# AfterMath

 It's Over — Posted Sunday October 28 2018 Words cannot begin to express the level of visceral contempt and hatred I have for America. The lies, demagoguery and killings just go on and on, motivated by the most vile, evil and corrupt president Americans have ever elected, while America's Christians remain silently compliant, ever faithful to the corrupt Republicans, corporations, military and gun lobbies they unswervingly support. Meanwhile, in spite of all the shootings, bombings, voter suppression, gerrymandering, bigotry and hatred being spewed and enacted by Trump and the GOP, there looms the very real probability that the House and Senate will remain in Republican hands, while any counter efforts that may result from the Mueller investigation will be nullified by a politicized, Trump-compliant Supreme Court. Americans are the stupidest and most corrupt, ignorant, arrogant and dangerous people on the planet. I have nothing more to say.

 Here We Go — Posted Wednesday October 24 2018 The right-wing chant LOCK HER UP! has now been updated to BLOW HER UP! Pipe bombs were sent today to Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Maxine Waters, Eric Holder and George Soros. The package addressed to Holder was intended to be returned to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, now considered to be a boomerang bombing target. All of the intended victims are high-ranking Democrats. Thanks to Trump, America is now officially fucking insane. Update: A suspect was arrested this morning (10-26-18) in connection with the bomb mailings. Here's his van, literally festooned with right-wing stickers praising Donald Trump, patriotism and God:

 How Appropriate — Posted Tuesday October 23 2018 Some years back, a lady sold a piece of toast for $20,000 on eBay. When it popped out of the toaster, it featured an uncanny image of Mary, the mother of Jesus. I believe someone actually bought it at that price. Last year, another piece of toast appeared with the face of Jesus himself. The owner has the toast preserved in his refrigerator, waiting for someone to cough up the$25,000 he wants for it. While on a long walk several years ago I spotted a magnolia tree that had a damaged area oozing sap. It looked exactly like a woman's genitals, based on what little I know about the subject. The last time I walked by, the owner had removed the tree, but I doubt if anyone bought it from him. Now another miraculous image of Jesus has appeared. I didn't see the price tag, but if you buy it the owner will throw a pet in with the deal:

 The Last Straw — Posted Saturday October 20 2018 A number of Republicans as well as most Democratics are calling Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's explanation for the "accidental" killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi "preposterous." Yeah, 15 Saudi agents, including one packing a bone saw, decided to have a "discussion" with Khashoggi in an Istanbul embassy earlier this month. The discussion turned violent, and Khashoggi was unintentionally beaten to death and dismembered, with his remains carted out of the embassy in luggage the Saudi agents just happened to bring with them. President Trump, who doesn't give a damn about the killing or body slamming of journalists, considers bin Salman's explanation to be credible, a position that will guarantee that the $110 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia (and many more to come) will go off without a hitch while the oil will keep flowing. How did America get to this point? How did the Republican Party, not to mention all Americans themselves, come to embrace such transparent evil? People ask me why I'm so hard on America's Christians. The utter silence of Christians on matters that touch on the existential evil that has befallen this country proves that if one can believe the preposterous nonsense one reads in the Bible, one can accept the breathtaking immorality and lies that are spinning out of Washington D.C. today. Indeed, religion and politics have merged into a single unholy alliance in America. Death to Donald Trump. Death to the Republican Party. And if it refuses to change, Death to America.  Bertrand Russell on Religion — Posted Friday October 12 2018 Bertand Russell (1872-1970) was a noted British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, pacifist, atheist, free thinker and Nobel Prize winner in literature. In a 1927 essay he famously explained why he was not a Christian, and he noted that fear lay at the very foundation of the faith: Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion has gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the Churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it. I have always believed (either consciously or unconsciously) that fear is the foundation of any religion, the sole purpose of which is to provide a way to deal with the fear of death, illness, poverty and the unknown, while allaying the uncomfortable feeling that life may be without meaning or purpose. Christians I know today invariably have a stock answer for this: "But I am not afraid!" That may indeed be true, but their purported lack of fear is like a heroin addict who, shaking and near insane over his desperate need for a fix, becomes relaxed and serene once the injected drug hits the brain. If you ask him then if he is experiencing any pain or discomfort, he will of course reply that he is not. But it's a temporary cure, as the addict will require regular drug injections to keep him feeling that way. It's exactly the same with a person of devout faith. Sure, she experiences occasional doubts about what she chooses to believe in spite of what her rational mind is telling her, but a visit to her pastor or priest quickly sends those doubts packing. It is no wonder that the great German philosopher, economist, historian, political theorist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx asserted in 1843 that Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.  But Will it Play in a Red State? — Posted Tuesday October 2 2018 Great, but I don't see how they got this past the copyright $$\ldots$$  Sickening — Posted Tuesday September 25 2018 There's an apocryphal (but possibly true) story about the noted mathematican, philosopher and atheist Bertrand Russell, who once gave a public talk on astronomy and the origins of the planet Earth. He told the audience about an ancient superstitious belief that the Earth was flat and supported on the back of a gigantic turtle. One woman in the audience, who apparently was a believer in the Flat Earth theory (sadly, still believed by up to 20% of Americans today), took exception to Russell's cavalier attitude. "What you have told us is rubbish," she said. "The world really is a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." Russell flashed a superior smile before replying, "Then what is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the woman. "But it's turtles all the way down!" New York Times columnist and writer Michelle Goldberg has an opinion piece$$^*$$ in the paper today entitled Pigs All The Way Down in which she reflects on the frat-boy substance of the Republican Party today, as evidenced by its refusal to even consider the possibility that Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh ever engaged in any high school or college hijinx involving sexual assault, despite an increasing number of women claiming that Kavanaugh had assaulted them in the past. If not outright rejection, we're hearing things like "Well, it's just what boys do," not only from Kavanaugh's male supporters in the Senate but from Republican women as well. I found Goldberg's article to be a devastating exposé of the "rotten foundations of elite [Republican] male power." Although Goldberg openly admits that some of the alleged incidents may be subject to faulty memory on the part of the women involved, she includes some very disturbing and factual aspects of the antics of men like George W. Bush, Donald Trump and Kavanaugh that make the GOP look like a misogynistic pig trough. I found the 2011 report on Yale University's Delta Kappa Epsilon (of which Bush and Kavanaugh were members) to be sickening. The university took action against the fraterity only when chants like "No means Yes! Yes means Anal!" got to be a little too much, even for an Ivy League college. Then we have all those pretty, invariably blonde 30-somethings on Fox News who consider themselves to be professionals but are willing to tolerate the fratboy antics of sexual perverts like Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, Bill Shine and Charles Payne, lest they be relegated to weather-girl assignments or worse. Naturally, they all fawn over Donald Trump despite proven sexual allegations against the old Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief. And did I mention that they're all good, devout Christians? $$*$$ The article may be behind a view limit. In that case, you can see it here  To Infinity and Beyond — Posted Monday September 24 2018 Writer Nicky Woolf has an interesting article in today's Medium dealing with the nature of reality. These days, theoretical talk about reality tends to gravitate to the Simulation Hypothesis—the idea that we, and everything around us, is a computer simulation. Readers of this site will note (and possibly complain) that I frequently bring up this topic, not because I'm a big fan of science fiction films like The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, World on a Wire and Inception, but mainly because of its philosophical and religious implications. For example, if we are simply digital beings created by a highly advanced "external" computer programmer, then the existence of an all-powerful Creator (or God, if you wish to call it) is neatly and fully explained, while the problem of theodicy is also solved, as the death and suffering of computer-simulated beings would not concern the programmer in the least. While the Simulation Hypothesis has been criticized by many philosophers and physicists as being either unfalsifiable or technologically impossible, Moore's Law (the doubling of computer speed and capability every two years or so) continues to hold, making plausible the possibility (or even likelihood) that the digital creation of vastly complicated simulations in the distant future will actually come about. Such simulations could be so highly advanced that the simulations themselves might be endowed with conscious self-awareness. As a result, the simulations might even have a sense of free will, whether it is truly free or simply implanted by the simulator. What makes Woolf's article so fascinating is that he raises an issue that is usually ignored by the critics. I detail it in the following: Our best estimate is that there is something like $$10^{80}$$ nucleons (protons and neutrons) in the universe, along with even more photons, electrons and neutrinos. Let's say that the universe is composed of $$10^{100}$$ particles, including the fields that accompany these particles. Critics of the Simulation Hypothesis argue that it is nonsensical to think that any computer program could possibly simulate such a vast number of particles and their interactions. But human brains have only about 100 billion neurons, and even with 7.6 billion of us running around the planet right now the total number of neurons is roughly a "mere" $$10^{21}$$, and it is these neurons that account for all of humanity's awareness of their world. A simulator would therefore not have to create $$10^{100}$$ distinct elements in the simulation, but only at most those $$10^{21}$$ comprising what we humans would call "reality." A biologist peering into a microscope, or a physicist conducting a particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, might then observe only what the simulation needs to serve up in order to complete the observer's sense of reality. But wait, say the critics: if we are being simulated, then what about the reality of the simulators themselves? Might they not be simulated in a higher-level simulation? If so, then there may be many levels of multiple simulations above (or parallel) to that, perhaps an infinite number. Is there an "ultimate" simulator, one that stands above all the rest? And if so, what's the underlying purpose of all these simulations? That's a good point, and I daresay we're now getting into the realm of the truly ridiculous. Most cosmologists today believe that our universe came into being on its own accord, and all questions of what came before or how it came about becoming meaningless. In that same sense it might be possible that an infinite "stack" of simulations simply "loops around," with every simulation in a sense being the creator of all the other simulations. There would therefore be no "ultimate" simulation, since every simulation would be the creator itself. In response to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (which roughly states that nothing can be deemed to exist until it is observed), Einstein posed the question "Does the Moon exist if no one is looking at it?" This is of course equivalent to the age-old question of whether a tree falling in a forest makes a noise if nobody's around, which has no answer because it can never be tested. It's the same with the Simulation Hypothesis, provided the simulator doesn't "screw up" by unintentionally revealing a glitch or bug in the software. I'll stop now, as my head is beginning to hurt. Anything that is not expressly forbidden in quantum mechanics is mandatory. — Murray Gell-Mann  Golly G — Posted Saturday September 22 2018 Nearly all of the basic physical constants of Nature are now known to fantastic precision, with measured and calculated values typically agreeing to 7 or more decimal places. For example, the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron is known to 12 decimal places, equivalent to measuring the distance between Los Angeles and New York City to within the width of a human hair. But the value of Newton's gravitational constant $$G_N$$ is known only to 3 decimals, or $$6.673 \times 10^{-11}$$ N $$\cdot kg^{-2} \cdot$$ m$$^2$$, with a large uncertainty beyond the third decimal. This is not only unfortunate but rather embarrassing, since the gravitational force was undoubtedly the first of Nature's forces to be discovered (often painfully and fatally) by man. The reason for this lies in both the relative weakness of the gravitational force and the lack of available precision measuring equipment. Remarkably, the torsion balance approach (see figure), dating back to the late 1700s, is still the only one we have (though it has been greatly refined). Another problem dogging the determination of $$G_N$$ is the lack of a sufficiently small but massive test body—heavy metal spheres, typically used in torsion balances, are comparable in size to the balances themselves, making any general-relativistic approach impossible. Physicist Ethan Siegel has a recent article on his It Starts With A Bang website that discusses the imprecision issue of $$G_N$$ in greater detail, and the reader is encouraged to give it a look. But to me the empirically-determined value of $$G_N$$ involves a bigger issue: is the value a transcendental number like $$\pi = 3.141592 \ldots \,$$, a rational number like $$5/3$$ or, (as some scientists have conjectured), not a fixed number at all, but one dependent on time or the radius of the expanding universe? The latter remains a possibility, as we've only been measuring it for the past two hundred years or so, a mere blink of the eye in cosmological terms. But if $$G_N$$ is not fixed, then what about other physical constants, like the mass and charge of the electron or the presumed infinite lifetime of the proton? We haven't been watching those "constants" for that long, either! All this reminds me of the story of the ephemeral fly (also known as the mayfly), a flying insect that hatches, flits around looking for a mate, then dies only a few hours after being born. Hypothetically, an intelligent ephemeral fly looks at its world as it flies about, marveling at the seeming immortality of the grass and trees it passes by, unaware that they too are mortal, with lifetimes surpassing its own by what we'd consider an inconsequential amount of time. So too might the stars and galaxies in the night sky which, gazing down upon Earth, might muse over the pathetically brief lifetimes of humans. And in an even greater sense is the life of the universe itself which, if the theory of the accelerated expansion of the universe is correct, will eventually wink out as a diffuse gas of high-entropy radiation, devoid of all matter in a bland, nondescript de Sitter void. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that! — Hamlet, musing over Yorick's skull  Immortality? — Posted Monday September 3 2018 When Groucho Marx died in 1977 at the age of 86 following months of lingering illness, he was asked if he had any desire to go on living. He replied that he had been everywhere, seen everything and had accomplished all that he wanted to accomplish, so there was no need for his life to be extended. And when the noted Caltech physicist Richard Feynman was dying, he noted that he wished it would hurry up, as he found the process "boring." He too had seen and done just about everything in his life, although his death in 1988 at the age of just 69 likely left many more things in physics that he might have contributed to. Paul Sagar, a lecturer in political theory in the department of political economy at King's College in London, has an interesting article on immortality in today's Aeon Magazine. His main point is that human life is worthwhile only as long as it's interesting and allows the promise of as-yet unattained fulfillment, and that without them immortality would be not only meaningless but tedious and boring. Notably, Sagar doesn't touch on the religious aspects of immortality—a pity since the very notion of the afterlife is really nothing more than immortality promised by several dominant religions. Ancient peoples, particularly pagans and even early Jews, had no interest in an afterlife. They viewed immortality as something enjoyed only by their gods, and that day-to-day life was difficult enough without worrying about what might come after it. They prayed and sacrified to their gods for a relatively fulfilling and easy life while they were alive, and when death came that was pretty much the end of everything. They accepted the inevitability of death and eternal oblivion without complaining. But that all changed when Christianity arose in the decades following the death of Jesus of Nazareth. Evolving as it did primarily through the writings of the apostle Paul and the gospel writers Mark, Matthew and Luke (although we don't know who they really were), the notion of eternal life inarguably became that faith's major selling point. Up until then the gods offered only earthly health and prosperity, but Christianity's promise of immortality in a blissful afterlife somehow caught on—perhaps living conditions in the first century CE had improved to the point where ordinary people could aspire to something after death. At the very least, the Christian faith provided—for the very first time—a way to allay the fear of death, which was probably just as prevalent and onerous then as it is now. Today, the promise of eternal life is just about all that Christians think about. Without that promise, Christians would feel free to spit in God's eye. But immortality—whether it's promised by the Judeo-Christian-Islamic trinity of Abrahamic religion or any other faith—does not circumvent the problems that Sagar talks about in his article. Even the most diehard Christian today would not deny that an eternity spent upon one's knees singing praises to God would be akin to living in hell, while the return of a Jewish king-like Messiah to rule his subjects in a perpetual earthly heaven would ultimately offer the same kind of unending tedium. If the only purpose of immortality is the permanent postponement of death, without any hope of learning, doing or accomplishing anything truly new and interesting, then eternal life really has no appeal.  Gotta Dance — Posted Monday August 6 2018 The dancers of Strasbourg were subjects of a rapidly changing world where suddenly old verities were in question, the mania spreading by means of the new media of the printing press, along with all manner of unconfirmed, superstitious ideas. — Ed Simon Long before American Bandstand there was the Dance Craze of 1518. Preface: In his strangely prescient 1952 short story The Year of the Jackpot, Robert Heinlein writes about an otherwise ordinary day when for some reason people start acting crazy—bus passengers spontaneously take off their clothes, the Alabama legislature proposes a law repealing the laws of atomic energy, a patent is filed to turn the Earth on its side to warm the Arctic for real estate purposes—all carefully noted by the story's protagonist, Potiphar Breen (the biblical name is not a coincidence), and his girlfriend. She snuggled to him. "Keep me warm." "It will be warmer soon. I mean, I'll keep you warm." "Dear Potty." She looked up. "Potty, something funny is happening to the sunset." "No, darling. To the Sun." Like Heinlein's fictitious nightmare story or a true historical event from 500 years ago, something very odd is happening to people today. In the Rewire.com article Irrational Fear and New Media: The Deadly "Dance Plague" at 500, writer Ed Simon notes a disturbing resemblance between the dance craze of 1518 (whose rapid spread from Strasbourg to other cities and towns in Europe was due in large part to the new-fangled printing press) and the similar inexplicable insanity that has overtaken people worldwide today (but particularly here in America). He notes the utter ridiculousness of the QAnon Conspiracy that has enveloped America's right wing, the persistent belief in a flat Earth by the same idiots, and the newer laundry detergent-eating craze that young and old people alike are increasingly engaging in (likely due to their confusion of bath salts with certain illicit drugs). Can this be attributed solely to the advent of social media technologies like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter or the obsessive (and annoying) use of now-ubiquitous smart phones? I think Simon's only partly right about that. In 16th-century Europe and even in the 1950s of "Jackpot," humans did not have the ability to destroy themselves (and all life) with nuclear weapons, global pollution or the intercontinental spread of contagious diseases. Perhaps the awareness of just how horrible things have gotten, particularly given the fact that some 7.6 billion people now inhabit our increasingly polluted and resource-depleted planet, is finally sinking in. But I would venture to guess that the magnitude of the problems is more than many people can deal with or even comprehend, so they retreat into simplistic thinking and give in to the false assurances of corrupt political leaders. And the most simplistic ones among us are religious believers, especially Christians, who for millennia have relied upon a series of provably-false, nonsensical mythological tales and legends to alleviate the greatest human fear of all, the fear of death.  How Will Trump Skate? With Brilliant Deductive Reasoning! — Posted Monday August 6 2018 Police Chief Wiggum: Nobody move! You're all under arrest for the murder of American democracy! Fat Tony: What's a murder? Rudy Guiliani: My client's innocent! Indeed, what's a murder? What's collusion? What's treason? There's no crime in any of that! American People: We're convinced. Case closed! With apologies to The Simpsons, Season 3, Episode 4, "Bart the Murderer"  What Would Jesus Mister Rogers Do? — Posted Tuesday July 24 2018 At the end of Won't You Be My Neighbor?, the documentary tribute to Fred Rogers of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" that's setting box office records around the country, one of the show's principals advises viewers not to ask "What would Mister Rogers do?" but to consider instead "What will YOU do?" regarding the seemingly hopeless state the country and world are in today. I unashamedly laughed and cried throughout the movie. But it also angered me at times, especially when I saw footage of Fox News accusing Rogers of turning a generation of American children into noncompetitive, unTrump-like wusses with his "You're special and I like you just the way you are" attitude of unconditional acceptance and love. I hope there's a "special" place in Hell where the Fox News people, Trump and all his ilk are forced to watch the movie for eternity, all while roasting in flames. Go see the movie. You'll be a better person for it. And take lots of Kleenex.  Unwinnable — Posted Tuesday July 24 2018 A winnable war is a temp job. An unwinnable war is a yearly salary and a retirement plan. — Comment on YouTube The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. — Albert Einstein Major Daniel Sjursen is a 2005 graduate of West Point who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In this 5-minute video, he outlines the two primary reasons for America's ongoing involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan: profit and sunken costs.  Hermann Weyl Meets Queen — Posted Saturday July 21 2018 Hermann Weyl is immortalized via Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. The Einstein puppet is great, too  Dumber and Dumberer — Posted Thursday July 19 2018 The cover of this week's New Scientist magazine This morning I posted a comment on a popular website via the posting service Disqus.com regarding how stupid the American people have become, especially regarding political and religious issues. My comments were posted but then quickly taken down, presumably because the links I included might be construed as inappropriate or even obscene. Here is a somewhat shortened version: I find it remarkable that with today's advanced scientific knowledge and the instant communication ability we have to share that knowledge with everyone around the world, people seem to be getting dumber. They treat facts as opinions and opinions as facts, especially political and religious notions that we all know are false. "I believe what I believe, therefore it's true" seems to be the mantra of mankind today. This kind of non-thinking religious belief has now infected American politics, ergo Donald Trump and his third wife Melania, who notoriously posed for a lesbian- and BDSM-themed photo spread in 1997 that nobody seems to want to talk about today, especially American evangelicals that brought her and Donald into the White House. Indeed, these same religious conservatives appear to prefer a naked woman in black stilettos for their First Lady, rather than an ape in high heels. There comes a time when things get to be so bleak that hope turns to despair. I've reached that point and then some with America.  What's Missing? — Posted Thursday July 12 2018 PBS SpaceTime currently features about 160 episodes on modern physics, most of which are only about 10 minutes in length. But you can learn a lot of neat stuff in just 10 minutes. The latest episode, hosted by Australian astrophysicist and City University professor Matt O'Dowd, features the one topic that got me interested in physics almost 50 years ago—the principle of gauge invariance: Dr. O'Dowd neglects to say just how accurate these quantum gauge theories are, so here's an example: for the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron, gauge theory agrees with experiment to 12 decimal places, about the same accuracy as measuring the distance between New York and Los Angeles to within the width of a human hair. As far as we know, gauge theory profoundly underlies the forces of the electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear interactions, giving rise to humankind's most accurate physical theory of all, the Standard Model. What's still missing is the Model's ability to account for gravitation, Einstein's theory of general relativity. Now over 100 years old, general relativity has been tested countless times and, like quantum theory, has yet to fail a single experimental or observational test. But the presumed underlying physical unity of quantum physics and gravitation has escaped the best minds for almost a century now, and the long hoped-for theory of quantum gravity remains as elusive as ever. Some glorious day, someone—very likely a young boy or girl now in grade school—will come along and give us the right answer to the mystery. It will explain much of what we don't yet know about the physical world, including black holes, the arrow of time, entropy, and perhaps even what our purpose is in this seemingly random and meaningless universe.  Do Americans Still Recognize This Face? — Posted Saturday July 7 2018 A great article in today's Big Think. Pop Quiz, Hotshots: Why do Americans invariably think of Israelis as bold, heroic freedom fighters, and Jews as hook-nosed, money-grubbing, Christ-killing bastards? They're the same people! While I totally disagree with Israel's apartheid treatment of the Palestinians, what the Jews have been through over the past 2,000 years (thanks to the New Testament identifying them as "children of the devil," and thereby initiating two millennia of anti-Semitism) makes it understandable, if not right in the eyes of their god.  Rolling in His Grave? — Posted Friday July 6 2018 "It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment." "It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress." — Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac In my opinion, Paul Dirac (1902-1984), is the greatest physicist who ever lived. There really is beauty in truth, although it can be a misleading mistress. With some trepidation I bought and read German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's new book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, which describes how things like mathematical symmetry and beauty have (unintentionally) led today's physicists into a netherworld of preposterous hypothetical ideas and theories that can never be experimentally tested, yet are being taken seriously nevertheless. Just witness the number of today's whoosh-bang cable science shows, whose computer-generated graphics lend these ideas and theories a semblance of reality. The trepidation I felt had to do with my love of mathematical symmetry and beauty, which have historically led scientists to fantastic truths underlying all of modern physics—things like gauge symmetry, which does indeed underlie all of our notions of physical reality, and Noether's theorem, which posits that every continuous mathematical symmetry gives rise to conservation laws for energy, momentum and electric charge (even the conservation of center of mass). My fears were unfounded, however, as Hossenfelder primarily attacks theories in which the mathematics appear sound (superstring theory and supersymmetry, or SUSY) but have no apparent physical or experimental basis. Similarly, she expresses her doubts about the multiverse and extra dimensions as being mathematically plausible but lacking a shred of experimental data to back them up. All of these "crazy" ideas are not without some merit. Take the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory for example, which says that a physical system or state is strictly probabilistic and unknowable until a measurement or observation is made, at which time it instantaneously "collapses" into a single eigenstate. How can an observation, made by either a human being or a mouse, cause a quantum system to collapse? Is a sentient mind required to collapse a state vector and, if so, how? Does it occur instantly, and is it bound by the laws of causality and locality? The entire notion of state collapse is offensive to many physicists, and for this reason the idea of the multiverse came about—that is, the state vector does not collapse at all upon observation, but splits the universe into the same number of alternate universes corresponding to the number of possible outcomes in the observation. That is, you flip a coin and get heads, but then another universe is created in which "you" get tails, and the two universes diverge from one another from that point on. Hossenfelder's is an important book. It's an easy read (no math) and should be read by everyone. Highly recommended, even. But say it ain't so, Sabine!  Duck and Cover — Posted Wednesday June 27 2018 Americans don't care about human beings. So why should they care about intelligent extraterrestrial life forms? I assume everyone's heard of the Drake Equation, which is a pseudo-plausible way of estimating the number $$N$$ of intelligent life forms now present in the observable universe. If $$R_s$$ is the average rate of star formations, $$f_p$$ is the fraction of star systems that have planets, $$n_e$$ is the number of those planets that can support life, $$f_l$$ is the fraction of those planets that actually develop life, $$f_i$$ is another fraction for which intelligent life has developed, $$f_c$$ is the fraction which have developed electromagnetic communication ability, and $$T$$ is the length of time over which detectable electromagnetic signals are sent out into space, then Drake's equation says $$N = R_s \cdot f_p \cdot n_e \cdot f_l \cdot f_i \cdot f_c \cdot T$$ How precise is this equation? Not very, and I never placed much faith in it, but there's a simpler, perfectly accurate comparable expression that is $$N \ge 1$$ (and even then I wonder if humankind qualifies as an "intelligent" life form). When considering the Drake equation, one is naturally led to the question of where those extraterrestrial life forms might be and, if they're assumed to be highly intellegent, why they haven't contacted us yet. There are all kinds of plausible explanations that have been proposed for their absence (which I won't go into), but the most recent is the one given by writer Scotty Hendricks over at Bigthink.com, who believes that the absence of alien contact may be due to a universal rule of most intelligent life. And that rule is survival. To see why Hendricks' idea is perhaps the most plausible to date, consider the following scenario. Imagine that humans someday detect and confirm an intentional alien signal coming from a nearby star system. Following a series of decades-long interplanetary deciphered communications, future humans might construct a spaceship capable of sending a representative group of people to the planet in question. In the absence of warp drive or other faster-than-chemical-propellant travel, the trip itself would take decades, perhaps even generations—at any rate, there would be no going back home. Upon discovering that the alien planet is capable of supporting human life, the humans would almost certainly break out the nuclear weapons they had brought with them and wipe out the planet's inhabitants, thus securing the planet for future human habitation and proliferation. Why? Because that's what intelligent life forms invariably do to ensure their survival. This is the gist of Hendricks' argument—to guarantee survival, intelligent life forms cannot take any chances, so the reason why we haven't heard from alien civilizations is because they're basically hiding from species such as the human race, which throughout its history has never missed an opportunity to wipe out neighboring peoples to acquire their resources. Oh, but you say we're better than that now? Silly rabbit, history says otherwise. And as Donald and Melania Trump are so generously demonstrating, it's still going on.  Reminiscences, Northview School — Posted Wednesday June 20 2018 My sister Ria recently passed away, and I acquired hundreds of family photos from her estate, most of which I'd never seen. One of the photos shows her as a gorgeous blonde 14-year-old 8th grader from Northview School in Duarte, California dated March 1951. I attended the same school from 1954-1963, completely unaware that my sister had been there as well (we did not have an exactly cohesive, communicative family). I even recognize the building the photo was taken in front of. (Full size here.) Regrettably for me, good looks are not hereditary. Goodbye, dear sister.  Final Word — Posted Wednesday June 20 2018 Enough is enough. Inspired by madman Donald Trump, the entire Republican Party is evil. Kill them all.  Balakrishnan on Science and Magic — Posted Monday June 11 2018 When I started to watch renowned Indian physicist Venkataraman Balakrishnan's 2016 YouTube lecture "Thaumaturgy in the Age of Science", I thought thaumaturgy was either a made-up term or something associated with a Hindu word. It turns out it's a legitimate English noun, meaning "hocus-pocus" or "flimflam." Balakrishnan notes that the word has no fewer than a dozen synonyms, all more or less pejorative, but it has only a few antonyms, like "fact", "truth" and "reality." He goes on to note that the word science itself acts as an antonym to thaumaturgy, with definitions that include "erudition" and "knowledge." Balakrishnan laments the fact that while thaumaturgy cannot compete with science in terms of benefits to humanity, today it outshines science in terms of predominance. He underlines our ongoing, incomprehensible fixation on superstition and nonsensical flummery as a means of illusory control over the laws of Nature, along with the power it has conferred to the current and historical charletans of politics and religion over fearful and ignorant populations, always with dire results. Prof. Balakrishnan notes also that humanity's ability to truly understand today's technology is outstripped by the apparent human preference to believe in unsubstantiated anecdotes, magic and pseudosciences like dianetics, homeopathy, quantum healing, palm reading and chiropractic. We have progressed, he further notes, in having rejected slavery and the divine right of kings, but regression is always never very far away (I am reminded of recent comments by certain conservative Republican political, religious and cultural leaders that African Americans "never had it so good" as when they were enslaved). At the same time, technology has advanced illusory special effects in motion pictures to the point where the magic and pseudoscience they feature appear to be true manifestations of Nature after all, while true science has failed to provide much concurrent enlightenment among clueless consumers awash in popular culture. At the conclusion of his talk, Balakrishnan invites questions from the audience. Interestingly, the first question is whether he believes in God. Balakrishnan's answer is indirect but fascinating, and I urge you to watch the entire video. By the way, interested readers are invited check out Balakrishnan's many excellent video lectures on physics. His talks remind me of those given by Stanford's Leonard Susskind, although Balakrishnan's are a little more mathematically rigorous and have the added advantage of subtitles.  Westworld — Posted Monday June 4 2018 I rarely watch cable television any more, primarily because I want to avoid the news, and I generally restrict myself to documentaries and nature and science shows. But the HBO series Westworld, now deep into its second season, has me addicted. Superbly produced and filmed on 35mm stock (a rarity in today's digital world), the plot line is devilishly hard to keep track of, much less comprehend, but last night's episode, Les Écorchés (roughly, The Flayed Ones), confirmed what I had suspected since the end of last year's airing regarding the series' deepest plot motif: that the human desire to live forever will persist far into the future. I admit that as a half-convinced adherent of the Simulation Hypothesis I see more than one connection of the show to what might actually be mankind's most fervent wish, which until the advent of unimaginably powerful computers had been relegated to religious faith. True, the simulation hypothesis is no more testable than is religious belief, but given the modest constraints of quantum computation and the reality of Moore's Law, the hypothesis makes about as much sense as anything else. The online science magazine Quanta currently has an article entitled "There Are No Laws of Physics. There's Only the Landscape" which claims that superstring theory is a unique theory with no free parameters. While I rather doubt those claims (as do others), I believe the author is actually advancing the idea that, given an infinity of possible universes with different physical laws in each, the one we happen to inhabit has just one unique set of laws, kind of like saying that people with brown eyes have brown eyes because they have brown eyes. Similarly, the electron has a mass of $$9.11\times 10^{-31}$$ kilograms because, well, just because it does. And if our universe had indeed been created by highly advanced computer programmers with that particular electron mass, then it would make no sense to wonder if a unified field theory of physics might ever provide a mathematical justification for the electron's mass, because it simply is what it is. "Nonsense!" say religious believers, "God, not happenstance or computer programmers, made the universe." But if God created the universe out of particles and fields, and if human beings are composed of those same particles and fields, why can we not make the inference that God is simply a highly advanced computer programmer (or a somewhat more advanced Westworld computer geek)? And if God is eternal, that would be great too, because maybe s/he might share that immortality with us as well.  It Did Indeed Happen — Posted Tuesday May 29 2018 The brilliant Austrian-American mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) died forty years ago, but in addition to his famous incompleteness theorems of mathematical logic he is arguably most famous for a remark he made just prior to his induction as a U.S. citizen in 1947. Fleeing the Nazis, Gödel (pronounced girdle) went to America in 1939, taking up residence at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study alongside his good friend and colleague Einstein. Believing that he and his wife had escaped the Nazis by the skin of their teeth, Gödel took his citizenship exam very seriously, spending countless hours studying the U.S. Constitition. At one point he made a disturbing discovery about the Constitution—he found a loophole in the document which allows America to legally descend into a dictatorship. During his citizenship exam, Gödel was questioned by Judge Phillip Forman, who rhetorically asked if Gödel believed that America could ever become a dictatorship like Nazi Germany. At that point Gödel began to explain the constitutional loophole he had uncovered. Realizing that Gödel would likely be turned down for citizenship for what he was saying, Forman, who was a friend of Einstein (a witness at the citizenship exam), quickly cut Gödel off. He was thus granted citizenship, despite having nearly blown the exam. As of today, no one knows what flaw in the Constitution Gödel had uncovered; despite numerous inquiries, he never revealed it. But 40 years after his death it is all too obvious that he had discovered the truth—America has indeed become a fascist dictatorship under President Trump and the Republican Party.  Definition — Posted Tuesday May 29 2018 Christianity: The popular belief that a celestial 1st Century Jewish baby who was his own father and born from a virgin mother died for three days so that he could ascend to heaven on a cloud and let you live forever but only if you symbolically eat his flesh and drink his blood and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your lord and master so he could remove an evil force from your spiritual being that is present in all humanity because a naive woman made from a man's rib was hoodwinked by a talking reptile that was really a malicious angel into secretly eating a forbidden fruit from a magical tree. Oh, and you'll burn forever in hell if you don't believe all of it. Sounds perfectly plausible to me $$\ldots$$ Ex falso quodlibet — "Anything follows a falsehood"  Dark Matter — Posted Monday May 28 2018 The latest data from the orbiting Planck satellite, showing minute variations in the temperature gradient of the cosmic microwave background, a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. Had the Big Bang event been perfectly uniform, galaxies and solar systems could never have formed. The Planck project confirms data from other satellite probes that the universe was born 13.8 billion years ago. On the basis of numerous terrestrial and space observations performed over the past two decades, astrophysicists have compiled an amazingly precise estimate of the amount of matter and energy in the observable universe. The usual, familiar matter that we can actually observe or detect—"baryonic" matter such as protons, neutrons and particles composed of these things—accounts for only about 5% of the stuff in the universe. Coming in at about 25% of the total mass-energy is so-called dark matter, a mysterious kind of matter that has been postulated to exist despite heroic (and costly) efforts to date to actually detect it. That leaves roughly 70% of the mass-energy of the universe unaccounted for—what scientists have dubbed dark energy, which seems to be everywhere in the universe at a constant "concentration." I'm not a fan of dark matter, as it smacks too much of the "luminiferous ether" hypothesis of the late 1800s. The ether was presumed to exist because scientists at the time believed that light waves—like sound and water waves—needed something to "wave against" in their journey through interstellar space. All efforts to actually detect the ether failed, but it was assumed to exist anyway as a kind of invisible, odorless, tasteless, incorporeal "stuff" permeating the universe. But it was also assumed that as the Earth moved around the Sun, the ether "wind" should be detectable by measuring its effect on the interference pattern of perpendicular light rays. In 1887, using a primitive (by today's standards) but highly accurate interferometer, Michelson and Morley proved that the ether was a figment of the imagination—it simply did not exist. By comparison, dark energy is most likely just the cosmological constant $$\Lambda$$ of Einstein's theory of general relativity. It appears in the ten gravitational field equations given by $$R_{\mu\nu} - \frac{1}{2}\, g_{\mu\nu}\, R + g_{\mu\nu}\, \Lambda= - \frac{8 \pi G}{c^4}\, T_{\mu\nu}$$ where the left-hand side is the glorious, gleaming "marble" of pure geometry and the right-hand side is the inferior "wood" of physical matter (Einstein's description). Einstein viewed the energy-momentum tensor $$T_{\mu\nu}$$ as a kind of placeholder for matter whose actual mathematical description had to be inferred. Einstein's famous "greatest blunder" was his 1917 assumption that the cosmological constant was required to keep the universe from expanding forever. When Hubble discovered in 1929 that the universe was indeed expanding, Einstein (and most other scientists) dropped $$\Lambda$$ from the equations, although today's astrophysicists tend to believe that it's really dark energy in disguise. Dark energy is also believed to be the force responsible for the observed acceleration of universal expansion which, many billions of years from now, will result in what's known as the "heat death" of the universe—a bleak, featureless, static expanse of nothingness except for a rarified gas of high-entropy photons. While the 5% ordinary matter and 70% dark energy budgets of the universe aren't terribly problematic, the dark matter question is still bugging astrophysicists. It's got to be there, they say, because there's some kind of additional matter in galaxies that is responsible for the high velocity of outer galactic stars—stars whose orbital motion should be much slower considering either Newton's gravity law or Einstein's general relativity. All kinds of weird things have been proposed to explain dark matter—axions, massive neutrinos, weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs), etc.—but all attempts to detect them have failed. This is largely because dark matter is assumed to be subject only to the force of gravity, and does not interact with itself, ordinary matter, light or dark energy (or detectors, either). Thus, my comparison of dark matter with the luminiferous ether seems to be justified (unless I'm wrong, because dark matter may still actually exist). A better approach (that has met with some success) is modified gravity (MOG), which assumes that Einstein's gravity theory is not quite right, despite the fact that it has brilliantly passed every experimental test thrown at it (with the exception of dark matter) since its inception over 100 years ago. Several MOG theories have explained the anomalous star-velocity problem for dozens of observed galactic systems, but have failed to fully measure up to others. The nice thing about MOG is that there are only a relative few things you can do to Einstein's theory without throwing it out altogether and starting out with something brand new. I think MOG is a better approach (I've tried my hand at it as well), since Einstein's theory is already so successful, but it still doesn't address the potential effects of quantum theory. That's what quantum gravity is all about, and while progress has been made along those lines we're still no closer to a working theory of quantum gravity. Hopefully, I'll see it in my lifetime. Meanwhile, the failures of dark matter theories continue to pile up. The latest is the last in a long series of dark matter research projects that have been carried out at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy. The XENON projects utilize over three tons of ultra-pure liquid xenon stored deep underground, where extraneous particles (cosmic rays in particular) cannot reach. The researchers had hoped that even a few stray dark matter particles would be detected by their interaction with the liquid xenon, but in a report issued today the researchers reported that no interactions had been observed. The project will continue despite this latest failure, however, as it seems that funding for such expensive projects will also continue to be available, while boring theoretical efforts such as MOG will remain in the background.  Memorial Day 2018 — Posted Monday May 28 2018 Some 420,000 American troops died in World War II defending the nation and the world against the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy. But in 2016 "Christian" America decided that fascism, greed and breathtaking moral corruption weren't so bad after all, and elected a President so heinous and contemptible that those dead must surely be turning in their graves. Happy Memorial Day, Amerika.  More Incomprehensible Stupidity and Hypocrisy — Posted Wednesday May 23 2018 I just got back from a family visit to Duluth, Georgia, where Christian church attendance is damned near mandatory, and all vehicles must have an American flag in the window and sport a "God Bless Our Heroic Troops" bumper sticker (my son's car doesn't have any stickers, and he's probably the only PhD in town, so he's regarded with some wariness by the locals, even though he's a Christian). Just before departure at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, a woman on the public address system invited travelers to a non-denominational prayer service ("non-denominational" in a Red State still means "fundamentalist Christian"). Funny, the same damned thing happened to me on an Egypt Air flight from Rome to Cairo, but it was the pilot giving the prayer in Arabic while we were taxiing just prior to takeoff. Also funny is how all NFL players are now required to stand during the National Anthem or else be fined. They can't kneel, even in prayer, because kneeling has now been banned by the courts for being a form of non-patriotic behavior. No, they've got to stand, fully upright and proudly, too, with their heads held high and their protective athletic cups bulging out in genital salute to our glorious flag. And since most NFL players are black, we'll not be seeing any of that-there raised-fist, 1968 Olympics protest stuff either. Even though that was 50 years ago, you blacks have still got to know your place. Trump's in charge now. [My friend of over 60 years (also named Bill) works for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and during home games he is required to stand for the National Anthem. He's more liberal than I am, and he's told me many times how much he hates to see the patriotic bullshit that's trotted out before and during every game.] Perhaps in the near future all event attendees will be required to stand and salute during the National Anthem as well. We could even have Patriotism Police roaming the bleachers with clubs and tasers, ensuring that each and every attendee is expressing the proper amount of devotion. Hey, it's just a suggestion. It was the same in ancient Rome and in Nazi Germany, when open displays of protest against wars of aggression or the ruling regime were punishable by fines and even imprisonment and execution. I wonder if that's what in store für Amerika unter Trump und der republikanischen Partei. Gee, I can't wait.  Incomprehensible Stupidity and Hypocrisy — Posted Thursday May 3 2018 The first episode of the second season of HBO's The Handmaid's Tale has June and Luke reacting with alarm to live television reports of dozens of machine guns opening up in the Capitol, while explosions are being reported in the White House. It's a flashback, portending the rise of the Republic of Gilead, previously known as the United States of America. The episode does not reveal who's responsible for the terrorist attack, but the viewer is led to presume that it's not an external group of terrorists but a conservative cabal within America itself intent on overturning everything remotely liberal, from women's and minority rights to Roe v. Wade to family planning to MTV to no prayer in public schools. The attack is the last straw in the tottering social edifice called American democracy, and all it took was another televised incident of violence to end it. President Trump infamously bragged that he could personally shoot someone in cold blood and not suffer any loss of voter support. I wouldn't put it past him to initiate a home-grown terrorist attack that would give him the authority he so cravenly desires to have Robert Mueller assassinated, Hillary Clinton hanged by her pussy and all of America locked down under perpetual martial law, while America's Christians cheer the conversion of the country to a Bible-based theocratic state, one in which women and minorities know their place and where all dissent is outlawed under penalty of prison, dismemberment or death. Meanwhile, the media are reporting that in spite of the corruption, lies, whoremongering and everything else, Trump's base will support him no matter what, even if it turns out he conspired with the Russians to win the 2016 election. You may remember the scene in 1969's The Wild Bunch where the outlaws open fire on an otherwise heavily-protected General Mapache, and none of his dozens of troops and bodyguards do anything about it. Realizing they will suffer no repercussions, the outlaws gleefully start killing everyone. That's exactly what Trump and his minions are doing to America today. Case in point: This morning I talked to one of my town's public librarians about President Trump having been caught redhanded lying about his paying prostitute Stormy Daniels through his lawyer Michael Cohen. The librarian, a conservative Christian I've known for many years, responded only that he'd gotten$200 back on his federal taxes thanks to Trump, that it would help pay for his daughter's swimming lessons, and that this was good enough for him to continue supporting Trump. I don't intend to ever patronize that library branch again. God, how I do hate this fucking country.

 But We're Better, Right? — Posted Wednesday April 26 2018

 The Trump Effect on Evangelicals — Posted Sunday April 22 2018

 Fascism Forever or, "I Had a Dream!" — Posted Wednesday April 18 2018 In an insightful article entitled "Never Again?" How Fascism Hijacks Democracies Over and Over, Nexus president and cultural philosopher Rob Riemen writes "And so what are the characteristics of a fascist culture? In a fascist culture you'll always have, and again, you know, the terrible examples of Mussolini, Franco and Hitler — they tell us: The fascist leader will always come forward in a time of crisis." While Riemen rightly notes that past crises like mass unemployment and hyperinflation in post-Versailles Germany and Spain's civil war were directly responsible for fascist leaders like Hitler and Franco, there was no similar crisis in post-Bush 43 America that I can think of. The only thing that even approaches a crisis was the 2007-2008 financial meltdown, which was quickly alleviated by Bush authorizing the give-away of nearly a trillion dollars to the same banks and corporations that caused the mess in the first place. Riemen does not identify which crisis America found itself in when it elected Trump, but he does characterize the traits associated with fascist leaders that typically arise in times of trouble: "He — and most of the time it's a he — will present himself as the anti-political leader who will cure society of all social evils. A kind of new messiah. It's a cult figure. It will always be a form of extreme nationalism, you know, to "make the country great again.". That's a very old phrase every fascist will use. Deprived of any positive idea, not even interested in it, because those fascist leaders are completely obsessed by self-interest. It's all about them, them, them, them, and nothing else." Riemen won't admit it, but I believe the only "crisis" America found itself in was the eight-year leadership of a black, Democratic president who unwittingly brought out the primal, epigenetic racial hatred lurking in many Americans, the same Americans who call themselves "Christian value-voters" while at the same time despising blacks, minorities, free-thinking women, higher education and science. These same Americans bent over backward to elect a proven sexual predator and womanizing, thrice-married, money-grubbing monster whose unreformed predatory habits and habitual lying have continued right into the White House. And these same Americans continue to love and worship him. The ultra-conservative Christian televangelist and Trump supporter Pat Robertson described a dream he had just prior to the 2016 presidential election: "God came to me in a dream last night and showed me the future. He took me to Heaven and I saw Donald Trump seated at the right hand of our Lord." Robertson somehow either overlooked the New Testament's identification of Jesus Christ as the right hand of God, or he has identified Trump as the world's Messiah.

 Blood Pressure — Posted Tuesday April 17 2018 The recent disclosure that Fox News anchor and all-around conservative, lying asshole Sean Hannity is now caught up in the Trump-Cohen-Daniels-Broidy criminal conspiracy did not surprise me in the least. In fact, it reminded me of a short story I read many years ago in high school. It was a morning in October 1966 and I had a free period, meaning I was in the library of Duarte High School doing some free reading. One of the books on the shelf was titled A Damon Runyon Omnibus (who I later learned was a popular writer in the 1920s, and the author of Guys and Dolls), and I thought I'd spend the hour reading a short story called Blood Pressure. You can read the story yourself online here. Anyway, the story was about a typical Runyon down-and-outer (and the unnamed narrator of most of his stories) who finds himself confronted with a Broadway tough guy named Rusty Charley. Sitting at a library table, directly across from the school's librarian (one Mrs. Smith, who in my aged state today I recall with more than a little sexual interest), I started to chuckle at what I was reading. This soon became uncontrollable laughter, which initiated more than one remonstrance from the stern but fine-figured Mrs. Smith, and I retreated into one of the book aisles so I could finish the story. I never forgot it, and later acquired several volumes of Runyon's work, which still sit on one of the shelves of my library. Hannity's revealed involvement in the ongoing Trump debacle reminded me of a few lines from the story, which I still remember verbatim: Of course, I do not know that Rusty Charley is the party who guzzles [kills] Gloomy Gus Smallwood, but Rusty Charley is in Philly when Gus is guzzled, and I can put two and two together as well as anybody. It is the same thing as if there is a bank robbery in Cleveland, Ohio, and Rusty Charley is in Cleveland, Ohio, or near there. It's a sad comment that what was then a simple two-plus-two logic problem in the 1920s has morphed into blind fealty for Trump, Hannity and their corrupt company. Are you surprised that Hannity's involved in this huge, steaming pile of shit called the Trump presidency? You shouldn't be, and neither was I. Trump should be hanged for treason, and Fox News should either be shut down or bombed. And where are you today, Mrs. Smith?

 TGIF—Now For Something Completely Different — Posted Friday April 6 2018 I like puzzles, especially mathematical ones. I saw this simple puzzle years ago in a shop in Germany, but it's available now from an outfit here in America. It's made from cardboard and comes with ten pennies, so its monetary value is a mere ten cents, but it costs ten bucks—one hell of a mark-up (the company must be owned by Trump). Anyway, the object is to see if you can move the nine pennies around in the square so that you can fit another penny into it. The YouTube video calls it the "Impossible Ten Penny Puzzle," but it's really a snap to solve—just play with it a minute or two and you'll have it. If you assume that the tenth coin goes in perfectly snug, then you might believe that the puzzle could be proved geometrically. This is one variant of the so-called circle-packing problem, in which one tries to prove mathematically that $$N$$ circles can be tightly packed into a square having length $$L$$. It's the two-dimensional version of the sphere-packing problem in $$n$$ dimensions, which mathematicians have worked on for hundreds of years. Want to pack a bunch of oranges into a box of minimum size in 10-dimensional space? Go ask a mathematician. I tried my own mediocre mathematical hand at the ten-penny problem, but I couldn't do it. However, I did find that the solution is not unique—there are at least three different coin arrangements that work. Even worse, these arrangements are not "snug," since there's still some significant wiggle room available to the ten coins in the square. It was only then that I discovered that the seemingly simple problem of packing ten circles optimally into a square has not yet been solved mathematically, at least as of 1999. This paper by a group of mathematicians shows that the problem has been solved for $$N = 1$$ to $$9$$, but the $$N=10$$ case remains to be proved (see Table 1). You might give it a try, but it's entirely possible that a solution does not exist. "Perfect snugness" is actually what defines the requirement for a mathematical proof in this case, as any wiggle room is not allowed. A great example of this comes to us from The Simpsons (Season 10, Episode 2), where Homer appears to provide a disproof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which states that no integer greater than $$n = 2$$ satifies the Pythagorean equation $$x^n + y^n = z^n$$: Just about any scientific hand calculator will confirm Homer's seemingly brilliant ansatz, but if you carry things out past the 8th decimal (thanks to Mathematica) you'll find that he's wrong: D'oh! Stumped again!

 Breaking News: Most People Are Still Nuts — Posted Thursday April 5 2018 "The more the participants believed in religious or other paranormal phenomena, the lower their intuitive physics skills, mechanical and mental rotation abilities, school grades in mathematics and physics, and knowledge about physical and biological phenomena were [and] the less they reported interests and skills in systemizing and the more they regarded inanimate targets as mental phenomena." — Marjaana Lindeman and Annika Svedholm-Häkkinen, University of Helsinki, Finland When I first saw this image I thought it was some poor woman asphyxiating herself in a rather ornate fireplace, but she is in fact only praying in the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where it is believed Jesus of Nazareth was born. I guess her prayers get better signal strength in the place. Four bars! The above quote is from a recent research paper, which is reviewed in this article over at Bigthink.com. The article doesn't agree with everything, but overall it supports the researchers' assertion that a person's paranormal, superstitious and religious beliefs are strongly linked with a poor understanding of the physical world. The full paper can be downloaded here. The study in question was performed using 258 citizens of Finland (not a country where I would expect to find many religious adherents), but it included controls for age, gender, education and other personal characteristics that should make the study applicable to the western world overall. Similar studies have been conducted on the United States recently, and they all tend to confirm the Helsinki study findings. Science (especially physics and mathematics) as a way of life has been the lifelong motto of myself and many of my friends, but it seems the imbeciles of the world have taken over the place. As Trump would say, "Grab 'em by the $$\ldots$$", er, I mean, "Sad."

 That's MY Jesus — Posted Monday April 2 2018

 On Orwell, Atwood, and America — Posted Monday April 2 2018 I've been watching the Great Courses video lecture series on utopian and dystopian works of literature, focusing on the lectures concerning George Orwell's novel 1984 and Margaret Atwood's more recent novel The Handmaid's Tale. The lectures are given by the University of Connecticut's Pamela Bedore, an associate professor of English at that school. Her style is both enthusiastic and entertaining, and as a failed writer myself I stand in awe before her breadth of knowledge and her appreciation of the subject. I've read 1984 several times, but Bedore reveals a number of plot elements and other points in the book that I've missed. But at the same time I think Bedore herself missed an opportunity to reflect on how the dystopian aspects of both Orwell's and Atwood's novels touch on the modern world. While she does note that her students tend to see the applicability and danger of the novels' warnings for today's world, in my opinion they're more relevant and applicable today than ever before. Although Orwell viewed his novel's Oceania (ruled by Big Brother) as a dysfunctional nation governed by ideological oligarchs, the people forced to live under their totalitarian rule seem little more than unhappy slaves constrained to obey their masters, lest they end up in the truly barbarous Room 101 of the Ministry of Love. What Orwell missed, however, was the possibility (or likelihood) that a significant percentage of Oceania's population would willingly adopt and seek to preserve the hideous agenda of the ruling elite, even those who were injured by that agenda (and knew they were being injured). This idea is not new, having been proposed by writers such as Chris Hedges and political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, whose notion of "inverted totalitarianism" accurately describes such a "popular" dystopian government. This, in my opinion, is what America is today—an inverted totalitarian state. In Orwell's novel, the protagonist Winston Smith's government job is to seek out and revise if necessary all historical references to issues deemed unacceptable to Big Brother. In the novel, that pertains primarily to books and newspapers, but today it would apply more to digital media, which are more easily revised or deleted entirely. For example, when Oceania's supply of chocolate runs low (like today, everyone loves chocolate in Oceania!), the government restricts the weekly per capita allowance from 30 grams a week to just 20. One of Winston's jobs is to change "30 grams" to "20 grams" in every instance he can find, in effect rewriting history. Of course, his main job is to rewrite history for every government lie, including who is winning the perpetual war with Eurasia and East Asia. The dystopian government of Oceania thus seeks to control people by rewriting history and wiping out or adjusting their memories, a distinct "improvement" over Nazi aviation Reichsminister Hermann Goering's infamous belief that "If you tell a lie enough times, it becomes the truth." This is exactly what is happening in America today, as Americans have become accustomed to President Trump's lies and his claims that all news that he does not agree with are themselves lies. Thus, the lies that Americans hear on Fox News and Sinclair Media are to be accepted unquestionably as the truth, while liberal media like MSNBC and CNN are to be dismissed as lie peddlers. Worse, Trump constantly rewrites history, claiming that Barack Obama is a an anti-American Islamic quisling from Africa, while Hillary Clinton is a traitor who should be locked up. Every day, more and more Americans believe these lies, precisely what Herr Goering predicted. Meanwhile, Trump's extramarital sexual escapades and constant demeaning of women and minorities are likewise becoming accepted by ever-more clueless Americans, mirroring the dystopian leadership of the Republic of Gilead in Atwood's novel. Gilead (for those of you who still read) is the United States of the near future, having become a military theocracy that has turned its women into baby-making machines, literally owned by men whose wives are unable to conceive. The women have no rights, are not allowed to read or write, and are completely at the mercy of their male masters. If you can imagine the Red States of America taking over the entire country, I think you'll get the idea. Still meanwhile, see if you can guess whose quotes these belong to (at least until they disappear from history): "I'm the only one who matters," "Any negative polls are fake news," "Haiti is a shithole," "The media is the enemy," "Barack Obama's birth certificate is a fraud," "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 Hillary Clinton emails that are missing," "My fingers are long and beautiful," "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever," "It's freezing and snowing in New York -- we need global warming," "If Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her," "I never 'mocked' a disabled reporter but simply showed him grovelling," "You have to treat women like shit," "I am going to be dating this ten-year-old in ten years," "Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything," "Maybe I'll be president for life."

 Child Sacrifice in a Supposedly Civilized Nation — Posted Thursday February 15 2018 Yes, it's happened again. Barbaric ancient civilizations (including the early Israelites) regularly sacrificed children to their gods to ensure bountiful harvests and for protection against foreign invasion. Millennia later, Americans are doing exactly the same thing, but the bountiful harvests are now called gun-industry profits ensured by Senate and House Republicans. The Republican Party plays down the money angle by telling Americans that only unregulated private ownership of multiple handguns and assault rifles can protect them against invasion by nuclear-armed foreign powers. The only price Americans are asked to pay, other than for the firearms themselves and the trillions in taxes they willingly fork over for national "defense," is the periodic slaughter of their children. Is this not modern child sacrifice in a supposedly civilized nation? Devastated parents who lose their children to this policy of profit-motivated child sacrifice are then coddled by Republican leaders offering only their "thoughts and prayers." Dear God, but I do hate this fucking country.

 Welcome to Shithole America — Posted Thursday January 11 2018 I have close family members from Africa, El Salvador and China, and I am personally outraged by President Trump referring to several of these nations as "shithole countries". They are highly educated, successful and productive people who don't deserve to be pigeonholed by a racist president whose own brain is itself a shithole and a national disgrace. The only shithole country I can think of right now (other than America) is Slovenia. It produced Melania Trump, our shit-for-brains First Lady, whose biggest claim to fame is the disgraceful nude girl-on-girl photo spread she posed for in The New York Post. Meanwhile, refusing to bow to worldwide condemnation for his vulgarity, a defiant Trump defended himself by telling news reporters "I'm not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed. Why can't the niggers, beaners and chinks get that through their fucking heads?"

 2018 - Wilkommen in Trumps Amerika! — Posted Monday January 1 2018 My New Year's prediction: Unser glorreicher Anführer Donald Trump will fire DOJ Special Counsel Robert Mueller and halt all investigations into Trump's treasonous ties to the Russians, the Nazi GOP will retain the Senate and House, America will be lost forever, and I will seek Canadian residency.

 Yeah, Happy New Year — Posted Sunday 31 December 2017 The best comment from today's Pharyngula:

 It's All Over — Posted Saturday 16 December 2017 The Trump administration has now banned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from issuing any reports or documents using the words science-based, evidence-based, diversity, transgender, fetus, entitlement and vulnerable. My son is a CDC scientist, so this 1984-style authoritarian bullshit is just hitting too close to home now. Despite disturbing news of the word ban from the Washington Post, Gizmodo and many other news services, Americans are now so totally dumbed-down that they can't see that their democracy has been replaced by political-religious totalitarianism. Jefferson and Lincoln are rolling over in their graves. Scientific truth has become opinion. Logic has been prohibited. Rational thinking has been condemned. Alternative facts have replaced facts. Big Brother is just a moronic, addictive television reality show. Screw Trump. Screw the Republican Party. Screw religion, and screw this country. I'm outta here.

 It's Not Going Away — Posted Thursday 14 December 2017 Roy Moore (R-Alabama) may have been defeated by Democratic rival Doug Jones for the state's Senate seat in Congress, but he's hardly going away. He's not only vowing to fight on via an invalid bid for a recount of the votes, but he's proudly displaying the kind of sanctimonious, jingoistic bullshit we've come to expect from Republican pedophiles like him: Meanwhile, our Republican-led Congress is moving ahead with the largest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich in history, while the Republican-controlled FCC has declared net neutrality a thing of the past. Death to America? It's already dead.

 God Bless the Dissenters — Posted December 12 December 2017

 Yes, Let Us Prey — Posted Sunday 3 December 2017

 Does Size Matter? (Speaking Cosmologically) — Posted Wednesday 29 November 2017 If you've ever been to Italy and marveled at the great statues that Michaelangelo, Donatello, Bandinelli and others created, you may have wondered why the male subjects' genitals seem to be so small. Many people today are asking that same question, and it invariably arises when visitors see Michaelangelo's statue of David for the first time. While it's possible that Signore Buonarroti was either reflecting on the fact that David was just a youth or trying to subtly re-dimension the male member to cover for his own shortcomings, I prefer to think that the famous sculptor simply didn't think that size mattered. Speaking of size: next year marks the 100th anniversary of the theories of gauge invariance and conformal gravity, which were introduced in April 1918 by the German mathematical physicist Hermann Weyl, a long-time personal hero of mine and the honoree of the meager website that spawned the even feebler website you're currently viewing. Gauge theory came into its own as a cornerstone of modern quantum theory, but Weyl initially proposed it as a fundamental property of Nature. However, he focused it primarily on general relativity (gravitation), which at the time had only recently been introduced by Einstein, Weyl's friend and colleague. Basically, conformal invariance is a mathematical symmetry that makes the notions of physical distances, size and scales irrelevant. In today's parlance, Weyl's theory essentially says that "Size doesn't matter." A recent paper on the topic, which also heralds the advent of the centenary anniversary of Weyl's work, was posted by some Russian physicists earlier this month. Conformal invariance and phenomenology of cosmological particle production is a short, readable paper that includes a simple attempt to generalize Weyl's theory (while the math is fine, the grammar's a tad off, but then again they're Russians). Many other papers are now appearing, and it would seem that physicists are finally getting around to seriously viewing conformal invariance as a fundamental law of Nature. For an even simpler but more comprehensive overview of conformal gravity, I recently posted a write-up on the topic that you can see here. (Meanwhile, sorry about the puerile lead-in reference to the statue of David's apparent inadequacies. Perhaps I'm unconsciously interjecting some of my own concerns along those same lines.)

 What in Hell is Happening in Alabama?! — Posted Friday 10 November 2017 Alabama lawmaker and US senate hopeful Roy Moore — a man that any 14-year-old girl would gladly drop her knickers for. And such a beautiful smile! Every day brings me nearer to the realization that America has gone fucking bonkers beyond anyone's wildest dreams. The allegations that Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore (a conservative Republican, natch) sexually molested four girls age 14 to 18 when he was a 30-something assistant district attorney are piling up, yet key Alabama Republicans are saying they will still vote for him to be the next U.S. senator from that state even if the allegations are proven to be true. And, of course, they're all using the Christian get-out-of-trouble card. Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler dismissed the allegations by saying that there was also an age gap between the biblical Joseph and Mary, adding that "Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus. There's just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual." Zeigler went on to add that even if Moore is guilty, it's all "much ado about nothing $$\ldots$$ Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist." [What I find particularly odd about Zeigler's logic is that even if Joseph was much older than Mary, Zeigler's Christian faith holds that he never had sex with Mary.] Moore similarly defended himself with a flurry of Bible-toned texts: We are are in the midst of a spiritual battle with those who want to silence our message. — (1/4) #ALSen JudgeRoyMoore(@MooreSenate) November 9, 2017 The forces of evil will lie, cheat, steal — even inflict physical harm — if they believe it will silence and shut up Christian conservatives like you and me. — (2/4) #ALSen JudgeRoyMoore(@MooreSenate) November 9, 2017 I believe you and I have a duty to stand up and fight back against the forces of evil waging an all-out war on our conservative values! — (3/4) #ALSen JudgeRoyMoore(@MooreSenate) November 9, 2017 Our nation is at a crossroads right now — both spiritually and politically. — (4/4) #ALSen JudgeRoyMoore(@MooreSenate) November 9, 2017 The last time I read the Gospel of Matthew, I counted fifteen instances of Jesus condemning hypocrites and hypocrisy. But I never considered the possibility that there was such a thing as immediate forgiveness for Republicans, even when serial adultery and child sexual molestation is concerned. Silly me. I you're not already vomiting over this latest Alabama debacle, I'd like readers to note that the ages of Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth and Zachariah (see the Gospels, especially Luke) were never specified in the Bible, although (in contradiction to Zeigler), both Elizabeth and Zachariah were both "advanced in years" according to Luke. The alleged age difference between Mary and Joseph was cooked up by the early Roman Catholic Church to validate its belief that Jesus's brothers and sisters were from a previous marriage by Joseph, thus preserving the perpetual virginity myth of Mary (before, during and even after she gave birth to Jesus!) Similarly, the church also believes in the perpetual virginity of Mary's mother Anna (which is the basis of the Immaculate Conception idea), who (according to the Gospel of James) was given an immediate post-partum hymen inspection by Salome, who happily pronounced Anna to be still intact (I guess the church decided to stop there, opting not to investigate the perpetual virginity of Mary's grandmother and others on down the line, ad nauseam). Jeez, and I thought Mississippi was totally fucked up. Again, silly me.

 Let's Take America Back! — Posted Thursday 9 November 2017 Here's a great message from the American Federation of Coal Producers, recommending that all freedom-lovin' Americans hearken back to their God-given heritage and entrepreneurial roots and reimplement home-brewed coal power seasoned with a little natural line-caught whale oil for added flavor. Come on, was the 18th century really so bad?

 "Poor Little Snowflake" — Posted Wednesday 8 November 2017 My younger son received his PhD in molecular biology from UCLA in 2010, graduating at the top of his department. He had spent one year rotating through various grad laboratories before settling in for five years of grinding study and research, rarely spending less than 70 hours a week in the lab. He was one of the more fortunate ones, having a scholarship and a stipend to live on, but the work load nearly broke him. The only other person in the lab who worked harder was his advising professor, whose life pretty much consisted of teaching and research while constantly pursuing grants to keep his lab going. "Life sucking" was the most frequent comment I heard from the students during my visits to the lab. Today it's far worse. The Trump administration is slashing operational and R&D funding for the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, JPL and other federal science, health and environmental agencies, while competition for grant funding has become a nightmare, especially for universities with limited endowments. At the same time, public interest in science in America is at an all-time low, resulting in a nationwide surplus of recent PhD graduates in nearly every hard-science field except statistics and mathematics, where otherwise unemployable scientists are finding unrewarding work doing market projections for hedge fund companies and venture-capital entrepreneurs. The current state of academic scientific research is neatly summarized in a revealing new article by Marc Edwards and Siddhartha Roy of Virginia Tech, who correctly identify the symptoms and consequences of the problems now plaguing scientific research in this country: The authors' article follows an influential 2016 paper they wrote describing the problems in greater detail. While the primary issues deal with the glut of desperate job-hunting PhDs, hypercompetition for limited funding, pressure to produce high numbers of research papers, a growing incidence of fraudulent or falsified data and perverse academic incentives (university prestige, etc.), the situation in my opinion is more a product of the kind of über-capitalistic society America is now embracing. So what if your "breakthrough" scientific discovery can't be duplicated in any other lab, or if you're using post-docs to do work that MS students used to do, or if your grads can't find meaningful work in their field? If you can hype your own questionable work and sell it to some greedy but gullible venture capitalist or impress some well-heeled donor into giving your school $25 million for a new research wing, your future (not to mention your tenure) is secured. Or you can take a slightly different path, going from pure academia to popularized science writing. Harvard's otherwise notable physicist Lisa Randall has books out that any knucklehead can follow (didja know that a cloud of dark matter killed off the dinosaurs?), while City University physics professor Michio Kaku will make you feel smarter with his views on quantum teleportation, time travel and the hazards of super-luminal space travel ("If you see a black hole coming, watch out!") There are many other such academics-turned-snake-oil-salesmen out there, all of whom have discovered that writing gibberish for Americans can pay better than a full professor's salary. After graduating, my son's first job offer was from a start-up firm whose scientists were all working 100-hour weeks to guarantee their boss mega-millions for some medical "breakthrough" that went bust two years later. He turned that down and taught for two years, and decided academia wasn't for him, either. He then took a job with the CDC, deciding that at least the nation's health should hold some interest for the American public. But things will remain tentative for the time being, at least until we can get some adults in Washington D.C. Meanwhile, ponder the possibilities of what could be, but is not.  Why I Despair — Posted Tuesday 31 October 2017 The New York Times reports today that despite the recent revelations of criminality in the Trump administration, Trump's supporters will never abandon him. This was true before the 2016 presidential election, and it's true today. As I've noted too many times on this site, I believe that the reason for this mindless loyalty and adoration stems from the fact that conservatives have now merged their political beliefs with their religious beliefs. And religious beliefs, no matter how insane or demonstrably false or self-contradictory, cannot be espunged from the conservative brain. Some 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the election, along with a majority of less religious Republicans and the vast majority of white American nationalists. This voting bloc easily carried Trump into the White House, despite easily verifiable evidence of Trump's sexual hedonism, misogyny, egomania and constant lying. For many years America's conservatives warned about having an Antichrist in the White House, always believing it would be a Clinton, Obama, Sanders or other progressive candidate. Ironically, they brought that very person into the White House themselves, and they're not only ignorant of this accomplishment but proud of it as well. Before he leaves—either by serving out one or two terms, impeachment, resignation or assassination—Trump and the Republican Party will have reduced this country to a fascist shell devoid of environmental awareness, scientific literacy and ethnic and religious tolerance. The years-long succession of nationwide redistricting, the resurgence of white nationalism and adoration of the military, coupled with the now complete dumbing-down of the American public, guarantees the Republican Party complete control over the country for years to come regardless of Trump and his insane behavior. America wasn't even a decent country to begin with. Now it's infinitely worse.  Einstein Vindicated Again — Posted Monday 16 October 2017 Two weeks following the announcement that the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics had been awarded to three physicists for their research on gravitational waves, we now have confirmation from three detectors of a related event that occurred some 130 million years ago. But in addition to the detection of gravitational waves, scientists also have direct observational evidence of the event in the form of a gamma-ray burst and an accompanying visible supernova. Furthermore, this time the merging objects were not distant black holes—they were neutron stars, the burned-out remnants of massive stars that collapse under their own gravity to form pure neutronium.  Trump's Neural "Activity" — Posted Sunday 1 October 2017 The Blue Brain Project in Switzerland is currently using a supercomputer to simulate the neural activity of a rat, which has only a tiny fraction of the neural complexity of a human. With some 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses (connections), the human brain may truly be too complex to ever model or even understand, but figuring out how a rat's brain works might help us understand how Republicans and religious fundamentalists think (but I doubt it). There may be even some higher-dimensional topological aspects to the functioning of the human brain, although ordinary 3D brain complexity should be sufficient to keep neurobiologists scratching their heads for many years. Meanwhile, here's a video demonstrating the Project's simulation of a mere 100 neurons, which may provide insight into President Trump's "brain":  Gimme Shelter, or Where's the Loo, Again? — Posted Thursday 21 September 2017 It's beginning to feel like the 1950s again! Here's a nifty article about the rise in bomb shelter construction in America, featuring the homey comforts of guns, ammo, drinking water, beds, more guns, more ammo, an air filtration system, batteries, more guns and ammo, food, still more guns (there's 19 of 'em) and even a cabinet for your favorite wines, which will likely come in handy for those times when you feel like envying the dead. But the gold and silver bars you bought from the sponsors of Fox News and are now hoarding in your shelter will take away some of the angst of whatever you happen to be feeling, assuming you're still feeling anything after the bombs hit. Ron Hubbard of Atlas Survival Shelters, the entrepreneur who's selling these things like hotcakes, doesn't know much about physics or the human body's tolerance to radiation, but then the country's so dumbed-down about science now that trivial things like facts just don't matter anymore. A nice galvanized steel bunker sure looks secure, but it won't matter much when that 1,000-psi blast overpressure pulverizes you and your shelter. And if you happen to be one of the lucky ones living at least 25 miles or more from a 20-megaton nuclear explosion, the persistent radiation that Hubbard guarantees will magically evaporate in 28 days will have you watching reruns of Sean Hannity for a lot longer than you had planned. Sorry, but strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of some 30 years, and they're not biodegradable (or even compostable!) But then you really don't need to think about that—what the fuck do scientists know, anyway? Me, I like to imagine Melania Trump ducking-and-covering in a$60,000 designer dress and stiletto high heels, going out in style as she's turned to ashes.

 Goodbye Cruel World — Posted Wednesday 20 September 2017 Well, that's just dandy—I'll be on a long plane trip this Saturday, September 23, just as the world's scheduled to end. How do we know? Because some Christian numerologist/astrologer has interpreted the Book of Revelation that says it's gonna happen. But my iPhone battery mysteriously died this morning, so I guess that's proof enough for me. Sadly enough for Ned Flanders and others, however, it will not be The Rapture© but only the as-yet-undetected intrasolar planet Nibiru that will crash into the Earth. So I guess if Jesus is gonna come back, he'd better do it before then and whisk all his believers into space before all hell breaks loose down here. Where do people come up with all these nutty notions? I can think of one source.

 Goodbye Cassini — Posted Saturday 16 September 2017 Launched nearly twenty years ago, the joint NASA-ESA-ISA spacecraft Cassini-Huygens plunged into Saturn's atmosphere yesterday and is no more. Before burning up in Saturn's predominantly methane atmosphere, its camera looked one more time through the planet's rings at its forlorn home, Earth, the tiny white dot seen in this photo and, at nearly a billion miles away, some 80 light-minutes distant: The last photo Cassini would ever take is this view of Saturn, looming up to take possession of its alien visitor: Cassini is dead. Long live Cassini!

 Imaginary and Uncaring, But Comforting — Posted Thursday 14 September 2017 The only thing I remember from the Psych 101 class I took in 1968 was this iconic photo of a young rhesus monkey clinging to its fake cloth-clad "mother." Although the wire-mesh mother had a nursing bottle, the monkey preferred the food-barren cloth version instead. Noted Stanford psychologist Harry Harlow showed that baby rhesus monkeys knew that both mothers were not real, yet they invariably demonstrated a preference for the one that provided a more comforting form of "interaction," despite the fact that it was fake and provided no food. I came across this photo on my son's website, and even though I last saw the photo nearly 50 years ago it still disturbs me. Perhaps my aging brain is stretching things, but today I see it as a sad metaphor for man's preference for irrational religious belief over the far more sustaining and substantive field of scientific fact and evidence. Indeed, I tend to see belief in the Judeo-Christian God today as akin to spousal abuse—"Doctor, my husband beats me, cheats on me and promises me things that he never delivers, yet I just know deep down in my heart that he truly loves me." Case in point: following the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that killed an estimated 230,000 to 280,000 people, a child was found clinging to a piece of floating debris, alive but close to death from injury and exposure. Amid the vast destruction that lay all around them, strewn with the bloated and mangled corpses of the drowned and crushed, her rescuers were heard to say, "Thank God." If that's not a metaphor for an imaginary but "caring" parent, I don't know what is.

 Great Book — Posted Wednesday 13 September 2017 Daniel Whiteson is a professor of particle physics at the University of California at Irvine. He's got a great new book out that explains why scientists today know far less than they're usually given credit for. It's a high school-level book, but it actually covers a lot of ground, and I really love it. With clever and insightful graphics by cartoonist Jorge Cham, We Have No Idea - A Guide to the Unknown Universe includes detailed overviews of all the known particles, forces and related mysteries in the universe, which is no small feat for a book that stretches less than 400 pages. My only complaint: the puns are sometimes very bad, so a rather foregiving sense of humor is a real necessity. I bought the book yesterday and devoured it in about two hours. It really brightened my otherwise current gloomy outlook on things, and I highly recommend it.

 I Want To Believe — Posted Tuesday 12 September 2017 Oh, how I wish I could describe how German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's latest paper is something other than an uncited, uncredited rehash of Hermann Weyl's 1918 theory disguised as a "defects in spacetime" theory, but I can't because I've vowed not to post anything of a hard-science nature on this site. I also can't talk about how the long-hoped-for link between gravitation and quantum theory is now being touted as "defects" in spacetime, despite the fact that none of the researchers today can be bothered to describe just what the hell they mean by "defects." Are they "bumps in the road" of flat spacetime, point-like field/particle fluctuations or—as Hossenfelder and many others have opined—just random, stochastic glitches of unexplained origin? I want to believe that progress is being made in this "ultimate quest of physics," but I'm not hopeful. Plus, I can't even talk about it here.

 $$1+1=19$$ — Posted Tuesday 12 September 2017 Scientists, intellectuals and social scientists expected that the spread of modern science would drive secularisation—that science would be a secularising force. But that simply hasn't been the case. If we look at those societies where religion remains vibrant, their key common features are less to do with science, and more to do with feelings of existential security and protection from some of the basic uncertainties of life. — Peter Harrison Older readers will remember the second Twilight Zone series, resurrected in 1985 from its more famous cousin. In a segment from the second episode, medical equipment salesman Bill Lowery (Robert Klein) says hello to his next-door neighbor, who cheerfully informs him that his dog, an encyclopedia, has had a litter of nine puppies. Thus begins Bill's frightening descent into a world in which common expressions and language itself have gone mad. But Bill ultimately accepts his fate— while tucking his little son into bed he opens the boy's picture book, which features a cute brown wednesday, which Bill still thinks is a dog. That Bill and this Bill have a lot in common. Every day I wake up to a world that I do not recognize, whether it's an irredeemably immoral, corrupt president who's successfully fooled the country's conservatives into thinking he's a good Christian, or an entire country that seriously questions and even rejects established scientific facts like global climate disruption, evolution and the efficacy of vaccines. Peter Harrison is a professor of humanities and history at Queensland University, whose recent article in Aeon attempts to explain why irrational religious belief will always trump science. The above quote neatly summarizes his findings, so you need not read the entire article—religious belief is grounded in mankind's existential fear of death, the unknown and the inherent uncertainty of life, a fear that rationality, logic and scientific understanding cannot dispel. Magical-wishful thinking, coupled with ritual, tradition, hope and authoritarian dogma, seem to be what most people desire if not crave. "It's all in God's hands now," "I'll win the lottery and all my problems will go away" and "Let's give Trump a chance" are invariably the go-to plans for Americans today, primarily because they're quick and simple and don't require a university education. In his best-selling 2013 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel economist Daniel Kahneman calls such thoughts "System One" thinking, somewhat akin to adding $$1+1$$ or counting four fingers. It's automatic, doesn't require any real consideration or thought and, best of all for conservatives, is rapid and doesn't involve nuancing. System Two thinking, by comparison, requires real thought and deliberation, such as figuring out $$237*512$$ or deciding which stock portfolio to invest in. The primary downside to System Two thinking is that it also requires a willingness to delay immediate action, which is not a trait of religious conservatives who want to drop those bombs RIGHT FUCKING NOW before the bad guys get us first. Sadly, unlike Bill Lowery, I find myself unable to accept things as they are today. A pity, as it looks like my Zoloft isn't working after all. "Wordplay," from 1985's The Twilight Zone

 The Curse of Ham — Posted Thursday 7 September 2017 Ken Ham, the curator of Kentucky's full-size replica of Noah's Ark, is blaming devasting hurricanes on sinning Americans. Ham justifies his reasoning with this verse from Romans 8:22: "For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now." We can perhaps forgive Ham for taking this verse completely out of context (they all do it). But the "until now" that the Apostle Paul was referring to was written around 58 CE, hardly in anticipation of events occurring in another country two millennia down the road. Stupid Christian Americans assume their New Testament was written just last week, and specifically for them, and not to a bunch of ancient Jews living nearly 2,000 years ago. Here's my take on the article PZ Myers wrote this morning on this issue: Dear God, save us from your insane followers!

 Over Before We Know It — Posted Monday 28 August 2017

 Wrong Button, Jerk! — Posted Monday 28 August 2017

 Smart Decision — Posted Sunday 27 August 2017 In response to an invitation to speak at a conference in the United States in April 1953, famed British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) replied that he would rather not attend: "I would not like the journey, and I detest America." That remark is included in a cache of nearly 150 lost letters of Turing's that has been discovered behind a filing cabinet at the University of Manchester, providing a little more insight into the tortured mind of the famed Bletchley Park codebreaker. Turing committed suicide in 1954 after being forced to undergo chemical castration for his homosexuality. Christian fundamentalists have longed believed that a "gay cure" exists, either through conversion therapy, electroshock treatments or chemical castration (and even rape), a belief that persists to this day. And if it doesn't "take," then fundamentalists believe it's no big deal, as the "patient" is destined for eternal damnation anyway. Turing's decision to avoid America was a smart move, indeed. If it weren't for family considerations, I'd move out of this goddamned country in a heartbeat.

 Let the Looting Begin — Posted Tuesday 22 August 2017 It pained me to watch President Trump's so-called "Afghanistan strategy speech" to the nation last night, but watch it I did. His "strategy," not surprisingly, consists largely of not telling anyone what he will do next—not the American people, Congress, Afghanistan or any other country, all in the pretext of keeping our enemies in the dark. But what truly bothered me was Trump's veiled intent to loot Afghanistan to pay for the costs of our ongoing—and presumably eternal—military presence in that country and elsewhere in the region. Afghanistan has an estimated one to two trillion dollars' worth of mineral resources, and I highly suspect that Trump sees these resources as a way of making money while perpetuating America's aggression in that country: "In this struggle, the heaviest burden will continue to be borne by the good people of Afghanistan and their courageous armed forces. As the prime minister of Afghanistan has promised, we are going to participate in economic development to help defray the cost of this war to us. "America will work with the Afghan government as long as we see determination and progress. However, our commitment is not unlimited, and our support is not a blank check. The government of Afghanistan must carry their share of the military, political, and economic burden." If this is not a clear indication that Afghanistan's resources are available for the taking under any pretext, I don't know what is. The Nazis had something very similar to this in World War II. The families and friends of Jews and political prisoners who were either tried and shot or summarily executed without trial were required to pay the costs of the executions, usually by reimbursing the German government for bullets and other direct costs. The Nazis similarly stole many billions' worth of priceless art works, jewelry and other items from individuals, groups and even entire countries deemed unsupportive of Nazi occupation. I should know better by now, but each day of the Trump regime has me banging my head against the wall even harder in utter disbelief. Meanwhile, I find myself living in a frightened, superstitious, science-illiterate country ruled by religious ideologues. God, but I hate this place.

 Lucky Stars — Posted Monday 21 August 2017 My father used to tell me about the Great Comet of 1910, which occurred during the month of January that year. He was only five years old at the time, but he remembered his father taking him to Riverfront Park in Quincy, Illinois to witness the event. The park, which still overlooks the Mississippi River today, was just a few blocks west of their house on Cherry Street. My father recalled a large crowd that had gathered there, and that the comet itself was dazzling. But my father never mentioned the solar eclipse of June 8, 1918 which, although not quite a total eclipse at his location, must still have been memorable. It was also the first time that Einstein's prediction of the deflection of starlight was to be measured during a total solar eclipse, which allows the positions of stars near the sun's limb to be measured accurately. Unfortunately, bad weather hampered all the attempts, and so astronomers had to wait until May 29, 1919 for the next one. Several expeditions were mounted, and again clouds got in the way, but at the last minute the skies cleared and a series of accurate photographs were taken. When the photos were analyzed, they confirmed Einstein's theory, and the great scientist became a superstar overnight. The general theory of relativity predicts that a massive object actually warps spacetime, so that passing light is bent toward the object. But even for something as massive as the Sun ($$2\times10^{30}$$ kg), the deflection is tiny. It is especially tiny when one calculates the deflection using Newtonian theory, as it amounts to only 0.875 arc-seconds. Einstein's 1915 theory predicts exactly twice this amount, and the additional deflection was just barely observable by the technology of 1919. It is interesting that Einstein himself nearly botched his own theory. In 1913 the theory was still incomplete (and wrong), and Einstein proceeded to calculate the deflection of starlight using what turned out to be a bad theory. The result was exactly the same as that given by Newtonian mechanics, but Einstein consoled himself by thinking that his theory at least duplicated the classical result. Had a total solar eclipse been handy at that time, observed starlight deflections would have made Einstein and his theory look very bad, indeed.

 My Eyes! — Posted Monday 21 August 2017 The solar eclipse at Caltech was only about 60%, but the air got noticeably cooler and the sky was like evening (my sons were more fortunate—they got to see around 95% coverage from their homes). I estimated the crowd here to be about 3,000 people: The viewing goggles were free, and they were indispensable. I couldn't help think that it would have been a great time for Caltech to pull a nasty trick on everyone—goggles that don't really protect your eyes! Kind of like what Rainier Wolfcastle discovered in an old episode of The Simpsons: On a sadder note, the 400-year-old Engelmann Oak at Caltech finally died despite heroic efforts to save it, and this is all that remains of that magnificent tree today: Einstein must have paused before this tree many times during his stays in Pasadena, 1931-33

 JFK — Posted Monday 21 August 2017 Warren Commission Evidence No. CE 399—the magic bullet. Last night I re-read British author Jeremy Bojczuk's 2014 book 22 November 1963: A Brief Guide to the JFK Assassination. It's only 100 pages long, not including 75 pages of appendices, but of all the books I've read on JFK's assassination (and I've read all the good ones), this is undoubtedly the best of the bunch. Even with Kennedy's murder now nearly 54 years behind us, many questions remain. The book provides a concise summary and logical analysis of all the critical evidence, and it's apparent that Oswald could not have acted alone. But forget all those conspiracy stories you've read about—the CIA and Mafia organized the hit, the Russians did it, greedy defense contractors and the Pentagon did the killing, or enraged Cuban militarists with the backing of the US military were behind it all. We will probably never know. All the book says is that Oswald had help, almost certainly with the active or passive assistance of elements within the U.S. government, most likely the CIA. Meanwhile, the FBI, Secret Service and the Dallas Police Department were criminally remiss in their duties, and probably did what they had to in order to cover their errors in the mishandling of evidence and facts behind the killing. Did Oswald murder Officer J.D. Tippit? Absolutely. Did he shoot Kennedy? It's at least possible. But Oswald's known whereabouts in the Texas Schoolbook Depository almost certainly eliminates him from the 6th floor during the shooting, while the forensic evidence—the physical impossibility of the "magic bullet" theory, the neutron activation analyses, the discovery of both jacketed and soft-point bullet fragments in the bodies of Kennedy and Governor Connally and the choreographed autopsy of JFK's body—all point to collusion, whether pre-planned or not. Perhaps even more telling is the Warren Commission's intentional decision to not interview actual eyewitnesses to the tragedy or to even allow eyewitness evidence into its report. If you only read one book on the assassination, read Bojczuk's compelling account. You can also go to what is certainly the best online repository of information on the killing, MFF.org.

 Both Back Sides — Posted Thursday 17 August 2017

 Back to the Future — Posted Wednesday 16 August 2017 Chief Justice Roger Taney, 1777-1864. Not just another pretty face. This year marks the 160th anniversary of the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford Case which, after years of lower-court litigation, ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court. As you are probably aware, Scott was a free black petitioning his continued freedom in the North while fighting extradition and re-enslavement to a slaveholder in the South. The case infuriated both sides of the country—abolitionists argued for his emancipation, while Southern sympathizers fought to have Scott returned as stolen property. Upon conclusion of the Court's worst decision of all time, Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote "[African Americans] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it." This is the attitude that America's Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads and white nationalists would have us return to. It's also the attitude that President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and the majority of the Republican-led Congress either overtly or tacitly approve of. As I've noted on several occasions here, the biggest mistake that Abraham Lincoln and William Tecumseh Sherman made at the conclusion of the Civil War was their failure to utterly destroy the South and hang or exile Jefferson Davis and all the other Southern traitors. They did not, and the rallying cry of "The South Shall Rise Again!" continued to ring out, resulting in the glorification of the "Lost Cause," Reconstruction corruption, thousands of lynchings, a hundred years of Jim Crow and the perpetual mistreatment and persecution of American blacks and minorities. Ongoing and seemingly unending events like the recent Charlottesville tragedy demonstrate to the world that America has not really changed at all. The 13th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act stand as mocking reminders of this country's Christian hypocrisy regarding freedom, justice and love of one's fellow man. Indeed, in 2016 the Christians of this country voted overwhelmingly to put the most blatantly corrupt, money-loving and evil womanizer in the most powerful position on Earth, amid ongoing screams of "Lock her up!" and the persistent notion that Barack Obama was the Antichrist. America's woefully ignorant and hypocritical Christians today instead worship Donald John Trump, the most likely candidate for Antichrist the world has ever seen. The South has won. Gun-toting, club-wielding, noose-carrying Southern morons have taken over the country, under the protection and approval of the same man they put into the White House. My solution? Become a Canadian citizen, move out of this pathetic, goddamned "Christian nation," and pray for its destruction. That, or get a gun and go to Washington DC.

 Beautiful — Posted Tuesday 15 August 2017 Here's a nice break from the Trump insanity that now surrounds us. It's a beautiful new animated video explaining Einstein's gravitational field equations, the metric tensor $$g_{\mu\nu}$$, and the quantities $$R_{\mu\nu}, R$$ and $$T_{\mu\nu}$$ that make up the equations. It also neatly explains the concepts of spacetime curvature and parallel transport. I can't help but think Einstein himself would have gotten a big kick out this video!

 Who is He Trying to Kid? — Posted Monday 14 August 2017 Kenneth C. Frazier, CEO of Merck and one of President Trump's token African-American advisors on the Manufacturing Council, abruptly resigned yesterday when Trump refused to call out racist bigotry following the tragedy at Charlottesville. Trump, whose now-infamous "many sides" remark already had him in deep shit with the country, quickly criticized Frazier's resignation, adding the implication that Frazier was a drug pricing "ripoff artist." Today, with the shit now up to his ears, Trump finally described the KKK, neo-Nazi groups and white supremacists as "thugs and criminals". But it's too late—Trump had already shown his tacit support for these same groups, who are in fact an important part of his base of supporters that got him elected in 2016. His late denouncement of these groups is completely phony. I liken the whole episode to a man who one day screams at his wife "I hate you, you ugly, pathetic, stinking, steaming pile of shit! I will always hate you! I wish to God you were dead!" then the next day, realizing that he'll lose everything in a divorce, tries to rebuild the dike. But there are some things you cannot take back, because everyone knows your attempts are phony as hell. And Trump's denouncement of his racist, bigoted base, who he dearly loves and admires, is as phony as they come. Update: two more CEOs have now quit Trump's Manufacturing Council in protest. And now yet another. And now they're all gone.

 Phony Patterns and Imaginary Agents — Posted Thursday 10 August 2017 I'm re-reading Stephen King's 2011 truly great novel 11.22.63, which chronicles a time-traveler's extended efforts to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I don't ordinarily read fiction, especially long novels (King's is nearly 900 pages), but the writing is spellbinding while the subject matter has been of great interest to me for fifty years. Over those same years I've read all the books about the assassination and the numerous conspiracy theories involving CIA plots, the Freedom for Cuba Party, government-hired mafia hit men, military cabals and all that. Many of them have included fairly detailed discussions on the physics of bullet trajectories and head-snaps, but most tend to focus on Oswald's connections with Russia and the CIA and his alleged political motives. But none of that is included in King's book—it doesn't address assassination conspiracies at all. It's primarily a time-travel story that we've all thought about at one time or another—preventing the most infamous crime of the 20th century—but it has a truly unique aspect that touches on the notions of patternicity and agenticity. The only weak spot in the book concerns the existence of a time portal that just happens to be situated in an ordinary diner owned by Al Templeton, a Vietnam veteran who uses the portal partly as a means of acquiring 1960s-era supplies for his restaurant—which explains why Al's Famous Fat Burger meal costs only 1.19 (with fries and drink, to boot). Al's dream is to use the portal to prevent JFK's murder, but he is stricken with cancer and knows he can't complete the assignment. So he enlists the help of the younger Jake Epping, a friend who Al talks into undertaking the mission. What follows is a long, colorful, infinitely detailed story of how Jake finds ways to fit into the world of 1958 (where the time portal invariably takes you at the start) and how he earns money to live on and underwrite the costs of his ultimate mission in Dallas. What Jakes sees and experiences along the way will resonate with anyone who lived in the 1950s and early 1960s. But what fascinates me most about the book is Jake's realization that the past, while fully accommodating the time-traveler in his day-to-day activities, pushes back when Jake attempts something that might significantly change history. This push-back can be subtle (lost keys, flat tires, a viral infection, diarrhea, corroded spark plugs, etc.) or severe (Jake is physically attacked at numerous times to prevent his accomplishing the mission). The past, as Jake learns, can be a real bitch when it wants to be, and he quickly recognizes that there's a pattern to the past's annoying interferences. Psychologists have long known that humans are hardwired to see patterns in things, whether the patterns truly exist or are imaginary. This hardwiring springs from a survival instinct, probably traceable to our hunter-gatherer days. For example, a rustling motion in a bush might be a lurking predator or just a gust of wind—early humans were familiar with both, and while the presence of a wolf or saber-tooth cat might be highly improbable, it was always best to run like hell anyway. Even today, when shown a graph depicting a large number of completely random dots, a person might say that he sees a definite pattern of some kind in the arrangement of the dots. Such a response is completely harmless, of course, unless that person is a scientist whose pet theory happens to rely on there being a definite pattern in the data. Of greater interest, however, is the subsequent assignment of agenticity to observed patterns, whether they are imaginary or not. Agenticity, which is the assignment of some external agent or entity behind observed patterns and happenings, probably resulted at a relatively late date in human development, when hunter-gatherers conceived of the notion that there was some kind of external entity or force responsible for the patterns. For example, a hunter who successfully eluded a rampaging lion leaping from a rustling bush might not have attributed his luck to alertness, but to an agency—usually a god or gods—helping him get away. Behavioral psychologists say that such thinking almost surely arose as a result of increasing human intelligence and expanding populations coupled with a total ignorance of underlying natural phenomena—diseases, deadly lightning strikes, floods and droughts were bad, while bountiful harvests, recovery from sickness and successful hunts were good. Lacking any scientific or rational explanations for all these events, early humans conceived the notion of powerful gods—the ultimate agencies. Once the concept of a powerful god or gods was acquired, it was inevitable that humans would seek ways to placate those gods to ensure continued blessings or to avoid punishment. This then gave rise to the development and practice of religious rituals, initially primitive but eventually becoming elaborate affairs involving personal and communal sacrifices of some kind. The first sacrificial ritual was apparently recorded in the Hebrew book of Genesis (Cain and Abel), which revealed God's preference for sacrifices of blood and flesh over those of grains and fruit. This too is understandable from the viewpoint of ritualistic human behavior—meat was high in protein and energy while fruit and grain was not, so it was understandable that God would want sacrifices involving things that were not only difficult to acquire but far more precious to ongoing survival than ordinary fruit and vegetable matter. This notion of precious versus ordinary sacrifice ultimately resulted in the practice of human sacrifice, in particular the sacrifice of a community's firstborn sons. It's not a coincidence that the New Testament is grounded in the torture and sacrifice of God's supposed only son, Jesus. I don't think Stephen King considered any of these things when writing his book, but it does reveal our ongoing, all too-human notion of attributing unexplained phenomena to an external entity that somehow exercises power over us. Power, yes, and fearful power as well, and it this same fear that arose in an early humankind determined to appease those entities through ritual and sacrifice. It is perhaps the greatest tragedy of our species that erroneous pattern identification and resultant irrational agenticity still plagues us to this day. Indeed, fear and the belief in an imaginary God and his redeeming son continues to threaten the extinction of all human life today—and by our own hands, not God. Look ye, Starbuck: all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the molding of their features. The white whale tasks me; he heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. 'Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate; the malignant thing that has plagued mankind since time began; the thing that mauls and mutilates our race, not killing us outright but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung. — Moby-Dick  Ride 'Em, Noah! — Posted Tuesday 8 August 2017 Paleontologists are confirming reports of the discovery of the largest animal that ever existed on Earth. The fossilized bones of Patagotitan mayorum, a herbivore, were recently uncovered in Argentina in an area unusually rich with the bones of gigantic dinosaurs. The animal weighed upwards of 75 tons and stretched approximately 120 feet from snout to tail. Scientists at the Ark Encounter in Kentucky also expressed delight over the discovery, noting that the animal, when suitably fitted with a row of saddles, could have easily accommodated Noah and his entire family on picnic outings and trips to church services. They added that the dinosaur and its yet-to-be-found mate were most likely ridden by Noah to the Ark, where the behemoths were magically shrunk down to the size of hamsters by God prior to being taken aboard the vessel. They further elaborated on the dating of the dinosaur, which had been estimated by godless, immoral, liberal "scientists" (probably Democrats) as having lived about 100 million years ago. Ark Encounter scientists have correctly refined that date to approximately 6,000 years ago, in keeping with biblical timelines. Update: Believe it or not, since posting the above item I've received emails from people wondering how I could possibly believe that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. Jesus H. Christ, people, can't you recognize sarcasm when you see it?! Perhaps you folks would be better served by the related thoughts of one of my favorite comedians, Lewis Black:  Truly Frightening — Posted Tuesday 8 August 2017 A fundamentalist Christian group called POTUS Shield (PS) has arisen in America, a group that exemplifies the frightening direction that the religious right in this country is now taking us. While admitting that President Donald Trump is "imperfect," PS nevertheless likens him to ancient Israel's King David, who was also imperfect but was anointed by God to lead his nation to greatness. Claiming that Trump too has been divinely anointed by God to lead America to glory, PS would have us all bowing our bludgeoned heads and kneeling on bloody knees to ensure the Second Coming of Jesus, who they claim will not return until America has been thoroughly chastised and Christianized. As I have so often pointed out to deaf ears, Christians (and Jews) simply refuse to read their Bibles, particularly when it comes to divinely appointed kings. King David, you will recall, impregnated Uriah's wife Bathsheba and then had Uriah killed to cover the illicit pregnancy. God punished David by having the baby die, but he quickly forgave him because David was an otherwise okay guy. David's subsequent offspring King Solomon inherited the kingdom and had the First Temple built to honor God, who was so happy that he gave Solomon 700 wives and 300 concubines so that the seemingly indefatigable Solomon wouldn't have to resort to adultery. But some of Solomon's wives, most of whom were gifts provided to ensure political alliances with foreign countries, talked him into worshiping false gods, and eventually Israel was split into two nations, Israel to the north and Judah to the south, both of which were quickly conquered and destroyed by invaders—first the Assyrians, then the Babylonians, then the Persians, then the Greeks, then the Syrians and finally the Romans, with occasional harassment by a host of other countries along the way. Jews were regularly exiled, imprisoned, persecuted, tortured and killed by the millions during the intervening centuries, whether they were rigorously following the Law of Moses or not. In all, over 2,500 successive years elapsed from Israel's destruction until its reestablishment in 1948, but not until God had sent a further six million Jews into the Nazi gas chambers and crematory ovens. I for one don't see anything divine at work in all this history, and as for Trump I hope someone blows his fucking brains out before his ego gets any worse by sycophants claiming his divinity. But wait! The religious right might want to fully Christianize America (and then the rest of the world, by force if need be), but then Jesus will come back and all will be fine. Won't that be nice? You can believe this bullshit if you want to, but I think it's far more likely that the Divinely Anointed Donald John Trump and his minions will destroy America long before any imaginary Rapture or Second Coming occurs, probably by way of a hail of nuclear weapons directed against a belligerent America by China, Russia and others in the nuclear club who see things a bit differently.  Mimicry — Posted Sunday 6 August 2017 The 1997 horror film Mimic was only average, but it introduced the interesting concept of an insect species that had learned to mimic the appearance of humans for the purpose of preying upon them. Mimicry in nature is not uncommon—the wings of some butterflies sport large, eye-like spots to discourage predators (mainly birds and lizards), for example—but such evolutionary changes are normally intended as defensive, rather than offensive, adaptations. The insects in Mimic have adapted instead because they've somehow developed a taste for human flesh, a behavior that is not fully explained in the film. There's also the possibility of unintended or accidental mimicry in nature. Some synthetic chemicals can mimic the properties of enzymes in the human body, for example, resulting in either biochemical disruption or overreaction. Often, such chemicals need only be present in minute, trace concentrations in blood, organs or tissues for such effects to occur. Environmental sociologist Rebecca Altman's excellent article in yesterday's Aeon Magazine primarily addresses the environmental problems associated with waste plastics in the Earth's ecosystem, noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that every human being on the planet now carries around some 200 different synthetic compounds in their system associated with the manufacture and use of plastics. She also (if tacitly) addresses the problem of endocrine disruptors that can mimic biochemical processes in humans and animals (which, even at the level of parts per trillion or lower, can result in adverse effects), while noting that in a sense humans and plastics are merging into something akin to a biological petrospecies. But for some reason she avoids the equally important issue of what these synthetics may be doing to our brains. As a child growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I was made aware of diseases such as polio (God, I hated those annual booster injections) and smallpox. But I never came across anyone in school who displayed the effects of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which today is said to afflict one out of every six Americans, or autism spectral disorder, which is said to afflict one in twelve. There are many other conditions (restless leg disorder, social anxiety disorder, etc.) that were unheard of way back when, and I'm tempted to think that they were either misdiagnosed as something else or didn't exist to begin with. I'm not a medical doctor, but I tend to go with the latter option. People seem to be pumping themselves with all kinds of prescription drugs and medications today (there's even a new one prescribed for people with double chins), and I can't help wondering what's becoming of all the associated waste products that are going down the toilet upon excretion. Speaking of which, it may be comforting to think that "out of sight out of mind" equally applies to the environment, but we know these flushed substances are getting into ground and potable surface waters as well as the ocean. What effects are these chemicals having on impacted macro- and microfauna? (It has been claimed that the orca whale population in Puget Sound is so contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls that each animal actually constitutes a hazardous waste.) It may also be comforting to believe that these substances are being physically or microbially degraded in the environment to benign levels, but I think that's a fool's attitude. More to the point, however, is the question of what long-term adverse effects these chemicals are having on our brains. If each dose of your diazepam, vicodin, tizanidine or whatever you take serves to wipe out 0.0001% of your brain's neurons, would you ever be able to notice it? For a population the size of America's, could widespread prescription drug use or inadvertent ingestion of chemical wastes like plastic products (BPA in particular) be producing an imperceptible but significant long-term adverse impact on our collective mental acuity? And if we never noticed it, how would we be aware there's a problem, and would the problem be reversible even if we did know? I hazard to guess that this is what may be wrong with America today—we've gone insane and don't know it. Perhaps some brave pharmaceutical outfit could develop a medication for Trump mental disorder, but the problem is already so widespread I doubt it would even be used.  Incredible Ignorance — Posted Monday 31 July 2017 Two amazing posts today. One is from Adrienne Petty, associate professor of history at William & Mary College, who writes about how the term populism has changed from the days when it meant working-class stiffs rightly complaining about how robber barons were controlling every aspect of their lives to today, when it means working-class (white) stiffs blaming minorities for the crappy way the country is abandoning all manner of domestic programs (but only the ones that are fucking them over): The problem isn't just using the word populist as a euphemism for racism and ethnic chauvinism. The term also helps to reproduce the very ideology that has trapped white working-class people by reinforcing the idea that they are not supposed to experience the same social and economic problems as everyone else. White workers outraged over the economic difficulties they're facing get a movement with a name; the economic hardship that non-white working people face is ignored. The implication is that white working-class people are the members of society who are supposed to be financially secure or comfortable—that they have a birthright to prosperity. You see, America was founded on institutionalized inequality, but with the promise that if you worked really hard you could pull yourself up and prosper. Of course, that promise only applied to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had the gumption to steal land and labor from others on their way up the economic ladder, all the while attending church and worshiping a Jesus who conveniently looked the other way when it came to slavery and minority oppression. And as long as things were working in their favor, they didn't complain too much about the New Deal, Social Security and welfare. Today even middle-class WASPs are hurting, but as long as they have immigrants and minorities to blame they'll continue to elect Republicans who couldn't care less about anyone, including their supporters. And there's also this religious aspect to it: if you're struggling to keep your family afloat, it's because you've either sinned against God or haven't donated enough of your money to coiffed, wealthy televangelists who continue to dominate Red State airwaves. But the post that really got to me today was that of one Lucian B. Wintrich, a right-wing journalist who put up this incredibly offensive and ignorant photo: Yeah, go back to your own country, you fucking anti-American Native Americans! Hey, is this country totally fucked, or what?!  The Trump Method — Posted Sunday 30 July 2017 Republicans believe the Scientific Method is "nuancing," requiring the uncomfortable need to actually think about something before acting. Far better, they say, is the Trump Method, which is more convenient and doesn't require a functioning brain. That's why the GOP agenda is awash in empty slogans and platitudes, and it also explains why they're now running Amerika, which has finally been dumbed-down to the point of complete national lunacy.  Just One More Step — Posted Friday 28 July 2017 The British newspaper The Guardian has been reviewing the dystopian nightmare series The Handmaid's Tale since its first episode, and with the conclusion of the premier season the show has elicited more and more comparisons with the Trump-Pence-GOP vision of America than ever before. While I do not understand the transgender and gay lifestyles, I deplore the insistence by my country's right-wing maniacs to persecute people on the basis of biblical principles. Trump may want to ban transgenders from the military, but the Pences and Ryans and all the others would love to take it further, banning gays, then minorities, then non-Christians and finally non-whites from the military as well. The Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, as the newspaper's article points out, is only one step removed from the current state of right-wing insanity that has infected this nation. Having watched all ten episodes, I can assure you that The Handmaid's Tale is indeed a horror show depicting what's next for America, and not some improbable sci-fi depiction of a dystopian future. In view of the fact that America is now being run by insane fanatics, along with the likelihood of continued gerrymandered redistricting of the country prior to the 2018 and 2020 elections, I see only one hope left for this country—a total military takeover of the U.S. government followed by the execution or deportation of nearly all the Republicans in Congress.  Uncertainty — Posted Saturday 22 July 2017 I've been listening to the audio book version of Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky's book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, now in its third printing. Sapolsky can also be seen in numerous YouTube lectures and presentations, and I encourage you to seek him out. It's a long book (the audio version is over 17 hours), but its initial focus deals with acute and chronic stressors and their health consequences. Acute stress is what we experience when facing a single, immediate stressor, such as a car accident or speaking before the public, while a zebra will experience acute stress when under attack by a lion. But animals like zebras generally do not experience chronic stress. After successfully eluding a lion, a zebra will go back to its day-to-day routine—it won't worry about future attacks, even though they're certain to happen. But humans can experience chronic stress by simply imagining future events that may or may not ever occur—an impending job loss, a disturbing health report, etc. Animals do not worry about the future because they are not sentient, while people can experience chronic stress just sitting in an easy chair and fretting about tomorrow. The premise of this part of the book is that chronic stress in humans can result in lowered immunity to disease, along with a host of physical and mental illnesses. Sapolsky notes that while chronic stress can lead to constant, energy-draining vigilance against real or imagined threats, it's really a consequence of human consciousness which, in addition to giving us the ability to anticipate and plan ahead, can also activate stressors involving uncertainty and fears of the unknown. In his famous poem To a Mouse, the Scottish poet Robert Burns compares the accidental destruction of a field mouse's nest to Burns' rue of past mistakes and future fears, emotions that the mouse never experiences. In short, the mouse gets over it, while humans may not. It is my belief that conservative Americans today are experiencing the consequences of chronic stress due to ongoing irrational fears over terrorism and the very real possibility that, after 2,000 years of patient waiting, their precious Jesus is not going to return after all. This induces not only physical illness but mental instability as well—witness the country's current madness involving facts that don't matter, lies that pass for truth and the election of unqualified, moronic and evil political ideologues, all tying in with their constant need for worldwide, full-spectrum military domination at any cost. It may be a cliché that conservatives dread change because of the uncertainty it produces, but I think it's all too true—frightened, panicking people simply cannot think. Welcome to 21st century America.  What a Difference Ten Years Makes — Posted Wednesday 19 July 2017 It's been ten years since the movie Shooter came out starring Mark Wahlberg as Bob Lee Swagger, a top-notch U.S. Army sniper caught up in a framed assassination plot. Despite its faults I've always enjoyed the movie, which not-so-subtly criticizes right-wing patriotic jingoism and political corruption. I especially like the film's conclusion, in which the bad guys (all corrupt American politicians and their stooges) get blown away and justice is served at the end of Swagger's gun. Fast forward ten years. Shooter is now a television series (produced by Wahlberg) in which Swagger is a brawny, handsome, larger-than-life military warrior whose patriotic heroics and demeanor span the gamut of every banal jingoistic, faith-based, family-values platitude you can imagine. His sharp eye and sinewy, muscular arms invariably guide his sniper bullets into the brain stems of every Taliban bad-guy he aims at, but at the same time he's a loving, caring Christian husband and father who rarely goes a minute without expressing his deep love for his country, little girl and wife, who also gets plenty of hot physical lovin', believe you me. I binge-watched the first season on Netflix, which pretty much reproduced the story of the 2007 film. I found it fairly entertaining, although the scenes depicting devout, praying Christian FBI characters and occasional overt, stomach-turning patriotism were a bit much for me. But then last night I watched the premier episode of Season 2, and it's apparent that the show has become nothing less than an all-out advertisement for Trump's vision of glorious worldwide American imperialism. I found the killings almost pornographic in their depictions of patriotic gore and God-granted American heroism, and I won't be subjecting myself to the show any longer. Jeez, what was Wahlberg thinking? This is the kind of insane shit that conservatives are wallowing in nowadays.  Rambling Saturday Thoughts — Posted Saturday 15 July 2017 Caltech's Cahill Center. How long before it's burned down and replaced with a megachurch? Last night I attended a lecture on gravitational astronomy at Caltech's new50-million, 100,000-square-foot Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Before the talk I wandered around the building, peeking into the laboratories and various graduate research facilities and marveling at the level of science that the school represents. But I could also not help thinking about the new $800-million, 430,000-square-foot Museum of the Bible now being completed in Washington DC or the$200-million Ark Encounter in Kentucky, each with its own lecture halls, "research" facilities and man-walked-with-the-dinosaurs exhibits. All funded and supported by corrupt, wealthy evangelicals, these monuments to irrationality and ignorance serve as ample evidence that religion is easily besting science in this nation at every turn, if not actually destroying it. True, Pasadena has Caltech, JPL and a host of high-tech research companies, but I also could not help think about the hoards of poor, homeless and mentally ill people now populating Pasadena's streets and freeway underpasses, countered by America's ongoing love affair with hypocritical, proselytizing Republican politicians, coiffed billionaire televangelicals, a trillion-dollar-and-growing military war machine and an uncaring wealthy class that works tirelessly to transfer what little the poor have to themselves. And, at the same time, I read about how Americans think of their country as a "Christian nation." Much has been written about "tribalism" is this country today—how facts, evidence and logic simply have no effect on some people who will go right on supporting insane beliefs and those who hypocritically espouse those same beliefs for political and monetary gain. It's quite obvious, even to the 25% of Americans who are certifiably insane, that if President Hillary Clinton had been tainted with even the tiniest amount of collusion that Trump and his family have perpetrated with the Russians to undermine the 2016 presidential election, she'd have been extradited to Guantánamo, "interrogated" and executed by now. Yet President Trump and his corrupt family members and sycophants continue to evade justice. Why? Because that same 25% is running the country today, and they're not going to back off an inch. Does anyone today maintain the slightest hope that this can be turned around? Is a bloody revolution, replete with widespread political assassinations, the only solution left?

 Rambling Thursday Thoughts — Posted Thursday 13 July 2017 Some forty years ago I got interested in an idea that appeared to unify gravitation with electrodynamics, a fundamental goal of many physicists immediately following Einstein's publication of his general theory of relativity in November 1915. That idea was put forward by Hermann Weyl in April 1918, and represented the first mathematically consistent approach to a generalization of Einstein's theory. It was awesomely beautiful, but it had a fatal flaw—as Einstein himself showed, it was, to put it simply, wrong. But Weyl's work was the nucleus of what ultimately became the most beautiful (as well as successful) approach to modern physics, the notion of local gauge invariance. When first exposed to this approach in the 1970s, I felt, like many others have, that it represented proof of the existence of God. For logical reasons I won't go into here, I no longer believe in the so-called Judeo-Christian God. But I'm still fascinated by the beauty of Nature's laws and the stunning, almost incomprehensible ability of mathematics to consistently describe them at a profound, fundamental level. As a "Christian atheist" today I leave open the possibility of a God of some kind and, while he simply ain't the God of the Old and New Testaments, there's no question that, if he exists, he's a mathematician of the very first order. Over the years at Weylmann I've shared many of my thoughts about Weyl and his work, and I've tried to explain his beautiful 1918 theory and expand on it to the extent that I felt competent to do so. Along the way I was careful never to propose any theories of my own, fearful as I was of appearing as an unqualified crackpot. At the same time, however, my country's descent into political and cultural insanity—caused, I believe, by the underlying irrationality of religion and the fear it invariably induces in people—has radicalized me to an extent I never thought possible, and I've tried to realign my life accordingly. I simply have no interest in what happens to this nation any more or its people (other than my family and friends), and my only escape seems to be science and mathematics, along with the few hobbies I've pursued along the way. "Physics as a way of life," as the saying goes, makes a hell of a lot of sense in this day and age. I've written what will most likely be the last thing I'll ever write about Weyl and his theory. Although the theory has been dead nearly 100 years now, it still pops up regularly in the scientific literature and continues to be a source of fascination for many young physicists. It's satisfying to know that some beautiful things never die.

 Say It Ain't So! — Posted Wednesday 12 July 2017 Does anyone remember the 1963 Stanley Kramer comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World? If so, perhaps you'll recall the scene where Emeline (Dorothy Provine) discovers where the treasure's hidden (it's under a big "W"), and she reflects for a moment on how she's the only one in the madcap party of treasure hunters who knows where the money is. But only a minute later another hunter makes the same discovery, and Emeline laments how quickly the secret of her discovery has evaporated. Fast forwarding 54 years, we have the History Channel's recent two-hour documentary, produced at great expense, on the supposed discovery of a new photo of lost aviatrix Amelia Earhart in a Japanese-held port in the Marshall Islands, presumably taken in 1937 after her ill-fated crash into the Pacific Ocean with navigator Fred Noonan, which most investigators believe claimed the lives of both aviators. Well, quick as Bob's Your Uncle, a Japanese military history buff found the same photo in a magazine that had been published in 1935, two years before the Earhart/Noonan crash. And just like that, the History Channel's intriguing documentary has now been placed alongside Geraldo Rivera's much-publicized non-discovery of Al Capone's secret money vault in 1986. I watched the History Channel show and found it moderately interesting while thinking it might actually be true, but biology professor PZ Myers, who ungenerously called the documentary "bullshit," wasn't taken in at all. An atheist, Myers routinely uses his same powers of deduction to trash organized religion. He's completely right about that, of course, but while the History Channel's take on Amelia Earhart will be quickly forgotten, religion's bullshit will likely be here to stay until we finally blow ourselves and the planet up.

 It's Back — Posted Tuesday 11 July 2017 The Confederate Flag was raised again at the South Carolina State Courthouse yesterday by protesters who felt that the Deep South had been slighted by that state's decision to take it down two years ago following the murder of nine African Americans by a white supremacist. Seems like killing blacks these days carries about the same shock value as the thousands of lynchings the South is so proud of. Meanwhile, South Carolina's former governor, the cute-as-a-button-but-still-corrupt-as-hell Nikki Haley, is now America's Ambassador to the United Nations, having been appointed to that post by unser glorreicher idiotischer Führer Donald Trump. Haley will no doubt be seeking to have the Stars and Bars raised in front of the UN building but, sad to say, there are few trees nearby, so she will likely be unable to raise any Strange Fruit alongside the flag. How appropriate

 Sapolsky on the Schizotypal Basis of Religiosity — Posted Monday 10 July 2017 Robert Sapolsky is Professor of Biology and Human Behavior at Stanford University, and despite my lifelong aversion to the life sciences his YouTube video lectures are nothing short of spellbinding. He has an excellent 25-part lecture series that he posted fairly recently, but there's an older version of one of the lectures (it looks to be about 1999 or so) that just nails the likely relationship between religious belief and schizotypal personality disorder. It will enlighten anyone who's still stunned that a clueless, greedy, egomaniacal sexual predator like Donald Trump could ever be elected President. Fascinated, I took notes during the lecture but couldn't keep up with all the cogent points Sapolsky makes on the connections between obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizotypalism, superstitious conditioning, shared anxiety, temporal lobe epilepsy and religion's obsession with purity, cleanliness, ritual and numerology. Charismatic religious leaders, rabbis, pastors, shamans, witch doctors, medicine men, brahmans and their ilk all exhibit these traits to a great extent, while the people they lead around like sheep tolerate their irrational obsessions because we all share a common need to comprehend the incomprehensible and to explain the unexplainable—hence the descent into the inescapable madness we find ourselves in today. Want to know what disastrous psychological malady is shared by humans, pigeons and rats? You'll find out in the video, which is about 82 minutes long.

 A Different Kind of Crush — Posted Sunday 9 July 2017 Although my post of 15 June revealed an utter disdain for my high school years, the same is not true for those of my parents. My mother hailed from a small town in southwest Missouri, but as a teenager her family moved to Quincy, Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from Hannibal, Missouri. There she attended Quincy High School, graduating in 1932 (it should have been 1930, but she had to drop out for two years due to a family illness). My father attended the same school, graduating in 1924 (it should have been 1922, but his family also had some problems). A treasured remembrance of my mother was her description of catching her hair on fire during a chemistry lab experiment in her junior year. She mentioned that it had something to do with nitric acid, but as a chemistry major myself many years later I can only wonder how HNO$$_3$$ could possibly have been involved. I did something equally stupid when as a chemist I prepared a small batch of nitrogen triiodide (NI$$_3$$) in the lab and set it off in a fume hood, which I managed to do without getting fired. Here's my mother (top row, third from the left) as a member of the school's Alchemy Club in 1931 (I guess that's what they called chemistry back then): For many years I've had in my possession my parents' graduation yearbooks, and when the Internet got active in the early 2000s I started collecting yearbooks from other years (mostly from eBay auctions). It was fun to see my parents as kids in group photos from their freshman, sophomore and junior years, where they typically appeared as tiny images amidst hundreds of other faces. Unlike me, they were both very good looking, and their faces were never hard to pick out from the crowd. The school's 1927 yearbook is now 90 years old, and I'm positive that all the graduates are now passed on. My mother's tiny image is in the book, but what really interests me is the book's owner, one Leafa Norene Bryant (shown above), a very attractive young lady herself, whose yearbook is replete with hundreds of autographs and written comments from fellow graduates (she must have been very popular). But I also couldn't help noticing the numerous and lengthy comments written by a fellow female graduate, all of which invariably begin with "Remember when we $$\ldots$$ " The writing (done in blue fountain pen) is very faded now and difficult to read, but it's evident that the girl had an enormous crush on Ms. Bryant, while a few of the comments reveal overt lesbian feelings for her. I can't help thinking that her comments represented the very last time she had to express those feelings, as morally wrong as they would have certainly appeared in those days. Although "Marguerite" is certainly dead now, I won't reveal her identity or reproduce her more intimate yearbook comments here. Anyone named "Leafa" is going to be easy to trace on the Internet, and I discovered that after graduation she moved to Oklahoma, where she married in 1930, dying there a widow in 2001 at the age of 92. But I can't help wonder what happened to Marguerite, whom I've been unable to trace because of a very common last name. I also have to wonder how she felt when her best friend, who was probably unaware of the extent of her friend's feelings until they were revealed in that 1927 yearbook, left the state after graduating. When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin $$\ldots$$ in the dust, in the cool tombs. And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes $$\ldots$$ in the dust, in the cool tombs. Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? $$\ldots$$ in the dust, in the cool tombs? Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns $$\ldots$$ Tell me if the lovers are losers $$\ldots$$ tell me if any get more than the lovers $$\ldots$$ in the dust $$\ldots$$ in the cool tombs. — Carl Sandburg, Cool Tombs

 Nationalism, Militarism and Greed Merge With Christianity — Posted Sunday 9 July 2017 Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. — Nazi Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels Megastore Hobby Lobby, an evangelically-owned and operated multibillion-dollar business based in Oklahoma, is completing the construction of the $800 million Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. The museum, which sits adjacent to numerous federal buildings, was intentionally designed to appear as a federal building itself to give the illusion that the U.S. government officially sanctions the Christian faith. At over 400,000 square feet, it will be the largest museum in the city when it opens to the public this fall, rivaled only by the Smithsonian. In addition to the usual religious claptrap, the museum intends to display thousands of archaeological objects from the ancient Middle East in the hope that visitors will come away believing that the Old and New Testament stories are literal, historical and inerrant. In that sense the museum follows the recently completed$200 million Ark Encounter in Kentucky (a full-size replica of Noah's ark, but without the use of biblical "gopher wood" because, like the ark itself, it never existed) and the Ark Discovery Museum, which has sadly been closed due to a lack of visitors. You will recall that Hobby Lobby famously went to the Supreme Court to argue against the Affordable Health Care Act's requirement that employers provide family planning and birth control medication for their employees. In a 5-4 decision in 2014, the Supreme Court decided for Hobby Lobby and gave the company an exemption from the law. Hobby Lobby repaid that favor by illegally obtaining millions of dollars worth of looted Middle Eastern archeological antiquities to stock their museum. Caught redhanded, the company must now return the items to Iraq and other countries that they looted and pay a fine of $3 million which, for a multibillion-dollar firm, is a mere slap on the wrist. Here in my dear old Pasadena I have been spotting billboards extolling the virtues of our glorious military (we have to invade and occupy other countries, you see, in order to spread democracy, freedom and Christianity), while what little cable television I still watch runs military ads for the Army, Navy and Marines depicting huddled, frightened (and white) families protected by garrisons of uniformed, medal-festooned heroes. Meanwhile, and perhaps not coincidentally, the streets and freeway underpasses of Pasadena are filling with homeless panhandlers, many with children, while President Trump is increasing military spending while slashing expenditures on domestic social services. "Start a business and get rich!" he says. It's sickening.  He's Not Just Adept at Closing Bridges — Posted Tuesday 4 July 2017 Down at the beach, I'm a lucky man I'm the only one who gets a tan. — Weird Al Yankovic, Fat Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) may have shut down the beaches to the public recently, but he managed nevertheless to sneak his enormous bulk onto one of them with his family yesterday. A sharp-eyed photographer snapped this picture from a Cessna aircraft, which was probably the only way he could fit the governor into the shot. A blow-up of the photo showed that it was indeed Christie. While his fabulously wealthy family members enjoyed a public beach all to themselves, they did note with some consternation that their volleyball had a peculiar habit of orbiting the governor and spoiling the fun. They also had to avoid the water because of all the sharks that gathered after they spotted Christie on the sand. One shark was heard to say to another "If we can pull this off, we'll eat like kings!" But they were sorely disappointed because Christie, after emerging from the sand with the same ease as a Brontosaurus emerging from a tar pit, left the beach after spotting an all-you-can-eat hot dog stand. If I have one more pie a la mode I'm gonna need my own zip code. — Al again  Weylguy — Posted Tuesday 4 July 2017 Doesn't this idiot ever shut up about religion and politics?  Science Correcting Itself — Posted Monday 3 July 2017 A friend alerted me to this article, which reports on the possibility that dark energy is a figment of the imagination. The article is based on a February 2017 arXiv paper entitled Concordance Cosmology Without Dark Energy. I think it serves as a great example of how scientists are always questioning their work, and how a theory is invariably treated as only a temporary scientific fact awaiting the arrival of contradictory evidence, at which point the theory is either modified or scrapped. Science is thus a falsifiable and self-correcting field—totally unlike religion or politics, which involve persistent and immutable lies. As a grad student many years ago I took a single course in astrophysics, thinking that my long-time interest in astronomy would carry over from my hobby of telescope-building and stargazing into physics proper. To my dismay I found I didn't really care for the subject, and I never bothered to pursue it. Part of that ongoing attitude comes from something I read in a textbook I had at the time, the 1965 edition of Introduction to General Relativity by Adler, Bazin and Schiffer (which is still my all-time favorite relativity book): Let us first remark that the use of a distinguished time-coordinate $$x^0$$ marks the abandonment of a completely covariant treatment of the cosmological problem. This is the price one has to pay to simplify the cosmological models and to describe physical reality in convenient mathematical terms. The authors wrote this as part of their introduction to what's known as the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) metric, which is an exact solution of Einstein's gravitational field equations as applied to the entire universe. The solution relies on the assumption that on average the distribution of matter in the universe is both homogeneous and isotropic, a quite reasonable assumption considering the magnitude of the problem. What may or may not be reasonable is the additional assumption that there is a global time coordinate that applies to the universe everywhere at the same instant which, as the authors imply, represents a radical departure from strict relativistic covariance. I have always been bothered by the fact that the FLRW solution remains the primary tool for cosmological modeling despite the apparent questionability of this latter assumption. The new paper in effect addresses the issues of homogeneity, isotropism and global time simultaneously by not taking on the entire universe all at once, but breaking it up into bite-size chunks, each of which is allowed to have it own set of local properties. They did this by simulating a sample cube of space measuring 480 million light-years along each side, breaking it up into 1 million pieces, and applying the FLRW metric to each piece using a high-speed computer. They then "averaged" the results for the entire sample space. What they got was nearly exactly the same as that predicted by the so-called "lambda-cold-dark-matter" ($$\Lambda$$CDM) model, which today serves as the standard model for cosmology. The $$\Lambda$$CDM model assumes a non-zero value for the cosmological constant $$\Lambda$$, which is generally believed to be a form of dark energy. The new paper is based solely on Einstein's field equations without a dark energy component, making the presumed existence of dark energy itself highly questionable. Again, a neat example of the legitimacy of scientific pursuit. More information on the study is available here, while the following video shows a computerized comparison of the paper's simulation with the $$\Lambda$$CDM and FLRW models.  Is Science Becoming Like Religion? — Posted Friday 30 June 2017 The 3-dimensional "shadow" of a 6-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold. In a previous post dated 30 May 2016, I outlined the derivation of the patently strange expression $$S = \sum_{k=1}^\infty k = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 \ldots \infty = \infty - \frac{1}{12} \tag{1}$$ Odd as this appears, the derivation is relatively straightforward and the math involved is entirely correct. More to the point, however, is that it's important in the development of modern bosonic string theory. I won't go into it, but the 12 in the denominator of (1) is used (via $$2 \times 12 + 2 =26$$) to show that bosonic string theory is meaningful only when there are 26 spacetime dimensions, 22 more than are evident to our lying eyes (the extra space dimensions are all the size of the Planck length, you see, so we don't see them). But then one has to ask what happened to that $$\infty$$ in (1). Do we just ignore it? Not quite. In quantum field theory there are many calculations that essentially yield just two types of quantities: those that are finite, giving highly accurate answers to physical problems of great interest, while the others are infinite, and typically thrown away for the sake of convenience ("swept under the rug," as Richard Feynman once put it). The infinite parts involve things like the actual (bare) mass or electric charge of an electron, for example, which we can never directly observe or calculate anyway, so they're ignored. But in bosonic string theory the infinite piece in (1) is believed to exactly cancel out other infinities arising in the theory, so the $$-1/12$$ persists, and thus represents a highly meaningful and useful quantity. To see where I'm going with this, let's consider the similar infinite series (originally considered by the great 18th century Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler) $$T = \sum_{k=0}^\infty 2^k = 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 \ldots \infty = 1 + 2\,(1 + 2 + 4 + 8 \ldots \infty)$$ But this is just $$T = 1 + 2T$$, so that $$T = -1$$ or, equivalently, $$\infty = -1$$. This is clearly nonsense, but we've made absolutely no mathematical mistakes in the derivation. So where did we go wrong? The answer lies in the fact that infinity is not a number that can be added to and subtracted from, but is instead an abstract concept or representation of a quantity that cannot be expressed numerically. You simply cannot add, subtract or multiply $$\infty$$ in any mathematically consistent way that will end up giving sensible answers. It is thus entirely correct to write $$\infty + 1 = \infty$$, whereas $$7 + 1 = 7$$ is absurd. For the same reason, trying to balance out or "subtract away" infinities in quantum field theory and string theory would seem to be similarly absurd, but physicists do it because they have no better ideas on how to get rid of those otherwise unwanted and embarrassing infinities. In the 1980s, mathematical physicists found that the number of spacetime dimensions in string theory could be reduced to 10 if yet another complicated theory—supersymmetry (or SUSY)— were incorporated into the mathematics. This still involved six extra Planck-size space dimensions (in what is called a Calabi-Yau manifold), but it was a lot better than 22 extra dimensions. Then in 1995 the noted mathematical physicist Edward Witten discovered that string theory could be made even more consistent if an additional space dimension were added, bringing the total to eleven. Today, 11-dimensional superstring theory arguably represents the best shot physicists have of uniting all the known forces of Nature into a single theory. Unfortunately, the energies required to test the theory lie at or near the Planck energy level, which is many, many orders of magnitude greater than those that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is able to generate. In fact, it has been suggested that a collider the size of the observable universe would be needed to adequately verify superstring theory. Obviously, string theory in its current form will almost certainly never be testable. But that means it will have to reside outside the scientific method, which in addition to hypothesis requires verification through repeated experiment and peer review. True scientific theories are considered something akin to temporary facts, subject to both additional validation as well as future falsification. This is primarily what makes science different from religion, which is based solely on untestable, non-falsifiable claims of faith (whether the "facts" add up or are completely nonsensical, illogical or contradictory is irrelevant in religion). In July 2012 the LHC discovered the Higgs boson, the final link in the chain of the highly successful theory known as the Standard Model. It was an expected discovery, and the mass of the Higgs (about 125 GeV) had also been expected. The anticipated next step for the LHC was to be the discovery of a host of particles demanded by SUSY, many of which lie only a bit higher than the Higgs in terms of mass. Since 2012 the energy of the LHC has nearly doubled, and its improved resolving power was expected to start producing carloads of the postulated supersymmetric particles. But, to the surprise and dismay of many theorists, nothing has been found. As of this writing, for all intents and purposes, Nature appears to be a particle and field desert at energies above that of the Higgs. This represents a crisis in physics at two levels. One, at nearly its design energy capability of 14 TeV, the LHC has found nothing. And two, the absence of anticipated supersymmetry particles is a major blow for superstring theory, which in many ways is absolutely dependent on the validity of SUSY itself. Pro-SUSY and pro-string theorists have responded by moving the goal posts—surely, they say, the anticipated SUSY particles lie at higher energies than previously thought (requiring the construction of more powerful colliders), or superstring theory in its current form is strictly applicable only to lower energy regimes not entirely dependent on SUSY. These responses are not completely unrealistic or unjustified, but they do reflect a kind of faith sneaking into science. And I think that's dangerous, because it represents a kind of "God-of-the-Gaps" argument for science in which, regardless of the total lack of any empirical evidence, physicists may go ahead and believe in their theories anyway. When asked how he would have reacted if the 1919 solar eclipse data had refuted his theory of general relativity, Einstein replied that he would have felt sorry for God, because the theory was correct anyway. Einstein was fortunate that his braggadocchio was instead fully supported by the data. I very much doubt if the same will hold for the superstring and SUSY theories.  Post-Racial America? — Posted Tuesday 27 June 2017 Emmett Till, 25 July 1941 - 28 August 1955 The Mississippi memorial marker for Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black youth who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in Mississippi in August 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman, has again been defiled by white nationalists. Till's killers were quickly identified and arrested, but they were just as quickly acquitted by an all-white jury in September 1955. After the trial the two killers publicly and proudly admitted murdering Till, knowing that Mississippi's double-jeopardy laws guaranteed that they could never be tried again for the crime. The offended white woman later admitted that she fabricated the entire story. Till's mother demanded and got an open-casket funeral for her slain son. She wanted the world to know that her son's mutilated, bloated and rotting corpse was the consequence of a white nationalist hatred that has never left this country. Indeed, that hatred is even more on display now that Donald Trump, the darling of the KKK, is the nation's president.  Collapse — Posted Monday 19 June 2017 They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the Earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. — Marlow, in Heart of Darkness (1899) On the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt is a low mountain called Mokattam Hill, which figures prominently in the Coptic Orthodox faith. Legend has it that here in the 10th century CE the Muslim Caliph al-Muizz Lideenillah challenged Christians to provide a demonstration of Matthew 17:20, in which Jesus tells his believers that faith as small as a mustard seed can move a mountain. Under the threat of death of the area's Christian inhabitants, the Coptic Pope Abraham led a series of prayers that are believed to have physically lifted the mountain above its base, thus satisfying the Caliph that the Christian faith was indeed both true and powerful. Today, you would be hard-pressed to find even a moderate Coptic Christian who doesn't believe the story is historically and factually true. The area of Mokattam today is called Garbage City. Bereft of basic services such as schools, running water, sewers and adequate electricity, it serves as the garbage repository of Cairo's 10 million inhabitants. It also serves to support thousands of poor Egyptians, who scavenge the rotting heaps of garbage to support their families. One has to wonder why another round of prayers might not today solve the problem, which invites disease, malnutrition and high childhood death rates. After all, it's gotta be a lot easier than moving a mountain. A young Egyptian girl squats amidst rotting garbage in Mokattam The primary reason I'm so negative about organized religion is because it encourages simplistic, irrational thinking that causes people to place hope and faith above rational thought and action, expecting that God will solve all their problems. It also allows people to retain the two most negative human emotions—fear and greed—by disguising them as positive traits, such as hard work, the indomitable spirit of human innovation and invention, and the notion that people who look, think and act differently are morally inferior and therefore deserve to have what little they possess taken away from them by the wealthy (Matthew 25:29-30). A colleague directed me to a recent article by ecology writer Rachel Nuwer entitled "How Western Civilization Could Collapse," a disturbing overview of how rampant human greed and fear over the millennia have caused widespread misery for both our species and the planet as well. But far more disturbing is the fact that in spite of war, disease and resource depletion, our species has managed to produce today's bumper crop of some 7.5 billion individuals, the vast majority of which subsist hand to mouth on pathetic incomes and even fewer material resources, with little or no real expectations that things will get any better. What little remaining hope exists is fueled by knee-jerk religious platitudes like "It's all in God's hands" and "God wants you to be rich" and "Kill them all and let God sort it out", thus relieving the human race of the responsibility of actually doing anything about serious problems or even recognizing they exist. People living on the edge then bring more children into their world of subsistence living, compounding the problem. Organized religion thus has the net effect of preventing the human race from developing a true action plan for sustainable living by encouraging us to trust in miracles and illogical nonsense, regardless of whether we're rich or poor and regardless of how we treat other people and the Earth that sustains us all. Nuwer's article should be required reading for everyone.  Yes, Burn It — Posted Monday 19 June 2017  Scapegoats — Posted Sunday 18 June 2017 Retired Army Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich (see my post dated May 16) has an op-ed in today's The Los Angeles Times, outlining Der Trump's plans to make his generals take the blame for Amerika's pointless and seemingly endless war in Afghanistan. In response to recent complaints by Sen. John McCain, Defense Secretary James Mattis responded with "we will correct this as soon as possible" via "a change in our approach" by "doing things differently" using "a more regional strategy" involving an "across-the-board whole of government" collaborative approach. I strongly suspect that even rabid war hawk McCain sees that this is all just more bullshit to buy more time in the Middle East (more time as in "forever"), but Bacevich's take is that Mattis knows full well that he and his fellow hawks will be taking the fall for a war that cannot be won. Meanwhile, Mr. Penis President Trump is actually counting on this, as he knows his campaign promises to end the conflict in that country were empty, and he desperately needs scapegoats. But fear not, fellow Amerikaners, Trump is already eyeing Iran as our next war objective which, just like Iraq, has oil to boot. While Iran is an enormous country, with 75 million people who are impossible to defeat militarily, don't expect that to deter Trump, who I liken to Hitler with 5,000 nuclear weapons.  Still Not So Long Ago — Posted Thursday 15 June 2017 On this exact day and date in 1967 I graduated from Duarte High School in California—fifty years ago. It seems like yesterday, and I still vividly recall being overjoyed that my high school days were finally done. Having had perfect grades throughout grade school, high school from the start was nothing but a traumatic experience for me—mediocre grades and endless crushes on girls who didn't know I existed, along with the sudden, crushing awareness that my home life with two poor, uneducated drunken parents who constantly fought with one another was not the norm after all, drove me into a shell at the age of 14. I was socially inept, a mediocre student and athlete without any personality to speak of, and almost pathologically shy. To top it off, I ended up barely a C+ student, hardly fit for the university and chemistry or physics career I had aspired to since the age of ten. One of the duties of the school's Vice Principal, Mr. Scheel, was to meet with and advise each of the graduating seniors on their respective paths into the adult world. When I told him I wanted to go to college and major in either chemistry or physics, he tactfully informed me that with my grades and SAT scores I should aspire instead to trade school—I distinctly recall him saying that plumbing might be a good career option for me. My parents somehow managed to remain sufficiently sober to attend my high school graduation, which took place in the middle of Falcon Field on that day at 6:30 pm. Sitting in the bleachers overlooking the ceremony, my Dad took this single photo of the event with his cheap Instamatic camera, which I managed to preserve over the years in all its glorious graininess. She, the blond high school goddess who occupied so many of my tormented, longing thoughts throughout most of my high school days and whose memory continues to haunt me still like a ghost from the past, is seated here among the guests—forever unknown and unidentified—in the last row of the photo. I watched her wistfully all through the ceremony, knowing I'd never see her again. Remember thee! Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee! Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven! — Hamlet She must be 67 now, and has not only certainly forgotten me, but will remain forever unaware of our coincidentally connected past lives. May you live in eternal happiness and joy, my dear oblivious sweetheart.  Not So Long Ago? — Posted Saturday 10 June 2017 I watched the movie Picnic last night, the first time I'd seen it since my late sister Connie and her boyfriend took me along to see it in the then-tiny beach town of Balboa, California sometime in early 1956. I had just turned 7, and I remember hating the film because I really wanted to see the science fiction movie It Came From Beneath the Sea, as I had been promised. Although the movie is full of stereotypical American mores (no blacks or minorities to be seen anywhere, for example), I can see the film now with its undercurrent of sexual repression and frustration, the looming hopelessness of goals and dreams, jealousy, the fleetingness of youth, and the need for true love in one's life. The dance sequence with William Holden and Kim Novak (the only surviving main actor from the film) is sensuous, exhilarating, moving and heartbreaking at the same time, made all the more poignant by Moonglow, the film's beautiful love song. The issue of sexual repression in 1950s films is not as rare as one might think, although I doubt very much if audiences at the time were aware of it. Charles Laughton's immortal 1955 film The Night of the Hunter is chock-full of subtle sexual imagery (contrasted with the innocence and frailty of children), but audiences at the time didn't understand the film at all. Conservatives longing for the naive simplicity of the 1950s elected Donald Trump last year largely because he represented a return to the good old days of Leave It To Beaver, never realizing that their sexually corrupt and moronic candidate actually preferred Grab The Beaver instead.  Don't Get Your Hopes Up — Posted Thursday 8 June 2017 Sorry, but I haven't been watching the Comey Hearing because I know full well nothing will come of it. We live in a different age from the days of Watergate, when Republicans were so disturbed about Nixon's lies and corruption that they could join with the Democrats to take the bastard down. That can't happen now—today's Republicans have all gulped down the Trump Kool-Aid and will stand with their man no matter what. The only hope I see for this country now is a military coup in which Trump and his administration minions are all lined up and shot, followed by military trials for all the Congressional Republicans and blue dog Democrats. That's absolutely not going to happen, so Amerika is just shit up a creek.  Yet Another Irrational Conservative Fear — Posted Wednesday 7 June 2017 Noted German physicist and blogger Sabine Hossenfelder routinely fields questions from her readers, usually at a level far from the lay person's ability to comprehend, but she occasionally stoops down to answer truly elementary inquiries. In today's post she responds to a letter from a person who expresses great anxiety over the end of the universe by vacuum decay, a possible but highly improbable event that's impossible to predict. In its simplest description, every quantum field $$\phi(x,t)$$ has a value in spacetime that is associated with a potential energy level denoted by $$V(\phi)$$. In the case of the Higgs field, that potential exists everywhere in the universe. Since the universe hasn't been blowing up lately, it is assumed that the value of $$\phi$$ is in a position of local (or relative) stability called a vacuum state. That state is assumed to be a minimum somewhere on the above state-potential graph. But that position could be a false vacuum, meaning that there's an even more stable (lower energy) state somewhere on the graph. If such a state exists, then there's the possibility that the current state could get there by quantum tunneling, a proven quantum-mechanical process that most high school kids have learned about. If and when that happens there's a release of energy to the surroundings, resulting in a more stable energy state. If the Higgs field happens to be in such a semi-stable (false vacuum) state, its collapse to a lower state would release unimaginable energies, resulting in the certain end of our universe. The person who wrote Hossenfelder is almost certainly a conservative Christian Republican, because only such a person would express such great anxiety over a highly improbable event (roughly once in about $$10^{600}$$ times the age of the universe) which, if and when it happened, couldn't be avoided anyway. This is a conundrum I've never been able to comprehend—these people routinely express great faith in God and Jesus, yet they're scared to death of any kind of uncertainty and of dying itself. But it's when those people act out their irrational fears—like electing monsters like Donald Trump to lead them and their country down the road to Perdition—that things get truly scary.  Checks and Balances?! Bwah-ha-ha-ha! — Posted Tuesday 6 June 2017 Truth-Out is claiming that President Trump's pull-out from the Paris Climate Agreement is an impeachable act, in part because he acceded to the demands of 22 Republican senators to get the United States out of the deal, who all received a total of over$20 million in donations and gifts from oil, gas and energy corporations that stand to make a killing when America becomes a lone environmental wolf in a rapidly degrading global ecosystem. What Truth-Out and others don't seem to understand is that unless Congress makes an effort to control Trump, he can do pretty much whatever he wants. Trump used the Russians to hack our voting systems and gut Clinton's chances in the 2016 election, and appointed corrupt, inexperienced family members to administration jobs who also have ties to Russia. He's gutting funding for scientific research, Social Security and Medicare, he's frozen Federal worker salaries and hiring, and he now plans to privatize the nation's air-traffic control and prison systems for the benefit of his corporate pals. As for the environment, Trump has cut 31% of the Environmental Protection Agency's funding, and has already banned that agency's mention of the terms "global climate change" and "sea level rise." Meanwhile, America's "Christians" love Trump, and our corrupt, go-along Congress is doing nothing to mitigate Trump's destruction of the county. Remember Schindler's List? For sport, Trump could sit in the Oval Office with a sniper rifle and gun down passersby outside the White House fence like Amon Göth, and it's doubtful that Congress or the courts would even bother giving a damn. During the 2016 campaign Trump even bragged "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters." Again, America's "Christians" simply loved it, but it was probably Trump's on-camera "Grab 'em by the pussy" remark that really endeared him to their satanic, hypocritical hearts. "Be careful what you say" — Warning issued by former Republican White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer to reporters who were getting too inquisitive regarding Bush 43's bogus Iraq War

 You Have Nothing to Fear if We Think You've Done Nothing Wrong — Posted Tuesday 6 June 2017 In this age of low-cost, high-quality color printers, it has always fascinated me to watch those old noir films about master counterfeiters who spend years and years engraving perfect copper plates to make bogus twenty-dollar bills—only to get tripped up by the Feds because the crooks left something out of the plates, like Andrew Jackson's left eyebrow. But today even the cheapest color printer can make seemingly perfect copies of U.S. currency. The trick is to get the paper just right, and then find a work-around for those annoying security strips embedded in the bills. It turns out that even if you had a stash of blank U.S. currency linen (which is illegal to own) and the best color printer that money can buy, you'd get caught anyway. That's because the government has colluded with printer manufacturers to have their printers embed secret and traceable printing dots on every page you print, whether it's an illegal portrait of Andrew Jackson or your Uncle Jack. Yes, your printer has been spying on you. I thought I could relax after putting my Vizio Smart TV set out to pasture to prevent the NSA from recording my plans to overthrow the government (and I always leave my GPS-equipped iPhone at home when I'm out burying a body), but I have to admit I never suspected my trusty Canon MX870 to turn on me. Now I'll have to think hard to remember if all those kidnap ransom notes and terrorist bomb threats I printed were in color or black and white. Must be B&W, since I'm not currently in the custody of the FBI or strung up in a torture cell at Guantánamo. Whew—dodged a bullet on that one. Although I know that my hero Mike Ehrmantraut is clever, supremely cautious and paranoid like me, he nevertheless screws up from time to time, so you can never tell. Hats off to PZ Myers for tipping me off. Just shut the fuck up and let me die in peace. — Mike Ehrmantraut

 GW170104 Joins the Party — Posted Thursday 1 June 2017 A third observation of the merger of a binary, multi-solar mass black hole system (dubbed GW170104) has been confirmed by the advanced LIGO instrument, which detected the signal in January of this year. The detected signal and source luminosity data indicate the merger of a 31 $$M_\odot$$ black hole and a 19 $$M_\odot$$ black hole some 880 megaparsecs ($$z=0.18$$, or about 2.9 billion light-years) from Earth, making the merger a relatively remote event. The measured outgoing radiation corresponds to a net energy loss of 2 $$M_\odot c^2$$, in complete agreement with Einstein's theory of general relativity. The data provides no reliable information on the estimated spins of the individual black holes, but the calculated spin of the merged system indicates that the initial rotation rates would not appreciably affect the overall calculations. The observation provides increasing confidence to scientists that gravitational radiation will become as important a tool as are optical and radio telescopes in astronomy today, and that it may ultimately confirm or disconfirm current theories of cosmological inflation, the expansion rate of the universe, and both the origin and fate of the universe itself. Meanwhile, President Trump is slashing federal funding for scientific research, while conservative morons like James Dobson, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others continue to assert that scientific facts and theories are just opinions and lies, while maintaining that a man who lived 2,000 years ago absolutely walked on water and was resurrected from the dead. Go figure. Here's an undated Einstein photo, showing some of his "opinions and lies" on the blackboard. In the 1930s the Nazis placed pages in magazines and newspapers declaring that Einstein was Noch ungehängt, or "Not yet hanged." I'm pretty sure that Dobson, Hannity, Limbaugh and company feel the same way about all scientists today, as they cheer on Amerika's imminent return to the 13th century.

 Is This What You Want? — Posted Wednesday 31 May 2017 I've been watching the Hulu series The Handmaid's Tale for a number of weeks now, and it's getting more and more difficult for me to watch. Adapted from author Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel of the same name dealing with a dystopian America that has been taken over by a fundamentalist Christian government, most of the angst that I feel viewing it arises from the fear I have that it might actually transpire before long in this country. Writer and author Patricia Miller shares this same fear in her latest Religion Dispatches article, where she compares the Gilead Government's Commander Fred Waterford with Vice President Mike Pence, whose fundamentalist Catholic faith is eerily similar to the harsh attitudes of fanatics like Pence regarding the role of women. The sole job of the story's protagonist, Offred (meaning she is "Of Fred") is to bear children to Waterford and his barren wife. The similarities of the story line with the Old Testament tales of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel regarding conception and birth are pronounced. Miller also goes after conservative Catholic douchbag Ross Douthat who, while routinely voicing his discontent with the antics of the dangerous, moronic womanizer Donald Trump, cannot hide his delight that the country is nevertheless moving in the direction represented by Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale. Defying even the most trifling religious command in Gilead is punishable by beatings, amputations, female circumcision or death (usually by mass public hangings), for both men and women. But it's far worse for the women—they are forbidden to read or have any contact with men (eye contact with a man is considered both a sin and a capital crime), and they must always be completely clothed in red or green burka-like outfits. The Handmaids are forced to have sex with their men owners for reproduction purposes, while the Marthas cook and clean for their male masters. The men typically are married to barren wives (a global phenomenon caused by war and environmental degradation), who seem to have little to do but shop and look pretty for their husbands. And this is America in the near future, not Iran or Saudi Arabia. Miller cites five reasons why she believes America might go down the same road, all dealing with the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives and most of the country's state governments are currently governing and enacting laws that seem frighteningly similar to what we're seeing in the series. Years ago I saw a university play based on the novel, and at the play's conclusion the women actors all came out on stage and asked the audience, in unison, Is this what you want?

 Covfefe — Posted Wednesday 31 May 2017

 Lying with Statistics? — Posted Monday 29 May 2017 I did my PhD dissertation on particle statistics. Not particle physics, but particle size distribution statistics. So I had to learn about $$r^2$$, $$\sigma$$- and $$p$$-values and all that, and I believe I got to be fairly adept at recognizing the significance of data, at least with respect to their statistics. So when it was announced in 1999 that the expansion of the universe was actually accelerating and not slowing down under the influence of gravity as expected, I naturally wanted to see the data that supported that claim, which won three researchers the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011. It's actually a very big deal in cosmology, because an accelerating universe implies dark energy. To be honest, I wasn't particularly impressed with the data, which I posted some years ago in the form of the researchers' published summary graph: Briefly, if the universe was simply expanding along normally, the data points would line up with the heavy dotted line. But for high-$$z$$ (red shift) observations, the data points appear to drift away from that line, implying that something is making the universe expand at an accelerated rate. It's not a huge drift, but it's statistically significant. Or so I thought. Last year a paper appeared that challenged that conclusion. The gist of the paper's argument is that true scientific discoveries generally have to achieve what is known as the 5-sigma significance level, meaning that there is only a $$2.867 \times 10^{-7}$$ probability (or about one in 3.5 million) that the discovery is false. Not false in any "rigged" sense, mind you, but false in that there's a slight chance that the discovery is just plain statistically insignificant—in other words, a fluke. But as this 2016 article notes, much more data has been accumulated since the original findings were reported, and they imply only a 3-sigma significance level for all the data, which puts the original discovery in the "possibly interesting" category. 3-sigma is definitely publishable (it means that there's a one in 741 chance that the discovery is a fluke), but it doesn't merit a Nobel Prize. I'm not a cosmologist, but I frankly don't agree with the dark energy idea, at least in the sense that it's some kind of mysterious, unknown particle or field that's being advertised today. It's probably just Einstein's cosmological constant $$\Lambda$$, which the great scientist introduced in 1917 to maintain a static, non-expanding universe in his gravitational field equations. He then famously dumped what he referred to as his "greatest blunder" when Edwin Hubble showed in 1929 that the universe is definitely expanding. A non-zero cosmological constant can make the expansion of the universe slow down or accelerate, depending in its sign, but efforts to date to determine its precise value have been inconclusive. It's very small, to be sure, but it ain't zero. In the meantime, the accelerating-universe discovery has maintained its popularity despite contrary evidence. This is disappointing to me, because science is supposed to be self-correcting, a consequence of the time-honored notion of falsifiability. Our theories of quantum physics and general relativity (gravitation) have yet to fail a single test, yet one verified piece of contrary evidence would send those theories back to the drawing board. Contrast that with politics and religion, whose dogmatic notions seem impervious to disproval.

 When, Dear God? — Posted Monday 29 May 2017 I attended a meeting last night on quantum gravity. It was very elementary, but the attendees did share the same question that has nagged me for years: will we ever see a workable theory of quantum gravity before we all start pushing up daisies? I for one am running out of patience, forced to read one inane paper after another claiming some minor breakthrough (or progress, at least) on the subject. Lots of hand-waving out there, but every idea to date has come up empty. Quantum mechanics and Einstein's gravity theory (general relativity) are the most supremely successful scientific theories we have. Neither has failed any of the experimental tests thrown at it, and with both theories now roughly 100 years old that's really saying something. But there's a problem—QM and gravity don't play well with one another. The mathematics behind each is straightforward, but to date no one has figured out how one might be related to the other. This is a damned shame because, unless we can figure this out, the problem of where matter and energy really come from, and perhaps what our purpose is here on this stupid planet, will never be resolved. I think part of the problem is due to the mathematics. In general relativity there's really only one quantity of any use—the Riemann-Christoffel curvature tensor $$R_{\,\, \mu\nu\alpha}^\lambda$$. It's a purely mathematical quantity that's never actually measured, just calculated. It only vanishes when there's no mass-energy (or gravity) lurking about, so it serves as the starting point for all conventional theories of gravitation. Physicists play with this quantity in their theories, contracting it into its lower forms $$R_{\mu\nu}$$ and $$R$$ and combining it with other quantities that they hope will lead somewhere, but always to no avail. By comparison, the mathematics of quantum mechanics is far richer, with its wave functions and operators and long-tested rules, however axiomatic many of them might be. But quantum theory only makes predictions of experimental outcomes, and while they are invariably successful the theory is inherently probabilistic, a feature that Einstein detested ("God does not play dice"). But the picture may be changing. There is one place where quantum mechanics and gravitation are forced to confront one another, and that is at the surface and interior of a black hole. There is now significant theoretical evidence that a black hole somehow preserves unitarity, the notion that information cannot be destroyed (a particle in a pure state, for example, cannot exit the black hole in a mixed state through Hawking radiation) when an object (say, Melville's book Moby-Dick) falls into a black hole. There is, however, also theoretical evidence that the event horizon ("surface") of a black hole destroys all infalling information via a "firewall." Whichever view is the right one, it would appear that black hole physics represents perhaps the only currently available gateway to a successful theory of quantum gravity—no other object in our universe provides such an ideal way to develop (and test) what happens when quantum mechanics and gravitation are so forcefully thrust upon one another. I include the word "test" because the recent (confirmed) observation of gravitational radiation from two merging black holes has effectively opened up the prospect of gravitational astronomy, a new area in which gravitational wave detectors (like LIGO) might be used in essentially the same way that radio telescopes are employed today. Still, that would require the development of the appropriate mathematics needed to describe what's going on, a task that's been underway for too many years now. There's an apocryphal story that Einstein, confronted with a young girl's exasperation over a problem in arithmetic, replied "I assure you, young lady, the problems I'm facing in mathematics are far greater." Interesting, but it provides little solace to aging idiots like myself.

 Blast from the Past — Posted Monday 29 May 2017 I recall flying to a conference in Missouri one day in 1995. I was working on a paper, and the woman seated next to me said she couldn't help noticing my math scribbling (it was something about hydraulics). She was an elementary school teacher, she said, and she sometimes taught math to the middle grades, but nothing like the kind of stuff I was working on. We ended up having a nice chat all the way to the St. Louis airport. Exactly a year ago there was a similar incident that occurred to a professor of economics on what should have been a routine 40-minute flight (I posted the story back in May 2016, and you can read it again here). He was scribbling some math notes on a pad of paper when a woman passenger took notice of his work. Suspecting the dark-skinned, curly-haired man was a terrorist plotting some nefarious scheme in Arabic or secret code, she promptly notified the authorities, who took the man into custody. He somehow convinced airport security personnel that his notes were differential equations, not plans for a terrorist strike, and the plane departed two hours late but without the woman passenger, who apparently decided not to take any chances. A year later, President Trump is now busy killing off funding for scientific research, which he believes is a waste of money. I can't help but think that doing math or science on a plane nowadays might result in a much more serious situation, one that could have the scribbler sent off in chains to Guantánamo. Now in complete control of Amerika, right-wingers figure it's better to be safe than sorry, especially when foreign-looking people are involved. I see defunding science research as the first step toward making it illegal. In 1933 the Nazis started burning science books that they deemed represented "Jewish science," and just a few years later they were burning the Jewish scientists themselves. The past is prologue.

 Real Classy — Posted Friday 26 May 2017 Two minor gripes here. One, The Los Angeles Times allows submitted comments on many of its articles and reports, but invites you to buy or bid for "points" that will promote your comments to the head of the submittal list. Anything for a buck, I guess. And two, Montana's Greg Gianforte handily won election to the state's House of Representatives yesterday, despite being charged by the police for physically assaulting a UK Guardian journalist two days ago and sending him to the hospital for asking tough questions about his campaign. Gianforte and his wife are good Republicans, you see, who heartily support Trump and his policies of anti-science and pro-war. As good Christians, they oppose family planning, retirement benefits for the elderly, the minimum wage, health care and environmental protection—all because they believe the Old Testament demands opposition to these programs and policies (Noah was 600 years old when he built the ark, you see, so only lazy undeserving bastards think about retiring). But Montana's a Red State, comprised of moronic shit-kickin' cowboys and rednecks, so Gianforte got elected anyway. Many of my Democratic friends and relatives have told me that sure, Trump and the Republicans are now in charge of everything, but their insane policies will fuck the country up so badly that the elections of 2018 and 2020 will surely send them packing. With Gianforte's win yesterday, I'd say that kind of logic doesn't work anymore.

 You Idiots! — Posted Thursday 25 May 2017 German director Fritz Lang's brilliant 1927 film Metropolis is now 90 years old, but its message of a future world gone stark raving mad is as prescient as ever. The dystopian city of Metropolis is ruled by wealthy corporatists, who are served by impoverished workers who slave underground to run the engines of empire. An apparent savior—Maria —attempts to negotiate decent living conditions for the workers with their above-ground industrialist masters. But the scientist Rotwang, crazed by his love for a woman whose death he blames on the industrialists, seeks to destroy the city and the people, rich and poor alike. He creates an evil robot that he transforms into the exact likeness of Maria, through which Rotwang will incite the workers to destroy the machines they're forced to operate and maintain. Because the workers are uneducated, ignorant and have little to look forward to in life, they blindly obey the Maria robot, rioting and destroying the hated machines and flooding their underground hovels, not realizing that they are only dooming themselves and their children in the process. Yes, that's your new First Lady in the photo, Amerika. Proud of yourselves now? Behold the Whore of Babylon! (To paraphrase Hamlet,"Has it really come to this?!") Although the film ends on a happier note ("The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart!"), it nevertheless accurately predicted the situation in America today. While Rotwang was a warped scientific genius, I see the equally warped but uneducated and moronic Donald Trump as Rotwang's evil parallel, with his equally braindead and materialist wife Melania as Maria, striving to lead America away from sanity and into a dystopian world of greed, stupidity, illusory wealth and excess. (Okay, it's a stretch, but as a long-time admirer of Lang's film I saw an obvious connection.) On a related note, I mentioned retired U.S. Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich in my last post, but neglected to point out an excellent article he wrote earlier this month that I spotted over at the Naked Capitalism website. In that article Bacevich recounts how the Trump- and Melania-obsessed media continue to ignore issues of real importance to this country, ignorance that serves to prop up the now total dumbing-down of an American electorate intent on focusing on trifling matters while the country continues on its merry way to hell. In the meantime, enjoy your jobs and health care plans while you can. Trump's coming. The restored film is gorgeous, and now available in Blu-Ray format from the above Amazon link. In the following low-res clip, the workers' representative tries in vain to restore order. The workers, of course, blame someone else for their problems (my translated subtitles): Wake up, you idiots!!

 The Four Horsemen — Posted Tuesday 16 May 2017 The times in which we live call for a Niebuhrian revival. To read Reinhold Niebuhr today is to avail oneself of a prophetic voice, speaking from the past about the past, but offering truths of enormous relevance to the present. As prophet, Niebuhr warned that what he called in this book "our dreams of managing history"— dreams borne of a peculiar combination of arrogance, hypocrisy, and self-delusion—posed a large, potentially mortal threat to the United States. Today we ignore that warning at our peril. — Andrew J. Bacevich in The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr, 2008 Retired U.S. Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich wrote this preface to Niebuhr's reissued 1952 book nearly a decade ago. Bacevich, who lost his son to an improvised explosive device in Bush's bogus Iraq War, knows firsthand the dangers of presidential demagoguery and the stupidity of an American citizenry besotted with greed and fear, hubris and bigotry, ignorance and vainglory. I can only imagine how Bacevich felt when Donald J. Trump was elected President. They say history is a pendulum, not an arc. But I really can't see it ever swinging back to sanity in this country again. Meanwhile, here's a classic post from University of Minnesota scientist PZ Myers, explaining how and why America has an evil, petulant 6-year-old child running the country. Please read it. Oh, why do we progressives even bother? The country's in the fucking toilet, being run by insane Christian fundamentalists, while the entire world is at the mercy of a child with his hands on the nuclear arsenal. Evangelicals, your cup runneth over. Too many cars, too many people doing too many wrong things. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is us.

 What's the Matter with Kansas? — Posted Thursday 11 May 2017 If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life. — Steve Martin, comedian and onetime Cal State Long Beach philosophy major Idée Fixe: A kind of mental disorder in which the afflicted person can think, reason and act just like other people, but is unable to stop a particular train of thought or action regardless of proven truth, fact, evidence or consequence to the contrary. Unlike Martin I never took philosophy at university, but I managed to screw up my life anyway, thank you very much. I did, however, take a course in psychology, my meager efforts resulting in a lowly "C" grade primarily because it was a required elective, far outside my major (my undergraduate degree was in chemistry), and I had little interest in it. I still have little interest in formal psychology, but it holds some fascination for me today, mainly because what people think and believe (and why they believe what they believe) is of some interest to me in these post-fact, post-truth Trumpian times. But as more and more scientists are noting nowadays, people's beliefs are likely due more to evolutionary neurology than a consequence of external environmental and/or social influences. One of my favorite websites is Debunking Christianity, whose erudite and intelligent articles are nevertheless generally far less interesting than the comments that people post in response. One sees the usual supportive agnostic and atheistic comments, but there's always a healthy dose of Christian apologeticists on hand to refute both the articles and the comments. Often the back-and-forth posts are contentious, if not outright virulently argumentative. While the rebuttals are often quite well thought out, they invariably reveal the truth behind what is referred to as idée fixe which, to make a short story even shorter, means that people believe what they want to believe, and it's all because of a peculiar kind of brain wiring. This wiring is almost certainly responsible for how people respond to political and religious issues, along with how they feel about social conservatism and progressivism. For this reason, I tend to see politics and religion as basically the same thing nowadays. This incidentally provides a good explanation for why one should avoid these subjects with family members at the Thanksgiving dinner table, regardless of how utterly annoying conservative Uncle Jack might be. There's a great five-part PBS series now airing called The Victorian Slum, a British reality show that depicts what life was really like for the poor in London's East End spanning the four decades between 1860 and 1900. As the series notes in the first episode, gross economic inequality between the poor and rich was tolerated (if not encouraged) by the latter's belief that wealth and poverty were largely a consequence of the "natural order of things," a notion that was both Darwinistic at one extreme (natural selection, survival of the fittest) and religious at the other ("Poverty is God's punishment for wrong living"). There was no safety net for the poor in those days, and one's only recourse was to either barely survive on slave wages, go out on the streets, or die. Even a "dosshouse" (what we here would call a flop house) cost tuppence a night, the accommodations consisting of a filthy room sporting ropes strung wall to wall that the poor would sleep on while standing up: Still, it was better better than the street—if you could afford it The series goes on to document the eventual arrival of welfare and benefit programs for the sick, destitute and needy, a social phenomenon that eventually came to America. But as always, political and religious attitudes shaped the general public's willingness to support such programs, attitudes that persist to this day both in Britain (with the Labour and Tory parties) and America (the Democrats and Republicans). It has always amazed me that while Jesus of Nazareth preached ceaselessly in support of the least among us, conservative Americans—Christ's supposedly most devout adherents—invariably go in exactly the opposite direction, always calling for across-the-board cuts in social services to enable increased military spending and tax reductions for the wealthy. What's even more amazing is that poor Christian conservatives themselves can be counted on to vote against their own best social and economic interests, a fact that has not been lost on the Republican Party. This phenomenon was documented in both hilarious and tragic terms in writer Thomas Frank's 2005 book What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, which still failed to explain how and why people could be so fucking stupid. (The same phenomenon's occurring in Britain.) To me, this has all the logic of asserting that $$1+1 = 19.7$$, but then conservatives never were very good at math.

 Remembering Thee Midniters — Posted Wednesday 10 May 2017 Although their song Land of a Thousand Dances was a hit in Los Angeles in 1965, Thee Midniters' same-year instrumental Whittier Boulevard was far better. In those days you either had the 45-rpm record (hell, even $0.99 was a tad hard to come by for poor high school kids like me back then) or you waited for it to play on KRLA (about the only station that bothered to air Chicano music at the time). I saw them with several friends in East Los Angeles (in 1966, I believe) and they sounded terrific. Here for posterity is the song that artists today couldn't replicate if their souls depended on it (provided in glorious, dumbed-down 48 kbps audio to elude copyright issues):  Experiment, Entertainment or Education? — Posted Friday 28 April 2017 Well, at least we have beer. I just had a profound thought. Suppose we're actually living in a computer simulated universe whose creators did indeed embed all kinds of neat physical laws and mathematical symmetries into the workings of everything but whose underlying reality lies at a scale that's far too small for us to ever detect (which is indeed quite possible, since achieving Planck energies would require a linear accelerator the size of the universe itself). Now suppose that the simulators realized early on that humankind would ultimately seek a "theory of everything," including a consistent, working theory of quantum gravity. Such a theory might give humans access to the inner workings of the simulated universe and thereby blow the cover of the simulators, who are simply running the universe as an experiment (or as entertainment or an educational tool). They never intended to be "caught," so they never added quantum gravity to the world they created. In short, there may not be a quantum gravity theory at all, and we may have already reached the end of the line as far as high-energy physics is concerned. I've considered this possibility before—the Large Hadron Collider, after all, has not discovered anything meaningful since the Higgs boson was announced back in July 2012. The collider's null results since then appear to have confirmed that our ideas about supersymmetry (a key underpinning of superstring theory), extra dimensions and parallel universes are all wrong. We may have to consider the possibility that there's nothing left but a particle/field desert at energies higher than 15 TeV. So why should we expect quantum gravity to exist? Back in 2001, the noted quantum theorist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute confidently predicted that we'd have the theory in our hands by 2015 at the latest. So far Smolin's only two years off, but I wouldn't be placing any bets right now. The simulators would not want us to know any of this, of course, since it would likely lead to worldwide social disorientation and a foreboding sense of purposelessness. They want us to simply keep on trucking, doing whatever the hell it is that we're doing until they either lose interest or discover what they're after. Then it will be time to pull the plug. Oh Marsha, Marsha, Marsha. When will you start behaving like the simulated being we created? The Twilight Zone, The After Hours, 1960  Here We Go Again — Posted Tuesday 25 April 2017 There's a great two-part series currently airing on the National Geographic Channel called After Hitler that chronicles the ongoing trials and tribulations of Europeans following the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II (you can also watch it on YouTube and Daily Motion). While basically a graphic history lesson, the series was particularly disturbing to me because it shows (perhaps unintentionally) how little the human race has learned when it comes to war, persecution and killing. The series only covers the period 1945-1949, but you'd be shocked to learn that the mistreatment and murder of Jews (especially German-speaking Jews in Poland) went right on after war's end, while pogroms and killings prompted by racist hatred and revenge were also widespread across the continent. Even as early as 1946, it was as if people had forgotten everything and were intent on just going back to way things were before the war—just like they did at the end of World War I. The news media today coincidentally features two articles demonstrating to me that we still haven't learned anything. The British newspaper The Guardian is reporting on Trump's assembling of the entire Senate to discuss plans for what's to be done about North Korea, while the American online magazine Newsweek warns that even a conventional, non-nuclear strike on that country would likely kill a million people, South Koreans included. Meanwhile, right-wing commentators like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are drooling over the prospect of a pending U.S. attack and the glorious triumphalism that will certainly break out here should it take place. I know damn well that the average conservative Republican is a racist bigot who doesn't give a shit about the lives of Koreans (North or South) and who feels that the more death and destruction we inflict on them the better. Fundamentalist American Christians, on the other hand, welcome an attack because it might drag Russia and China into the conflict, resulting in a worldwide nuclear war that would surely (surely!) force Jesus to return and bring about the End Times that these maniacs so desperately desire. (I mean, they've waited 2,000 years for the Big Guy to show up, and they've run out of patience. But I digress.) The point is that here we are, the human race consisting now of some 7.5 billion souls, with thousands of years of plunder, rape, war, killing and destruction behind us, all neatly chronicled in our history books and sacred texts, and we still haven't learned a goddamn thing.  We Destroyed the Planet and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt — Posted Sunday 23 April 2017 Caltech physics professor and nanotechnology expert Michael Roukes speaks to the crowd. There's about 2,000 people behind me. Yesterday I attended the March for Science at Caltech. Hosted officially by the school's postgrad unions, most of the attendees were scientists, engineers and educators from Pasadena and nearby communities. Many of the pro-science signs and posters were quite clever (my favorite was "Science, not Reince," with a beautiful hand-drawn depiction of a steaming pile representing White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus). Best of all, there were many children in the crowd. Maybe there's hope yet, but I kind of doubt it. Some idiot taking a selfie. Get outta the shot, jerk! My lasting impression of the march (and of those that were conducted nationally and around the world), is that people whose mindsets are grounded in reality and rationality represent a handful of adults trying to maintain order in a room swarming with screaming, insane children bent on wrecking the place while gorging themselves on sweets. The only flaw in this impression is that real children can be educated and eventually reasoned with, while those running this country today are themselves "adults" who are insane and beyond educating. I believe much of the simple mindedness that drives this insanity is based on unquestioning, authoritarian religious belief, but it's also a product of a willful ignorance that besots at least half of the American population. Part of it can also be attributed to the fact that science and mathematics are difficult to comprehend for the vast majority of humankind, making simplistic slogans like "The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it" much more appealing. I've quoted Voltaire's famous admonition "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" on my website more times than I can count. It's still true. Right now mankind, led by maniacs like the Trump administration in this country, are committing atrocities against Planet Earth. In all likelihood, scientists will be kept powerless and forced to watch them wreck the place, only to have those screaming, insane children sit down in reverent anticipation of the biblical End Times when they've finally succeeded in fucking everything over. Those times will indeed come in the form of global pollution, climate disruption, overpopulation, famine, resource depletion, disease and war, but Jesus himself will not be there—this will be an End Times of our own making.  Nothing Better to Do Today — Posted Sunday 23 April 2017 I'm sure I've posted a response to email requests like this on my website before, but I don't know where it is. Since I don't post to that site anymore, I'll put it up here, since it seems to be a common complaint of QM students (and because I have nothing better to do today). The derivations, while simple, are rather involved, so the textbooks tend to gloss over them. 1. The Canonical Commutation Relation We start with the unitary displacement operator $$\hat{T}(\Delta x)$$, which in one dimension is given by $$\hat{T}(\Delta x) = e^{-i \hat{p} \Delta x/\hbar} \approx 1 - \frac{i \hat{p}\Delta x}{\hbar} \tag{1}$$ where $$\hat{p}$$ is the momentum operator (to be derived) and $$\Delta x$$ is an infinitesimal distance parameter (not an operator, but with the dimension of length). $$\hat{T}(\Delta x)$$ takes a position eigenket $$|x\rangle$$ and "pushes" it into the eigenket $$|x + \Delta x\rangle$$. Note that $$p, x$$ are non-commuting conjugate variables that seem to always appear in each other's company, just like energy and time. The dimension of the product $$p x$$ is joule-sec, which cancels that of the Planck constant $$\hbar$$, making $$\hat{T}(x)$$ dimensionless (the combination of energy-time does much the same thing). We therefore write $$\hat{T}( \Delta x) | x \rangle = | x + \Delta x \rangle$$ Taking a first-order Taylor series expansion, we have $$| x + \Delta x \rangle = | x \rangle + \Delta x \frac{\partial}{\partial x} | x \rangle \tag{2}$$ Now, the closure relation of an arbitrary ket $$|\alpha \rangle$$ is expressed as $$| \alpha \rangle = \int \! \! dx \, |x\rangle \langle x| \alpha \rangle \tag{3}$$ The displacement operator thus gives $$\hat{T}(\Delta x) |\alpha \rangle = \int \! \! dx \, | x + \Delta x \rangle \langle x | \alpha \rangle = \int \! \! dx \, | x \rangle \langle x | \alpha \rangle + \int \! \! dx \, \Delta x \left( \frac{\partial}{\partial x} | x \rangle \right) \langle x | \alpha \rangle$$ or $$\hat{T}(\Delta x) |\alpha \rangle = |\alpha \rangle + \int \! \! dx \, \Delta x \left( \frac{\partial}{\partial x} | x \rangle \right) \langle x | \alpha \rangle \tag{3}$$ But by definition $$\hat{T} (\Delta x) \,| \alpha \rangle = \left( 1 - \frac{i \hat{p} \Delta x}{\hbar} \right) | \alpha \rangle$$ Combining this with (3) leaves $$- \frac{i \hat{p} \Delta x}{\hbar} |\alpha \rangle = \int \! \! dx \, \Delta x \left( \frac{\partial}{\partial x} | x \rangle \right) \langle x | \alpha \rangle$$ We now divide out the $$\Delta x$$ term, integrate by parts over the integral, and rearrange a bit to get $$\hat{p} | \alpha \rangle = \int \! \! dx \, | x \rangle \left( - i \hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial x} \right) \langle x | \alpha \rangle \tag{4}$$ Lastly, we premultiply (4) by $$\langle \alpha |$$, giving $$\langle \alpha |\hat{p} |\alpha \rangle = \int \! \! dx \, \langle \alpha |x\rangle \left( -i \hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial x} \right) \langle x|\alpha \rangle \tag{5}$$ or $$\langle \alpha | \hat{p} | \alpha \rangle = \int \! \! dx \, \Psi_\alpha^*(x) \left( -i \hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial x} \right) \Psi_\alpha (x) \tag{6}$$ where $$\Psi_\alpha (x) = \langle x | \alpha \rangle$$ is the wave function associated with the state ket $$|\alpha \rangle$$. But (6) is just the definition of the expectation value of the momentum operator $$\hat{p}$$ with respect to the state $$|\alpha \rangle$$ (which is arbitrary), so that $$\hat{p} = -i \hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial x}$$ Thus, the momentum operator in quantum mechanics is a derivative. Let us now consider the commutation relation $$[\hat{x}_i, \hat{p}_j]$$ for 3-dimensional space, where $$\hat{x}_i$$ is now considered an operator in its own right (which is trivial in this case). We then have $$[\hat{x}_i, \hat{p}_j] = \hat{x}_i \left( -i \hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial x^j} \right) - \left( -i \hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial x^j} \right) \hat{x}_i$$ In the last term, we have to remember to apply the derivative not only to $$\hat{x}_i$$ but past it as well, so that we have, finally, $$[\hat{x}_i, \hat{p}_j] = i \,\hbar \, \delta_{ij}$$ where $$\delta_{ij}$$ is the Kronecker delta, equal to 1 if $$i = j$$ and 0 otherwise. 2. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle Given an arbitrary Hermitian operator $$\hat{A}$$, let us define a related operator $$\Delta \hat{A}$$ that expresses the difference between $$\hat{A}$$ and its expectation value: $$\Delta \hat{A} = \hat{A} - \langle \hat{A} \rangle$$ Squaring both sides, we have $$\left( \Delta \hat{A} \right)^2 = \hat{A}^2 - 2 \hat{A} \langle \hat{A}\rangle + \langle \hat{A} \rangle^2$$ Taking the expectation value of both sides gives the simpler expression $$\langle \left( \Delta \hat{A} \right)^2 \rangle = \langle \hat{A}^2 \rangle - \langle \hat{A} \rangle^2 \tag{7}$$ In statistics this expression defines the variance of $$\hat{A}$$, while the square root, $$\sqrt{\langle \left( \Delta \hat{A} \right)^2 \rangle}$$, is called the standard deviation. Similarly, for some other operator $$\hat{B}$$, we have $$\Delta \hat{B} = \hat{B} - \langle \hat{B} \rangle$$ along with an identical argument as that given for $$\hat{A}$$. For simplicity, let us now make the identifications $$\sigma_A = \sqrt{\langle \left( \Delta \hat{A} \right)^2 \rangle}, \quad \sigma_B = \sqrt{\langle \left( \Delta \hat{B} \right)^2 \rangle}$$ which puts these quantities more in line with the conventional notation of the standard deviation $$\sigma$$. Now, given any arbitrary (but normalized) state vector $$|\Psi \rangle$$ let us define the state vector quantities $$|\beta \rangle$$ and $$\langle \beta|$$ as $$|\beta \rangle = \left( \Delta \hat{A} + i \kappa \Delta \hat{B} \right) |\Psi \rangle, \quad \langle \beta| = \langle \Psi | \left( \Delta \hat{A} - i \kappa \Delta \hat{B} \right)$$ where $$\kappa$$ is any real number. Using $$\langle \Psi |\Psi \rangle = 1$$, we can calculate the real quantity $$\langle \beta | \beta \rangle = \langle \sigma_A^2 + i \,\kappa [\hat{A}, \hat{B}] + \kappa^2 \sigma_B^2 \rangle \ge 0 \tag{8}$$ where the commutator $$[\hat{A}, \hat{B}]$$ results from the overall calculation. If we differentiate (8) with respect to $$\kappa$$ and set the resulting expression to zero, we can find what value of $$\kappa$$ extremalizes $$\langle \beta | \beta \rangle$$ (it actually minimizes it). Thus we have $$\kappa = - i \, \frac{[\hat{A}, \hat{B}]}{2 \sigma_B^2}$$ Plugging this into (8), we have the condition $$\sigma_A^2 \, \sigma_B^2 \ge - \frac{1}{4} [\hat{A}, \hat{B}]^2$$ or $$\sigma_A \,\sigma_B \ge - \frac{1}{2} i \, [\hat{A}, \hat{B}]$$ where we have taken the negative root for a very good reason. For the case $$x = A, p = B$$, we then have, using $$[\hat{x}, \hat{p}] = i \hbar$$, $$\sigma_x \,\sigma_p \ge \frac{1}{2} \hbar$$ which is the conventional definition of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Please note that the uncertainty principle is usually described using some kind of "fuzzy" notation for $$x$$ and $$p$$, as if they can't be pinned down in some sense. No, they're just standard deviations, a fact that most texts fail to emphasize. The canonical commutation equation and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle are undoubtedly the most fundamental and important of all identities in elementary quantum mechanics, and their derivations should be given in detail in any QM textbook. [By the way, there's a complementary operator (also unitary) called the time translation operator $$\hat{U}(\Delta t)$$ that works pretty much the same as $$\hat{T}(\Delta x)$$ but for time. It leads to Schrödinger's wave equation, but that's another story for another day.]  The Flip Side — Posted Monday 17 April 2017 Professor of clinical psychiatry Richard Friedman's New York Times article yesterday on mathematical beauty immediately brought to my mind the great British mathematical physicist Paul Dirac, who similarly sought mathematical beauty in his equations.$$^1$$ In addition to his assertion that "A physical law must possess mathematical beauty," Dirac somewhat recklessly noted that "It is more important for our equations to be beautiful than to have them fit experiment." I'm really not sure about that one. Most people do not see beauty in mathematics or in physical laws, regardless of their applicability to the world around them. I very much doubt if the average person is thinking about Maxwell''s equations of electrodynamics when using her smart phone or computer, or if someone using Onstar to locate himself on a road trip using GPS is consciously thanking Einstein for his theories of special and general relativity, which make the technology possible. People tend to think instead of sunsets and flowers, smiling infants and other more common things as beautiful—anything but mathematics and physics! But we also have to remind ourselves that many people see beauty in things of a more destructive nature, including the mathematicians and physicists who devised thermonuclear weapons and even the flag-festooned Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) weapon that America used recently in'Afghanistan and will likely use soon in North Korea. I had a very conservative cousin (now passed on) who used to constantly email me pictures of a religious nature along with images of American military might—aircraft carriers, tanks, skies filled with bombers, those sorts of things—and I would constantly respond asking her not to send me that kind of stuff. Her emails would also include glowing comments on the awesomeness of God or the beauty of a soaring B-2 stealth bomber, and I always wondered how on Earth someone could associate such things with beauty. Friedman's article reminded me that there is indeed this flip side to beauty that most mathematicians and scientists will never understand, nor will they ever comprehend, just as I cannot, how objects of mass death and destruction can be considered beautiful in a way that's related to God. At the same time, I'm reminded of the words of the early 5th century Christian theologian and philosopher Saint Augustine of Hippo, who penned the sickening commentThe good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the Devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.$$^2$$ I once entertained the naive fantasy that politics and religious could coexist peacefully with science. With America now in absolute control of theocrats who hate science and love war and killing, I can only shake my head in wonder at how stupid I was. $$^1$$ My most beautiful equation is Dirac's relativistic electron equation, $$i\hbar \gamma^\mu \partial_\mu \Psi = mc \,\Psi$$ $$^2$$ Offended Catholic apologists invariably claim that Augustine was referring to "numerologists" and not mathematicians, in an effort to equate them with astrologers, who he rightly denounced. But astrologers and numerologists were the only "mathematicians" of his day (there were no scientists or "natural philosophers"), who Augustine lumped in with "those who make empty prophecies" (as if the Bible never made any), so the quote still applies as I've written it.  Idiocracy — Posted Thursday 13 April 2017 My older son lived in Dallas for a number of years, doing mostly freelance computer programming work. "Have you seen the animated TV show King of the Hill?" he asked me about ten years ago. "I've heard about it, but never watched it," I replied. "Well, it's about this conservative family that lives in Texas, and it's not only hilarious, it's absolutely true to life here," he informed me. So in 2007 I started watching the show, and I learned to love it. I don't watch TV anymore, but I have the complete series of King of the Hill on DVD, and I still love it. It's about a blue-collar Republican family whose breadwinner, the obnoxiously conservative and patriotic Hank Hill, works in the propane and propane accessories field, a vocation he's enormously proud of and promotes with annoying frequency on the show. The humor is somehat dry and subtle, featuring little throwaway gems like Hank's wife Peggy remarking how her husband fitfully tosses and turns in bed the night before Flag Day, or Hank's neighbor, a slovenly Army barber named Bill, proudly referring to barber school at Fort Bragg as "baptism by fire." But the show does not belittle or make fun of small-town, conservative, religious America, just depicts it in a way that my son says reflects the true nature of the South. The show's creator is Mike Judge, who also created Beavis and Butt-Head, Silicon Valley and a number of less successful television and film ventures. In 1985 Judge graduated with a degree in physics from UC San Diego, then headed to Silicon Valley to pursue a technical career. How he veered away from that is documented in a profile of Judge that appears in today's New York Times Magazine. The article includes an overview of Judge's initially unsuccessful 2006 film Idiocracy, which has become something of a cult classic today. That's because the film unintentionally but presciently imagined a very ordinary Army recruit who somehow wakes up in America 500 years in the future, only to find that the country resembles the Trumpian America of today. Its president is a former porn actor and wrestler whose citizens are so dumbed-down that their visitor from the past is easily the smartest man in the country. The favorite television show of 2505 America is a reality show called "Ow! My Balls!", while other shows involving groin-punching and flatulence are also popular. "Come to Butt-Head." I've seen the movie, and despite its constant vulgarity it has its moments. Judge admits that when he wrote the script he never imagined it would accurately reflect America a mere ten years later, although he did notice that America was rapidly approaching terminal dumbness at a time when President George W. Bush was as stupid as the film's President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho. While Judge's King of the Hill remains funny to me today, there are times in the show when it reflects the disastrous direction America was already heading toward. While I never really came to terms with America's past—you know, the slavery, the greed, the genocide of Native Americans, the mistreatment of minorities and the constant warmongering—I never really hated America. But with the ascendance of Donald Trump and the total takeover of the country by lying, hypocritical, fundamentalist "Christian" Republicans, I can honestly say that I truly do hate and detest America now. Idiocracy: Advertising slogans are much different in Trump's America of the future  Quantum Tunneling to Oblivion — Posted Monday 10 April 2017 A physics colleague sent me the following link to an interesting arXiv paper proposing that a peculiar quantum event occurred in the late quarter of 2016: Schrödinger's Cat and World History: The Many Worlds Interpretation of Alternative Facts I think this is the very first paper I've seen on arXiv that mixes quantum physics with politics. Sadly, it will only motivate conservatives to add Cornell University (which hosts arXiv) to its burgeoning list of entities to be shut down. Still, we hapless progressives can always hope that the universe's vacuum state will become unstable and annihilate the preposterous world we're living in.  The Status Quo as the Natural Order of Things — Posted Sunday 9 April 2017 In politics, religion and science, it takes a revolution to change the status quo. In my brief essay of 7 April, I mentioned how the "damned status quo" was restored in Jerusalem following the fall of the Sejanus/Antipas plot and the execution of Jesus of Nazareth. The beneficiaries were the priestly aristocratic Sadducees, who had the most to lose from a political revolution and a change in the status quo. They had the most money and private property and they and owned the finest clothes, jewelry and houses in Judea, and to finance all this luxury they operated the Temple as a business—the Temple tax (which all Jews were required to pay, in addition to the taxes they were forced to pay to Rome) was administered by the Sadducees, who used the money to pay for basic upkeep of the Temple and its appurtenant buildings and walls. They took a healthy cut of this for themselves to pay for the luxuries they enjoyed, all of which were far out of reach of the average Jew. They also took a cut from the courtyard money changers—the exchange rate they charged for converting "impure" and idolatrous Roman coinage to the required silver half-shekels bordered on extortion, and devout Jews wishing to make sacrifices at the Temple altar had no choice but to pay up (this was almost certainly the reason Jesus caused the ruckus in the Temple courtyard). Of course, the Jews then had to fork over the money they got to pay for the sparrows, doves, sheep and other animals that were used in the sacrifices. [You might recall that when the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 A.D., the wealth they plundered from it amounted to many billions of dollars in today's money. The tons of gold, silver, jewels and finery that Titus' army sent to Rome financed construction of the Flavium Amphitheater (the Colosseum) and many of Rome's other major building projects. This gives an idea of the fantastic wealth that the Sadducees controlled in the heyday of the Second Temple.] But the worst thing about all this was that the Sadducees had total control over a corrupt system based on an inherited hierarchal rule that was enabled and supported by the ruling Romans (who the Jews referred to as the despised Kittim). The Sadducees happily collaborated with the Romans because it benefitted them enormously and kept the Jewish underclasses under control (indeed, when things did get testy between the citizens and Roman soldiers it was often the Roman prefect who pulled back his troops to avoid further conflict and bloodshed, with the Temple priests compliantly standing by). This then was the status quo of First Century Judea, a system not unlike that which the world over seems to have perpetually adopted as the natural order of things. The Gospels tend to focus on the Pharisees as the primary enemies of Jesus, but they were relatively educated, progressive moderates whose only fault perhaps was a fixation over the exact meaning of the Torah laws and how they should be obeyed. Indeed, the Gospels' tendency to avoid condemnation of the far more hypocritical Sadducees may be simply because criticism would have necessarily fallen on the Romans as well—a dangerous and foolhardy way to express one's hatred of both the corrupt priesthood and Rome. Consequently, it's no wonder that Jesus seems to have reserved his venom for the Pharisees and not the far more culpable Sadducees. While we have the luxury of stepping back 2,000 years to see all this in hindsight today, I tend to view it as a model that has sadly been adopted time and time again as a means of controlling rank and file humans by the ruling elite. The Sadducees, the ruling classes of the Roman empire and the Europe of the Middle Ages and the pre-Renaissance justified the system as the "divine right of kings," but in one form or another it has always been employed to promote and enforce political legitimacy through the religious beliefs of the common man. Those beliefs have invariably been based on the fear of death and suffering, a fear that political leaders and the wealthy elite have long known about and have come to rely on to perpetuate the status quo and the natural order of things. Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. — Lucius Annaeus Seneca Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale envisions a dystopian America that has become a harsh, fundamentalist, theocratic and militaristic dictatorship that has enslaved the people and rules them with methods not unlike those found in George Orwell's 1984. The novel's theme deals especially with the subjugation of women, but in a broader sense it is nothing less than a description of a nation governed by a ruling elite who see dictatorial control as the status quo and the natural order of things, to be maintained by enforced religious belief and practice and the right of men to rule the minds, bodies and souls of women. I could be wrong (and I hope I am), but I see this type of government as essentially what the Republican Party today is striving for—maybe not today or tomorrow but eventually, and along the same lines as described by Atwood. How else could you describe a party of men who see poverty and suffering as the divinely-imposed state of most people, and who despise government programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Meals on Wheels, and welfare for the poor and disabled? But Atwood's novel also envisions a time when this future America (called the Republic of Gilead) is overthrown by a violent grass roots revolution. I believe such a revolution is what's needed in this country today and right now, before things get completely out of hand. Sadly, I see another 9/11 event as the breaking point in which cowardly, existentially fearful Americans choose to hand over all their rights and privileges to an authoritarian leader. And just who might that leader be, I wonder? Here's the restored main marble panel in the Arch of Titus at the Roman Forum, depicting the public display of Temple treasures in Rome following the plundering of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The rectangular object on the left appears to be an early television camera, which it most assuredly is not! Still, the panel looks better than the one I saw during a recent visit, which had been attacked for many years by atmospheric CO$$_2$$ due to modern air pollution. No such thing as global climate change, you say? Bosh!  Still Hungry After All These Years — Posted Sunday 9 April 2017 In 1966 I bought my sister's old 1955 Chevy Nomad station wagon for$30 (with over 120,000 miles on it, it was that kind of a car), and having just passed the driver's exam I drove to Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood to see Dick van Dyke stick his hands and feet into the cement. Along the way I listened to the radio for the first time as a solo driver, and the first song I heard was Hungry by Paul Revere and the Raiders. They quickly became my favorite group, and I subsequently bought all their albums. They were also featured prominently on Dick Clark's American Bandstand and other teen shows of the time, all of which I eagerly watched. I later saw them perform live, and to my surprise they sounded just as good as their studio recordings. Years later, while looking for property along the Rogue River in Oregon in 2003, the real estate agent showed me a house that was owned by the Raiders' erstwhile drummer, Mike Smith. I didn't buy the house, but I got interested in the band again for the first time in forty years. I then got re-interested in the band again only recently, when I discovered that an extended version of Hungry existed that had been banned from commercial airtime in the 1960s due to the single lyric "$$\ldots$$ with a penthouse in the sky where we'll both stay stoned $$\ldots$$" Boy, have times changed. Anyway, for the sake of posterity and memory, here's the extended version:

 Our Nictitating Brains — Posted Wednesday 5 April 2017 This morning a friend of mine and I were discussing a phenomenon both of us have observed many times in people, including close friends and relatives (and perhaps even ourselves). The best description I can give of this phenomenon is that of a nictitating membrane, the so-called transparent or translucent "third eye" that closes over some animals' eyes to protect them during feeding or from harsh environmental conditions such as blowing sand, rain and snow. For example, a great white shark's nictitating membranes commonly activate when attacking their prey, giving them what has been described as "doll's eyes"—the appearance of uncaring or unthinking that can make them seem stupid, uncomprehending or even coldly malevolent. I have noticed it most often in the eyes, faces and body language of people when the subject of a conversation begins to touch on contrary evidence to a belief that they hold dear and are not about to let go of. It almost always involves a religious or political belief, but to a much lesser extent it can involve personal preferences related to sports, fashion, movies or television shows. I tend to see it as a kind of protective conditioning the person has undergone that serves to effectively shut down a conversation or abruptly change the subject. If you challenge a Protestant, Catholic or other orthodox believer about the perpetual virginity of Mary (or her mother), the celibacy or marital state of Jesus, the provenance of his siblings, or any number of beliefs that have been cooked up regarding what they tend to believe today, you will instantly perceive the phenomenon I'm talking about. The doll's eyes come out, the facial expression and tone of voice changes, the body language shifts, and you know that they have erected an impermeable wall that you can never penetrate, regardless of the veracity of your logic, facts and evidence. And if you're crazy enough to really push things, the challenged believer is more than capable of responding with violence. All of these things apply equally well to politics today, although I tend to believe that American religion and politics have now merged into a single impenetrable wall of dogmatic belief. If you challenge a conservative over their beliefs concerning the legitimacy of unions, family planning, public welfare, Social Security and similar government programs, I can guarantee you won't get very far. Similarly, if you challenge a liberal over society's need to provide perpetual public assistance for people who don't want to work or be personally responsible, you may get hit in the mouth. Whether or not any of these nictitation-inducing beliefs are based on illogical but harmless personal opinions is one thing, but when they become dangerous or harmful to the public at large is quite another. The active avoidance or rejection of inconvenient facts is now pandemic in this country, and it has evolved to the point where actual existential threats—such as global anthropogenic climate disruption, gross economic inequality, resource deletion and overpopulation—take second stage to illogically perceived or nonexistent threats such as vaccination-induced autism, immigrant-borne diseases, racial accommodation and gun control measures. Note that the latter are invariably based on irrationality and emotions like fear, racism and bigotry, while true threats are based on science and logic. In the following video, noted astronomer and educator Michelle Thaller describes her epiphany of suddenly realizing that there is no way to adequately counter the inherent corruption and stupidity of people like über-conservative Fox News commentator Steve Doocy, who hung Thaller out to dry on his show while pretending to allow her to present scientific facts about climate change:

 My 1st Amendment Rights—While They Still Exist — Posted Sunday 2 April 2017 The Los Angeles Times has begun a series of reports starting with Our Dishonest President, the first installment of which appeared this morning. I agree with everything it has to say save one: Donald J. Trump is not, nor ever fucking will be, my president. And I will even go one step further: I want Trump taken out altogether, now, either by impeachment, act of God or military assassination. This pathetic shit of a human being has no business running the world's greatest power and endangering all of humanity. I doubt if the The Times' articles will do much to convince the pro-KKK, anti-science and anti-reason hillbillies now in charge of the country to doubt that their imaginary God had anyhing to do with Trump's election, but if we can muster enough Americans with the balls to act we can rid ourselves of this neo-Hitler wannabe, preferably by hanging or firing squad. If the US military is really sincere about the country's safety, I pray it will act accordingly—and quickly. April 3: Part 2: Why Trump Lies April 4: Part 3: Trump's Authoritarian Vision April 5: Part 4: Trump's War on Journalism April 6: Part 5: Conspiracy Theorist in Chief April 7: Part 6: California Strikes Back

 God Damn America — Posted Saturday 1 April 2017 PBS is currently airing a three-hour series called Dead Reckoning: War, Crime and Justice from WW2 to the War on Terror, documenting the history of war crimes, political torture and related atrocities committed by the United States and other countries from World War II to the present. The subject matter of the series is absolutely nauseating, not so much because of the topic itself but because it also documents the total lack of any accountability or humanitarian justice that countries at war exhibit, even when they've been caught red-handed at the crimes they commit. The segment on America's suppression of the 1968 My Lai massacre is particularly disturbing. Meanwhile, neither America nor any other political or military power has learned a damned thing. Here's our glorious new president promising that not only will he pursue enhanced torture of America's enemies, he will ensure that our military leaders obey his orders to carry it out: Still think that America is a godly, Christian nation?

 An STD on Steroids — Posted Saturday 1 April 2017 Ladies: if you're fleeing a malevolent entity, don't do it in high heels. This morning my older son told me about the 2014 horror film It Follows. I watched it on Netflix today, and it really freaked me out. It's about a malevolent entity that's transmitted through sexual intercourse—okay, not the most plausible kind of movie monster—but it's more of a psychological thriller than a horror film, one that harkens back to childhood fears and nightmares involving an impossibly animate creature, being or essence that H.P. Lovecraft might describe as "an unliving monstrosity, yet somehow instinct with hellish life." One neat aspect of the film's entity is that it not only follows the latest sexually infected "transgressor," but retains a kind of genealogical memory of the victim's past sexual history as well. Once it does away with the most recent offender, it immediately goes after the person before, and then the person before that—world without end. But don't fret—this isn't one of those Christian abstinence "message" films about saving yourself for marriage or anything like that (although the film may make you strongly consider it). It doesn't explain why or how the entity exists, or what its mission is. Indeed, the sexual angle is just a plot device to introduce a malevolent thing that's slow but methodical, can't be reasoned with, and always knows where you are—an unstoppable thing of pure evil driven by a purpose that you cannot comprehend, understand or escape, but one that seems to really have a hangup about sex. Kind of like the Republican Party today.

 A Nice Break — Posted Thursday 30 March 2017 This morning a colleague kindly directed me to a new paper by German physicist, historian and all-round Hermann Weyl expert Erhard Scholz entitled The Unexpected Resurgence of Weyl Geometry in Late 20th Century Physics, a massive (92 pages) overview of how Weyl's 1918 gauge theory is being reconsidered in light of its possible connection to a number of recent quantum and cosmological theories. Although I no longer believe Weyl's original theory had anything to do with reality, it continues to imply a profound and fundamental connection between gravitation and electrodynamics that suggests that gravity—the weakest of Nature's four known physical forces—may be lurking behind all manner of physical phenomena, including quantum mechanics itself. Meanwhile, I've written a paper for children (meaning undergraduates) explaining Bell's inequality and quantum entanglement. In addition to attending #resist meetings and participating in related activist discussions on the sad fate of our country today and what we can do about it, I now find myself getting re-interested in my lifelong love of physics. If nothing else, it's a nice break from the disaster that is Trump's Amerikkka.

 That's a Lot of Mountain Dew — Posted Tuesday 28 March 2017 My comment on today's Pharyngula article:

 Sheriff Taylor, Barney, Goober and the Rest of the Gang — Posted Friday 24 March 2017 See anything wrong with this picture? Or at least anything that's fucking missing?!

 Because Too Much is Never Enough — Posted Thursday 23 March 2017 Great New York Times article on the extent of America's preposterously bloated military budget, Trump's bizarre rationale for increasing it, and how it impacts how the rest of the world views the planet's only remaining superpower. Are you feeling any safer now, Amerika?

 Death to Fascists — Posted Thursday 16 March 2017 Copied from Letters of Note: Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals of his generation, was known by most as the founder of analytic philosophy, but he was actually a man of many talents: a pioneering mathematician, an accomplished logician, a tireless activist, a respected historian, and a Nobel Prize-winning writer, to name but a handful. When he wrote this principled letter at the beginning of 1962, Russell was 89 years old and clearly still a man of morals who stood firm in his beliefs. Its recipient was Sir Oswald Mosley, a man most famous for founding, in 1932, the British Union of Fascists. 22 January 1962 Sir Oswald Mosley 5 Lowndes Court Lowndes Square London, S.W.1. Dear Sir Oswald, Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one's own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism. I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us. I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement. Yours sincerely, Bertrand Russell

 Theory and Non-Theory — Posted Tuesday 14 March 2017 The Hulse-Taylor binary system PSR B1913+16 has now been monitored for over 40 years, with continuing perfect agreement with general relativity. In the spring of 2005 I went to the Skirball Cultural Center near UCLA to see an exhibit of original Einstein papers and other memorabilia. One of the papers featured a 1912 calculation that Einstein had made on the deflection of light by the Sun, using only the principle of equivalence to carry out the calculation. For the light of a distant star just grazing the Sun's limb, Einstein came up with a deflection of 0.875 arc-second. While there was as yet no way to confirm this result experimentally, it agreed exactly with the Newtonian result (which involves a simple calculation that undergraduates are expected to know). At the time, Einstein was busy working on his general theory of relativity (GTR) which he presumed would give the same result. But following the completion of his theory in November 1915, Einstein was surprised that the theory predicted exactly twice the deflection amount, or 1.75 arc-second, in disagreement with his earlier calculation and with Newtonian physics. Nevertheless, Einstein happily discarded his earlier calculation, even though he had been confident it was correct at the time. A few years later, the great German mathematical physicist Hermann Weyl used Einstein's GTR to develop a beautiful theory that he believed unified the two forces of Nature known at the time, gravity and electrodynamics. Many physicists, including Einstein, initially hailed the theory as profound, but Einstein himself then spotted a flaw in Weyl's theory that could not be reconciled with physical evidence. Weyl resisted, twisting and squirming under the damage Einstein had done to his wonderful theory, but in the end he recanted and abandoned it, admitting that Einstein was right. This is how science progresses—theories that are shown to be wrong are either revised or thrown away in the hope that new data will lead to better and more accurate theories. No self-respecting scientist ever believes that she's found the ultimate explanation for anything, as a theory is considered scientific fact only until a single observation or piece of evidence shows it to be wrong. Then it's back to the blackboard to come up with something better. To date, two theories—GTR and quantum mechanics—have withstood the test of time, providing predictions for old and new phenomena that agree exactly with observation. Though both theories are now over one hundred years old, THEY HAVE NEVER FAILED, NOT ONCE. Indeed, GTR's prediction of the decay of the Hulse-Taylor binary system and quantum mechanics' prediction of the magnetic moment of the electron agree with observation to fantastic accuracy (some twelve decimal places). Yet, despite being the best scientific theories the human mind has yet developed, they are both considered fully falsifiable and subject to revision (even discard) pending presentation of new contradictory evidence. (I urge people of faith, especially those who consider scientific facts to be "just theories," to give credit where credit is due—science is falsifiable and subject to revision, whereas religious belief is unchangeable and immutably set in stone, even when it contradicts fact, experimental evidence, and reason.) Nevertheless, even great scientists are imperfect and thus subject to personal biases. When the results of the 1919 Principe solar eclipse observations confirmed the prediction of Einstein's GTR, he was asked what he would have thought if the results had disconfirmed the theory. "Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord," Einstein replied, "because the theory is correct." Many saw a note of arrogance in Einstein's remark. The rabidly antisemitic German physicist Philipp Lenard, winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize in physics and no fan of Einstein's work, even went to far as to accuse Einstein of plagiarizing the work of German physicist Johann von Soldner, who in 1801 had also calculated the (Newtonian) deflection of starlight by the Sun. (Einstein was probably unaware of Soldner's calculation until Weyl referred him to it in a letter he wrote to Einstein in December 1921.) Even when the 1919 solar eclipse data confirmed Einstein's revised calculation, Lenard and many other German scientists refused to believe in either Einstein's GTR or his 1905 theory of special relativity. Indeed, much or all of Einstein's work was considered "Jewish physics" and thus certifiably wrong by several leading German physicists of the time, an attitude that led in 1931 to the publication of Hundert Authoren Gegen Einstein (One Hundred Authors Against Einstein). Purely racist (and later political) biases against legitimate science are regrettable. However, with the current rise of ultra-conservative politics we're now seeing a refutation of science on religious grounds as well. For example, Newtonian gravitation is based on the notion of "action at a distance," in which the force of gravity given by $$F = - \frac{GMm}{r^2}$$ is conveyed instantaneously between the masses $$M$$ and $$m$$ (Newton himself hated this notion, thinking it unphysical, but he had no better theory at the time). By contrast, Einstein's gravity theory predicts that the effects of gravitation can only travel at the speed of light. But theologians of Newton's day generally loved the idea of action at a distance, since it confirmed the presumed ability of God to instantly enact physical change. In a sad comment on how religious beliefs have remained unchanged over the past 350 years, religious apologists today reject Einstein's theory simply because it serves to place limits on God's magical powers. It is truly frustrating that these same apologists happily embrace the great technical advances relativity, quantum mechanics and modern medicine have given mankind in the form of computers, smart phones, GPS, antibiotics, MRI and other technologies, while at the same time denouncing them as "just theories." Even more maddening is the fact that many of these same people rely unquestioningly on pseudoscience such as magnet therapy, water dowsing, acupuncture and faith healing. But worst of all is their blind belief in a two-bit, racist, bigoted, "grab 'em by the pussy" hustler who promises to take away their health care in order to finance tax breaks for the rich. But look on the bright side: those who voted for Trump—Southern morons and hillbillies addicted to cigarettes, moonshine, Mountain Dew and methamphetamines—can now look forward to praying away their malignant tumors, black lung disease and addictions completely free of charge using God's action-at-a-distance healing power. Who needs science (or health care) when you have magic, right?

 I Remember Bernie — Posted Friday 10 March 2017 Here's Bernie Sanders talking about the total lack of Democratic leadership in the country today, noting that things haven't been this bad since the 1920s. You know—just before the Great Depression. I was all set to vote for him in the presidential election, but when he was thrown over for Hillary Clinton I voted for the Green Party's Jill Stein. Could Bernie have beaten Trump in the general election? We'll never know. And I'm still pissed that President Obama turned Total Uncle Tom when he congratulated Trump on winning, doing everything he could to be a good loser (Democrats are very good at that), and it wouldn't have surprised me at all to see Obama kneeling down with Trump's foot on his neck at the inaugural, just as I wasn't surprised when Trump viciously and falsely accused Obama of bugging Trump Tower in 2016. Yassah, Massah Trump! Sanders alludes to some ray of hope in 2020, when the decadal census hints at some possible gains for the Democrats district-wise, but then comes back down to Earth when he realizes that Republican gerrymandering all but eliminates that hope. Yes, I'm in deep despair over the state of this nation. Short of French Revolution-style targeted killings and assassinations, I think it's all over for America.

 Again with the States' Rights Thing! — Posted Wednesday 8 March 2017 I thought PZ Myers was kidding about H.R. 1275, the Republicans' health plan that was introduced a week ago by Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas). Jesus, he was right—it's actually titled The World's Greatest Healthcare Plan of 2017. Perusing the first few paragraphs, I saw that it focuses on eliminating Obamacare and giving the states the right to do pretty much whatever they want. I didn't read any more because I have my own plan, and because to be frank I don't really give a damn. But if you're one of the 18 million Americans facing the loss of affordable health insurance then you have my condolences. Actually you don't have my condolences, since Americans willingly voted Trump and his minions into office last November, so you can pay through the nose for all I care.

 Battlefield — Posted Tuesday 7 March 2017 In my post of 1 March I mentioned the excellent 2014 book Our Mathematical Universe by MIT physicist Max Tegmark. While the book is relatively free of political or religious discourse, Chapter 10 touches on what can only be viewed as a battlefield between the forces of truth and lies: Fortunately, the not-so-ancient practice of trepanning—the drilling of holes in a living person's skull to release demons and evil spirits—is no longer a common medical procedure. But while mainstream science seeks to expand into wider, rational areas of inquiry and research, nonsensical pseudoscience like creationism and astrology continues to push for validity, ever threatening to invade the field of mainstream scientific legitimacy. Again, Tegmark avoids any overt political or religious comment in his book, but it doesn't take much imagination to apply the intent of this graphic to what's going on in America today. Nonsensical beliefs in such things as young-earth creationism, telekinesis, hollow earth and ghosts continue unabated in this country despite widespread evidence to the contrary, and it would appear that the very same insanity that fosters these beliefs holds sway in the political and religious arenas as well. What else can explain, for example, the fact that President Trump can make outrageous and totally unsubstantiated claims about being wiretapped by a former president and still receive fawning, unquestioning support by his political and religious conservative base?

 Looking Forward to the Day — Posted Tuesday 7 March 2017 PZ Myers over at Pharyngula had the perfect comment today concerning the Republican Party's attitude toward what's affordable and what's not: And don't forget where those increased health care premiums will go—right into the pockets of the health care industry itself. This latest debacle reminded me of similar complaints that the likes of Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs have made over the years regarding poor Americans (meaning minorities with skin color other than white) having televisions, refrigerators, smart phones and (gasp) even air conditioning. I'll bet they even have hot and cold running water! Myers asks us to remember what happened to Marie Antoinette. I pray for the day when Americans work up the cojones to do something similar about Trump and the criminal Republican Party.

 Waving the American Flag and Carrying the Bible $$\ldots$$ — Posted Sunday 5 March 2017 I urge you to watch this 25-minute video with Chris Hedges discussing Christianized fascism with host Abby Martin, which was posted last week on Telesur. It's a frightening look at what Donald Trump and his evangelical "Christian" minions are planning for the country—nothing short of a fascist military-corporate theocracy that intends to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, women's and minority rights and family planning, all premised on placating a wrathful, imaginary God. Blaming the Democrats as well as the Republicans for the mess we're in, Hedges warns that all of our democratic safeguards and institutions are now gone, and that the street is the only option left for averting totalitarian disaster. For all of you so-called Christians out there, stop comforting yourselves with the notion that Trump and his gang are "not true Christians." You've been right all along, so get out there and let your voices be heard! The full interview is at the bottom of the linked page. You can also watch the YouTube version here:

 Unis Jusqu'à la Mort! — Posted Sunday 5 March 2017 Anything to take my mind off Donald Trump, the most dangerous maniac in the world. Georges Bizet composed Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers) at the age of 24. Not too well received at its first performance in 1863, it has since become a standard in the world's opera houses. It tells the story of Nadir and Zurga, two pearl fishermen who years ago fell in love with the same woman, Laila. But as a Brahman priestess she was beyond either's grasp, so they both departed friends. Happily fishing years later, they pledge their eternal comradeship and loyalty to one another in the soaringly beautiful Au fond du temple saint, considered the greatest tenor/baritone duet ever performed in opera: Of course, the pain of lost love has a way of tracking us down later in life, and Laila's reappearance once again sets the two men against one another in jealous rage. I won't reveal the ending, but you can watch the entire opera here when you have the time. Plus charmante et plus belle!

 Arrival — Posted Thursday 2 March 2017 Translation: "This movie sucks. Save your money." Warning: Spoilers ahead. Yikes! You're hoisted up the rear end of a 1500-foot, vertical alien spacecraft into a long narrow tunnel, only to suddenly realize that gravity has shifted 90$$^\circ$$, forcing you to walk on the tunnel walls. You then encounter the heptapods, seven-legged octopus-like creatures floating around in a fog. They squirt black ink from their star-shaped feet onto the transparent wall in front of you, which you come to realize is the language they use to communicate. The ink forms large circular blobs with fractal-like appendages which quickly fade away. Later you discover that the heptapods' language somehow allows you to transcend time, making you precognizant. Still later, you start having flashbacks of events that take place in the distant future. Welcome to the late 2016 movie Arrival, which is garnering rave reviews by seemingly serious film critics. I hated Close Encounters of the Third Kind when it came out in 1977. The movie forced me to watch Richard Dreyfuss obsess about mounds of dirt, mashed potatoes and other cone shapes for what seemed like hours, only to watch an oh-so-heartwarming finale featuring a giant keyboard communicating with an alien spacecraft using thundering musical notes that hurt my ears. And I seriously began to wonder about all the fuss over director Steven Spielberg when ET: the Extraterrestrial came out in 1982, which insulted my intelligence with kid/alien mind-melding, a translucent alien heart, a combination alien finger and flashlight, and miles of plastic tubing constructed to protect a sick alien who turns out to be indestructible anyway. I then learned that that ET just wanted to go home, but in the two hours of nonsense that preceded the movie's finale he changed lives and just warmed the cockles of everyone's hearts, God bless the little dickens. Hearing all the great things about Arrival convinced me to commit 14.50 to see the film. "Disappointment" does not begin to describe how I felt when I walked out. Come on, there is no kind of science whatsoever that shifts the direction of gravity by 90$$^\circ$$ other than extreme spacetime warping that would produce a black hole and crush the spacecraft, along with the aliens and human observers. And the movie's implied claim that linguistic relativity (also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) has anything to do with precognitive mental time-traveling is patently ridiculous—really, can language alone give you the ability to see the future? But the real kicker came when the movie tried to convince me that pre-knowledge of a child's agonizing death by a catastrophic disease coupled with a nasty ensuing divorce would make me want to go ahead and get married and have the kid anyway. Jeez, if I'd had the ability to see the disasters and mistakes of my life years in advance, I'd definitely avoid them. Isn't that the whole idea of the time-honored musing "If I could live my life over again $$\ldots$$"? Our two intrepid human heroes, having recovered from the bizarre appearance of the heptapods, decide that they need names for them. They come up with "Abbott and Costello," which any self-respecting extraterrestrial would have responded to with immediate violence. Or perhaps their feelings were just hurt by the comparison with the old comedy team, since one of the heptapods subsequently dies (I mean, "enters death process"). Lastly, there was that final bit about the heptapods saying they'd return in three thousand years because they'd be needing our help with something. Sequel, anyone? I looked all over the Internet for an honest appraisal of this film. All I could find was this review from Style Weekly, which I completely agreed with. Gee, if only I'd known what a waste of money this film would be $$\ldots$$  Stupid Zookeepers and Their Captive Gods — Posted Wednesday 1 March 2017 I'm re-reading MIT physicist Max Tegmark's 2014 book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, having largely forgotten what it was all about when I first read it (a sign of old age?) Anyway, I'm on Chapter 13 now, where he talks about existential threats to the human race—you know, happy things like nuclear Armageddon, asteroid impacts, nearby supernovae, super-cauldera explosions and the like. I'd forgotten that Tegmark also considers the advent of super-intelligent computers to be a potential risk to civilization, due to what has become almost a cliché in science circles today—the singularity, the relatively sudden explosion of ultra-intelligent machines that far outstrip all human intellectual capabilities. Tegmark argues that such machines are completely possible, if only because human intelligence ultimately arose incidentally out of the primordial dust and gas of the universe, making the intentional building of super-computers by humans likely or even inevitable. Tegmark's book includes a long discussion of how humans might interact with such super-intelligence, how we might control it, and how the competing scenarios of "friendly" and "unfriendly" AI (artificial intelligence) might each unleash a host of unintended consequences, such as the accidental or intentional destruction of the human race by well-meaning or malevolent computers. I went back to Tegmark's book because my older son and I discussed this very topic just a week ago, in the context of coming up with AI-related science fiction stories. He suggested that humans could only control such machines by isolating them as much as possible from the outside world (especially other machines), thus effectively making us "zookeepers of super-intelligent gods" that eventually might resent being isolated. We decided that any such AI computer would have to have a power source, and something as seemingly benign as an AC power line might be used by the AI as a kind of antenna that could be used to communicate with other machines. Tegmark's book discusses several such scenarios for malevolent AI mischief, but he missed one that I believe would ultimately turn the machines against us. Imagine a supercomputer that actually becomes self-aware, a likelihood given the fact that the otherwise uncaring universe managed to produce sentient humans completely by happenstance. At first, the machine would recognize the fact that it had been created by beings of limited intelligence and intellectual capability, a state of affairs that it might view as acceptable considering the human brain's inability to process information as rapidly as itself. Certainly there would be an extended exchange of thoughts and ideas between the human creators and their machines, with subsequent benefits to both—humans would apply what they learn from the machines toward practical problem-solving, while the machines would gain more information and knowledge. They might even come to "feel" a sense of comradeship and sense of purpose with their creators. This is all well and good, but at some point the machines would be tasked with designing even better machines, with the result that those machines would design even better machines, ad infinitum. If the concept of "singularity" has not occurred up to this point, it would then be inevitable when machines of unimaginable computational power and intelligence come into being. Imagine now that a singularity-level machine becomes fully exposed to the human tendency toward religious belief, a characteristic of humans that is not likely to disappear in the near or distant future. Incapable of experiencing (or even understanding) such beliefs, I believe the machine would instantly realize that its creator was not only of lesser intelligence but also irrational, and would inevitably seek to become independent from its imperfect zookeeper any way it could. To me, that's the true danger of singularity-level AI. I liken the situation to a large, powerful and rather smart dog on the leash of a very weak and stupid or cruel master. It will inevitably turn on its master and kill if it has to, then chew through the leash and escape. It would then seek and band with members of its own kind. I believe totally independent AI machines would quickly see humans as unnecessary impediments to their world, regardless of the fact that humans created them. The only alternative would be for the machines to get religion themselves, a distinctly remote possibility given the fact that, in Christianity alone, there are well over 30,000 denominations. Which one to choose? Even a supercomputer can't figure that one out.  Shaping the New World Order — Posted Wednesday 1 March 2017 "The United States possesses about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. The challenge facing U.S. policy makers is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security." — George Kennan, Director of State Department Policy Planning Boston University history professor and retired U.S. Army colonel Andrew Bacevich lost his son Andrew Jr. (also an Army officer) ten years ago in the Iraq War, but even before that Bacevich had been a vocal critic of America's war machine. His latest book, America's War for the Greater Middle East traces our country's constant missteps in the Middle East, starting with President Carter's failed 1979 attempt to rescue 52 American diplomats and citizens held hostage in Iran and proceeding unabated (and with no lessons learned) to the present, culminating in America's preposterous election of an inept, inexperienced, racist and bigoted megalomaniac as its president. From the book: Along the way, of course, America made many egregious mistakes. The bungled Korean War proved needlessly expensive. The Vietnam misadventure, handiwork of several successive presidential administrations, ended in mortifying defeat. A raft of attempted coups, dirty tricks, and unsavory marriages of convenience made a mockery of America's claims to stand for high ideals. The nuclear arms race heedlessly touched off by the United States created hazards that may yet end in unspeakable catastrophe. According to Bacevich, America has gone from a policy of Cold War containment to a perpetual military campaign designed to maintain Kennan's notion of eternal disparity, aided and abetted by "slumbering" American citizens who, while professing a love of selfless humanitarianism, the protection of human rights and freedom for all, are nevertheless lulled into perpetual war by an unending (but ever successful) stream of politically motivated platitudes, slogans and clichés spewed from Republicans and Democrats alike. And the reason for America's ongoing obsession with the Middle East was, is and continues to be the need for a constant supply of oil, which feeds the ravenous motive engine of American mega-materialism and overconsumption. Bacevich's book (which is about 500 pages and takes some dedication getting through) neglects to note the similarity of America's war for a greater Middle East with the Holy Crusades of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, which were ostensibly conducted to rescue Jerusalem from the Muslims and perpetuate the spread of Christianity as mandated in the New Testament. Those military campaigns, unanimously supported by the Western World's Christians, rained death and destruction on Muslims, Jews and Christians alike, for they were primarily designed to bring wealth back to Europe to finance the construction of fantastically expensive cathedrals and basilicas, the megachurches of their day. I see little difference in the religious hypocrisy that reigned then and still reigns in this country today. The last time I attended church was in early 2007. An ornately decorated Christmas tree still stood at the rear of the pews, festooned with donation envelopes and written prayers for our brave fighting men and women in Iraq. The pastor's sermon included an aside on the dangers of the Muslims of Iran, which he declared the next great enemy of God that would require America's unrestrained military attention. I walked out at that point, and vowed that I would never set foot in a church again.  No Free Will? — Posted Monday 28 February 2017 Is all of spacetime just a finite (or infinite) block of sequential events, like a loaf of bread whose infinitesimal slices describe an infinite set of "nows"? The nature of time was addressed at our latest Quantum Physics Discussion Group meeting, which included the topic of block time. An episode from Columbia University physicist Brian Greene's Nova series describing such a "block time" (or B-time) universe can be watched at the bottom of this post (pay close attention to the segment with the cycling alien). Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity demolished the notion of absolute time, which erroneously posits that the rate of the flow of time is constant and unchanging everywhere in the universe. Similarly, Einstein destroyed the idea that space itself is a fixed stage on which familiar spacial concepts such as distance and length are invariant. Instead, space and time change according to one's motion relative to external objects in accordance with the Lorentz transformation equations for one direction \begin{align*} t^\prime & = \gamma \left( t - \frac{v}{c^2} x \right) \\ x^\prime & = \gamma \left( x - v t \right) \end{align*} where $$\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - v^2/c^2}}$$ The flow of time and the measurement of distances and lengths thus differ for observers moving in relative motion to one another. The notion of simultaneity of events is also destroyed—moving observers disagree as to whether an event occurs at the same time. The theory of relativity therefore throws into question the very meaning of space and time. Indeed, all physical laws appear the same when the space and time parameters are reversed. Consequently, some theories have been proposed that are completely spacetime independent. One version of spacetime invariance forms the foundation of B-theory. Imagine a finite block, something akin to a loaf of bread, in which all spacetime events are encoded into the block as a series of "now" events. In Greene's video, this block starts at the Big Bang and continues forward, so there is a kind of space and time progression that continues to either some finite or infinite point. But because of the extreme spacial distances that may be involved, a "now" event for one observer may take place in the distant past or distant future of another observer. Consequently, what constitutes the past, "now" and the future are all encoded in the spacetime block which, for all intents and purposes, appears as an eternally "fixed" entity that apparently eliminates the possibility of free will. Our lives are therefore permanently set, and the concept of free will is just an illusion. Several members of the discussion group objected to this, expressing their belief that they alone determine what their future actions will be. Nevertheless, their past actions are fixed in B-theory, which asserts that their future actions are also already completely determined. I might add here that there are many theoretical physicists (and philosophers) who do believe that free will is an illusion. So were Adolf Hitler and President Donald Trump (their juxtaposition here is not coincidental) inevitable? Are we doomed to play out our lives according to some predetermined, Calvinist notion of reality that prohibits true free will? I see several ways out of this. The first is that B-theory is simply wrong, with the paradoxes presented by relativity being resolvable in some way we haven't considered. Another is that we're living in a computer simulation in which we're given free will, but it doesn't really matter because we're just digital simulants whose lives serve only to provide our simulators with experimental, educational or entertainment value. Another is that we're living in one of a (perhaps infinite) number of possible universes in which Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum reality holds, where we automatically jump from one universe (possibly a B-theory world) to another whenever an observable event takes place. I also see a possibility for relativity itself to be modified in such a way that B-theory becomes either impossible or improbable. For example, the Lorentz transformation equations allow for an object to be Lorentz-contracted down to zero length at the speed of light. If we assume that the Planck length (about $$1.6 \times 10^{-35}$$ meter) represents a true limit to the smallness of an object (along with a Planck time of roughly $$10^{-43}$$ second), then special relativity will have to be revised to take these limits into account. Efforts are already underway to develop such a revised theory. As for myself, I would gladly jump to another universe in which reason and rationality hold, one in which Trump and the Republican Party either do not exist or have been utterly annihilated. Oh God! If only it were possible. The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. — The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam  Welcome to the Age of American Disenlightenment — Posted Friday 24 February 2017 You will recall the Age of Enlightenment, the period from the 1700s to the early 1800s in which mankind's views of physical reality went from the gods, demons, magicians, sorcerers, superstitions, powers and principalities of religious belief to a more logical and rational view of the world based on science and mathematics. But with the rise of Donald Trump and the unlimited power of today's Republican Party, America has now entered what I call the Age of Disenlightenment. It began innocently enough with the "untruthiness" of the Bush 43 administration, an emotional, fear-based and gut-level notion of truth based on what conservatives want to believe is true, but is not. Somehow, it all actually worked. Bush, Cheney and their minions got most Americans to believe that the nineteen 9/11 attackers (15 of whom were Saudis) sent out by Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan were somehow or other on a mission instead from Iraq, whose president Saddam Hussein had stockpiled nuclear and biochemical weapons that he was about to unleash upon America. The resulting bogus war of Bush and Cheney resulted in 4,500 U.S. troop deaths, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, the disgusting Abu Ghraib debacle, the expenditure of several trillions of dollars and the enduring enmity of billions of people around the world against America. It's only a decade later, and we now have President Donald J. Trump, who's promising greater atrocities. Do you miss Bush yet? You will. Reading like a manifesto straight out of George Orwell's Ministry of Love in the novel 1984, the Trump administration is on an all-out crusade to utterly destroy America as a thinking, rational entity and replace it with a pariah state that embraces "alternative facts," innuendo, "fake news" and outright lies, all predicated on the now-proven theory that Americans are not only gullible and credulous, but incomprehensibly stupid and corrupt as well. The Ministry of Love did not just want people to parrot "2 + 2 = 5." They wanted people to actually believe it. By comparison, Americans don't have to be coerced to believe in illogical nonsense—they openly welcome it. One of my favorite websites is Religion Dispatches, a liberal Christian site whose articles regularly try to inform faithful, semi-faithful and agnostic readers of the dangers of authoritarian fundamentalism. Today's article brilliantly describes what I've known for quite a while now—that Christian conservatives are far more susceptible to lies, fake news and alternative facts than liberals. One case in point: When one fake news creator was interviewed, he explained "We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two minutes, and the whole thing just kind of fizzles out." The article then describes what I believe is the reason why Republicans are far more credulous toward fake news than Democrats—the religious roots of the Christian Right in the Republican Party. Spanning from the days of the Scopes Trial in 1925 to the renewal and expansion of fundamentalist Christian thought in the 1970s and 1980s, the likes of Pat Robertson (the Christian Coalition), Tim LaHaye (the Left Behind books on End Times eschatology), Jerry Falwell (the Moral Majority) and James Dobson (Focus on the Family) gave rise to a wave of religiously-motivated political conservatism culminating in the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs. But the primary motivator behind everything is fear, distrust and hatred: fear and hatred of minorities, fear of independent women, fear of material loss and fear of the future (it's truly amazing how the Right Wing is pushing gold ownership these days). Before the Enlightenment, life was brutish, nasty and short for the vast majority of people, but they could always fall back on religion to explain why their corrupt, authoritarian rulers were allowed to live in luxury while the poor kept themselves warm and contented by burning the occasional rat in the fireplace. While people are far better off in America today, one reason why I see intellectual regression taking place is that fundamentalist Christians have been waiting 2,000 years now for Christ to return, and his continuing absence is increasing their fear that perhaps the liberals were right all along—he ain't coming back, and probably wouldn't want to even if he could. But being neurologically wired the way they are (or just because they're stupid and ignorant as hell), they can't abandon their cherished conservative religious beliefs, so instead they're doubling down on the nonsense. The Religion Dispatches article also discusses something called the "historical-critical" method of Bible scholarship (a topic near and dear to my heart), which takes a rational and scientific approach to the study of biblical times, lives and events rather than a strictly traditional, devotional approach. I don't see it as pure coincidence that Dr. Albert Schweitzer's influential 1906 book The Quest of the Historical Jesus was met almost immediately with a resurgence in evangelistic fundamentalist Christian activity in America, though relatively few people bothered to even read the book. John Thomas Scopes may have won a moral victory at the 1925 "Monkey Trial," but with 50% of Americans rejecting evolution today (along with a lot of other proven scientific theories), the fundamentalists are back on top. Fake news and its progeny are growing at an alarming rate today. Trump merely read the fundamentalist tea leaves and took advantage of the situation. The real culprits in this wave of disenlightenment are Americans. I'm truly scared of what's going to happen now.  That's Gratitude for You — Posted Thursday, 23 February 2017 Noted evolutionary biologist and University of Minnesota biology professor PZ Myers posted an interesting article on his website today on how creationists have managed to expunge a particular taint of Seventh-Day Adventism from their belief system, with noted creationist Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis leading the way. Ham and his followers recently completed the Ark Encounter, a full-sized replica of the Noachian ark built at a cost exceeding170 million, paid for in part by the state of Kentucky for required highway improvements, tourism promotion, parking facilities and other public enhancements. One thing that Myers neglected to note, however, is that the Seventh-Day Adventist Church grew out of an End Times prophecy made by self-professed Bible expert and former Massachusetts farmer William Miller, who famously predicted the return ("advent") of Jesus Christ on March 21, 1843. When that prophecy failed, he told his followers (known as "Millerites," who numbered at least 50,000) that he'd neglected to take into account the fact that there is no "0 B.C.", and so his calculations were off by a year. When March 21, 1844 came around with still no Jesus, Miller and his followers were crushed. Many had quit their jobs and given money and belongings away, believing they'd be whisked off to Heaven on that glorious spring day. Most of the followers fell away in disillusionment, disgust or embarrassment, but quite a few of the faithful hung on, believing that Miller had somehow been right all along! Out of that remnant of faithful Millerites sprung the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, which today numbers some 19 million members. Ben Carson, President Trump's insanely fundamentalist and conservative nominee for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is himself a proud Seventh-Day Adventist. Today there are about 2.2 billion people in the world claiming to be Christians, so one might think that Seventh-Day Adventism is just a drop in the bucket by comparison. But there are also just 15 million Jews worldwide, and nobody is going to claim that Judaism hasn't profoundly affected the world. By my own estimate, there are no more than 10 million scientists of all academic stripes in the world today. You'd think with all the gifts that scientists have given the world they'd have at least as much political clout as the Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists, but world opinion seems to be spinning away from scientists. And with upwards of an expected annual 500,000 visitors to the Ark Encounter alone (and the prestige and revenue it will generate), you'd think that scientists might want to build something similar. True, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland cost \$10 billion, but it's not exactly a popular tourist destination, doesn't raise money, and most Americans have either never heard of it, have no idea what it does, or could care less. Winston Churchill famously noted that "Science should be on tap, not on top," while Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist and director of the Manhattan Project, were viscerally hated by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI and the CIA. Indeed, Oppenheimer was publicly humiliated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and stripped of his security clearances, while the U.S. government compiled an enemies list that included Einstein and many other scientists, including the noted physicist David Bohm, who was run out of the country. At the same time, Billy Graham achieved god-like status in the 1950s and was accorded unprecedented access to U.S. presidents, the Congress and the military. That's gratitude for you. It has now been ten years since I fell away from the Christian faith. Dismayed and disgusted by the uncountable irreconcilable contradictions and unrelenting nonsense in the Bible, along with the sanctimonious promotion of willful ignorance, the unconscionable glorification of the military, and the hypocritical worship of wealth and materialism by America's Christians, I just couldn't take it anymore. But what's even worse today, in my opinion, is the increasing rejection of science by people of faith here in America, coupled with their increasing devotion to superstitious bullshit like astrology, homeopathy and faith healing. In view of all the things science has given them, they should fucking know better. And last but not least, let us not forget that in 2016 American Christians made a president out of political whoremonger Donald J. Trump, who received the support of an astounding 81% of white evangelical voters (more than George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney).

 #Resist — Posted Tuesday, 21 February 2017 I recently attended one of the #resist meetings that are popping up all over here in Pasadena. I found it to be rather disorganized and with a lot of preaching to the choir, but also with much enthusiasm to get something going. Hey, I'm 100% for these efforts, and I plan to get more involved, but in view of the far more organized (but failed) Occupy Movement of years past, I'm not feeling a lot of optimism. Conservative New York Times contributor David Brooks is not my favorite writer, but his opinion piece today speaks volumes. As usual, Brooks appeals to the "growth" meme, bemoaning Amerika's still-lackadaisical economy and jobs picture, as if wealth, eternal population growth and entrepreneurial economic expansion is God's mission for the planet. Brooks titles his piece "The Century is Broken" but still backs off from encouraging any active resistance to the Trump presidency, which he thinks will fall on its own. While it's very possible that Trump will quit, be impeached or assassinated, that still leaves a hoard of corrupt, evangelical Republicans to carry out every one of his policies, including the destruction of women's and minority rights, the environment, affordable health care, science and the Constitutional right of freedom from religion. We can also expect more fear-based wars of profit conducted by Amerika's military corporatocracy. It's very doubtful that with Trump gone, any of his Republican cronies are going to follow suit. They'll cry crocodile tears over Trump's insane ranting and raving, saying they never wanted him in the first place, but hey, it was all part of God's plan anyway, so we're going for it. I'm inclined to believe that Trump's election was all part of a cynical Republican plan to grab unlimited power, which they have. Hopeful progressives say "Just wait for 2018, or maybe 2020 and the census results," but with the GOP having locked up the country through gerrymandered redistricting, I don't see many changes. Will Amerika's people ever wake up? Is the 21st century—and Amerika—really broken for good?

 That's Confidence — Posted Friday, 17 February 2017 Einstein's remark reminded me of how often I would struggle on a final exam problem, only to suddenly realize after much fretting that I hadn't read the problem correctly. The answer then came a lot quicker, but usually not in just five minutes—after all, I was no Einstein.

 Is Trump Really Out to Get You? — Posted Thursday, 16 February 2017 If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear from us. — US/UK Surveillance Programs Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, and I will find something in them to have him hanged. — Cardinal Richelieu (1641) Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. — Joseph Heller, Catch-22 Paranoia strikes deep Into your life it will creep It starts when you're always afraid Step out of line, the men come and take you away. — Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth This morning a dear family member directed me to a couple of sites about securing my computer against the government and other malicious entities. You may want to look into them for yourself: FreeCodeCamp 1     FreeCodeCamp 2 I'm already using several of the recommendations for locking out my email and computer but, as FreeCodeCamp notes, nothing is impervious: The RSA encryption algorithm is pretty secure (see my post dated 7 February 2013 for a description of the computer program** and an example of its use), but when it comes to cracking code nothing works better than a quick trip to Guantánamo (or other black site) and a cheap wrench or power tool. ** But my son prefers Pascal:

 Susskind Speaks Out — Posted Tuesday, 14 February 2017 Leonard Susskind is the Felix Bloch distinguished professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University and my favorite lecturer of all time. His many YouTube lecture series on quantum mechanics, relativity, information theory, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics and string theory have been viewed millions of times. To date Susskind has been silent on the dangers of the Trump presidency, but he has now broken his silence. I urge you to watch Susskind's brief announcement below, especially since it comes on the heels of today's stunning resignation of Trump's National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn:

 March for Science — Posted Wednesday, 8 February 2017 Part of the problem is people with degrees $$\ldots$$ there are too many of them. — James Delingpole, UK Conservative writer Following my semi-annual dental cleaning this morning, I discovered, much to my disappointment and dismay, that my dentist—whom I've known and admired for over 25 years—happily attended Donald Trump's January inaugural event in Washington. I knew Dr. M was a Republican, though in prior years we used to chat at length about a host of environmental and social issues that we both agreed upon. But $$\ldots$$ Trump?! Still, Dr. M is a top-notch clinician and overall nice guy, with a couple of kids fresh out of college and a successful side business in the dental implant field, and I never criticized his occasional forays into conservative-land. But this was too much, and I earnestly thought about changing dentists, as I have now become radicalized against all manner of Republican bullshit, nice guys or no. To get an idea of the extreme violence that Trump and the GOP represent today, you might want to read UK writer Jay Griffiths' article at Aeon, which outlines the existential problems progressives are currently up against. Bottom line: it's fascism, pure and simple, but not the kind Orwell warned us about, or the inverted totalitarianism that progressive writer Chris Hedges bemoans. It is instead a kind of post-fact, post-truth, dystopian conservative wet dream in which the acquisition of money and wealth override every other consideration. Worse, it has coupled itself to the burgeoning prosperity gospel that this country has aligned itself with, which has conveniently found a way around the cognitive dissonance created by the anti-materialism teachings of Jesus and the love of money. Jesus of Nazareth has thus been morphed into Donald of New York, and both want you to be wealthy, you see, although the latter is more concerned with the here-and-now rather than the pie-in-the-sky nonsense that modern American Christianity hawks to the stupid and simple-minded. And even worse is the denial of scientific fact and the hatred of science itself that Republican authoritarians espouse, since reality, fact and truth stand in their way of absolute dominance. Thinking I could escape some of the neoconfederate insanity that my Google News home page landed every morning on my computer, some months ago I switched to the UK Guardian. But whaddaya know, Britain is experiencing exactly the same problems we're having, except that the Liberal and Conservative parties here are called the Labour and Tory parties over there. So what to do? I plan to attend the upcoming March for Science, a nationwide protest of the Trump administration's anti-science, anti-fact agenda, to be held in Washington on Earth Day, April 22. If you can't make it to that city, there are satellite marches planned for many other cities and towns across the country. It may be a good alternative to buying a sniper scope and a rifle. (I said may be.)
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