussed the basic premise of the series and some working definitions of religion, politics, and science. It also laid out the main program that I would explore the relationships between the three. This is a discussion of the relationships between religion and politics.

Religion and politics have been closely intertwined since civilization began. Rules that were found to work in groups of people became part of the commands from whatever gods were being worshipped. In addition fear of the unknown made people more inclined to propitiate such gods, thinking that it would buy them safety. With power given to the gods for such things as weather, the ocean, the seasons, and actually anything that was not understood, it would be natural for politicians to want some sort of power. There were two ways to obtain this power, ally oneself with a god or set of gods, or declare oneself a god. I think the former is more common than the latter.

However, in allying ones rule with the dominant religion, the ruler becomes actually subject to the ruling priest. Thus we have the creation of theocracies. In the case of the Roman Empire, from time to time the Caesars demanded to be worshipped as Gods. After the fall of Rome, the Bishop of Rome, in time, gained tremendous power over the rulers of medieval Europe through the threat of excommunication. Thus Europe came to be a theocracy. One of the first major cracks in this scheme of thing was the Reformation headed by Martin Luther. Luther presented a way for rulers to remain faithful to God yet not be threatened by the Pope.

When England split from the Roman Catholic Church, it retained everything except the Papacy. However, nominally the King or Queen of England became the ruler of the church as well. Thus the Church of England, from which came the American Episcopal Church, became the official church of state, i.e., it was established. It was to escape the evils of the established church that Puritans, Quakers, and others came to this country, to practice their religion freely. Interestingly enough, with the exception of Rhode Island, none of the early colonies tolerated other than their particular founding religion. So instead of one established church, we had several.

As was noted in an earlier post, separation of church and state is built into Christianity with the quote from Jesus to “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and render unto God that which is His.” (The quote may not be perfect but it is accurate in meaning) This obviously was ignored for 1800 years until the Founding Fathers created the Establishment clause. This is the operational guarantee of religious freedom in this country which supports the stated freedom in the Bill of Rights. Truth to tell, its origin is not scriptural but political from the abuses of the C of E.

For most of our history, religion and the state have remained completely separate in trying to control each other. With a predominately Christian society, there was little furor when public functions opened with a prayer, and generally the honor of giving the prayer rotated among the available ministers. In spirit, there was no establishment of a religion. However, as time has gone on, with the subsuming of education by the state, there are now legitimate and non-legitimate conflicts of church and state, as well as each trying to control the other. It is interesting that it is in the area of education that the battle seems to be most frequently joined.

However, the first instances were actually religion co-opting the state. The first result the Scopes trial in 1925. This link gives an excellent overview of the trial and the fact that it was purely an attack by fundamental religion on school teachings that had been proscribed by law. The laws were religious in origin. In an echo of that past time, two years ago, the Kansas State Board of Education stated that evolution could not be taught in Kansas schools. Here was a case where religion and state had joined together to suppress science as had the laws in the 1920’s.

One other instance is the insertion of the words “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance. When I was an agnostic, I refused to say those words, yet remained a devout patriot (but not chauvinistic patriot). To me the Pledge has always had great significance and meaning, but I refused to accept a phrase that I did not believe in. Now there has been a suit to remove the words from the Pledge, but it is now in the Supreme Court and how it is resolved may have less to do with the Constitutional issue than a legal detail of who has standing to bring the suit.

More recently the bulk of the news concerns efforts by the state to restrict or even control religion and promote a secular agenda at religion’s expense. There have been reports that in California, the Roman Catholic Church must offer birth control to employees that are ostensibly working in secular jobs. Of course this runs completely counter to church doctrine. Any mention of religion in school systems is being proscribed as counter to the Establishment clause. However, there is a notable bias here, in that the proscriptions are focused almost entirely on the expression of Christian religion. Any program supported with state funds in a parochial school has to be implemented in vans and trailers outside the main school building lest a religious artifact be visible during a state-sponsored program.

I had an occasion to read several hundred Federal District, Appellate, and Supreme Court decisions on prayer in school and the Establishment Clause. Actually, the study expanded a bit, and I found I was reading cases that were dealing with other aspects of the Establishment Clause interpretation. As it turned out Establishment Clause law is some of the most tortured and inconsistent I have run across. It wasn’t OK for the town of Pawtucket, MA, to have a crèche scene on public property, but it was OK for the Nebraska legislator to open with a prayer from the same minister for 15 years. In such a vacuum, political correctness substitutes for law and reason. . Any governmental organization is now being accused of encouraging or sponsoring religion merely by tolerating displays of religious ideas. Note that this is a generalization from establishing A religion to tolerating religion in general, and from Congress to any government function. (Governments shall make no law or regulation that tolerates religion).

Even individuals have been persecuted for their personal expressions of religious belief in a school setting. Religious student groups are forbidden equal access to school facilities after school hours, just because they are religious. Such a difference fifty years makes. When I was a page in the Nevada State Senate, one Senator was quietly held in contempt by others because he was not respectful in his behavior during the daily invocation. In the process much has been lost. When I was in the school chorus, we sang a large number of works from the classical composers that were religious in nature, but were not sung for religious reasons. The only time the high school choir sang a religious work for religious reasons was when it sang the oratorio, “The Seven Last Words of Christ” on Palm Sunday. We gave a concert of carols on the local television station at Christmas.

As I stated in an earlier post: “This country was founded on tolerance for all religions as well as for atheists and agnostics. It is becoming intolerant of religion, and in some cases vehemently so. In other cases it is a strangulation by bureaucratic fiat, bit by bit. E.g., children no longer have a Christmas break; it is a winter holiday. These attempts at secular purity make a mockery of the actual motives and history of this country and erode bit by bit our heritage. Without a knowledge of the role religion played in the lives of our forefathers, how can we understand why they did what they did?”

So what would be the proper relationship between religion and the state? The state should adopt a completely hands-off attitude towards religious institutions. To dictate what benefits an employer can and cannot offer is to intrude into the choices of both the employer and the employee. Employees sign on knowing the picture, if they accept it then let it be. There is no right to a job, only the right to pursue one. With respect to education, nothing short of a major destruction of the public school system will work. I am a great believer that Thomas Jefferson’s ideals aside, public education, i.e., government-provided education is doomed to constant conflict. Every taxpayer is contributing to the schools, yet it is impossible to accommodate all views and still provide a basic education. One can reasonably argue that if a taxpayer’s views run counter to what is being taught, he is being forced to sponsor his enemies. This is manifestly wrong. Yet escaping paying the taxes is next to impossible. (Or let us say the consequences are generally highly undesirable.) Physical churches and church organizations should be treated equally and equal to the equivalent secular institutions. There have been cases where churches or their publications receive tax abatements, just for being churches. This burdens everyone else, including atheists and agnostics, to make up the difference. This is another version of taxation to support ones potential enemies or at least beliefs that one does not agree with.

Obviously, I have no real answers at this point, but I am greatly concerned with the situation. At sometime in history every group eventually becomes marginal and persecuted. Eventually the situation will turn and secularists will become the persecuted instead of the persecutors. Memories are long, and there will be vengeance. I don’t wish to see that happen. We are seeing some of the results of that type of thinking in the Middle East today. They still hold the Crusades against us. Fundamentalist intolerance is equally as bad as secular intolerance. We need to ignore the screams of both and find a more tolerant way to deal with each other.

The AnalPhilosopher, once again in his disguise as the philosophy professor, Keith Burgess-Jackson, has written a very penetrating essay on why liberals stay liberal for TCS. It actually explains why the very wealthy, who one would think would understand where money comes from, form their unholy alliance with the poor to rape and pillage the middle class.

If any of you do not read TCS regularly, then please see this post by Gordon Cucullu. He makes a good case for the true nature of our enemies (for those of us who still don't realize).

US atheletes are being told not to wave the flag at the Olympics this summer to "avoid being confrontational." BULLSHIT. Shame and restraint never gained friends nor influenced people positively. I hope they all ignore the advice and proudly wave it as high and as long as they can.

Randy Johnson threw a perfect game last night. I am not a big baseball fan, but I sort of pay attention. This is a great accomplishment. Here is the Fox News article I read on it. The background is as interesting as the accomplishment.

Garry Kasparov, the world champion chess player, has posted a superb essay in the WSJ Opinion Journal. One of the most succinct and well-written articles on the subject I have read.

I recently finished reading a book by Greta Van Susteren, called My Turn at the Bully Pulpit. There were a number of interesting observations in the book, some of which I will comment on in the future. One of the cases she discusses is the MacDonald’s coffee suit. As it turns out there is a lot more there than was reported in the press, as usual. But what struck me was that coffee will keep at 185 degrees but not at a cooler temperature. This runs counter to intuition so I thought it would be interesting to discuss this.

This phenomenon of coffee staying fresher at a higher temperature is an example of kinetics and its impact. In the day to day world kinetics is fairly intuitive, billiard balls, crashing automobiles, baseballs and bats, golf balls and clubs all are kinetic phenomena in which energy is transferred from one object to another. When we get to the world of chemistry, things change considerably. Here we have things like bond energy, meta-stable states, colloids, hydrogen bonds, and molecular bonds. Fortunately there are day-to-day analogs for these things, so if you stick with me, I’ll explain it. The important thing to remember that all we want to do is explain why coffee stays fresh at a high rather than low temperature.

Lets start with some things that are intuitive. If we cook meat, it changes and the higher the temperature, the more it changes in a given length of time. What happens in meat is that the heat excites the molecules of the meat and causes it to break and remake molecular bonds. A molecular bond is the strongest bond between two atoms, and is analogous to holding things together with glue. Just as we can use glues that melt and re-solidify, so chemical bonds can break and reform. Only there is a rule on the combining of atoms. They will combine in ways that give up the most energy, which leads to the most stable bond.

Energy is contained in all molecular bonds. It is the breaking of the bonds between carbon atoms and carbon and hydrogen atoms with the recombination with oxygen that produces the power in a car. The amount of power is the difference between the energy in the carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds and the resulting bonds between carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and oxygen. This example is an extreme case. When things cook, the excited atoms and molecules don’t combine with oxygen since that is only available at the surface, they combine with their nearest neighbors in a way that gives off energy. When cooking, the more heat we provide, the more bonds become excited, break, and recombine.

But why do they not break and recombine in the refrigerator or at room temperature? This is because the bonds are stable at room temperature and below. In one sense this is a version of the next term we need to know, a meta-stable state. A meta-stable state is one that requires an energy input to change but when it changes it goes to a lower energy, more stable state. It is like a marble on a saucer. It will stay there until the saucer is sufficiently jiggled, at which point it rolls out and falls to the floor. So with meat, the molecules of protein are meta-stable in that heating them will cause them to change to a lower energy content.

If you are still with me, there are only two more concepts to introduce, hydrogen bonds, and colloids. Hydrogen bonds are like static electricity. They occur when a hydrogen atom of one molecule has a slight positive charge (Please trust me here, explaining that is much more complicated) and a nitrogen or oxygen has a slight negative charge. Since opposites attract, this causes an attraction between the two molecules. In very large molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins, these bonds also can form within the molecule and cause it to take a particular shape. The shape of hair is controlled by a combination of hydrogen bonds and molecular bonds. When you wash your hair, the water breaks up the hydrogen bonds, and will allow the hair to become softer and more relaxed. This is how women in the past created spit-curls. They would wet a lock of hair to soften it, then pin it in a curl. When the curl dried, new hydrogen bonds were formed that held the lock in place. This is similar to a curling iron or steam curlers. Both operate the same way. However, a permanent breaks and remakes molecular bonds which hold the hair much more firmly.

Finally let’s talk a bit about colloids. The closest thing to a colloid we see in everyday life are dust-motes in the air. If you watch them they bounce around in seemingly random paths. What they are doing is responding to very fine currents and turbulence in the air. Now if we reduce the size of this system to where you need a microscope to see it you have colloids. These are particles that remain suspended in a liquid even though they are solids and are not dissolved. We sometimes speak of a colloidal solution, which is an oxy-moron, but do so because colloids are so fine they cannot be seen with the naked eye, so the liquid appears clear – a solution. The correct term is a colloidal suspension. One application of a colloidal suspension is colloidal gold which has been used to treat rheumatoid arthritis.

Finally we are ready to think about coffee. Coffee is a colloidal suspension. It looks perfectly clear when fresh brewed, but it is a combination of dissolved and suspended material. When the temperature is very high, say near boiling, or 185 degrees, in our earlier example, the colloids move around vigorously and when they bump into each other, they recoil rather than stick. The same may be true for the dissolved material as well. If the temperature is reduced, say to 140 to 150 degrees, then because the energy of the particles and molecules is less, when they make contact, the energy is low enough that a hydrogen bond can form, holding them together. Over time more and more of these occur, and the colloids start to clump forming a more opaque solution. At the same time the dissolved compounds will also clump or cling to the colloids. Much of the flavor of coffee comes from the dissolved compounds and the feel and part of the flavor comes from the colloids. As these change their nature, combining and clumping, they may also undergo reactions, that were not possible earlier, due to their prolonged proximity. So after a while the coffee tastes old. Interestingly enough, coffee will still go stale when left cold. However, a slight revival can occur when it is reheated. That is because the clumping may not be as irreversible, since the clumps formed at low temperature rather than high. In such a case, fewer reactions will occur.

So in our example, kinetics drove the economics of serving coffee, which led to the great coffee suit.

Fox News posted the following article.

PHOENIX — Thirty years ago, homeowners just outside of Phoenix bought 250 acres at the top of Black Mountain to keep developers out.

The government sold it to them with the understanding that it would remain open for the public to enjoy. Now, many of those same homeowners are working to keep out nature lovers, claiming they trample vegetation and compromise local residents' privacy.

The homeowners consider themselves conservationists.

"Preservation means you close the land and people don't have access to it," said resident Robert Carsia.

But outdoor enthusiasts disagree, saying they are conservationists.

"Preservation means preserving the land in good condition while still allowing people to visit it," said hiker Paul Diefenderfer.

A recent newspaper article rated Black Mountain the best hike in the Northeast Valley. Hikers say if the city and county don't allow a hiking trail on Black Mountain, they'll sue. Federal law clearly favors the hikers, leaving many legal experts to say the question isn't whether they'll get a trail, but how wide it will be.

So basically the people thought they were buying control, i.e., property rights. As usual with any deal with the government, it only holds until a new pressure group has a stronger say.

My friend, Peg Kaplan, at What If? just posted a very well stated argument on gay marriage to both Keith, the AnalPhilosopher, and Ally at Who Moved My Truth? I think Peg did a good job of answering the specific arguments that Keith and Ally put forward, but I think the fundamental problem here is not really discussed directly.

The problem as I see it is that the concept of marriage in our society conflates three separate concepts of marriage, religious, romantic, and legal. The romantic argument is the easiest to accept and argue for. Peg's reply to Keith and Ally is essentially a romantic argument for marriage, and she does an excellent job of presenting that argument. With notable exceptions in the history of monarchies, societies with arranged marriages, and marriages that are for money or convenience, romance is the primary motivator for marriage. What is important here to understand is that what is being desired is a public joint acknowledgement of the intensity of the relationship and an acceptance by the public of that relationship, henceforth treating the two persons as a couple. Around that desire for acknowledgement has grown up a whole host of traditions and behaviors that add nothing to the original commitment but can provide social enhancement for either the families or the couple.

The legal aspect of marriage is also easily discussed and dealt with. Married couples have special privileges under law that other people don't. They obtain special considerations on taxes, estate law, and are protected constitutionally from testifying against each other. In addition there are protections in law for partners if the marriage breaks up. Employers also provide benefits to the spouses of employees equivalent to the employee (except for life insurance in most cases) for a less than marginal cost additional fee. I see this as an acknowledgement of both the state and employers that being married is desirable. For employers this is obvious, married employees are more stable and generally more productive. For the state, it is not an explicit decision, but has grown out of our traditions and it is here that the confusion starts. However, before the confusion can be discussed, we need to look at the religious side of marriage.

Religions institute marriage for two purposes, to safeguard the children of couples and to ensure the propagation of the faith. Religious acknowledgement of a couple’s desire to live together also contains a mandate from God to remain married and to bring any children up in the faith. Such ceremonies also came to be celebrations, even large public spectacles, from a simple awning to a large cathedral, with feasting and dancing. In addition to the mandate there is also the belief that the blessing of God on the union will foster it and help it to be stable and raise children. It is this vision of marriage that has been instituted in the United States rather than the European civil contract.

So the problem arises from the state promulgating marriage law and definition from a religious background. When the US was young and Christianity was the predominant belief this created no problem. Even as non-Christian faiths became more numerous, it was still not a problem because they also had a belief in the basic structure and purpose of marriage. Where we now have the problem is that essentially secular couples want all the emotional recognition as well as the civil recognition that accrues to religious marriage. The problem is that the courts are not parsing the emotional from the legal benefits. (This is typical of most liberal positions anyway) The state has no business in the emotional/religious side of marriage. What has grown up, that makes the issue more confused, is that ministers become ex officio officers of the state when performing marriages. Their pronouncements of husband and wife have the full force of law.

In looking at what to do with this, I think first of all we need to acknowledge that there are two forms of marriage, civil and religious, and that neither should be binding on the other. In the area of civil marriage, we do need to adopt the proposed Constitutional Amendment that protects states from having to accept gay marriage under the full faith and credit clause. Also we should allow all legal benefits within a state to accrue to those married in a civil marriage. Every state would define civil marriage by law not by judicial fiat. Second we should withdraw the declaration of legal marriage by clergy. Clergy should perform religious weddings. These may be the full celebration that is generally thought of with the term wedding. A civil wedding would essentially be a swearing before an official of agreement with the terms and laws relating to civil marriage. Then secular groups could repair to a social hall to celebrate, and religious groups, first to the church to be married in the sight of God, and then to where ever the celebration is to be held.

I am a romantic. I am also a nit-picky legalist sometimes, and an off-beat theist. I want everyone to have the necessary emotional satisfaction of their (hopefully) life-time partnerships, but I don’t want the rest of our society threatened by the change. Both secularist and Believers who wish to impart their vision of reality on the other need to back off. There is room for both, and not at the exclusion of the other. With my proposal, religious groups are not required to acknowledge a gay marriage unless they choose to, within the confines of the church. At the same time gay marriages would have the same civil stature as heterosexual marriages. I think that the proposed Constitutional amendment would allow the states to tailor their marriage statutes to avoid all the slippery-slope arguments over gay marriage that indicate a risk of allowing all sorts of strange couplings.

Steve at JusTalkin has a good post on the FairTax, a national sales tax. I agree with the value of having such a tax.

[The problem is Steve, what will you do with all the out of work tax collectors? I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy, let's bring back stoning.]

RUN do not walk to Ally Eskin's Who Moved My Truth?. Her current post on homosexual marriage says it better than any carefully nuanced, thoughtful piece on either side. Her site continues to amaze me with her ability to combine a youthful passion with clear logic and a strong command of the language.

Once again Peg Kaplan at What If? has said it so eloquently. See her current post on Michael Moore's reception at Cannes.

The following quote appeared today in the Founders Quotes email of the Federalist. It is a good follow up to the previous post on the Second Amendment.

"The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If 'Thou shalt not covet' and 'Thou shalt not steal' were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free." --John Adams

I have read recently a number of posts and essays pointing out that property rights are one of the foundations of a free society. Without the protection of property there can be no commerce and trade, nor any security of person. The hypocrisy of liberals with respect to property is sickening. It is OK to steal some property by law, just leave mine and the causes I support alone.

In the previous post I pointed out that defense of property in Canada is a criminal offense. It is slowly becoming so in this country as well. We can still protect ourselves at the personal level, but when the government under the eminent domain powers takes our possessions we have little or no recourse. Look at the screams of anguish every time there is an attempt to subject environmental projects to consideration as takings. Or for that matter try to fight the oldest rape and pillage around, the Income Tax. Its purpose is not to provide revenue, there are better and simpler ways to do that, its purpose is social engineering, the redistribution of money. All the exceptions in the law that make is so complicated are simply ways to provide just enough relief to prevent an all out tax revolt.

Personally, I can be a pretty revolting guy. I think we need another Boston Tea Party.

[OK I can’t resist the cheap shot, what happened to Boston (and Massachusetts as well) between 1776 and today? They certainly wouldn’t lead a tax revolt. One could consider them revolting, however.]

Today the AnalPhilosopher published a link to a Canadian essay called, “A Knock on the Door”. Keith pointed out that the Canadians had become effeminate. Yes, that is a good first response to the essay. The guy really had no “cajones”. However, my response is that, here is what the liberal gun-control crowd is really after – a police state. Please go read the essay, and note that near the bottom, he points out:

“There is no danger if you live next door to a police station? The truth is that a peaceful and independent individual now has reasons to fear a knock on the door from cops as much as from bandits. For both groups are up against our liberties.”

Do not kid yourself, what was once taken as paranoid ravings by the militant right-wing and the NRA has come true in both Canada and Great Britain. By controlling guns, the government has secured itself against the citizens. There are two ultimate safeguards against tyranny. One is a jury, the second is a fire-arm. Good police are perfectly happy to see citizens armed; it makes their job easier. (One of my protégés is a cop.) Please also note that the defense of property and person are now a criminal acts in Canada.

The bumper sticker is true: “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”

The last paragraph of the essay says it well with a quote from George Orwell:

George Orwell, the author of 1984, wrote (with his underlines): “The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do [read in the sense of, ‘dare not do’]: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working class flat or labourer’s cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”

I am adding an new blog to the right, Iraq The Model. It is one of the ways we can obtain better and different information from the press. I think this is one of the Iraqi blogs that Texas Conservative has quoted in the past. I got this link from Naked Villainy.

Michael J Totten, whose blog link is to the right, has written an excellent overview of our current relationship with Saudi Arabia and what we should do with it, in TCS. I highly recommend reading it.

Another perfect quote from The Federalist, from one of its readers.

"I can't imagine any torture more inhumane than leaving an innocent young woman to slowly drown in a sinking automobile in the dark, cold waters off Chappaquiddic."

I think this says it well, from a man who has the right to say it.

An open letter to some political partisans, especially certain politicians and people in the media: "I have a son who is an American soldier in Iraq... I am not fooled, when you partisans spew propaganda that helps our enemies and harms our soldiers, then tell us you support our troops. I am not fooled, when you focus on, highlight, and exaggerate the negative things that happen in Iraq, while ignoring our positive accomplishments, then tell us you support our troops. I am not fooled, when you focus attention on American soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq, to use these brave patriots as an anti-Iraq-war political football, then tell us you support our troops. I am not fooled, when you keep criticizing why and how we invaded Iraq -- that is done; our troops are there -- then tell us you support our troops. I am not fooled, when you engage in constant, carping criticism of what the U.S. has done and is doing in Iraq, then tell us you support our troops. I am not fooled, when you search for and trumpet to the world anything that will diminish respect for our soldiers and their leaders -- even when it endangers greatly their lives, then tell us you support our troops. I am not fooled, when you tell our soldiers and the rest of us that they are stuck in a 'quagmire' and will suffer a Vietnam-type defeat, then tell us you support our troops. I am not fooled, when you spout propaganda that undermines the morale of our soldiers and the American public and boosts the morale of our enemies, then tell us you support our troops. You are giving aid and comfort to our nation's deadly enemies! They know they cannot defeat us militarily in Iraq. However, you cause them to think they can win here politically by breaking our will, if they kill and wound enough of our soldiers. You despicable partisans! You are stimulating our enemies to attack our soldiers and the people working with them. The blood of many Americans and Iraqis is already on your hands. And your hands collect more blood every day! You are determined to regain the political power you have lost, and you believe your presidential candidate and congressional candidates will win, if the U.S. fails in Iraq. If your anti-American propaganda contributes to the deaths of many Americans and Iraqis, that is a price you are willing to make them pay. You are pathetic and dangerous!" --Proud Father of a Decorated Army Officer serving in Iraq

This came from The Federalist, which requires signing up.

My friend Keith, the AnalPhilosopher, has just posted his Fifth Peeve -- The use of the words morals and ethics in the same sentence and without really understanding the distinction.

I fancy I have held a clear distinction in my mind for years, but this challenges me to exposit that difference. As such it is certainly a good exercise to clarify my own thinking. If I am off-base, I will welcome comments to that effect.

I consider morals and ethics to be overlapping but not congruous. Neither is a subset of the other. Both derive judgments concerning behavior, and in many cases the judgments are the same. However, it is possible for behavior to be ethical and not moral and vice versa.

For me, ethics deals primarily with relationships to other persons. It describes acceptable and unacceptable behavior in dealings. We speak readily of business ethics, legal ethics, medical ethics. In many cases these ethics are codified or at least written or spoken of as a set of rules. An examples of an ethical rule is maintaining confidentiality of client information for a lawyer or doctor. Unethical behavior is breaking one of the rules. Ethics has a pragmatic quality about it. It is rules that have been derived over time as working to maintain relationships with relative strangers.

Morality is less specific and more general and inclusive of behaviors in that it also includes proscriptions on behavior that relate strictly to oneself. We rarely, if at all, speak of moral rules. However, we do speak of moral principles. Morality pervades our lives to a greater extent, in that it includes the judgments of right and wrong. Morality may provide the foundations from which ethics sprang, but it cannot substitute for ethics. Morality deals with ends and means to the ends. Ethics deals mostly with the means. It is from morality we get our concept of sin (I posted on that a week or two ago). Ethics is blind to what we do to ourselves in our lives, e.g. excesses in the pursuit of pleasure. However, morality is very concerned with that, or some moral systems are concerned with that.

The above sounds almost as if ethics is a subset of morality, but I would disagree. The basis and the operation of the two concepts is different. It is perfectly ethical to open a brothel, as long as the law allows it, and one honors the implied and explicit contracts between employees, owners, and customers. However, most moral systems, at least those based on religion, would condemn it. It is ethical but not moral. Suppose a member of PETA (one of my favorite betes noir) hired on at a lab and then released the animals. In this case he/she is guided by her/his moral principles concerning animals. However, in violating the trust of the employer, that person has committed an unethical act. This is a slightly contrived example of a moral behavior that is unethical.

For the most part morals and ethics appear congruent in their positive and negative judgments. Hence the apparent confusion between the two. Keith is right. It is important to distinguish them when used together.

I have published two pieces on my theistic thinking previously (see here for souls (aka Life after Death) and here for Concepts of God), and now consider myself a theist, though not traditional and still willing to reconsider in light of new evidence. Before I came to where I am now, I spent years in internal conflict enjoying the emotional side of religious worship but intellectually not allowing participation. During this time I was blessed with a very tolerant and intellectual pastor, who I now consider to be a good friend. He gave a sermon one Sunday that included a story that hit home. As a result I wrote him a letter that provides the bulk of this post.

But first the story:

A man was walking down the road and the Sun and the Wind got into a discussion of who could make the man take his coat off. So first the Wind tried. He blew and the man held onto his coat. He blew harder and all the man did was grab his coat more tightly about himself. Finally the Wind gave up and let the Sun try. The Sun started shining and soon the man released the hold on his coat. The Sun shone more brightly and the man unbuttoned his coat. Finally the Sun shone still more brightly and the man took his coat off. [The moral is obvious here, especially since the subject was love and Christianity.]

My reply:

Your story of the Wind and the Sun has had me thinking for the last week. I can certainly say that Trinity would qualify as an analog of the Sun in your story. The archetype of the Wind would be Jonathan Edwards or Cotton Mather.

If you don't mind, I would like to retell that story in a somewhat different way. A man was on a long journey. Typical of most journeys, there were warm days, wet days, cold days, and so forth. Yet none of this seemed to bother him much, because he had this wonderful fur coat that protected him enough from the cold and damp and didn't overheat him in the warm days. He was never totally comfortable except on rare days, but he was also never really miserable except on rare days. During his journey, he sometimes thought about taking off his coat, and once in a while, he was even tempted to try. But, every time he seriously thought about taking if off, the day would suddenly turn cold or a storm would appear on the horizon, and he would keep it on.

One day he came to a place where the sun was brightly shining and there were people enjoying it, playing together, singing together, and talking together. They were extremely friendly and invited him to come over an join them. He did, and after a while, he saw what fun they were having, and that they were doing things that in the past he had occasionally enjoyed. They kept encouraging him to join in what they were doing, and he really wanted to. He realized that all he had to do was take off his coat. And after all, in this place there was no apparent threat of cold or storm. So he thought about it, and he really wanted to join the activities. He went looking for the buttons and seams. He couldn't find them. He tried pulling here and there on the fur, thinking it would reveal the opening. But everywhere he tried, he couldn't find an opening or a way to remove the coat. Finally, he realized that the wonderful coat wasn't something he had put on, but was a part of him just as everyone else had skin, and removing it would be like skinning an animal. And so he remains, enjoying the company, being happy for the people who are having the most fun, and occasionally feeling sad for not being able to join in. However, we shouldn't feel too sorry for the man. In his journey, he has had several life-times' worth of experience and adventure and pleasures that many others have not had. If his wonderful fur coat prevents him from fully enjoying the sun and games now, it protected him when otherwise he might have perished. That isn't too bad a trade-off.

To bring the story to reality, my internal state is very much like the conflict between science and religion. My intellectual side which is very widely read and rigorously trained refuses to accept anything on faith. It has also gotten me through situations that might have otherwise totally overwhelmed me. (To arrive at today, in the past I have had to consciously choose to live, and consciously choose an external objective universe vs. a subjective one, among other things.) My emotional side feels and does not consider the logic, and it does feel good in church. Where I differ from the science side of the argument, is that I cannot, with integrity, make the statement that, "since there is no proof of God, there is no God." This misapplication of Occam's razor puts the science side in as foolish a logical position as the most strident anti-technologists, and far worse a position with respect to any religion. As Karen Armstrong has stated, there seems to be a part of man's emotional makeup that desires religion. I can now personally acknowledge that observation, but I have no clues to its nature. I have read fairly widely in the philosophy and history of religion, not just Christianity, and I have no clues from there, other than it is universal in all cultures, and that every religion that is successful provides a way of living as humans that is distinctive from that of other animals. I have been wrestling with this issue for years and will continue to do so.

It is from this position that I eventually arrived at my current theological stance. I offer this as my Sunday Religious Post, simply to illustrate one way to resolve an internal conflict between hard-core agnosticism and emotional desire to participate in religion. I had to resolve this conflict, because it kept me tied in knots, and consumed too much intellectual and emotional energy that could be better used elsewhere. As long as I fought myself, I was destined to stalemate. By creating the theological position I currently have, I am able to address important questions that were previously moot.

When people start to discuss mental capabilities, they frequently use eight words, and in my opinion usually incorrectly. Some of these misuses are more frequent and more obvious than others. Four of the words, fool, stupid, ignorant, and dull form the negative end of the spectrum and are often used interchangeably when nothing can be further from correctness. The other four, wisdom, smart, knowledgeable, and brilliant, have the same misuses only that they are used for positive remarks. In the interests of pedantry, and to be a bit anal (like my friend, Keith, who is proudly so), here is how I see their proper use.

Let’s start with the one that I find the most common and the most irritating, the interchangeable use of ignorant and stupid. Ignorance is a quantitative measure in the sense that it measures the lack of knowledge. E.g., I am ignorant of the exact distinctions between Heisenberg’s and Schroedinger’s formulations of quantum mechanics. The example was chosen to illustrate a particular point, that I can be ignorant and not stupid at the same time. If I were stupid I would not be even interested in the basics much less the stated difference.

Another bad but common equivalence is foolish and stupid. Smart people do foolish things, and so do stupid people. Foolishness is a property of trying to do something in an uninformed way that someone who knows would not do. Intelligent people can be quite foolish with respect to emotions, where less intelligent people might not be, because they have had more experience. So in some ways foolish is allied with ignorant, but not exactly. Ignorance can lead to foolishness but not necessarily — false knowledge or an emotional block can also.

One other word on the negative side is dull. Actually this is a combination of stupidity and ignorance. Not only does the person not think, but they have no information with which to do what little thinking of which they are capable.

On the positive side, wisdom and smartness are often confused. Smart or smartness or, if you will, intelligence, refers to a capability to process information. Frequently, smart people have wisdom, but not necessarily. For that matter, not so smart people can have much wisdom. Wisdom accrues from the process of living, more than the acquisition of information. It summarizes and generalizes the things that have proven true over time.

Another common confusion, the reverse of my first mentioned one, is smart and knowledgeable. Frequently someone with a large repertoire of facts is considered smart. Generally speaking that may be often true. However, look at autistic persons or persons with savant syndrome (non-politically correctly referred to as idiot-savant) and one sees a very specialized acquisition of facts or a specialized processing capability without the generality required by knowledgeable or smart. These people are proof that the terms are separable and independent.

Finally, let’s look at brilliant. Here we see a combination of smart and knowledgeable. Most people considered brilliant have a command of facts and can combine them rapidly and on an ad hoc basis.

Here is what I consider the proper antonymical pairings of these eight words: wisdom-foolishness, smart-stupid, knowledgeable-ignorant, and brilliant-dull. Any other pairings are inaccurate. It is preferable to be ignorant over stupid, the first is correctable. Fools can become wise, but unfortunately dull people seem to remain that way.

In keeping with my crusade (oops, that's a bad word these days...slap on the wrist and tie my tongue [So what is the difference between a crusade and jihad?]) to expose elitism and provide examples, here is one from John Ray's Greenie Watch.

Ally Eskin at Who Moved My Truth, is on a roll today. I love her directness coupled with a youthful viewpoint and fearlessness about saying what is true. If you don't read her blog, do so. The main link is in this post and to the right.

I just "discovered" a powerful blog, SoDakMonk, I assume South Dakota Monk. He is an American Benedictine monk who writes extremely lucid and powerful commentary. Whether you totally agree with it or not, it is a joy to read.

Many thanks to John Ray at Dissecting Leftism for the link.

It will be to the right in about a minute.

I just checked out a new blog, JusTalkin. He has good commentary on some issues that no one else has said much about. I recommend following him. He keeps it up and he will be a strong voice in the blogosphere.

Thanks to AnalPhilosopher for the link.

It struck me this afternoon where I had seen the murderers of Nick Berg before -- in pictures of the Ku Klux Klan. Same mode of operation, same cowardice -- terror but don't show your face. So where is the liberal press that so effectively exposed the Klan?

The Maximum Leader at Naked Villainy posted a link to this essay. In the process I think I may have found another good source.

I was reflecting on the murder of Nick Berg this morning. My thoughts ran in two directions, one was the lack of journalistic “legs” to this story compared to Abu Ghraib, which has been thoroughly discussed today in the blogosphere by all the bloggers I visit. The other direction was on what should be done to punish these murderers and all the others like them, specific names include Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden, Sheik Omar, and, of course, Saddam Hussein.

To me it is self-evident that the only adequate punishment for these people is death. However, I spent some time thinking about how I wanted them to die. Vengeance and Retribution are not possible. How can one kill or torture another person thousands of times? However, Justice also encourages deterrence. What I realized I wanted was a public trial AND a public execution. They publicly displayed their murders, as a deterrent to their subjects and the world, so should their deaths be public. (A bit more on that below). Of the possible public methods, beheading, hanging, or firing squad, my own preference is for a firing squad, I would like them to be fastened to a post, NOT blindfolded, and shot, with multiple bullets to guarantee their deaths. However, hanging has a certain ignominious quality about it, that would be very appropriate in the case of these people.

Now for some comments on public execution. One of the cases made against capital punishment is that it is not a deterrent. I question the finding, but regardless of the pragmatic aspects, there are crimes for which death seems to be the only adequate punishment. However, as we have become more civilized, we have hidden the results of our death sentences behind prison walls and opened them only to a few select persons. At one time executions were a public spectacle. I don’t propose to make them a spectacle, but I do think that part of the reason that execution is not a deterrent, if that is the case, is that no one actually sees the results of a verdict of death.

Making executions public in the sense of available via telecast would have two results. First it would make more people aware of exactly what capital punishment is. This could be salutary in that there might be a disinclination to dispense it in questionable cases. Second, it would provide a very clear lesson on the results of performing capital offenses. There is a third result in the case of the butchers mentioned above. It would give everyone a sense of justice obtained and relief that they definitely did not get away with it. In addition it might serve as a warning to wannabe butchers that it doesn’t work.

Just a cautionary note: Public executions are not to be viewed by children. It might be acceptable for them to see the results with supervision, but not the process itself. As a child I saw still pictures of men hanging from ropes from either the war or history of the American West. I still do not consider them traumatic. Actually seeing someone executed in real time is a different story. There are many adults that would not want to see such things, and I respect that. They are not the object of the desired result, either the justice or the warning. I would not watch for gratuitous pleasure. Only executions with direct meaning to me would be watched, e.g., the four butchers above, others like them, or someone that had deliberately murdered a member of my family or a friend.

Public executions should not be run as a spectacle. That is why I recommend doing it as a telecast. The element of justice and solemnity has to be maintained. The actual persons physically present could be selected the same as now. There would be one more spectator, the TV camera.

As for who would do the broadcasting, it is not important. Either the broadcast services, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, etc. would pick it up or a cable service like CSPAN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, CNN would. The only thing that would aggravate me would be if the broadcast networks tried this hypocritical, “That’s too violent for broadcast.” I remember some time ago seeing a news film that showed part of a mass execution in either Eastern Europe or in Southeast Asia.

I am not an advocate of wholesale slaughter nor of killing people for anything less than the most grievous offenses. I do however think that we have become so reluctant to face the harsh realities of our world that we are in danger of being overrun by savages.

Compared to the gloom and doom of yesterday, today is downright cheerful. Bloggers, Congressmen, and Editors are all looking at the poor perspective presented by the press and other news media and taking them to task for pushing the Abu Ghraib story over the murders committed by Al Qaida and other terrorists. Not only that, they are naming the motives. Best of all Senator Joseph Lieberman has come out against the liberal feeding frenzy.

(Of all the possible candidates they could have run for President he was one of the most plausible. Lieberman and Edwards as a ticket would have presented far more of a challenge to President Bush than the current front-flip-flopper paired with anyone else.)

AnalPhilosopher's first and second posts for the day are on the topic of coverage of Abu Ghraib vs. Nick Berg. He sees it the way the rest of us do. Today I get to be the cheerleader on this one! Go! Go! Go! Somebody has to find a way to make obvious what the press does and how obscene it is.

Right Wing News posted a comment that is extremely funny. It is another parody of one of these interview shows, with a talking heads insert. Great!

Peg Kaplan at What If? has this excellent link.

While I was driving into work this morning I thought of two topics related to the murder of Nick Berg. Texas Conservative has already posted on one of them and he did it last night. He also did a better job of it than I would. Read it along with the other recent posts there. Steve does a great job with his blog.

Hello from the Land of the Pharaohs has a new post that gives his overall view of things to date. He doesn't have much use for Paul Bremer, either. Overall, he is on our side as far as objectives. He doesn't think we are doing it well or right at all times.

Norm Weatherby at Quantum Thought has put effort into producing what he considers the requirements for going to war and winning. I have listed the points here, but you need to read the article to have the full context of my comments.

1. The need for an absolute and unequivocal declaration of war
2. The non-innocence of enemy civilians
3. The rejection of the "Hearts and Minds" doctrine
4. Revocation of cultural or physical sanctuaries or limits to military action
5. Declaration of martial law and suspension of civil rights privileges
6. Absolute control of enemy and domestic media
7. No setting of time limits or scope of combat
8. For us, against us or neutral with enforcement
9. Total balanced arms combat with massive force application
10. Avoidance of truces, time-outs or less than unconditional and total subjugation of the enemy.

From my perspective some of it makes sense, but yet other parts do not. They smack of the last big war we fought, not the present war.

Item 1
I agree a declaration of war is necessary. It removes doubt from everyone’s mind what we are about. I think that was one of the big problems with Vietnam, we never officially declared war.

Item 2
I strongly disagree here. There are civilians who are actually combatants in the current fight, but not all civilians are combatants and should not be treated as such. His selection of the bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, etc. assume that a benefit was gained. In those days there might have been, since it seems that war was waged with the support of the people and these events destroyed morale. However, in Iraq, war was not waged with the support of the people. This is clear from the information that does not come from the media but from the GIs themselves, and from Iraqi blogs. Norm’s concern for combatants to blend with the population are valid, but I get the idea that our soldiers are becoming very clever at ferreting them out.

Item 3
I have mixed ideas here. Part of what he describes may be a straw man. It also includes the assumptions that underlay his item 2, that all members of the opposing country are enemy. Actually the Germans successfully did that with France in WW II. I have seen reports that we, the liberators were resented because of the damage we did in freeing France. From what I have seen, we can win hearts and minds to the degree that we are appreciated for having made their lives better.

Item 4
In this item Norm takes on the restriction from bombing mosques, etc. when combatants hide in them. It is my understanding that when a combatant does hide in a mosque, school, etc. he has destroyed its nature as a sanctuary, and the structure is fair game. That we don’t always take out mosques when the enemy fires from them is a propaganda issue, and despite our preferences to the contrary, as Lee Harris said in TCS today images count.

Item 5
I don’t know that this brings much in the long term that is satisfactory. In the short term it can make security easier, and we have used it in Iraq. We just don’t require it constantly. This is a place where I think that Norm is placing military objectives above the overall objective. Yes, we increase risk with the behavior described in his note, but it’s a bit like letting children out when they have been restrained severely. They tend to be over-exuberant for a while then settle down. Yes some of the weapons were later used against us but not all.

Item 6
Sorry, Norm, but here I think you are way off base. I don’t think that putting a dictatorial control of the news by the government helps anyone. In the US dissent is always a God-given right, and in Iraq, the Iraqis are building their own sources of independent news from the ground up. I do not believe it is to our interest to dictate the content of Iraqi news. It would just lead to resentment and less control. Besides the Iraqi people need to learn how to be democratic while we are still there to protect everyone. Free speech is the base on which democracy is built. That we are having to allow it during war may make the war harder, but in the long run it is the only way to get a self-sufficient Iraq.

Item 7
Regardless of how desirable it may be to wag war until it is over, and to ignore political pressure, it is unrealistic. If a great concern to the non-combatants and maybe allies in that region is the possibility of the US becoming an imperial power, then stating we will withdraw by a deadline or that they will have self-government by a deadline is a way to reassure. Though it might be desirable to define it in terms of goals reached, not time, time has greater credibility.

Item 8
This one I have a pretty strong agreement with. It requires a bit more brass and military force than we might normally use, but if we could make this statement credibly it would go a long way to easing our troubles. However, the punishment of non-neutrality needs to be handled carefully. When the war is over, we might find ourselves in the position of needing former friends more than they need us. Too harshly pursuing this is counterproductive.

Item 9
I agree with everything except the use of so-called tactical nukes. First of all nukes are machetes where scalpels are needed. Second they create such a long-lasting residual effect. Third, the use of nukes would destroy any credibility we have in the world on that subject and the discussions of disarmament. Reagan forced the Russians to blink over SDI, and I would like to see nuclear weapons completely disappear. Many of our conventional munitions can have much the same effect with far fewer side effects. I have also read that every scenario that started with the use of a tactical or other nuke ended up with MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction)

Item 10
This last one could have prevented this war, but Item 7 took over then.

My thanks to Norm for putting this list and his discussion together. It makes a good place to think about these issues.

Radly Balko at the Agitator has posted the secret to Eliot Spitzer's success at tearing apart businesses. The Martin Act. It makes Patriot Act III look sissy. Radly also mentions some examples of what happens when civil rights are trampled.

This is one of those days when everything I read in standard news outlets is gloom and doom, the right sees defeat and the left wants defeat. Thank goodness for bloggers. They seem to have some good inside sources. In particular go read Texas Conservative. Steve has posted two great letters from GIs in Iraq actually doing the work, and a very interesting post from an Iraqi. Just to go his site and start scrolling down to read them. It helps a lot.

Right Wing News has a great parody on the liberal treatment of the war in Iraq. It is genuinely funny, but also too true. Give it a read.

"The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life." --Theodore Roosevelt

One of the comments I have heard many times is a regret over mass-produced goods. Somehow they aren’t as good as hand-made, custom crafted goods. This is a myth that needs some exposure. Since I work in wood, I will use furniture.

I actually made a piece of furniture for a (hoped-for) profit for a while. It was a Lego table. It sat about 30 inches off the ground, was made of solid ash, had a hole in the middle from which hung a net bag that held the Legos. There were four colors of plates glued to the top to provide a solid base for construction. I sold these to the distributor for $145 apiece, and they resold them for about $250. From that I bought my materials, costs of equipment, and labor for my effort. I had a small shop, but I made all the jigs and fixtures necessary to make my time as effective as possible. At the peak of my productivity, I made six tables as a batch (that was the largest batch I could effectively process). When I was done, I calculated I made $20 an hour. For a woodworking shop to survive it must bring in an average of $60/hr per employee.

The amount of time I spent on the entire six tables was about 40 hours. For that I actually cleared no money because I was paying for my equipment still. But let’s assume I had my equipment paid for, then the marginal cost would be the materials (about $20 and utiities) and I would have made about $800 for a week’s work. That’s not bad, it is a middle-class income in this country. But that assumes there is a market to absorb 300 Lego tables a year at a final selling price of $250 or so. The actual demand for my tables was about one every month, except at Christmas. This means I would need to find other projects to make enough money to survive in this way. But other projects require different tooling, that I would have to purchase, and then not have as much net.

A woodworking factory would have made the same product for less than $100 and made its necessary profit as it did so. The factory product would have been just as sturdy and possibly more so. I could not set up for mortise and tenon work, so had a different way of fastening the legs to the apron. If a flaw occurred I had to either remake the part or try to repair it. This of course ate into my labor and materials profits. Every unit had to be sellable.

There are places in the South, especially, that say they sell handcrafted furniture. There are also places over by Lancaster, PA, the Amish country, that sell handcrafted furniture. In all cases they are making essentially factory items. The only difference is that there is allowance for more variation in finish, style, and woods than a true factory operation. The same power equipment is used to produce the product.

I went out of business when one of the children’s toy companies came out with a plastic model for $60. It would not be an heirloom to hand down to grandchildren. But then again, few people would do that. A Lego table was an item to be used for a few years. The plastic version would do perfectly fine for that.

My experience illustrates several things. First for me to make a profit to sustain my woodworking business, I would have to have made two to three times what I did per table. Second, despite the best workmanship, I could not build a unit that would be truly comparable to the best factory-built unit. Third, in order to make a profit at all, I had to sell my seconds as if they were firsts. Fourth, I had to hope for an infinite market for my product. Fifth, I did not have the resources to diversify and not be dependent on a single-product output.

As far as the satisfaction aspect, (one often quoted by those elitists that have never had to work with their hands for a living), after a while, I received little marginal satisfaction from each table. It became a job. My goal was to pay for my equipment so I would have it when I retired in 15-20 years. I received major personal satisfaction when I built the chest for Adam’s mementos. I designed it, and built it from scratch. I had between 60 and 100 hours effort in it. That makes its nominal extrinsic value $3600-6000. Of course that is a ridiculous price; the actual market value of the equivalent chest would be on the order of a few hundred dollars.

My situation was similar to those third-world people selling the tourist junk. They spend significant amounts of time to make actually very little profit, and can only produce a few items. The only saving grace for them is that they live in such a poor standard of living, that the pittance they make will allow survival. What is more, once the items come home and the charm is worn off, they are often seen for what they are—poor quality stuff. The items are fit to put on a shelf and look at, but rarely fit to use.

The moral of the story is that arguing against the loss of handcrafts is arguing for poverty. The third world does not exist to provide handcrafts for liberal elites (or arcane languages for linguists and interesting cultures for anthropologists). Savagery is savagery, and primitive is primitive. Let these people have factories, trade, dirty energy, DDT, and all the other things that they need to get out of their disease-ridden existence. Given proper nutrition, health-care, and a chance to develop, these people will be just like the rest of us, just as able, just as smart. But then to whom might the elitists feel superior?

Thanks to Peggy Kaplan at What If? for a new link to a very thoughtful blogger, Belmont Club. The general link is to the right.

Keith's Animal Ethics site published this link. I followed it, read it, and then followed the links to the PETA response. Nobody will make any progress in this manner. The problem is, this is probably more illustrative of current discourse than the more reasoned exchanges I have seen in this blogging community. My exchanges with LS Carrier were a society tea compared to this, but we were extremely serious in what we were saying. There is more potential for Dr. Carrier and I to agree than Maddox with his opponents. Mostly because the tenor of the exchanges is unreasoned from the start.

AnalPhilosopher has published:

"I’m speechless. This essay by Terrence O. Moore gets to the heart of our difficulties. It may be the best thing I’ve ever read, and believe me, I’ve read some good stuff."

I just read it. I agree.

Fox News is showing the picture also. I can assume it will be all over all the media. They just don't get it. GRIEF IS PRIVATE. This poor man just had a monstrous hole ripped in his heart and life, one he will never get over, and they think it is to be broadcast. Psychically Mr. Berg just had an amputation without anesthesia and then someone deliberately beat on the wound.

No wonder the Roman Games were so successful in their day.

I am breaking my usual blogging pattern and posting a rant before looking at anything or reading anything. I am enraged. I am on the road and USA Today was delivered to my door as usual. The picture on the front page has me boiling. The story that goes with it has me wanting to find a the photographer, the editors, and the reporters and commit violence. If this is a sign of the new editorial direction at USA Today, they were better off with liars.

Nick Berg was beheaded by Al Qaida and the video published on the web. Reporters went to Nick's father's home and informed a man already in shock and grieving over his son that the video was on the web and then took photographs of his collapse and comforting by his other son. I don't know what those cold, inhuman, m*****f****ing maggots thought they were doing, but Hell has no place bad enough for someone deliberately causing more grief and exploiting it for their own purposes. They are lucky I suppose, because when my son was killed, if the next day a reporter had gotten in my face I would have committed mayhem on the spot. We heard later that a picture of my son's feet on the gurney covered by a sheet appeared on local news. Fortunately our friends had the decency to protect us from it at the time.

We don't have paparazzi in this country, we don't need it. The regular news does the job perfectly well.

Chaos theory and its closely allied field of fractal geometry, are the newest areas of applied mathematics to practical stuff. The concepts lie behind image compression algorithms and the generation of computer landscapes. They have been used to create some truly fascinating images. They have also been misrepresented, and here is an example:

“A butterfly flapping its wings in China can create a hurricane.” The original statement of which this has to be a corruption, would have been something like this, “a measurement error equivalent in size to a butterfly flapping its wings, can, overtime, create the equivalent change of a hurricane.” One of the characteristics of chaos theory and fractals, is that extremely small changes can suddenly cause large changes. The nitty-gritty details are mathematically challenging, but there are classes of equations that though, in principal, are absolutely determined, in practice require impossibly precise measurements to calculate that determinism. Interestingly weather and moving liquids fall into the phenomena that these types of equations deal with.

A better example to illustrate the problem comes from one of the books I have read. If the entire earth were covered with a network of sensors that were three feet apart and went well up into the atmosphere, and at one instant of time all the measurements were made and fed into a hypercomputer that could predict the weather from these measurements, by the end of a week the predictions would be worthless due to the limitations in the density and the precision of the measurements and the calculations. The density of the measurements is how close the sensors are. If we made them twice as close, we would only gain a day or two at best. The biggest problem is that even the most sensitive of measurements still has a finite error in it that propagates through the calculations. Since each iteration of the calculations depends on the previous iteration, and it, of necessity, has errors, further error creeps in. This is why one never sees really good forecasts more than five days to a week out, yet we can produce long-term forecasts, because they are based on a different class of variables and equations.

Another important concept here is that of an attractor. My favorite illustration of an attractor is the fountain in the pond behind my condo. This fountain shoots a thick stream of water straight up into the air. The stream stops climbing and breaks into many droplets that fall in a long, tall dome-shaped pattern. If you spend some time watching the edges of that shape, you see that it is actually changing all the time, because it is composed of all the droplets seen as a group. If you were to keep track of the most outside droplets over time, they would trace the ultimate shape of this “dome.” That shape is the attractor of the dome. By the way, if you haven’t guessed, I love to sit and watch fountains of any sort – for hours. Another example is a roulette wheel [My favorite gambling game. This is what can make science and math fun!] The ball is constrained to stay around the outside in the groove until it loses enough kinetic energy to suddenly and unpredictably fall to the wheel, where it bounces a bit then settles in on a number. The actual point at which the ball leaves the groove is a chaotic process, in that it is inherently unpredictable, but the shape of the path it takes to the wheel is very similar. That path is an attractor.

To me it is of extreme interest that Chaos theory, Relativity, and Quantum Physics all have at their heart a problem of measurement. In a very vague way that makes them related in my mind. One thing that I have done is to consider the drawings of the shape of an electron around the nucleus that shows up in chemistry books as being drawings of attractors. I have since seen the idea in serious science articles. An attractor is a natural concept to apply, because of the nature of how those shapes are obtained. The description of the motion of an electron around the nucleus is described by an equation developed by Dr. Schroedinger, now known as the time-dependent Schroedinger equation. The solutions to this are very difficult to find and use, so it was found that by “squaring” this equation (multiplying it by itself in a special way), one could find a probability equation, that predicted where the electron could be (not where it is, but where it was allowed to be). This proved to be more useful to the physicists. What is interesting to me is that where the electron is allowed to be is very analogous to the attractor for my fountain. That attractor is the boundary where water from the fountain is allowed to be. Because of this analogy, when the wind blows and changes the shape of the dome of water, I think of atoms in an electric or magnetic field having the electron paths change.

To me, the lesson here is that science and math do not remove the beauty or romance from the world just because they explain much of it. The beauty and romance are put there by the observer(s) – people. But science and math can give us a deeper and different appreciation of what we are looking at.

I am on the road this week, and cannot access my mindspring email. I will answer all letters when I get back home.

Not long ago, I added a link to a liberal blog, thinking that it was a bit more reasonable than most liberal commentary. Today I was disabused of that illusion. He published a very demeaning cartoon of Bush and Rumsfeld, and published commentary that by implication, his response included, said that an American life, specifically that of Nick Berg, was not worth commenting on when we could rave on about American misdeeds. I'm removing the link. Its presence was an implied endorsement that it was worth reading. I no longer think so.

Joanne Jacobs whose educational blog, joannejacobs.com, is a must for anyone concerned with school issues, just posted a note on a Charter school that is sending 50 of 55 graduates to four year colleges. There is a lot more in the post as to the history of the school and the background of the students that makes it so remarkable. But I want to quote these two paragraphs which emphasize AnalPhilosopher's comments on expectations.

"One word characterizes Preuss: more. The school year is nearly a month longer. The school day is an hour longer. Classes are intense, scheduled in every-other-day blocks that run for 1 hour, 42 minutes, rather than the typical 55 minutes. Some students return for Saturday-morning sessions.

One senior, David Iaea, who is headed to New York University, says with a nod toward the brutal schedule, "College will be a breeze after Preuss." "

Steve Headley, the Texas Conservative, has reached his 4000th hit. Congratulations! Well deserved recognition of the difference he makes. I find his links to Iraqi blogs especially valuable and unique. Keep it up!

Oh, yeah, I was banned from watching the news on television over 20 years ago. Same as Steve.

Right Wing News published this list of answers to 20 questions about conservatism. It might seem redundant with all that gets published on the subject but this is very straight-forward and clear. Give it a read.

These two pictures tell a different story than we usually hear about Iraq. Thanks to the Drudge Report for the story.

(I promised this yesterday, but technical issues and a very late hour, 2 am, prevented its posting)

AnalPhilosopher posted an excellent essay on expectations and their impact yesterday. I agree with everything he wrote in the essay. I would like to make an cautionary point. Expectations must be reasonable and must be consistent with the person for whom they are expressed. There is a lot of press being given to parents that obsess over getting their children into the "right" university, following the "right" career. I have no brief with parents expecting a bright child to accomplish something with their lives. The problem comes in what they want them to accomplish. If the child is musically talented and they insist on a science-based career (I know of such cases), it may lead to the child becoming what they want, but at a price to the child that only is measured in later life. I know of people who are still sorting out their lives from having been pressured into unsuitable careers at a early age. By all means expect high academic standards in general, and definitely demand a high moral standard, but make sure the specifics of the accomplishments fit the child, young person, young adult.

Samizdata has a long post on Terrorists and Weapons of mass destruction. Good read.

Peg Kaplan strikes me as a very gentle person, but she can certainly provide some horrific examples of inhumanity, such as this one in her blog, What If? . So where are you now, Patricia Ireland?

Hello from the Land of the Pharaohs is back with a very good commentary on the Iraqi prison scandal, The Arab League, and the UN. Our press has no clue about what is thought in the Middle East, and I think sometimes our leaders don't either.

My younger son played hockey for a number of years until he had a very bad coach that turned him off from it. When someone scores three goals in a game it is a hat trick, and is the equivalent of a grand slam in baseball. Today, my friend Keith, the AnalPhilosopher, made a hat trick. I have already referenced his post to TCS. In addition he posted the essay on expectation and the extract from Swinburne. The first of which I will comment on briefly in a post tonight and the second of which will be copied and saved as part of my on-going source collection in religious philosophy. In addition he gets credit for an assist by publishing the note from Ally Eskin, a new blogger who brings a direct, and very fresh perspective on things.

John Hawkins at Right Wing News posted this. A very interesting comment on the current reporting on Iraq.

Check out this at Right Wing News.

The AnalPhilosopher, once again in his disguise as the mild-mannered Keith Burgess-Jackson, professor of philosophy, has written an essay for TCS. Keith writes clearly and logically (I should certainly hope so) on the issue, but it is more fun to read his blog.

This was in the top 10 letters to the Weekly Standard online edition;

I am a financial adviser and prior to the Patriot Act, all information we received from our clients was for the benefit of the client or the protection of our firm. (Claudia Winkler, Who's Afraid of the Patriot Act) We are now required to get information about our clients for the government.

As Winkler says, the government may never use the information, but I resent the implication that all my clients are laundering money for al Qaeda. Once again the government uses a sledgehammer when a scalpel is needed.

--Joe Davey

This essay on Fox News at first had me upset that he was trying to rationalize or at least reduce the shame over the prisoner torture expose. As it turns out, he points out that we have a reduced sense of perspective. Give it a read. You may not agree with me, but that is OK. I just want us to think more.

The phrase "Love thy neighbor as thyself" (Okay, I was raised on the King James version, and the old Common Book of Prayer) is sometimes used to point out Christian hypocrisy and, in many cases, rightfully so. But actually, this allows considerable latitude in behavior. If I work hard for what I get, and am consistent in my expectations of myself and others, then to give part of what I have to my "neighbor" may be charitable or ,as I think it is in the case of liberals and welfare, patronizing, which is not loving in nature. If I give nothing but do everything I can to assist in helping the "neighbor" become self-supporting and well-off that may be sincere love of my fellow human. If I give nothing, and at the same time work to keep someone down, then I am definitely not Christian in any sense of the word.

A real-world example of Christian Love is the Interfaith Hospitality Network. This is a program that churches in Warren County, Ohio, participate in. The churches provide temporary homes for homeless families until they can obtain their own housing. Families apply for the program, and those that are chosen must not be actively abusing drugs or alcohol, and cannot be in an abusive relationship. This is because the program uses almost all volunteer, untrained staff. The adults in the families must then take life-skills classes as part of the program. During the 45 days or so a family is in the program, they spend a week at a time at different churches, sleeping there and eating breakfast and supper there. They also prepare a sack lunch for their children and themselves. During the day they either attend the day center for the program or their jobs.

In our church, the guests arrive on Sunday evening and stay until Sunday morning. We convert the education wing into sleeping rooms. The program is administered by the county and they bring a trailer with motel-style roll-away beds in it to the church for us to set up in the rooms. We do this after the second service on Sunday afternoon. Then volunteers from four other churches and ours provide meals and evening and overnight hosts in rotation during the week. This is done via sigh-up sheets for the various slots. The church also provides bedding for the guests; the overnight hosts are given beds but bring their own bedding. After the guests leave, around 6:45 Sunday morning, we then convert the education wing back to a Sunday school from being temporary housing. Families usually find housing within 45 days. They receive assistance with the housing.

The program has an 80% or better one year success rate (the percentage of families that still have their home after one year).

This program was one of the things that helped me decide to join the church I belong to. There is little room for ego trips the way it all plays out. Providing meals, laundry of bedding at the end of the week, and host-time are not things that readily lead to the self-aggrandizement that is sometimes seen in so-called Christian giving.

I would suggest that examples of true Christian giving and service are quiet – to the point that they are often not seen. Cases that are readily seen should be suspect as to motive. Case in point, Ted Turner made a big point of giving a lot of money to the UN or some other such institution. The thing is, that Bill Gates gives that much every year and nobody hears about it.

One of my favorite bloggers, Peg Kaplan at What If? , has published a difficult question and example of why it is asked. I have copied the column. It is tempting to weigh in on the question in the near future.

Radly Balko (the Agitator) has a very interesting post on alcohol and the hypermoralists in our society.

Keith Burgess-Jackson (AnalPhilosopher) just pointed to a new blog, Who Moved My Truth? , by Ally Eskin. Here are Keith's comments:

"Some of you may remember the exchange between Ally Eskin and Dr Leonard S. Carrier concerning the morality of war in Iraq. Ally, a mere undergraduate, held her own against the good doctor (in my opinion). I'm pleased to report that Ally has started a blog, Who Moved My Truth? Her posts to this point are superb, and the blog itself is aesthetically pleasing. "

I have visited the site and agree whole-heartedly. This lady has a delightfully direct commentary! Also as Keith suggests, visit her photos. She does an excellent job of presenting her travels in Scotland.

Zogby considers this election Kerry's to lose. I don't agree with his reasoning and I think he may have wishful thinking, but he is a professional pollster. Read and be concerned.

Link via Drudge.

As I noted in an earlier post, I am a frequent flyer. I have a preferred airline that is determined by geography originally, but has become a personal preference as well. I like to enjoy what I am doing, even if it is sitting on a plane, and reading and working cross-word puzzles isn't all of it. Here are some things that I do to entertain myself during my travels.

Time to rotate and leave the ground:
I am a compulsive measurer. I specialize in computer performance so naturally like to measure any kind of performance. From the moment an aircraft begins its acceleration to the point at which the front wheels lift off the ground (rotate) is almost a fixed value for an aircraft type. It modifies slightly with load. I time this interval every flight. The record 18 seconds was held by a DeHaviland Dash 7 owned by Wisconsin Air, until I rode on the newer Dornier 628's owned by Atlantic Coast Airlines, a Delta connection regional. These plans are a real delight to fly on -- good seat room, big windows, fast lift off, and they can actually fly off the deck not just rotate and boost like the big jets.

Checking out construction:
Every airport I fly into has ongoing construction. Yeah, like I said in an earlier post I am a construction junkie. I check the progress every time I go through an airport.

Safety demonstration rating:
I just formalized this one today. One of the kind of irritating things on an airplane trip is the mandatory safety speech and demonstration at the beginning of hte flight. The cabin attendants (I used to call them stewards and stewardesses) are required by law to do this. I decided to make it fun. I rate every presentation as if it were an ice-skating or diving event in the Olympics. I use a scale of 0-6 and give a rating for technique and one for style. It is purely subjective. Today I announced my rating to the attendant when she was picking up my cup for take off, and after we were airborne explained what I was doing. I gave her a 5.8/5.9, which she thought was generous. Later she said that the back cabin attendants suggested that the vocal should be rated as well. It is rare that the presentation is seriously bad, so giving an honest rating should still be above 5 in almost cases. It certainly encourages me to pay attention.

Rating landings:
I have found that certain aircraft are harder to land than others. MD-80s and MD-88s are among the worst of the big craft. In my experience only one airline consistently lands them gently. The remaining aircraft have varying results, and the presence of strong, gusty cross winds must be taken into account. I haven't formalized this yet, but I do like to comment on the really good landings.

Always get a window seat:
You can test this, but my experience says that a window seat is only 30 seconds or less slower leaving the plane than an aisle seat. For 30 seconds more getting off the plane, you can be treated to some of the most wonderful sights in this country. It helps if you have a bit of general science in your background. Cloud patterns, ground shapes, city layouts, railroad and highway right-of-ways can be seen with a new perspective. The old topographic maps from intro to geology come alive.

If you fly frequently, it really helps to make it more fun. If you fly really frequently, then pay, if necessary, for some of the perks -- upgrades and airline club rooms. They make a real difference in comfort.

I will try to recreate this. I was building it on the fly in the airport and when I went to preview it, I ran into the "new look" update window.

I have always been aware of what I am doing and analyzing it and everything associated with it--even in my younger days. In those days, when blitzed beyond reasonableness, there was always a part of me sitting there observing and analyzing. As a result I formed ideas and concepts. However, to explain blogging I need to digress.

When I started working in computers, I attended a class in Transaction Process Monitor creation. At the time I was a systems engineer working 70+ hours a week and had the stupidity to sit on the front row of the class, where I battled sleep the entire three or four days. The one thing I did get out of it was that before processing input you had to clear all the output. This was in the days of memory constrained processing and slow paging of memory to disk.

How this applies to me is that as my mind filled up with ideas, I eventually had to write some of them down -- but words without an audience are sterile. Since I have started blogging, I have shared some of what I have created in the past as well as new ideas, and I have found that as I post various ideas, room is made for even more new ideas. It is a self-generating process. I blog because it is necessary for my thinking. I have had more new ideas in the last month and a half than in several years put together.

I will continue this and you will continue to be provided (or afflicted, as the case may be) with my views on whatever seems important, until I physically can no longer blog.

I have begun to settle on a routine when I blog. I open my blog maintenance then start browsing. I look at news sources first. This often leads to a number of short "go read this" type posts. Then I go read all my favorite bloggers as well as some that are not favorites but still sometimes have value. BTW if it is in my links to the right, it counts as a favorite. Somewhere in there I read my mail. Finally I try to put out a substantive post. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I find the posts that I am not impressed with are the ones that strike a chord in someone else. So what you get is me, at the moment, not what I want to impress some imaginary audience with. Sometimes I like to add a quote before I close down for the day.

My friend and mentor, Keith, the AnalPhilosopher, has a very structured method. I am beginning to see its value, but I am trying to let the structure develop naturally. One constant I will work for is that every Sunday there will be a post related to religion. I have done a lot of thinking in that area and have a lot I wish to share. I also will try to add a couple of science posts (not as definite) and certainly some posts on general political principals as well as responses to current events. My goal is to provide a minimum of four or five substantive posts a week.

My thanks to the 760+ readers that have visited since I started and especially to the ones that return to see the next posts. One of the wonderful things about the blogosphere is that, no matter how constrained our day-to-day contacts are, we have the chance to reach others of like interests.

I once had a nice parody on the announcement of a new element. It was announcing Administratium. If anyone knows where it has been posted or can be obtained, please let me know.

Thanks.

I think this is funny. I don't know where I got it from. The date is Feb of last year for file creation.

trollingisham research
Trolling for Taillights (and related Effluvia)
Draft 3.0 (05/25/92)

Introduction
Trolling For Taillights (TFT) is becoming one of America's fastest growing
highway participatory sports. It is loads of fun, requires only modest equipment
and achieves justice on the highway. And it is Good Clean FunÔ at least until
the target has to clean his drawers.
TFT refers, of course, to the sport of communicating to other drivers by
stimulating their radar detectors and observing and recording their responses.
Only simple radio equipment is needed: an old microwave burglar alarm will do
fine. More sophisticated equipment such as a Kustom KR-11 Instant On Moving
Police Radar will yield better and more consistent results. Nontheless $10 worth
of Gunn Oscillator will achieve quite adequate scores if the proper skills are
practiced.

How it Works:
Think of RADAR as a Tractor Beam. It's a vector-subtraction ray, a negative
speed insertion device: If the target is ahead, it sucks them back toward you;
if they're behind, it pushes them away. One can also think of it as a high-tech
version of the American Indian game of counting coup. In short, think of it as
evolution in action, as in Road Warrior.

Safety First:
Because the target of your trolling may react erratically, certain basic safety
rules are necessary.
No trolling of vehicles with less than two car lengths of clearance behind and
in the lane to either side (if applicable.) This allows for an Unintended
Deceleration Transient (UDT.)
No trolling of Texas Cadillacs (pickemup trucks.) with large dogs standing on
the toolbox. The dog might not like it.
A minimum of 1/10 mile clearance between you and the target is required if the
target is placarded with any of the following:
"Flammable"
"Explosive"
"High Explosive"
"Radioactive"
"Nuclear Weapon" (2/10 mile for this one.)

Special Awards:
It is desirable to recognize outstanding fishermen in our ranks. Accordingly the
following special award catagories are established:
The Million Dollar Club - A million total points.
The Kilobrake Trophy - Causing one thousand Brake applications.
1000 Points of Light - Causing the most simultaneous brake lights in any one
year.
Worked All States (WAS) - Snagging a trophy catch originating from each of the
50 states.
Golden Jam Award - Causing the largest traffic jam as a result of trolling
WITHOUT involving a wreck in any one year.
If you think you qualify, contact the management for your award. Video tape is
highly recommended for scoring purposes and for documenting when the cop
mistakes your head for a baby Harp Seal.

Rules of Engagement:
Trolling posture
Proper trolling posture is in the right or next to right lane with the Radar at
the ready but out of sight and de-energized. Speed should be at or slightly
below the speed limit.

Eligible Targets
An eligible target is any vehicle that meets the above safety specifications and
has a radar detector.

Target Selection
A target proceeding at greater than 20 mph over the posted speed limit is the
most fertile in terms of variety of actions and presents the best odds of
winning Adders and Multipliers.

Firing techniques
Forward - Wait until the target is a few car lengths in front of you and fire
phasers. Best results are achieved if the Radar is bounced off a sign or
overpass ahead of both you and the target. It is best to confine your range to
that where you know your Radar will cause the target's detector to go full
scale.

Rear - Generally confined to eliminating Rear Bumper Dwellers because of the
difficulty in scoring, the best technique is known as the Annie Oakley style.
Simply lay the Radar across your shoulder and fire. Since you are achieving line
of sight contact with his detector, the results are spectacular. The Tractor
beam in action.

Setting up for Subsequent Shots:
If you have a target that appears to be fertile for a repeat multiplier, the
best technique is to wait a minute or two and then pass the target. This
encourages the target to resume trolling speed again. Lead the target for awhile
to build his confidence and then lift the throttle and coast. Allow the target
to pass you again and when you achieve minimum clearance, fire again. Repeat
Phasors coupled with the vague recollection in the target's mine that you just
slowed way down will generally lead to spectacular trolling. This technique can
be use up to about 5 times (10 on yuppys and lawyers) on a given target before
he figures something's up. About the 4th or 5th shot is the optimum time to set
the target up for a nuke (see definition below.) The use of an intergalactic
communicator (CB) is vitally handy for assessing the conditions favorable for
nuking.

Special Techniques and Definitions:
These techniques have been found to produce better scores than shooting for lone
targets.

Nerd Herding: If you spot multiple cars equipped with radar detector, you can
herd them into a cluster by zapping them each time one tries to pass another.
Wolf Pack: Played by two or more cars in convoy, communicating on an obscure
non-CB frequency: Wingman trails leader by about 1/2 mile, spots targets and
gives early warning to leader. Leader fires rearward, hitting the marks with a
strong head-on signal. Wingman confirms hits. Leader and wingman try to see how
many marks they can herd between them.

Fast Lane Bandit Blasting: This dual purpose technique yields good scores and
frequently busts up Fast Lane Bandit clumps. This is the one instance where
clearance rules are relaxed. This is used when the trolling vehicle is stuck
behind a bunch of left-lane-bandits proceeding side by side with geriatrics
(real or premature) in the overtaking lanes. If there are more than 3 or 4 cars
in the clump, odds are one vehicle will have a radar detector and will be driven
by a target who will respond to the troll even when going below the speed limit.
Also known as the Paranoid Factor. Technique is to lift throttle (to give you
some room) and firing into the crowd. The inherent entropy introduced by the
tractor beam will tend to scatter the cars so that you can find a way through
the mess. You bust a fast lane bandit and score at the same time. Also known as
"Bumper Cars."

Yuppy Puppy: Canine Critters, generally of a large/exotic/expensive breed and
always an utterly stupid, undisciplined monster.

Yuppy Larvae: Similar to Yuppy Puppy except of human origin. Generally the
result of her taking something seriously he poked at her in fun. Also known,
depending on context and age, as "accident", Yard Ape, Busted Condom, Curtain
Climber or Precious. Personality characteristics are almost identical to the
Yuppy Puppy except that the Larvae is louder and is generally allowed in
restaurants and movie theaters where they do maximum damage.

Scoring:
Scoring is done in accordance with the following table. This table recognizes
the added value of multiple hits on a given target and on the difficulty
inherent in getting multiple responses from one hit.
The easiest way to score is to get one of those handheld counting "clickers" as
used by the gate keepers at sports venues to count fans. This is a chrome
golf-ball sized orb that contains a mechanical counter and a pushbutton that
increments the count. Available from your local office supply store for a
nominal price. Scores can be kept in a log book for submittal to the management.
Winners will be recognized accordingly.

Basic scoring: What the target does: Select all that apply and add.
Looks about, slows down 1 point
Tail lights 2 points
Hard braking 3 points
Lane change 3 points
Hides his radar detector 4 points
Blue smoke from tires 5 points
Takes next exit 10 points
Turns off detector 10 points
Pulls over and fakes breakdown 12 points
Hits median and goes the other way 15 points


Bonus Adders: Add to whatever you got above:Points
Fuzzy dice1
Suction Cup Garfield (or other critter)
Was already below the speed limit2
Cellphone in use2
Radar detector has cord draped across dash2
Eating/drinking interrupted2
Ditto, stuff spilled4
Detector heard3
Yuppy puppy on board3
Yuppy larvae on board3
"" "" "" with sign announcing same5
Slapping of yuppy larvae interrupted4
Vanity tag/poserplate5
CB announcement5 per call
Makeup being applied or shaving6
Head to head hit (opposite direction)8
Bimbo (male or female)10
Sexual act interrupted15
Off-duty cop20
Patrol car/jam sandwich30
Confirmed lawyer40
Lawyer w/vanity tag that says "Tort"50



Just add 'em all up and then do the multiplier.


Multipliers: Take all that apply.
Each subsequent hit on a target X (count of hits on that target)
Yuppy scum X 2
BMW/Benz/Porche/Jap clone thereof X 3
Motorcycle X 5 (reflects rarity)
Yuppy puppy bus (minivan) X 4
Lo-riders, similar vehicles X 3
Junker X 2
Nuke * X 10
* "Nuke" is the term used when the target is baited into busting a
real radar trap. Ticket must be issued to count.


Penalty box: Subtract these points:

ActionPoints
to deduct
Target shoots back with single digit of the hand 2
with radar 5
with gun 10
Caught for speeding while trolling 10
Caught for more serious infraction while trolling 15
Operating without a radio license 20
Getting trolled by another competitor 20
Getting caught by the Phuzz without license 25
Getting caught by Uncle Charlie without license 30
Having trolling implement confiscated 40 * disqual.
Caught for speeding by RADAR while trolling 5

"Consensus is the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead."
-- Margaret Thatcher "The Downing Street Years", page 167

Peg Kaplan at What If? has this really great post on What It Takes to Become a Democrat.

I have belonged to the Society of the Sigma Xi, a research honorary, since graduate school. One of the major benefits is their publication, American Scientist. One might compare it to Scientific American, but it is written to a higher level of scholarship and there are almost no advertisements. It is oriented towards college graduates not the general public. The articles cover all branches of knowledge, and I used it as one of my major sources when preparing my lectures on nuclear energy.

This month’s issue was particularly rich in articles of interest to me. I may write on some of the others later, but one is especially apropos to my post on Scientific Representation. The article is "g-OLOGY" and describes the efforts to calculate the g-factor of the electron. This is a very fundamental constant in quantum mechanics and relates the “spin” of the electron to the mass to produce a magnetic field. Part of the emphasis on this value is that both experiment and theory agree to the parts per trillion level. There are constant attempts to refine the calculated value, and the article deals with these.

The technique used is to create the Feynman diagrams for all the interactions of an electron with a magnetic field. It emits a photon when it does. The emission of a photon is represented by a single Feynman diagram. A second possibility, according to quantum electro-dynamics, is for the electron to emit a virtual photon then reabsorb it. The total energy involved is then the sum of the relative contributions of the two diagrams. But then it is also possible for two virtual photons to be emitted and reabsorbed, and all the ways this can happen produces seven Feynman diagrams. The emission and reabsorbtion of three virtual photons produces 72 diagrams, four virtual photons require 891 diagrams and five require 12,672 diagrams. (This latter is far beyond any available computing power today.)

The article also discusses this same project for the muon which has some rather intriguing results. However, what I want to focus on here is the explosion of necessary calculations to obtain greater precision. It is quite parallel in my mind to the situation around the time of Copernicus in astronomy. At that time the Earth was considered the center of the universe, and the planets were assumed to move only in perfect circles. As astronomical observation and calculations improved in accuracy, it was necessary to add epicycles on the cycles (orbits) to account for the variations in movement observed. In some cases it was necessary to add additional epicycles on the epicycles. This entire enterprise became most unwieldy. Finally Copernicus suggested that for purposes of calculation it would be easier to assume the Sun was at the center not the Earth. (He did not come out and say it did, because the church dictated the way the universe was structured, and he did not want to be called a heretic.)

I see the adding of additional Feynman diagrams and the explosion in calculations analogous to the addition of epicycles upon epicycles. I have also considered the explosion in numbers and kinds of subatomic particles to be in this same category. Once a technique is found it gets used and abused far beyond reasonableness.

The situation might also be likened to Dr Dibblekorn in the story “Instant Gold”. There is a great line in the book. “Where Langmuir filled the bulb with nitrogen [to increase incandescent bulb filament life], Dibblekorn would have pumped and pumped until he vanished incandescent into his own vacuum.”

One of the intriguing features of a milking stool (Shows my age, doesn’t it? I have seen and used them.) is that it has three legs. This is a concrete application of the geometric theorem that any three points determine a plane. In other words, no matter how you set it down, it doesn’t wobble. It also is quite strong and can take a lot of rough handling. It is an excellent analogy for our society. I consider the three legs of our society to be science, religion, and politics. [Funny, the same thing as my blog subtitle] One of the strengths of our society is that they have until recently been fairly independent of each other. I consider us now to be in an internal holy war that has currently been partly sidelined for the real war. With this post, I want to start a multipart discussion on these “legs” of our society and their interactions.

Each of these items for our discussion is somewhat broader than is usually used everyday, so at the risk of creating what I have termed “rubber band words” (My earlier post, Humpty Dumpty) I will start with some definitions.

Politics:
I include under politics everything that has to do with people living together – the rules of society. This would include law, regulation, civic bodies that promulgate rules and the police and courts that enforce them. I consider the purpose of politics to enable people to live together peaceably in groups. Politics does not establish standards; it reflects them. It does not create moral values; it expresses them in law. Ideally politics is the arbiter in conflicts, generally through the courts. In its best form it is neutral to any given side and is ruled by law and precedent. It also is willing to compromise to achieve the best solution for the given situation.

Religion:
Religion includes not only the organized religions, but any SOURCE of moral and ethical teachings. In this particular sense, philosophy belongs more with science than religion. The reason was given by the AnalPhilosopher some time back. He pointed out that philosophy can only analyze a set of moral premises for consistency, it cannot a priori create them. Moral and ethical teachings and premises are the result of a combination of emotional reactions and observations on the world as to what works and doesn’t. There is nothing neutral about religion. It says this is right and that is wrong. Religion is about absolutes and does not wish to compromise. It may have some reason in its considerations, but intuition and “leaps of faith” are perfectly valid in this context.

Science:
Science includes engineering and all the trades. Science is the explanation of the physical world and how to deal with it. Science provides no values with its output. Its sole concern is validity. Is it true? Is it accurate? Can it be objectively observed? Can it be reproduced by third parties, based on the information given? Is it logically consistent and coherent? Science is primarily a process for studying the universe and secondarily a collection of knowledge obtained by using that process. It is through the use of science that we have improved our lot so far above the other animals, that we now protect them.

It would be tempting to order the three categories along a line, science at one end, religion at the other, and politics in the middle. But I don’t think that is accurate. Such a vision would imply that science and religion have nothing to say to each other or if they do it must be mediated by politics. I believe that science and politics have much to say directly to each other, and later posts on this subject will expand on this.

Future posts in this series will look at the interactions between each of the three “legs”, and what I see as problematic today.

John Ray's PC Watch has a link to a column by Jerry Della Femina on political correctness. When I was in my twenties, Jerry Della Femina was one of the most talked about advertising executives. He is a brilliantly funny and creative man, and this column is classic Della Femina.

Having decided that elitism was something to write about, I am finding other bloggers beating me to the punch. Great, as long as it is discussed. Today, John Ray, at Dissecting Leftism, has posted this good overview of the way elitist think. Good read.

Norm Weatherby who has the Quantum Thought blog sent me these one-liners.

1) "Mrs. Schroedinger to Dr. Schroedinger: What the hell did you do to the cat? It looks half dead!"

2) "Don't let Heisenberg take the cat for a walk anymore"

One of the biggest problems I have with modern science is its difficulty representing the concepts in intuitive terms. Sometimes I think this is deliberate – by obscuring the obvious one is therefore automatically more knowledgeable. Einstein thought about relativity in visual terms. We have that from biographical information. I always think visually when doing science or computers. I think it is important to be able to visualize dynamic phenomena. Once visualized, we see much more and understand much more than we would otherwise.

One of my pet peeves in this area is the presentation of the quantum orbital structure in beginning chemistry. Atoms are represented as these weird-shaped things, sometimes as balls, sometimes as waterwings with a doughnut around the middle, sometimes as four lobes coming from a central point. The problem I have with it is that it does nothing to help the student understand what is going on. It is often used as a means to “explain” why carbon compounds have a tetrahedral structure around each carbon atom in the saturated cases, but that can be done just as easily with the old electron-pair presentations which are more intuitively evident and easier to remember. In fact it gives the student an algorithm by which he/she can figure out a structure and its geometry. As a student I have no motivation to remember 1s2, 2s2, 2p6, 3s2, 3p6, 3d8, etc. To an inorganic or organic professor that as studied this for a lifetime maybe it is a good short-hand, but not to students.

(For those who didn’t read my autobiography, I studied this to the PhD level. It is not sour grapes or frustration at not learning)

Quantum mechanics is very counter-intuitive, and most of the quantum physicists I have read don’t seem to be able to get around it when “explaining” the results. Part of it is because many of the formulations have contradictory expressions built into them from the outset. I have seen formulations of quantum phenomena that have a wave part and a particle part. Which is working depends on what is to be solved. One of the most famous presentations is Schrödinger’s cat. A cat is in a room and there is a cat. There is also a radioactive source and if it emits a particle the cat is dead when you open the room and if it does not the cat is alive when you open the room. What is the state of the cat before you open the room? According to quantum mechanics it is neither dead nor alive because you haven’t checked. The act of checking determines its state. I have a lot of problems with this, because it is not only counterintuitive, it is bad philosophy. In effect, it is a harkening back to Bishop Berkeley and the subjective nature of the world. If the world is not defined until the observer observes, then there is not an independent, objective world.

Relativity is almost as bad. When objects travel faster and faster relative to an observer, they appear to contract, and their time seems to move more slowly relative to the observer. At the same time, nothing in our normal universe can travel faster than the speed of light, and only light can travel at the speed of light, everything travels less slowly. There was a scientist named Rudy Rucker (Rudolph v b Rucker) who wrote some popular-level books on this and emphasized the paradoxical nature of the statements. I looked pretty carefully at one of the so-called paradoxes a lot of years ago (yeah, about 20), and found that one of the dependencies was the unstated assumption that the object traveling close to the speed of light was carrying a small part of its universe with it, the part it could perceive. Thus it had “normal” perceptions while the external observer saw contraction. I did not complete the exact formulation and quantification of the problem when one didn’t make that assumption, but the indications were that properly formulated the paradox disappeared.

One of the very high-level conclusions I have come to, is that most physicists forget that their mathematical formulations are models and are heir to all the short-comings inherent in models. The particular models that physicists use are actually epistemological models not metaphysical. Yet, they are treated as metaphysical models. Both quantum mechanics and relativity are based on light. Relativity is a formulation of what the universe looks like when light is the only signal that can be used. It is a brilliant formulation, and it has lead to amazing insights, such as the inter-convertibility of matter and energy. But because it leads to meaningless mathematical values when speeds faster than light are considered, it is taken as saying that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. (In the more popular press, at least. There are physicists, mathematicians, and tyros that have latched onto the same thing I have here and are trying to do things with it). No, actually it is saying that if something does travel faster than the speed of light, something other than light needs to be used to measure it.

Quantum mechanics as a fundamental base in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. This again is a measurement theory. It says if I use a photon to measure the position and velocity of a particle, the total error has a minimum that is based on the energy of the light used to measure. The better I measure the energy of the particle, the worse I measure the position and the reverse. There have been cosmologists that have used this idea as a way to “borrow” unavailable energy to expand the universe and pay it back before they get caught (mathematically speaking). Again, this principle does not say that there really is an uncertainty or a discontinuity in reality, it just says we can’t measure more finely than a certain level.

Nuclear quantum mechanics represents nuclear bonding as the exchange of particles between two other particles. It is rather like you and I were to remain bonded as long as we throw a baseball back and forth. But where our association could end arbitrarily, a nuclear association is like slavery. It is permanent until something disrupts it. The difficulty I have is this may be a good mathematical description of what happens, and Richard Feynman (one of my heroes) received a Nobel Prize for his work in this area, but it does not necessarily represent the actual physical reality of what is happening. Nuclear science has become more and more complex over the years. The proton-neutron model has evolved into a host of sub-proton and sub-neutron particles, which in turn exchange other particles, etc. That the mathematics predicts these particles does not validate either their existence or the math’s truthfulness. It merely means we can create experiments that give results that follow the model. I am waiting for a nuclear Copernicus to upset and simplify things with a totally new way of looking at them.

When I was 11 or 12, I was a nerdy sort that actually enjoyed going to the library and reading chemistry books about the structure of atoms. I read about energy levels and how they were calculated, though I didn’t completely understand it. When I was a freshman in college, I had the good fortune to actually reproduce the classic experiments that measured the energy level of the electron in hydrogen, the charge on the electron, the mass/charge ratio, and molecular weights. When I was in graduate school I took a chemical physics course which was essentially quantum mechanics for chemists. In all of that, I saw the mathematical description, but I have yet to see an explanation in metaphysical terms why 1) the electron doesn’t spiral into the nucleus, and 2) why it has fixed levels of energy.

Part of the problem I see today is that the physicists are such good mathematicians now that they can extrapolate their theories far beyond the experimental evidence. Experiments to confirm or disprove theories have become horribly expensive and complex, probably due to the complexity of the theories. Now we have experiments designed to confirm theories, instead of theories to explain experiments. I’m not sure such a reversal bodes well for the current crop of physicists. Something has to be waiting in the wings to upset the apple cart. I sincerely hope so.

Ed at Ed's Rants and Musings posted this interesting bit.

John Ray gets a double hit tonight. If you haven't read this post in his PC Watch, do so.

John Ray, one of my blogospheric mentors, has posted this interesting story on Brazil and nuclear power.

Keith has posted a great link to an article on dolphins in his Animal Ethics blog. I have a special interest in this as my middle son is a Navy diver working with dolphins. He says that dolphins are extremely smart and emotionally about like children. The Navy only positively rewards dolphins and never punishes them. Dolphins cooperate willingly with Navy divers or not at all. I think the biggest difficulty we will have in working and cooperating with dolphins is that we constantly want to project ourselves onto them. However it works out, learning to live with dolphins will be great training when we meet the first interstellar species.

The United States of America is the wealthiest country that has ever existed. I do not mean rich, which is the usual term, but wealthy. It is much more than just money, but it is money that buys the rest. To really understand what our wealth is, don't read books or reports, start looking around you at what is going on.

Take a trip by car. Every semi-tractor rig represents a quarter-million dollars or so in equipment, on average. The cargo can have a value of up to millions. A large portion of the drivers own the tractor or the entire rig. This is personal and national wealth--the private ownership of more tractor-trailer rigs than the rest of the world put together. It is not possible to really understand the amount of wealth represented just by rigs, and I am just beginning.

Take an airplane trip and sit by the window for a change and look out. Don't worry about escaping as fast as possible at the other end--you only get out a few seconds earlier anyway. Look at housing and think that these are PRIVATE homes. Every one (for the purists it is not absolutely every one) is owned by an individual just like ourselves. Millions of homes worth five to six figures each. Now remember that each home probably has two cars on average worth $10-20,000 apiece. Again, owned by individuals.

If you are lucky and come into LaGuardia from the North, you will pass over Long Island Sound. Take note of all the private, pleasure boats anchored there. Each one represents two kinds of wealth, money to purchase it and time to enjoy it.

Drive past any industrial park and think that each building represents several hundred thousand dollars. While waiting for your plane at the airport think about how each plane costs millions of dollars, and the costs of building an airport. Interstate Highway costs around $10 million a mile or more. Look an any city sky-line. Each tower is millions of dollars. Factories, docks, fuel storage farms, railroad yards, it all becomes incomprehensibly large.

The average American has more than the richest of rulers from centuries ago. The poorest of Americans are better off than the better-off in many nations of the world. The poor have TVs and cell phones. We have the best medical care in the world, and it is not ruled by the government (effect and cause). Despite the fat police and the food police and the politically correct, we are healthy and we spend far less of our income proportionately on subsistance than any other nation. We have time to play, time to be activists (OK, considering some activists maybe this is double-edged), time to create, time to blog. We have more disposable income per capita and more disposable time than any place else on earth. And we use it to support the most diverse entertainment market ever seen. Multiple media and venues for music, sports, art, drama, movies.

It is the best laboratory experiment in almost-free markets ever created. It is objective proof that we should be proud.

Dick McDonald's Right Scale has some very interesting pieces today. Dick writes very interesting and forceful commentary and he links to some interesting articles as well.

A blog that has a book by Virginia Postrel, Karl Popper, and a 45 automatic (maybe its a Glock) stacked on one another can't be all bad. Actually it is very good. Try Samizdata. It is a quiet, pointed commentary on the world's events.

Thanks to John Ray at Dissecting Leftism for the link.

My friend, Keith, the AnalPhilosopher, posted a very well worded counter to his article in TCS on liberal anger. The interesting thing is that what this gentleman describes as conservative and liberal could be as easily true if the words were interchanged. The important thing that comes from his letter is that there are conservatives as equally as jerky as the liberals we are currently upset about.

Also it makes a good point that labels often become stretched and distorted. The most visible examples become the archtype or even stereotype. Such is the case here. The writer considers himself a liberal, yet he more resembles a decent human being rather than the caricature of humanity we have come to identify with liberal. In his mind the abusive, nasty people he saw as conservatives became the archtype for conservatives. He has other generalities on the idea of conservatism that in his experience were true, yet would not hold for us who consider ourselves conservative or libertarian.

Were more liberals like this gentleman, I would be less likely to dislike them as a group.

Michael Totten has published a good essay in TCS on who the enemy is. It is not just Al-Qaida. His case is persuasive. Michael also has an interesting blog. The link is to the right.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds has published a piece in Tech Central Station on the current attempts to get to space and exploit it. His focus is on the issue of property rights in space and the current lack of law in that area. Glenn Reynolds is also the creator of Instapundit.

I have for some time considered a posting on elitism. The longer I thought about it, the more I realized that one post wouldn't do, that there were too many examples. Radly Balko has published an essay on Fox News about third world labor realities vs. elitist perceptions (not exactly the subject, but a far better presentation on the issue than I could make. Radly also has a blog, The Agitator, which I recommend. The link is at the right.

Victor Davis Hanson whose essay I linked yesterday has this to say today. Thanks to my newest link, Right Wing News for this.

I have just added Right Wing News to the right. They had the intelligence to name AnalPhilosopher Website of the Day. Congratulations, Keith!

President Bush visited Ohio today, and apparently was going to be staying or visiting at the hotel across from my work. The street between my work and the hotel was blocked off, with city dump trucks set cross-wise. The lane on the main thoroughfare next to the hotel was blocked off. The row of parking slots next to the street was blocked off with barrels. The exit from the parking lot was blocked off with another dump truck, and the street further down was blocked as well. There were police cars all over the place and police watching everybody. I also heard a lot of helicopters flying around.

Considering that this is a free society, why should the President need so much security? Because he is the most powerful man on the earth. Never mind that he has to have the advice and consent of the Senate for much of it, or that he has no money without Congressional approval, and the courts can rule he has overstepped his bounds. At any given instant he still has a tremendous amount of power to wield. With the few exceptions in our history, John Wilkes Booth [Yeah, I mentioned him in the previous blog.], Lee Harvey Oswald [Him, too.] and others, Americans don’t have a penchant for killing Presidents. However, especially now, there are foreign agents that would literally give their lives to assassinate our President, be he George W. Bush, or any one else.

It is an unfortunate thing, but all concentrations of power whether benign or brutal, draw opposition and attempts to destroy them. This country is fortunate in that we have a Constitution and an electoral process to substitute for a coup d’etat. Yet look at the current emotional level of this year’s Presidential politics and try to deny that without a 200+ year history, we could be another third-world country “electing” our leaders with guns and troops.

Like I said about orange barrels and construction, don’t cuss the inconveniences from Presidential security, be proud of it. It is the proof of this country's power and place in the world.

Time is a very interesting concept. In our day to day lives we take its existence for granted, yet philosophers and scientists argue over its nature and even its very existence. Science fiction writers have had a grand time with time (OK, I'm afraid this piece will be full of such statements.) They travel forwards in time, backwards in time, sideways in time. Their characters do all three. (Usually not sidewise in the same story as forwards and backwards) Sidewise in time is the parallel universe type of story, where the author imagines the universe, or at least our subset of it, as it might be if some significant event had not occurred. There was one series in the old days of Analog Science Fact/Fiction (originally Astounding Science Fiction) where there were multiple parallel universes.

Very briefly I see a problem with sidewise time because if the separation points are quantum in nature, then what determines the creation of the next parallel version? If they are not quantum in nature, then what would separate one parallel universe from the next. It is very likely that this one falls on its own internal deficiencies.

Time seems to be inherently paradoxical when considered in any way other than a single-directional, straight line. There is always the travel back in the past and shoot your parents/grandparents/grand? type of consideration, or, for that matter, making any change in the history of time. These fall into two camps, every change mushrooms and is amplified, and changes are damped and require a lot of effort to make permanent.

One early story of the first type I read had dinosaur hunting as a time-travel sport. In order to have no impact on the present, the hunt was designed to kill a dinosaur that would otherwise die in a short time from a natural cause, and to remove the bullet that did the killing before returning to home-time. In this story the central character left a relatively benign society on the eve of an election that seemed assured to maintain the moderation. During the hunt, he inadvertently kills a butterfly and returns to a harsh society.

One of the stories of the second type, which I cannot remember any details from, had a central character constantly going back in time to make a change and finding it always undone. There were also stories where there was a time-traveling organization that kept time policed from people wanting to change it for nefarious purposes.

I also remember a story where a man invents time travel to go back and make investments in order to have the money to afford to create and finance the experiments that allow him to go back in time and make the investments....... One of the best of this type of story is "The Knife." (I think that is the correct title). An anthropologist goes forward in time to the ruins of his own university and finds a knife in a museum. The knife is unlike anything every seen. It is analyzed, and in the process a small notch is cut on the blade to obtain a sample. A search in time is then conducted to determine when the knife was placed in the museum and where it came from. The problem is that the only footprints are the ones that originally brought the knife back in time, and when the knife is in the museum this time it has a notch.

One problem that is missed or a single solution is generally taken is one of spatial displacement during time travel. Almost all time travel stories have the person or object remain in the same physical location on the earth. It leads in some cases to interesting arrivals when he/she/it is below or above earth level at the destination.

I did some thinking about time travel a few (actually quite a few) years ago. One of the problems that I saw was that there would be huge energy barriers set up between the time-traveling object and the rest of the universe. This of course assumes that one is actually taking a volume of the current universe forward or backward in time and the traveler is residing in that volume. This is the fundamental assumption of all time travel stories. True time-travel would have a person become younger and younger until they disappeared as an ovum/sperm disparity if backwards in time, or died of old-age if forward in time.

The second problem is what happens with respect to physical displacement in the universe. Suppose we travel backwards in time for 50 years. In that time the earth will have rotated over 18,000 times, it will have gone around the sun 50 times, but would not be exactly at the same place in its orbit, because the orbit precesses, and the sun would have moved through space, and our galaxy would also have moved through space. Does the traveler somehow remain bonded to the geography through the backwards changes? Or will Traveler have to constantly correct physical location?

The third problem I see is how will Traveler maintain contact with the universe? Of necessity there will be a time/energy gradient between the small, local volume of the universe that is traveling and the rest of the universe. This gradient will increase with distance traveled. How will any type of signal cross that barrier?

A fourth problem is how will matter be displaced from in front/behind the traveling volume? And does it depend on how fast forward or backwards in time the volume is traveling? What happens when it stops?

And we haven't even gotten to the fun stuff like what happens if I shoot John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald?

All the foregoing questions are basically dealing with traveling to the past. But, what about the future? Now we get into some real metaphysical fun. The first question is, "Is there a future?" that is, a future that is concretely real. If the answer is yes, we have just stated that the universe is deterministic, because our current time is simply a location on a pre-existing string of events and objects. If there is not a future, then what happens when we try to travel to the future? Do we create a limited future consisting of our small volume of the universe that is traveling, and if so does it impact the universe that hasn't arrived yet? Is it possible to travel to a future faster than the universe is already doing so? Or does Traveler annihilate when past the current time?

So we discover that speculating on time travel leads to a major metaphysical problem. Is the Universe deterministic, and whether or no, does the future exist before we arrive there?

Dick McDonald at The Right Guage has posted this reminder of the history of Ted Kennedy as he accuses President Bush of lying and campaigns for John Kerry. I remember much of this well. Anyone under 40 needs to read it.

I just finished reading PC Police in Views on the Fox News page.

I don't give a damn if a person is black, white, puce, green, red, violet, pink, chartreuse, or any other color. I don't give a damn if a person sleeps with the same sex, the opposite sex, themselves, a group or whatever. What pisses me off is that there is nothing even-handed about it anymore.

Blacks call a cartoon of a black teacher having screwed up a science experiment "racist" and created a big hullabaloo over it. Stupid idiots! You should be glad that blacks are considered qualified to be science teachers. The same cartoon has been applied to white science teachers for years. Welcome to TRUE equality. Or do you want to be more equal like the pigs in Animal Farm.

Both sides-- LEAVE SEX IN THE BEDROOM. What ever you like, just do it and shut up about it. Quit bashing each other and condemning each other and demanding visibility and sanctions and recognition. If the laws are uneven in application deal with it the way everything else is dealt with, in the courts and legislators. Just ban all message T-shirts from schools. I am a firm believer in school uniforms.

There are a lot worse problems in the world than the above. Get a life! Self-pity and self-righteousness doesn't solve anything, it just keeps it going--look at Ireland and Israel for examples.

OK, I have that off my chest. Maybe we can all have a better day.

I am a woodworker. I have built doors, chests, tables, cabinets, athletic lockers, and am currently working on a bed. Woodworking is where my kinesthetic side comes to the fore. I am mostly a visual person, working with printed word and diagrams. But my secondary learning and expression method is doing. I have always loved to work with my hands. I used to take things apart and put them together just for the fun of it. I loved Erector sets. What I have found is that woodworking satisfies all of this.

Ten years ago, I was a very crude woodworker. I remember going into a Shop Smith store several years before that and seeing the hardwood with rough edges and surfaces and being intimidated. It was ten years ago that I agreed to make Lego tables for one of my wife's day-care moms, who then sold them to doctors' and dentists' offices and at holiday shows. I acquired a table saw and router table and started buying hardwood from a store that had evening seminars, at $10 a shot. I rapidly learned about grain, and planing and joining. I became bolder in what I would tackle.

I started working for the wood store part time, and learned much more just by being there and watching. I began to be able to tell one wood from the other before it was finished. I learned many techniques along the way as well. The highpoint of this was when I was given a project of my own when the shop contracted a major chapel renovation.

One of the things that makes even the simplest project interesting is that no two pieces of wood are identical. Both can be tight-grained oak or maple, yet when run through a planer or joiner one will tear-out and the other not. (Tear-out is when a chip of wood is removed rather than a shaving by the cutting knife, and it leaves a rough pit instead of a smooth surface.) Reversing the feed direction sometimes helps, but not always. Another is to engineer the project correctly. Joints have to have to be self-supporting for maximum strength, and wood is best in compression or tension, not sheer or bend. In addition, one has to allow for expansion and contraction of the wood. Wood expands and contracts with temperature and moisture, 1/4 inch per foot across the grain, and almost nothing with the grain. Where planks join a grain at right angles at their ends, this expansion must be allowed for, or it will eventually destroy the piece.

My favorite challenge on major pieces is to pick the grain for best effect. I can order 100 board-feet (one board-foot is 12 inches square by 1 inch thick) of white oak (my favorite wood), and can find mostly the darker heart-wood, but also pieces with sap-wood in them. Since I generally need to glue several boards together to make wider boards, the grain needs to match as closely as possible between the edges, so that it gives the effect of one large board. No only that, but one has to incorporate the sap wood aesthetically, because there is too much to be discarded. Another challenge is to pick the best grain for show. I was very fortunate when I built the memento chest (looks like a blanket chest, just a different purpose). I happened to receive some white oak that had a beautiful, swirled grain like hickory. I was able to glue it up and use if for the front panels. The bed I am currently working on will have a lot of different surfaces, and it was indeed interesting and challenging to choose the grain to make it look showy in the appropriate places and yet have there be a sense of continuity.

I love watching the grain pattern evolve as I plane rough-sawn planks to first smoothness, and then sand and finally finish them when I finish the piece. I love the feel of wood as it becomes smoother with each finer grit of sandpaper. Typically I will sand first with 80, then 120 or 150 grit. If I am staining the piece, I stop there, but if it is an oil finish, I sand to 220 grit. I then apply the oil, usually Danish oil, and when it has dried several days, I wipe on gel varnish and wet sand it with 600 grit paper. This leaves a smooth, silky hand-rubbed feel that is quite durable. I use gel varnish or a clear urethane finish on stained pieces.

I have seen and appreciated glossy finishes. They require a lot of skill and patience. I am not a fan of these; I like being near the wood when I stroke the finished piece.

It's funny; I lost much of my urge for golf, when I took up woodworking. I think it is because it provided the same reward, a way to escape the everyday pressures and do something that the thing itself was the goal. The additional benefit was that I had something besides a score-card when I was done.

Bloggers take it very seriously. Pragmatic Libertarian apologized for light blogging due to classes. Keith, the AnalPhilosopher, has done the same when he had technical problems. Peg Kaplan at What If? did it when she went to the National Bridge Tournament (and kicked butt, bringing home the National title in mixed doubles), Steve Headley at Texas Conservative did when he went to Europe. I have done it as well. We all seem to feel a need to publish daily or explain why.

Notice that we seem to take the blogging, not ourselves seriously. All of my favorite blogs, which include the three for John Ray, Dissecting Leftism, Greenie Watch, PC Watch, publish daily, but never concern themselves with the authors, except incidentally when it advances the meaning.

Diversity of opinion is the watch phrase. With the exception of Marc Cooper, a liberal (BTW though his latest column is obviously liberal, it is not offensive. He does not go beyond his facts, nor engage in senseless bashing.), all the links to the right are to libertarian/conservative type of bloggers. Yet, none of them will present the material the same way nor choose the same items to be of importance.

Bloggers give credit. They thank each other and mention where they get their links. They recommend each other and can tell why.

All in all, they form a community. Typically this is referred to as "virtual" community, as if a community requires physical structures to exist. I would strongly disagree. A community is defined by its common spirit, not its structures. I have seen collections of very nice homes and stores that would never be considered a community. Yet, I feel a strong sense of comradeship with other bloggers, in particular those that I correspond with as well as cross post.

I just read this on Fox News. The military has moved very fast to deal with the torture case. Under the headline is a note that six MP's face criminal charges. Good. I do ask though, what about the civilians that were part of it?

Thanks to the Maximum Leader at Naked Villainy for this link to Victor David Hanson's essay, "What the President Might Say." Thorough and eloquent.

Since today is Sunday, it seemed appropriate that I should publish some more of my religious thinking. Here is what I have put together on the subject of sin.

One of the most important contributions of religion to civilization is the concept of sin. This is because sin has a connotation that extends beyond the disobeying of rules, and takes into account motive as well as behavior. It also is more comprehensive in its application. My working definition is , “Sin is that which harms either oneself or others.” There are a number of behaviors that are perfectly legal, but on an individual or person-to-person level can be harmful. Any excess tends to come under that umbrella. Food, drink, sex and greed are the prime examples where legal behavior can lead to harm. By branding the excess as sinful, a moral force to correct the behavior is established. In addition, sin requires knowing that the sinful act is wrong.

The nature of sin is a conflict of newer human behavior with older animal behavior. With the exception of pure evil, most sin is driven by emotions. It occurs even when we know it is not right, or that we will be sorry. This is because the emotional part of our brains has remained very powerful as the rational part has evolved. No doubt this was/is a necessity to insure that we remain motivated to do those things necessary to survival.

The New Testament deals primarily with the nature of Jesus and only secondarily with what is sinful. Jesus pointed out that He does not supplant the Law but expands it. He wants all to honor and obey the Law. This means that Biblical definitions of sin must come primarily from the Old Testament. From my research so far, the Ten Commandments and some prohibitions on certain specific behaviors in various books, especially Proverbs, are the only definite statements of what is sinful. In the area of sex, adultery, the seduction of virgins, male homosexuality, and general prohibitions against ‘licentiousness’ are all that are specifically mentioned. The omissions are as important as the explicit prohibitions.

Sin and Punishment:
Erasmus and Luther touched on God allowing or possibly encouraging sin. Erasmus taking the stand that the person was predisposed to sin, and since God would work with all persons, he motivated the sinner and the sinner under that motivation sinned more greatly. (I notice I get pompous and Biblical when I start these kind of discussions) Luther essentially said "Don't question it, God does what he does and it is all good." I don't look upon God as punitive, or vindictive. The Bible, especially the OT, often takes that view. I think it is much more subtle than that.

If we are open to His influence, we find it easier to strive for the good, and when we do so to the best of our ability, and are genuinely remorseful about our sins, He forgives and even rewards, though not necessarily in ways we expect. However, if we do evil, He does not directly punish. Rather He lets us harvest the results of our wrong-doing. (To directly contradict Erasmus, God did not harden Pharaoh's heart. Pharaoh was obsessed with control. That overcame the remorse of losing his child, even though he had been told it was the result of his obsession with controlling the Jewish slaves.) Actually this can be a much more effective justice than some immediate punishment.

I am a firm believer that justice will always happen. Most often on this earth, and not always as result of direct action to punish. The punishments we craft for ourselves by our behavior can be far harsher than what we might think of as direct action from outside. In one of G & S's operettas, there is a song, "Let the Punishment Fit the Crime." This is often what happens when we receive the consequences of our actions. Example in point, the parent that is harsh, unloving, self-centered, and expects the children to live for their expectations. The likely outcome is a lonely, unloved old age with no one remorseful when they die and no one to visit the grave or remember them later. It takes a long time in coming (the biggest problem most people have with justice, it can be very slow), but the outcome is harsh and cold. Or for another example, the collapse of the USSR took place when the internal contradictions of communism finally were to great to ignore. The result for many communist leaders was deposition, imprisonment, and even death, the very things they used as tools of coercion.

To extend this discussion further, I do not believe in Satan or the Devil, or in Hell. I think Satan is an attempt to personify and externalize our own unwanted desires and emotions. God does not require an anti-god. Based on the few anecdotes in Hello from Heaven, persons that were evil or bad or did many bad things in this life end up very unhappy. [I discussed this in more detail in an earlier post] I suspect rather than being tortured in the exquisite Hell that Dante imagined, they are made to simply face what they were, until they are sufficiently remorseful. Consider the impact of having to face in full emotional impact all the deepest shames in our hearts. How much worse for those who spend their lives in genuinely evil behavior.

Original Sin
In an allegorical sense the doctrine of Original Sin has some validity. Man evolved from animals and their simple, self-centered ways of living. As Man evolved more complex behavior and thinking, he began to create ways of behaving and thinking that ran contrary to simple animalistic ways, but had great survival value. Over time (hundreds of thousands to millions of years) these new ways of behavior became the rule. Older contrary ways were seen as wrong, but seemed to be part of our makeup. Thus we have original sin.

Part of rearing children is civilizing them. Left to their own devices, children can be quite anti-social. This is further support for the idea of original sin. However, we don't hold them responsible for their behavior, and consider them innocent until they are older. Hence arose my antipathy to the doctrine of Original Sin as I first knew it--how could an innocent baby be sinful? I presuppose that to be sinful requires knowledge of good and evil. We are sinners to the extent that our deeper, animalistic impulses control our behavior, without being controlled and channeled by our intellect and sense of morals.

Luther said God controls everything. He meant in the sense of everything, all the time. God may have the power to control everything[I no longer think this. See the previously linked post], but I think he only guides rather than controls. I have already argued that he does nothing to violate the laws of physics, and that He works through people. In working through people, He does not force himself on us, He enters when we let him. Much like the professor who makes the students try to solve the problems before giving help, God lets us strive for ourselves until we ask for help. The implications of this are that life on this earth is preparation for life in the next.

Sin and Virtue:
Virtue is relatively ignored. Much more energy is spent discussing sin -- Because there is so much of it. Jesus discusses how to be virtuous.

Texas Conservative has returned from his overseas trip. He has already posted several items.

The Pragmatic Libertarian posted this link concerning a bill in the UK to create a national identity card. Other than the fee structure and some additional requirements, I fail to see much difference between it and our Social Security Card. The fact that the national ID looks so bad and SS doesn't reminds me that the way to cook a frog is to put him in cold water and turn on the heat. By the time he might realize he is too hot, it is too late to escape. Social Security cards started strictly as an identifier for benefits. Try being born without one now.

I saw this idea posted by Greg over at Begging to Differ. A list, reproduced below of so-called Classic Books is passed around and each person marks what they have read. I have done the same below with bold lettering. The number of asterisks indicates my opinion on a scale of 0 to 4. I was intrigued by some of choices, and added a few of my own at the bottom. Have fun--I don't take it too seriously. You can see how unwell-read I am. :-))

Classic Book List

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales ***
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante – Inferno **
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe ****
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment *
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers ***
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones *
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby ***
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary *
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies *
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22 **
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad **
Homer - The Odyssey **
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World ***
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis **
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild ***
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel GarcÃ-a - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick **
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm *
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago **
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales ****
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac ****
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye ****
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet *
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth *
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream *
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ***
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath *
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island ****
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels **
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David – Walden *
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace *
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ***
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five ***
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass ****
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Others that I have read by mentioned authors
Bocaccio - Decameron **
Dante – Purgatorio ***
Dumas, Alexandre – The Count of Monte Christo ****
Hemingway, Ernest – For Whom the Bell Tolls *
Ibsen, Henrik – Hedda Gabler ***
Orwell, George - 1984 ***
Tolstoy, Leo – Anna Karenina *

Peggy Kaplan at What If? posted this link to an editorial written by a former solder about the torture of Iraqi prisoners. Here is the opening paragraph, but it is important to read the entire text.

THE United States just experienced its first true disaster in Iraq. As news of the disgraceful mistreatment of prisoners by American soldiers sweeps the world, our enemies celebrate a major propaganda gift. Even our friends cannot defend the indefensible.

There are some things we can do to minimize the damage.

1) Do not deny it existed

2) President Bush has to address the world with an apology on behalf of the United States and its armed forces. He also has to make it clear that he and we condemn this behavior in the strongest terms.

3) There must be an IMMEDIATE and PUBLIC trial of both the military and civilians involved. If the civilians cannot be tried in military court, despite working for the military, then their civilian trials had best be ruled by a strong judge, and made expeditious, with none of usual bullshit that substitutes for defense these days. The perpetrators are entitled to a proper defense, one to prove they did what they are accused of, and two to make sure they are convicted of only that which they are guilty. BUT no plea-bargains, mercy sentencing, constant delays and grandstanding. This has to be the showcase of American and Military Jurisprudence if we are to salvage anything from this mess. The rest of the world must see what justice in a free world looks like.

Because I consider myself a person of principle, I seem to be more angry and sickened by this than some of the people I have heard commenting on it. Make no mistake, this is one of the biggest black-eyes the US has ever received. Much as I wish to see Osama Bin Laden and Sheik Omar dead, I do not wish to see them tortured. I think the humiliation of being captured and shown as prisoners would be far more effective.

At this point, I hope and pray that our leadership sees the right thing to do and does it--unhesitatingly.

My friend Keith, the AnalPhilosopher, celebrated his 47th birthday at the beginning of April. He has suggested I post my comments on aging I sent as a birthday card. I cannot readily edit it to be general, so with Keith's permission here is what I wrote:

Keith,

A day late, but Happy Birthday, anyway!

Regardless of atheism or theism, life is meant to be lived to its fullest every minute. Once I became aware of my own mortality around the age of 30 (Hence the old phrase among young people--never trust anyone over 30), I also realized I had to actually accomplish things in a time frame. I couldn't wait for someday. As I have gotten older, I also have had to relinquish quests for things that no longer can be accomplished. The result is to be more focused and actually accomplish more.

You have noted in earlier posts about the effects of aging. You cannot run as you once did. I find that I don't have the raw strength I once had, nor the endurance. I can get some of it back with regular exercise, and you are obviously keeping in shape and good health.

I can tell you that if you were to die tonight, I would not mourn for you, I would mourn for me and my loss. I would celebrate you and would find some way to archive your blog before it disappeared. When the living grieve, once they let go of what might have been, they still feel a loss that is painful, but are able to find joy in the existence of the deceased.

When you turn 50 and 60 and beyond, I hope people throw big parties that have lots of black crepe paper and napkins and over-the-hill gag gifts. It is their way of laughing at death and cheering you on.

Happy Birthday and many, many more.

Bill

Radly Balko at The Agitator posted this item on the amount of money spent on counterterrorism vs. drug interdiction. There was three times the money spent fighting drugs. Considering the "effectiveness" of the drug war, it probably didn't make much difference which way the balance of spending went.

Having technical problems with my main logon. Blogging may be sparse until I can get if fixed on Monday.