Speed Screed: Imagining the Tenth Dimension

One problem with dividing everything into “rants” and “raves” is that I don’t really have a neutral category. Obviously lumping things into “love” or “hate” is gross oversimplification that I use as a cheap draw. I may have to invent a new category for stuff that is simply interesting or informative, but that I don’t have a particularly strong opinion about. If I don’t have a strong opinion, you may find it boring, but at least I don’t have to pretend something is either wonderful or abhorrent. Not that I have yet. That’s called integrity. Ahem.

Anyway, I recently checked out this interesting video called “Imagining the Tenth Dimension” which was posted by the writer of a book of the same name, Rob Bryanton. It’s basically a technique that helps you wrap your head around some of the possibilities of the dimensions beyond the three (or four) that we experience, by using lower-dimensional analogies.

For example, if you collapse all of space into a point (i.e. three dimensions) then a line segment moving from that point to another is movement in the fourth dimension, which is roughly described as time (in truth I think it’s more complicated than the way it’s presented; the way the exercises handle time is a little too flippant) It’s an interesting exercise and I highly recommend it.

As a cautionary note though, this whole experience is really an exercise in philosophy and imagination than any sort of scientific model. I somehow doubt that a string theorist who works on Calabi-Yau spaces really considers the sixth dimension as movement between logically inconsistent realities. String theorists have more or less no physical evidence for their claims (though I still think the theory is a good one) so they use higher dimensions as a way to get the equations to balance out; in other words, string theory becomes a usable model when there is an assumption of ten (or eleven) dimensions, but I think they are viewed mathematically and not as “lines of travel” which is what this mental exercise basically assumes.

The author more or less admits that he is trying to reconcile philosophy and science in a certain fashion, but his spiritual and aesthetic side somewhat damages his scientific credibility. He also produced a series of songs that supposedly outline the key concepts of his book – but the man is not a professional songwriter so I felt mostly confusion at his attempts to use music. I felt that he was once again trying to blur the lines between rational discourse and intuitive spiritual belief. I personally believe that there is no such thing as an informative song – songs are not about transmitting information, at least, not in a form where it has any real-world use.

In short, I believe this is a good thing to watch in order to understand how lower-dimensional analogies can be useful in wrapping your head around things that seem impossible, but to take the entire thing with a grain of salt. Particularly telling was the way that he shaped the 10-dimension symbol like the Sefirot, the Tree of Life from the Jewish mystical tradition of Qabalah. Jumping to premature conclusions much?

Today’s Rave: The Scientist’s Claim To Fame

Have you ever though about Planck’s Constant? No, not the actual number, or what it represents. I mean the fact that Max Planck’s name is forever tied to a fundamental principle of quantum physics. Few honors in real life really compare to something of that magnitude.

Granted, it’s an arbitrary label. Planck’s constant simply is, regardless of what it’s called. But now the name is attached to the universe. It’s pretty interesting if you think about it. Avogadro’s number. Bernoulli’s principle. Boyle’s law. In a funny way, it’s almost like an invention. By discovering something (or the mathematical principle by which it operates) they have de facto provided something new to the scientific community, even though it was always sitting there.

In a roundabout way, this is true of physical inventions as well. The potential for a steam engine was always there; it was physically possible. James Watt simply provided the structure for physics to operate in such a way that it provided power. Does it take more ingenuity to invent a context for a physical principle to work then to discover it?

I don’t know, really. But in a certain sense, James Watt discovered the steam engine, since he himself was relying on the principles of gases that were “discovered” by someone else. So in that sense, the difference between an inventor and a discoverer is a semantic one. Really, it’s a question of an engineering approach vs. a research approach.

One makes observations about reality and tries to create mathematical systems that match and predict the behavior of these real world phenomenon. The other takes the principles of these systems and tries to use them in such a way to produce a desired end. The second sort of feeds off the first.

And inventions are often named after their creators too. The Wankel rotary engine is the best example I can think of. The only problem with that is if the invention becomes obsolete, the name of the creator is likely to become less well-known, if not gone entirely (except from history books, the fate of all luminaries without something named directly after them). The only way Planck’s constant becomes obsolete is if it’s not constant, or if it’s somehow wrong.

Interesting, no?

No. I know.

Today’s Rant: True Faith

I am so pissed off at creationists who think that public schools ought to teach “intelligent design.” There are a hundred reasons why this should offend everyone, even Christians, but rather than rattling them off, I will approach this from the opposite angle.

Evangelists and their ilk have, in my opinion, an extremely weak faith in God. You would think, due to their
rabidity in defense of their faith, they must be the most brainwashed people in the world. I actually think it’s the opposite: their faith is so weak they need the society to reinforce their views, or it all falls to hell. Literally.

People who have true faith in God would not be threatened by evolution, nor by its being taught in schools. In fact, people of true faith would not go around trying to superimpose their will on you because they ought to be supremely confident that they have it right and don’t need to worry about what the rest of society thinks. They ought to hold firm in their belief. This is what FAITH is all about. It’s about having belief in something for which there is NO proof. That is the POINT.

Creation scientists looking for “proof” of a supernatural creator are extremely poor Christians, in my opinion, because they shouldn’t need scientific evidence – their faith should be enough. God would surely consider it a waste of the faithful’s time to go and look for proof when the Bible is sitting right there on their goddamn bookshelf.

I know that Evangelism (i.e. the religious tenet that spreading your faith is part of being a Christian) throws a wrench in this a bit, but I do think part of the popularity of Evangelism is that people do realize that religion is falling apart in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So they have to buttress the crumbling edifice by quickly converting others and trying to shut out the evidence that their religion (as they see it) is nonsense.

The only reason it is falling apart is because you simple-minded drones insist on taking the BIble literally. The intelligent, real Christians who care about getting on with their lives rather than making everyone else conform to their views have long ago reconciled evolution and creation. It isn’t hard. Even I can fucking do it. Earth was created in 6 days right? Well, assuming a “day” with no existent sun (the sun wasn’t created until later in the “week”) is an arbitrary amount of time, you can easily assign any number of geological eras to a day. And as for evolution, don’t they say that God works in mysterious ways? So God set the spark in motion that eventually resulted in evolved man being created in his image. Remember, we’re talking about an OMNIPOTENT god here. It is equally easy for God to wave a hand and create a man out of thin air or to set a nearly infinitely-complex system in motion and yet predict the exact result unerringly. This is God, people. Jesus. The Christians don’t seem to realize powerful the Lord is. He is Almighty. Remember?

All I’m trying to say is that real faith involves being able to adapt your views to new information and yet never falter in your belief. To reject the evidence in front of your eyes is foolish and almost certainly not what God, who gave you your brain, would want you to do. What would impress God (assuming he can be impressed, which is unlikely) would not be the empty-headed drones who sequesters themselves from the real world because he or she can’t grasp the fact that the Bible is not a literal document, but the people who keep their faith in the face of the evidence to the contrary. That’s real faith.

And speaking of literal interpretation of the Bible, the Jews (or at least those that study the Kabbalah and to a lesser extent Talmudic scholars) would think it laughable that divine wisdom could be comprehensible in a book of simple (and some admittedly pointless) stories. The Kaballah works at getting at the true divine meaning out of the Torah which is absolutely not apprehensible at face value. And Rabbis spend their entire lives mulling over the meaning of this document. The Torah is a living work, not a dead tome of endless rules and regulations. In this way, I believe, Judaism is a model faith because literalism is generally frowned upon (even though Orthodox Jews may take more tenets of faith directly, they still study the Torah like mad.)

Why some Christians can’t wrap their heads around the fact that God’s wisdom may not simply be a book of fairy tales is beyond me. Let me assure you that I am an atheist, but I can get a better grasp of dynamic faith than these supposedly faithful people. Rationality and faith aren’t incompatible! You just need to put rationality first, and all can be put right.

If you put rationality first, then you assholes wouldn’t be stepping all over our rights as American citizens. Off to New Plymouth Rock with you. You can keep your isolation and indoctrination, and we’ll keep all of the wonderful freedoms that we enjoy on a daily basis. Have fun!

Today’s Rave: Ants

That’s right. Ants. What the hell? Well, I’m at a loss for topics that involve any of my usual or unusual subjects, but I did read a great deal about ants recently (courtesy of Wikipedia) and was astonished (that’s right) by some of the crazy-ass species of ants there are. Mind-blowing weirdness at every turn.

There are ants called honeypot ants, that store up food by eating until their thoraxes swell to twenty times their size. When these ants hang from the ceiling, they look like honeypots. Hence the name.

There are ants that raid other ant colonies and take eggs and larvae back to their own colonies, and raise those ants as slaves or servants. There are even ants that cannot get food for themselves and have to have a slave do it for them, or they starve.

There are ants called “bullet ants” which have the most painful sting of any insect in the world (though it is not particularly dangerous). Quoted from wikipedia: “waves of burning, throbbing, all-consuming pain that continues unabated for up to 24 hours.” The bullet moniker is apparently because the pain is akin to that of being shot. Stay the fuck out of South America. (Technically it lives in rainforests from Nicaragua down to Paraguay) But it gets better. Some local tribes have an initiation rite where the make a gloves out of these goddamn ants (and leaves) and to pass into manhood you have to stick your hand in the glove and leave it there for 10 minutes. By the time you’re done, your entire arm is paralyzed from the venom. But the thing is, you’re not done. You have to do it 20 times over the course of the year. Allow me to myopically condemn an entire indigenous people with a single word:

Assholes.

Last but not least (of this list, not of weird ant species, there’s NO end to those) we have the leafcutter ants, who raise a special kind of fungus to eat inside their colonies. They are essentially farmers, but one of the craziest things about them is the whopping size variation within the species. Whereas the smallest ants are even smaller than the usual ants you see everywhere, the queen is as big as a mouse. Ugh. I can’t imagine stepping on that thing. Check it out. It’s the biggest goddamn insect you’ll ever see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Atta_colombica_queen.jpg

So what’s with the raving about insects, you might ask? Well, aside from the stunning variety of ants simply being fascinating on its own merit, I….wait. That’s all I got. The stunning variety of ants is simply fascinating on its own merit. You might think ants are pretty boring. But did you know they don’t have lungs, and air simply passes through them via a series of holes in their exoskeleton? Okay, I guess that’s pretty boring. I’ll try to write the rant equivalent of a car chase next time.

But in the meantime, think on the mysteries of evolution. Or don’t. Bye.

Today’s Rave: Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit!”

I have discovered a very cool TV show that’s been running on Showtime for 5 years now. Bullshit, which is hosted by illusionist/comedians Penn Jillette and Teller, goes around debunking widely believed rumors and even “science,” attacking mercilessly such diverse topics as religion (creationism particularly got my blood boiling when I watched people trying to make them teach it in public schools) including new-age and psychic nonsense, environmental movements, energy crises, sex, blind patriotism and a whole host of other fabulous topics. The show is frequently hilarious and generally I see completely eye to eye with them in most issues. I know preaching to the choir is entertainment, not informative, but it’s still great fun to watch.

Particularly what I like is how they continually bludgeon dumb-ass ideas with science until they collapse into the pile of crap that they are. They are atheists who revere science first and foremost as the only tool we have to make recommendations about practically anything, and I cast my vote for science long ago.

The only thing I would caution some people about is that the show is heavily slanted toward libertarianism, (both Penn and Teller are avowed libertarians) and while I agree with most libertarian principles regarding individual rights being the most important thing that the government cannot ever trample on (and guaranteed by that pesky Constitution) I do not believe that government can do no good, which they believe
is true except in very limited cases. Nevertheless, they make generally very compelling arguments, but of course, since they are pushing an agenda (to debunk things they consider bullshit) you can never be absolutely sure you are getting all the data you need to draw the conclusion that they draw. But in a certain sense, credulous fools are not likely to be watching the show to begin with, and it’s still better than Michael Moore’s stuff because they use more actual facts and less cashing in on emotions related to tragedies.

They address virtually all major issues that, say, South Park does but through actual research as opposed to immature lampooning, and don’t bludgeon you over the head with conclusion they draw.

Most importantly, they tend to draw you back into the center from major issues. Thanks to them, I’ve seen the not-always positive flipside of organic food, environmental movements, and the recycling program. Am I a convert to their point of view? Not necessarily. But they have given me a lot to consider about and increased my skepticism about virtually all issues, and skepticism is the attitude of science. Go science! Science not only says “show me,” but “show me repeatedly and show me how to do it so I can show myself.”

This show is highly recommended. Check it out if you get a chance.

Speed Screed: Theory of Cultural Relativity

Imagine my dismay when I read that the new Mariah Carey album is entitled: “E=MC².” Einstein and his contemporaries must be rolling over in their graves.

First of all, what the hell is it supposed to mean? It doesn’t even have a decent parallel to the actual equation: the energy inherent in a certain object is its mass times the velocity of light squared. Elegant, and something that I thought was common enough for pretty much any kid past the age of 12 to be at least vaguely aware of.

But what the hell is this? Energy = Mariah Carey Squared? What does the E stand for? Squared? Does that woman even understand what the original equation is? Because then she might have some sort of compunction about using merely due to the coincidence that her initials are also MC. Weak sauce.

What really terrifies me is with the state of education in this country, how many more people are going to think it’s the name of a Mariah Carey album rather than the mass-energy equivalence formula? Is this the best we can do with our science, is abduct it for “clever” use by corporate quasi-divas like Mariah Carey?

And isn’t it just the height of arrogance that anyone would label their album after one of the more important equations derived in the last 100 years? Yeah, your thrice-recycled pop drivel will have just as much of an impact on the music world as mass-energy equivalence had on the science world. Feh.

Today’s Rave: String Theory

What I don’t know of physics could fill a small city. Nevertheless, I am an avid amateur astronomer/astrophysicists/quantum physicist. I love reading about that stuff, even if I can only enjoy the most accessible parts of it. I’d gotten a few small insights into string theory, which is all the rage, but, if you take a look at the Wikipedia article, for example, it’s practically no help at all, because it is written for people with a considerable grounding in abstract physics. So my interest in strings fell by the wayside as there was nothing accessible enough for an untrained fellow like myself.

Every once in a while, though, some well-meaning scientist with a gift for plain speech and insightful analogies will write a book that lets the average person get a glimpse of cutting-edge research and theories. Stephen Hawking is one such man. Clifford Pickover (the author of such books as Time: A Traveler’s Guide) is another. And the most recent I’ve read, and of import to this particular article, is Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe. The book is actually about 5 years old, but it has finally brought string theory within my grasp.

I need to reread the last half of the book about 4 times to really get a handle on everything, but it is one of the most fascinating things I’ve read in a very long time. String theory is a special theory because it actually attempts to answer why everything is the way it is (in terms of matter particles, physical forces, and the like) and even how it couldn’t possibly be any other way (more ambitious, but as I’ve read, not outside the realm of possibility). Of course, now string theory is simply a small section of M-Theory, which is the purported theory of everything, and is unfortunately even more complicated, though many of the same basic principles remain the same.

I won’t bore you to death with many details on this wondrous subject, since I don’t have the mastery to distill it down to anything approachable in a six hundred word article. Suffice to say it says that matter does not at its core consist of points but rather one dimensional loops of string that vibrate. How the strings vibrate (i.e. what frequency, what amplitude, etc.) determines the property of the particle that we observe. A string vibrating in a certain way might appear to us as a certain kind of quark, while if it vibrates another way it might appear as an electron. Truth be told it’s a great deal more complicated (the string vibrates through 6 or 7 curled up dimensions in a shape called a Calabi-Yau space) but the basic principle is so uniquely compelling to me, especially due to my training in music. As if the whole universe was based on music. Cheesy, I know.

The other cool thing about it is that with string theory all matter is made of these fundamental strings. There aren’t different types, simply different kinds of vibrations. All strings are identical in terms of their composition. Now, unfortunately for my poor brain, with M-Theory, it’s looking like there are more oscillating shapes than we though, including oscillating two dimensional shapes called branes, and three dimensional shapes called blobs. I haven’t quite finished the book yet, but I’m sure you are tired of hearing me prattle on about stuff I barely understand anyway.

Long story short, I highly recommend you check out The Elegant Universe. The scientist in you will be extremely grateful.

Today’s Rant: Big Oil

Does anything piss people off more than huge prices for gas? I can think of one thing. When oil companies post record profits and then give a “who, me?” shrug when lawmakers point the old finger at them and ask why they need to make so much goddamn money, especially when they refuse to invest some of their capital in (gasp) renewable energy sources.

Now, I will admit, the era of cheap oil is over, and I would be willing (in theory only, as I don’t own a car) to pay even another buck or two per gallon in taxes if I knew that that money was going directly into a government fund for alternate energy research and development. As it stands, oil companies refuse to acknowledge that oil won’t last forever, and just sit idly by and rake in the cash while energy doomsday approaches at terminal velocity.

Any company with half a brain would realize that if they are tapping a limited resource, i.e. fossil fuels, and if they want to think about more than next quarter’s profit margin (a mighty intellectual feat for some of these greedy CEOs) they’ll realize that it behooves them to invest in long-term renewable energy sources so their company doesn’t collapse around them fifty years from now when suddenly we’re entirely out of oil. Somehow I think that a multi-hundred-million dollar paycheck somewhat deadens you to concerns like that. Call it a hunch.

Why a company like Shell wouldn’t want to invest its billions of dollars in becoming a worldwide leader in alternate energy sources is a complete mystery to me. Aren’t people motivated to get ahead of the competition? If you, unlike all your myopic competitors, actually consider the long term, you’ll have a goddamn monopoly on renewable energy twenty years from now because they were all too lazy to actually carve out any sort of genuine future for themselves. Next quarter, next quarter. How much can we increase our stock prices?

And let’s not forget that we fund terrorism indirectly with our oil obsession. If America didn’t have to lean on the Middle East like a crutch we would see much less money mysteriously making its way into the hands of Islamic extremists.

Oil companies are big scaredy-cats. They don’t want to invest any money in anything that doesn’t have a guaranteed return. The only thing they know is oil, so they invest in getting more. It’s not like they can’t afford to take risks. Give me a break.\

Also oil companies can’t just sit around and shrug when there are issues like the ones we are having here. It’s more than just free market capitalism at work; oil companies literally provide the modern world with what it needs to keep whizzing along. You can’t be a complete asshole with something that’s so blatantly necessary for the functioning of civilized society. Gasoline is not a luxury, it’s a necessity for billions of people. Stop acting like it’s some sort of god-given right to gouge the hell out of people because you’re providing a luxury.

These bloated, next-quarter driven American companies pretty much showcase the worst things about America. The only responsibility any corporation has is to its bottom line. No wonder Toyota has utterly replaced the American automakers; while Toyota actually plans ahead for things like oil becoming more expensive over time, Ford and GM refused to get with the times and rightly they have been punished for it. Toyota cranks out cheap, fuel efficient cars, whereas the best GM can do is offer to give you free gas for a year just to sell their Hummers. Absolute idiots.

I think its a crying shame that so many hardworking employees at these companies got laid off because of the inability of their executives to do anything remotely intelligent. It’s not the workers’ fault that the only thing the execs can see is the chart with an arrow sloping upwards. Down is bad. It doesn’t matter if it’s down for two years and then up for the next 10, down is bad. Always. God I hate these people. Stupid stupid stupid stupid.

I would love nothing more than to see these moronic companies come crashing down but they take so many innocent people with them. All of the ordinary employees and investors have to pay for the board of directors’ willful blindness to simple facts.

This is why corporate America disgusts me so much. Small companies actually have common sense and maneuverability. It would be worth working at one even if you got paid less, believe me.

Speed Screed: Disease

A most happy birthday to my dear old dad, who turns some number of years this year. My best guess is, uh, 56. I think that’s right. Either that or 55. And now, onto the rest.

Man, being sick totally blows. I rarely get colds, so I am poor at coping with them. I chock it up to an unusually strong immune system, though in reality it’s probably mostly sheer luck. And the fact that I actually make a point of washing my hands a couple of times a day.

What is it with people who think antibiotics are good for a cold? It’s just sheer stupidity. Maybe if doctors explained to them that antibiotics are anti-bacterial, hence the name, and are therefore useless and indeed counterproductive against 90% of the most common diseases people would stop taking them as if they’re just some kind of super anti-everything medication. Who gave them that idea? Who?
People have actually said to me, “Yeah I felt myself getting sick so I started taking some of my boyfriend’s/husbands/son’s leftover antibiotics.” I just sort of laughed to myself but I was thinking “Jesus Christ, that’s stupid. Thanks for contributing to the rise of drug-resistant bacteria strains.” What is the chain of logic? Even if it were effective, the drugs were prescribed by the physician for a specific person and purpose. It is imbecilic to think that it will help you get over the flu; flu is a virus!

Isn’t this the sort of thing they teach you in schools? Even the most basic biology class should cover this stuff. I don’t know why doctors should have to warn people not to take contraindicated medication that wasn’t prescribed for them but apparently they do. Unbelievable.

Today’s Rant: Homeopathic Medicine

So I woke up this morning and felt the cold-onset malaise. But as I have no form of income protection, being a temp, it is in my best interest to drag my sorry ass to work unless I can’t physically move. Or I just can’t stand to go to work that day. There’s more than one kind of “sick” if you ask me. But as I said, no income protection, so more than once every month is too much anyway.

So in an attempt to mitigate the effects of this cold, I bought some of those cold-eeze lozenges from Walgreens on the way to work. They have been shown to reduce the length and severity of the common cold, and I’ve used them before to some effect. But I noticed that they were listed as homeopathic medicine on the label, so I took some time to find out just what homeopathic medicine was. I was laboring under the misapprehension that it was simply herbal medicine or something, with remedies that were unsubstantiated by science but were claimed to be effective by some.

I was wrong.

Homeopathic medicine is based on the idea that, for some reason, if you can emulate the symptoms of a condition via ingesting some particular substance, it will help cure it. The only conceivable way I could see that happening is if it stimulated an immune response, but that’s more or less impossible given that the body’s response to any given toxin that causes, for example, a fever, is completely different than an actual immune response to the presence of viruses or bacteria, of which fever is a side effect.

So okay. That’s one of the weakest links in the chain of “logic” surrounding homeopathic medicine. But there is some additional fun stuff yet. When the founder of homeopathy was figuring out which substances cause which symptoms, he administered doses that were quite unpleasant in their effects. So what they did is continually diluted the active ingredient in order to see what minimum dose was effective, but continued that chain of thought into somehow insisting that the smaller the dose was the more effective it was. This is in direct contradiction of the dose-effect theory in modern medicine (not really a theory) and in fact in contradiction of common sense. But you see, they also shake the solution vigorously between dilutions. So, don’t you get it? Shaking it makes it more effective? Right? Shaking it?

But it gets better. The amount of dilutions is demarcated by either X (power of 10) or C (power of 100) so, for example a 2X or 1C dilution is one part in 100, whereas a 12C dilution is some astronomically tiny amount, something like a quadrillion or something (I’m too lazy to do the math right now). It’s been shown scientifically that any substance more diluted than 12C is no longer technically a “dilution.” It’s just the solvent. That’s it. There are a great number of homeopathic medicines that are sold at dilutions of 30C and even higher, so what you are paying for is water. There is virtually no chance that it contains even ONE MOLECULE of the active substance after diluting it so many times. But proponents claim that there’s some sort of water memory that makes it effective regardless. If that were true, then surely there’s water memory of that substance in any glass of water you drink anywhere on earth.

Homeopathy has been shown to be approximately as effective as a placebo, which would be fine if the stuff was dirt cheap, but it’s often hilariously overpriced, considering that a 30C dilution they could make an essentially infinite number of doses from 1 gram of the substance. What you are paying for is water, or in tablet form, milk sugar. Sugar pill? Sounds like a placebo to me.

However: people can take whatever they want, and if they feel better, that’s fine. Although I am a rabid rationalist, I also make allowances for people’s own subjective experiences. The scientific method is an invaluable tool but it is limited to certain factors. The scientific method is perfectly valid in saying that various methods are unscientific. This is absolutely true. But even if there is no empirical evidence, it is still a fallacy to insist that there are no subjective gains because science can’t know or measure that, and it never will be able to. All it can say is that due to a lack of empirical evidence there can be no external substantiation of claims, and hence there can be no recommendations made on the basis of facts. Which should be enough to dissuade most people, but to each his or her own, as long as it doesn’t harm others.

I know it seems like I pulled a 180 at the end here, but the bottom line is I was merely trying to show that homeopathic medicine is nonsense from a medical, scientific point of view. If it has some strange mechanism of working, so be it, but it sounds pretty hokey. These anti-cold lozenges seem to work, although they a) contain actual quantities (13 mg) of the active substance and b) have actually been substantiated by several double-blind studies which eliminates much of the subjectivity.

Fun with alternative medicine. See you tomorrow.