Chronological Snobbery

C.S. Lewis coined the term "chronological snobbery" and talking about the myth of progress. In the popular mind, anything older than yesterday is old fashioned and impossibly out of date. In the face of the constant technological flux this may be understandable but it ought to be sobering to realize that we really don't know how the pyramids were made and the columns of the Parthenon are really a wonder. Perhaps the ancients didn't have everything figured out, but they knew a heck of a lot more than we generally give them credit for.

The Antikythera mechanism is a mechanical analog computer recovered from an ancient shipwreck estimated to be from about 150 B.C. and recovered in 1902 from the sea floor near the Greek island of Antikythera. It depicts the locations of the moon and the five planets known at the time. Check out the video below from the New Scientist

Don't We Have Enough to Worry About?

I'm really amazed how emotional the "global warming" issue seems to be. I was just exchanging a series of emails with a troll named 'Q' on my sister Mary's blog. The usual propaganda was being exchanged. There is little doubt that there is some global warming on average. After all the ice from the last ice age is still melting. What is less understandable is why anyone thinks we, i.e. mankind, has anything to do with it. It's true that we burn a lot of fossil fuels, but the human contribution to CO2 is nominally 3% of what is a very small amount to begin with.

But that I have to mention that is already misleading because it has not been established that CO2 drives climate. It's about 380 parts per million in the atmosphere. The ice core data shows that warming precedes increases in CO2, not the other way around. One theory is that increased heat releases CO2 dissolved in the oceans.

The tree ring data shows that the current warming is not out of line with warming in the past long before there were humans burning large amounts of fossil fuels. Even the local temperature data going back to around the 1850s precedes the build up in fossil fuel usage but the temperature build up (slope) before and after the increases in fossil fuel usage did not change slope.

Finally, the global warming alarmists have used fallacious data and when this was discovered they did not correct it. That's quite disturbing since it shows that they are more interested in their social agenda than in the truth. There are too many Chicken Littles in the world sounding the alarm about all manner of things, most of which are at least exaggerated and often enough total fabrications.

The Primacy of Doubt and the Fallacy of the Answer

Among the proper goods of the mind is the search for and discovery of truth about the existence we all share. Key to discovery is an inquiring mind asking, constantly asking, questions. There is an embrace between the questions and the answers. There are two principles that I think are necessary on the journey of discovery:

AVOID THE FALLACY OF THE ANSWER
The fallacy of the answer is the idea that questions necessarily have answers and that often only a single answer. The questions frame the search for truth. Often the question narrows or dictates rightly or wrongly the direction of the search and can even misdirect. Usually there are many answers and there may be no answers. When there are many answers there may be no best answer. When people demand a single answer they are demanding the cessation of thought not the answer, for there is no answer in general.

EMBRACE THE PRIMACY OF DOUBT
If you have an answer it is essential not to stop looking. The answer may be wrong. It may not be the only answer. If you stop looking then you have abandoned the search. There are no answers that can not be further enriched. Many thinkers have expressed this in various ways and I'd like to provide some short quotes:

SOCRATES: "I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."

PETER ABELARD: "The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth."

MORTIMER ADLER: "When judgment is not suspended, and the mind judges correctly or incorrectly about the truth or falsity of propositions under consideration, such judgments may be either highly probable (i.e., beyond a reasonable doubt) or just more probable than contrary judgments, but they are never beyond the shadow of a doubt. They change from time to time, as new empirical evidence is found or new and better reasons are given for altered judgments."

RICHARD FEYNMAN: "The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt."

THE UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE OF EXISTENTIAL DOUBT
I think we would all be served by accepting the universal principle of existential doubt. No matter how certain we are of anything, we are fallible human beings and we are likely wrong in some manner or degree even if we are correct in other aspects.

Meeting of Minds

I always liked the whole "mind-meld" idea from StarTrek. It was especially poignant when Spock mind-melded with the mineral lifeform the horta whose children the miners had been harvesting on a mining planet.

What happens whenever we communicate is a form of mind-meld. An image in our minds is converted to a stream of words which we deliver as sound and those we are talking to hear the sounds and reassemble them into a version of the image now in their minds. We rarely reflect on how wonderful and mysterious this process is. The amount of shared knowledge which is required to give it any hope of working well is actually rather staggering. Yet everyday we communicate in this way and take it all very much for granted.

Remembering Pearl Harbor

My dad was on the U.S.S. Detroit, a light cruiser at Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack. I was only newly conceived in my mother's womb. She was in their small apartment in Oahu. The picture here is a Japanese recon photo published of the western side of Ford island. The caption is from another Detroit crewman, John Noyce Millner (you can see his comments by clicking on the picture): "Photograph of the western side of Ford Island and ships in moorings offshore, taken from a Japanese Navy plane during the attack. Ships are (from left to right): USS Detroit (CL-8); USS Raleigh (CL-7), listing to port after being hit by one torpedo; USS Utah (AG-16), capsized after being hit by two torpedoes; and USS Tangier (AV-8)."

Stories I remember are that they had to shoot the lock off the armament locker because the fellow with the key was nowhere around. Also they didn't have fuses for the anti-aircraft guns so they just pumped shells out which exploded at the peak of the trajectory (I gather) instead of being fused. Dad was contributing a little independent fire with a 30-06 rifle, probably not effective but good for the spirit when you're being attacked.

I always think that the John Wayne movie "In Harm's Way" is pretty much based on Detroit. Dad also had the con when Detroit was exploring North of the islands and was attacked by a Japanese submarine's torpedo. He ordered the ship to turn hard and that heeled the ship over some 60 degrees and dumped the Captain's breakfast in his lap. He was angry and came out yelling about the idiot who had turned the ship.

Luckily the Admiral embarked (the Detroit was the command ship of a Destroyer squadron) saw the whole thing and defused the situation by yelling down, "Well done son!" At least that's how I heard the story. Noyce Millner elaborates on the Detroit story with:

When the attack was over the Detroit got under way about 12:30 pm along with the USS St. Louis and a small group of destroyers with orders to proceed north and search for the enemy. After a three day unsuccessful effort the group returned to Pearl Harbor. What we saw was disheartening. Eighteen ships were sunk or capsized. Aircraft on the parking strip were burned. The hangars were destroyed. Many other ships were in various stages of damage. The surface of the harbor was covered with black oil, debris and floating bodies.

The Detroit left almost immediately to escort the commercial liners Coolidge and Scott which were transporting military wives children and some wounded to San Francisco.

My mom and I (on-board) were on one of those commercial liners that Detroit and her destroyers escorted to the mainland. I wasn't actually born until June 4th, 1942 the day of the battle of Midway when the Japanese carriers got their comeuppance. But that is another story.

No End In Sight

Down the Drain

The parade of whiners continues ... banks ... auto executives ... anyone that is big and irresponsible is crawling to congress for a fix. Since when is it a government function to throw money at whiners? Did I miss that part of the constitution? Oh I know, it's the line that says "Steal from responsible citizens to bail out irresponsible citizens ..." that must be it.

The song currently being sung is that bail outs are cheaper than collapse. Why should that be true? If you give money to irresponsible idiots they will throw it away and then collapse. Just look at congress as the foremost example. Besides where does all this money come from? Someone has to actually work to make it so that government can waste it. But government can waste it faster than it can be created. In that direction lies not depression but dissolution.

We will be on the road to social disintegration if we continue down this path. You can't save yourself by irresponsible support for irresponsibility. But with enough idiots reciting the mantra we have a bunch of Democrats moving that way. The sucking sound you hear is the country going down the drain and as we get closer the churn gets faster.

The only advantage I currently have is that I'm not in debt, but that just means that the gubbment will come and steal what little I have left. I think it may be time to go back to that old American custom of paying in cash.

Cool Stuff

Always writing about politics or greed or both seems like it could get mighty boring. Today Newt Gingrich sent around a political piece that sums up the current crisis following a Thomas Friedman editorial of November 25th as the progeny of a breakdown in well morals. He cites a sentence at the end of Friedman's editorial: “The financial meltdown involved a broad breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics.” My own view is that this means a bunch of people should go to jail, not be bailed out by throwing our hard earned money in after them. But it is all too depressing and way too predictable. It's just going to be more of the same so let's get on to Cool Stuff.

The Pulse Smartpen

I just picked up a Pulse Smartpen from Livescribe and I have to say I'm impressed. A few years ago I remember an earlier technology and I thought about getting that at the time but it seemed too expensive and too klutzy. The Pulse offers 200 hours of sound recording (2 Gigs of memory) and includes stereo earphone/microphones as well as a notebook (it requires special paper).

Well it came in the mail and outdid my expectations by quite a lot. Not only does it save your notes in high-fidelity, but it doubles as a calculator and a sound recorder and the lecture you record is time-synced to the notes you are taking. So you can tap on a note and the pen will play back what it was recording when you took that note. It also does text and number recognition and has a built in calculator. You create a calculate point and you can tap on it and them write (yes write) the four function math problem and the pen does the calculation.

You can also get third party software that converts script to text. I downloaded the trial version and if you are fairly careful it does a pretty accurate job. My handwriting is pretty good so maybe that's not a fair test.

One of the clever little touches is the piano. You can draw a keyboard and play the piano and your pen makes appropriate sounds as you do it. You can even select the type of instrument you want to sound like and pick an accompanying rhythm. The 2 Gig version was $199 and a one gig version goes for $50 less. At that price this is one of the coolest gadgets I've seen in years.