The House of David

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

V night!

I'll let you know how this goes. In the meantime, in keeping with what seems to be the themes of this day's blogging, we have the Church and aliens.

Maybe Pope Benedict has been watching this show too...? The pilot was pro-doctrine and pro-priest, but anti-hierarchy - in that they saw the bishops selling out to the Visitors, for the sake of gathering more parishioners.

UPDATE 10 PM: Takeaway themes from V2: the anti-V protestors are an unlovely bunch who are picking fights; the Vs are ruthless and totalitarian (although most people don't see that yet); interpersonal trust is going down; the media think they can manipulate the Vs for personal advantage.

UPDATE 11/11: "V Ratings Fall From Sky - The second episode of "V" logged a 29% drop in ratings from last week. That's the largest fall from a premiere for a scripted show this season." The pilot episode was a bit rushed and preachy. I thought it was good but then - I'm anti-Progressive. Kinda like how Lefties laugh at Margaret Cho these days.

Labels: religion, science

posted by Zimri on 18:52 | link |

Is SETI a religion?

Here's Michael Crichton back in 2003, on the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (h/t Watts Up):

Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. ... The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.

We can handily test Crichton's thesis that there is no proof of alien life. First, forget his invocation of the Drake Equation, which is a misdirection (deliberate or not). The correct starting point is to recognise that life in the galaxy follows inductive logic. (Like the public-option in healthcare, and intelligent-design in biology.) That is, if one planet around a main-sequence, 4.567 billion year old star can support life: it becomes unreasonable to exclude planets of similar surface g and age, with similar insolation from their star.

Thus the question of intelligent life in this galaxy has been solved. This was proven in 200,000 BC by Mitochondrial Eve.

From there SETI ceased to be a religion; and became a search. Either we find life, or else we find a reason for there not to be intelligent life on every planet within radio range. To resolve either hypothesis we need data on the nature of the stars, and solar systems if any, within SETI's sphere of 50 light-years (counting from 1960).

These data just weren't available in 1960 but we are catching up now. Since 1995 we have found that many nearby stars support planets. We will shortly be in position to tell which of these systems is likely to have habitable planets. When we find enough of them (and the SETI net goes out further), we will have our answer.

Even not finding anything is interesting, once the SETI sphere expands to include too many stars. That too is likely the result of (destructive) intelligence. Brian Aldiss in Helliconia Summer, I believe, proposed that sentient beings would always wipe themselves out; but there is also the alternative of Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space.

SETI is testable and does not qualify as a religion. The Drake Equation was a bad start to the affair, true, but that does not invalidate SETI itself.

Labels: bullshit, religion, science

posted by Zimri on 16:15 | link |

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Intelligent-design versus climate change

(Last of the 18 October series.)

Conservatives believe in "reopening the debates" on the theory of life origins and on the reason for global warming. Liberals believe the debate is closed on both: evolution for life origins; anthropogenic gases, mostly CO2, for global warming.

I think Conservatives are wrong on life origins and right on climate change.

Our model of biology comes about because of observations of Charles Darwin, and also a few metaphysical principles such as: leave open how mutations form in the first place, and exclude intelligent designers from the equation. Darwin didn't really come up with a theory so much as lay out the questions.

By doing that, Darwin forced researchers to come up with a genetic theory. Mendel did that. That forced researchers to come up with a genetic mechanism. Crick and Watson did that.

Climate change theorists on the other hand haven't yet cleared the "observation" stage. We have data for hundreds of thousands of years, with much warming and (mostly) cooling in between; but humans were only around for the last 200,000 and, as far as we know, penned up in Africa until well after the Toba explosion. We are asked to solve a problem in geological time with a model that is active only in historical time.

Also, evolution is a general principle. Its analogy in climatology would be the theoretical existence of a greenhouse effect: atmospheric content C, and insolation I, makes for a temperature T. Anthropogenic global warming would come after many stages after that: proof that the temperature trend over the timespan is warming and then proof that the model is consistent with the atmospheric composition at any given point in the time span. And then this has to be compared over past time spans.

It is also telling that climateaudit etc are attacking the research in current journals; Ben Stein and his boys are doing an end run Wedge Strategy, and not engaging current journals.

Evolution and anthropogenic climate change (warming or not) are not on the same level. AGW is open to debate. Evolution is not; those who are "opening" that debate are more akin to Holocaust deniers and 9/11 truthers.

Labels: climate, conservatives, propaganda, science

posted by Zimri on 16:07 | link |

Cold heart

Christians like the Canadian who runs the Wintery Knight blog think that atheism is innately immoral and that atheists are atheists because they, too, are psychologically indisposed to decency. Wintery Knight doesn't say it outright; but when a blogger holds up Peter Atkins as a "spokesman" for atheism, and then turns around to his moral relativism, that is the conclusion he forces upon her readers.

(I started this in 18 October but couldn't post it until I'd laid out my explanation for why scientists don't like God... in their experiments.)

I don't have any brief for Atkins the moral relativist and I have no problem in saying that he is wrong. I am not even an atheist. But I used to be one; and I remain allied with atheists on every issue related to secularism and support for science. That's still the case even after reading this hit piece. We're about to find out why...

The thesis, "atheists are inherently amoral", is testable. I propose that crime is the physical implementation of a man's immorality. We'll restrict the subjects to adult males of sound mind, and compare the sets "Japan" and "Louisiana". Japan has a secular culture; Louisiana does not. Now, let's compare crime rates between Japan and Louisiana. Q., E., f'n D.

How did Wintery Knight fail? His argument associates two separate groups ("atheists" and "the immoral"). It is an ad hominem attack against all atheists through Atkins.

Wintery Knight moves on to another philosopher, Thomas Nagel, who said that "I don't want there to be a God". He didn't ask Nagel why. Scientists have answers; as explained below, if you let God into an experiment here, you have to do it everywhere else and that way lies Pakistan. Some atheists may be nothing more than nihilist punks; but Nagel is a philosopher of science, and has personal reasons for excluding God which have nothing to do with a wicked life of hedonism.

So, why does Wintery Knight pick on atheists? I don't think he's generally evil; I don't see him picking on, say, Jews or the "First Nations". As far as I'm aware he just sees atheists as enemies he wants to crush by any means fair and foul. Maybe he's insecure.

Maybe he should be insecure. There is a stronger case that Wintery Knight's brand of Christianity creates immorality. Wintery Knight arguments are endemic on the Internet. I don't think any of the Christians making such claims have ever lost a night's sleep over their own dishonest methods. Cheating is hunky dory if it's for Jesus. The right sort of cheat gets into Paradise. The wrong sort of honest man ... doesn't.

Those who point out their flaws (and not just atheists) annoy this sort of Christian. But here too, such Christians don't lose any sleep over the thought of a Richard Dawkins (say) getting shut out. They don't think "hey - this God character, he's pretty far along that ol' autistic spectrum". Oh no; they're quite looking forward to an afterlife without Dawkins. (Some of them also believe in eternal hellfire, so they've got masturbatory voyeuristic sadism working for them as well. I'm giving Wintery Knight the benefit of the doubt there though.)

Labels: enemies, science, secularism

posted by Zimri on 15:48 | link |

Teaching creationism

Now that we've identified intelligent-design as a Socratic movement, it remains to explain why it doesn't belong in a science class.

The argument of Intelligent Design is metaphysical. A metaphysic is an axiom, a means of proving rather than the means itself. ID starts with the concept of an "irreducible" complexity, that just because we don't know if a complexity may have value (as something else) if reduced, that it is evidence for Something Else At Work. The IDer says it's the Christian God; the atomist might say "in an infinity of possible universes...". Neither is testable and neither can belong in the set of "science".

Scientists find the idea of a Cthulhu from beyond the stars meddling in this universe to be a horror. This inevitably follows from the principle that every proposal has to be testable in nature, and the definition of "Cthulhu" as an entity which follows extranatural rules. Pace C.S. Lewis, scientists cannot afford miracles; if Cthulhu can come here to create life, then It can also screw with the laws of physics. In that case, any deviation from theory can be explained by Cthulhu. Faith inductively reaches the point where there are no laws in science. (Or, to put it in libertarian terms: divine intervention is the "public option" of science.) We can see the results in Pakistan, whose science textbooks say that chemistry works "if Allah wills". It was Aristotle who formalised what had long been an unease of divinity among the scientists, into an ethic; but it took until Francis Bacon to get the process right.

A moderate Conservative, like Socrates, won't care too much about which theory of origins is taught (as long as it's not too weird) - but no Conservative can accept a theory which excludes the divine. The Conservative wants moral instruction and s/he thinks you need a personal God to give it. That is why the "nothing but mammals" meme is so common on ID proponent websites. That is why Ben Stein drew a line from Darwin to Hitler. That even explains why "intelligent design" keeps away from Genesis. Conservatives see that science demands an ethic but not a morality, and so they distrust it. They might make allowances for nerds, but for normal ("neurotypical"?) people they want to replace it with piety.

There is no way to teach science that a believer in miracles can accept. That explains Conservative opposition to it. Fortunately for science education in America: most of our Conservatives don't take their morals and metaphysics to their logical conclusion, and most of our science teachers practice taqiyya in their dealings with the PTA.

Labels: conservatives, science, secularism

posted by Zimri on 15:01 | link |

Forms of creationism

Conservatives propose that intelligent-design is a scientific alternative to the dominant biological paradigm (evolution via natural selection, mainly). It would help their case if they could define that alternative.

Intelligent-design proponents these days prefer to claim that they are "raising questions" about "Darwin". Evolution proponents counter that ID is a big obscurantist nothing which does not offer a testable counter-proposal.

In this country intelligent-design is a mutation which has evolved over eight decades under the restrictions of the American court system (Scopes, 1925 - Dover, 2005). The evolution of the intelligent-design argument tracks closely the evolution of creationism under the strictures of Greek philosophy 600-300 BCE. Creationism has a storied philosophical pedigree.

While I was at the Other Green-Themed Site, I discovered David Sedley's Creationism And Its Critics In Antiquity and recommended it in just about every creationism thread over there. On the weekend 16-18 October I started this essay (and several others, which I'm in the process of editing) but I'd mislaid the book, and found other topics to do, so I put all of that aside. Now that I've found the book, and also some free time...

Sedley's book describes the Greek attempts to explain life on Earth, and Earth itself, up to Galen in the 200s AD.

Greek creationism isn't taught in school, but that's not wholly the fault of the school. Sedley was the first to gather the references together and to assign them to strains of creationism (and, in two cases, anti-creationism). He also benefitted from modern papyri discoveries in Egypt. Now that we know the history, it's time to teach it.

Sedley found more advanced forms of Near Eastern creationism in the pre-Socratics. Anaxagoras figured the Creator as a cosmic Mind which separated order from primal chaos. Empedocles had the Creator stumbling upon a more ordered universe and building life from those blocks He found. Anaxagoras strikes me as a Genesis-1 Priestly sort concerned with the universe and Empedocles as a Genesis-2 Yahwist concerned with nature; both strains of thought were available to the Phoenicians as of 600 BCE. Anaxagoras and Empedocles extended these ideas and made them available to the Greek world.

Sedley found the first challenge to a theological worldview in the atomists, who proposed an arbitrarily-large cosmos of worlds - applicable also to parallel universes - of which this one happens to be the world we live in (pp. 136-7). This removes the need for any God hypothesis to explain our world.

Sedley then found in Xenophon's Memorabilia I.4 and IV.3 that Socrates was an "anti-scientific creationist" (p. 78). Socrates accepted that the world was naturalistic, but defended the gods from the atheist model by proposing a counter-model: disassociating science from theology. He assumed that if scientists wanted to, they could find out the rules by which the universe works. The universe (from a human perspective) contains an ends-based or "teleological" subset, with (e.g.) a whole class of "barnyard animals" who could never survive in the wild. Socrates concluded that gods did exist, and that some helped in creating the whole world as support for humanity; and by extension that they likely exist today, and are still the friends of humanity. Socrates asserted that scientists shouldn't bother making further discoveries, because these discoveries would do nothing to help humans live the good life. Humans should instead study their own lives to improve them, and thereby to deduce what the gods want.

Plato in the Timaeus, developed the notion of a creator god, the Demiurge, further stating that God was a pure theoretician. Aristotle fused this god with the universe, thus removing his ability to act from outside the universe; there was no act of creation, and God's thoughts and deeds were simply the actions of the universe itself.

Modern creationists from Paley to Behe base their stance on the Argument From Design / Watchmaker / "irreducible complexity" argument. That makes them Socratics.

Modern atheists (as opposed to agnostics) base their stance on the Anthropic Principle. That makes then Atomists.

Labels: antiquity, books, religion, science

posted by Zimri on 12:23 | link |

Friday, November 06, 2009

Jon Stewart is funny to malinformed people

...and AllahPundit thinks Stewart is funny.

What Jon Stewart relies upon, beyond the parody of Glen Beck himself, is the assumption that Beck is unqualified to opine on Constitutional issues and on American history. And what that relies upon is that these fields require a credential from an organisation which is also accredited according to peer review - in accordance with what Stewart states as the analogy of a medical degree from a decent university.

Unfortunately for Stewart, the liberal-arts side of the whole Western university system has been captured by the radical Left decades ago. For recent history, sociology, and political science the accreditation process is dead. Once you get more recent than the 14th Century, or (for the Middle East) 6th century, I do not start with trust in any college graduate, up to PhD or even (or especially) Nobel Prize laureate, over some anonymous character I'd read two weeks of decent posts from in UseNet.

Beck is a Mormon and I would not trust his judgement on North American archaeology up to 400 AD. However he has proven himself astute on American history from 1800 on. I suspect that Stewart knows this too, which is why he's been drawing deliberately false parallels.

Pity that AllahPundit doesn't know it...

Labels: bullshit, propaganda, science

posted by Zimri on 17:43 | link |

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Proofs and algorithms

I mentioned below that an argument is a class of automaton. I may have jumped ahead a little bit. Really what an argument is, is a chain of reasoning. In mathematics, arguments are conducted in a more formal means. We call these arguments, "proofs".

A mathematical proof assumes that its audience accepts base mathematics and logic. To communicate these findings means that mathematical proofs must be laid out in terms of a "formal language" which all mathematicians are bound to accept. In short, a mathematical proof is itself a mathematical object. That means we might be able to prove things about ways to express mathematical proofs.

That is how we get from arguments to automata; even bad arguments, like Pascal-complete debates, follow these rules.

Labels: algorithms, science

posted by Zimri on 01:25 | link |

Renewable energy

I mentioned it in passing below, but Understanding E = mc² bears posting again. What it boils down to, is that "renewable energy" doesn't scale for a population of our size.

Solar energy is good only for dealing with peak daylight usage; and it doesn't solve the problem of the baseline energy we must use when the air-conditioning isn't running and the offices are powered off (at night).

Geothermic, wind, and hydro power together won't make up that difference.

There's another equation to keep in mind here: total energy = number of people x energy use per person.

Environmentalists have a principled case to levy against coal and oil (less so, natural gas). If we find a principled environmentalist, who is fine with our population the way it is, and wouldn't mind lower energy bills: he would then support nuclear power. However we don't see this amongst the Al Gore set. Something Else Must Be At Work.

That Something is that these "environmentalists" are not, in fact, environmentalists. They are simply a coalition of those who would set a ceiling upon the nation. Here, the ceiling is allowable power usage. With total energy capped, the number of people becomes too high, and energy use must be rationed.

The Left wants either fewer people, or a return to the Dark Ages - except for the Left elite.

Labels: bullshit, energy, progressives, propaganda, science

posted by Zimri on 00:59 | link |

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

We are not ready for this

Daily Mail says: we can create a sperm cell from a stem cell, and an egg cell from a stem cell.

The article claims this was done through embryonic stem cells; which I'm against, as a pro-lifer. But it could just as easily have been done through stem cells in the bone marrow. The researchers are talking skin cells. So I am not going to get into the embryonic / pro-life dispute here. What is going on here is bigger than that.

I see here humans being cloned by strange humans, humans who have no genetic relation to the humans being cloned. This scenario is not exactly new; there was always rape, most bluntly, but also (since 1978) we could have had forced harvesting of eggs and sperm, and in vitro fertilisation. But those methods were crude and difficult to implement. Now someone can have the needed cells when he bumps into us on the subway.

I see here the fulfillment of The Abolition Of Man (CS Lewis) toward the Brave New World (A Huxley).

If human society worldwide, the technologically-advanced nations anyway, all took part in stable, contractual unions for the purpose of procreation then I would be embracing this discovery. (I have supported government discrimination for the sake of heterosexuality; but supporters of gay marriage and even polygamy should agree with me here, within their equivalent unions.) Human society would enact laws worldwide that mandated that only a stable family had the right to this technology. This would end the curse of infertility; at the same time, no child would be born except to parents who loved them.

But if there is a theme to this blog (this month anyway) it is this: human society is not inherently nice. We are higher primates; the act of being good is a conscious effort. There are evil people in the World Jungle, who don't bother; there are even evil nations. An evil nation of high IQs - I have in mind here, North Korea - can and will use this to mix and match the genes the nation wants. They will use this to create a genetically engineered caste of bastards. Worse than bastards; they will not even know a mother's love, and their real father will be the Dear Leader.

Labels: fascism, misanthropy, science

posted by Zimri on 23:46 | link |

Monday, October 19, 2009

Pascal-completeness

I'm currently seeing a tactic on various comment threads: a (polite) dismissal of findings in modern science, on the grounds that we will all know what the truth is when we die. (There's no point linking to an example; it's easily found.)

Says the person laying out this case - evolutionists (say) have but a "theory". If there's a 90% or even a 99.9% chance that evolution is true, it is still safer for us to be wrong in denying evolution and to deal with that minor bummer, than for us to be be wrong in accepting evolution and... well.

The first step, in any problem, is to find out if the problem fits any known template. In this case we are dealing with a passive-aggressive version of Pascal's Wager, cited here almost five years ago.

A debate develops in much the same way as an automaton, or machine, or running process. Some automata can be grouped into "-complete" classes, which follow principles common across the class. For example, Turing-complete automata: once you know that your machine is Turing-complete, it's just a matter of writing the compiler and then you can run your C program on it. Conversely, the NP-complete problems: once you prove your program is NP-complete, you know you're screwed.

So here, I give you the Pascal-complete argument - once The Wager is laid, the argument has become an argument over the Wager, and the original argument is dead.

There are counters to The Wager but unfortunately, no-one you meet will accept them. Anyone who reacts to an objectively knowable fact about this world, by means of Pascal's Wager (however much Nerf foam s/he wraps it in): that one has shown their hand. They'd have to want to change their outlook and, it's not going to happen. They are not to be reasoned with. evolutionThread.Abort(); if C# is your thing.

In a moderated debate, Pascalian arguments would be slapped out of bounds. If the general population were more rational, then the other observers to the debate would step in.

Real life isn't a debating society; standard-model humans, who aren't up with the literature and have lives outside logic - they judge based on personal feelings. And anyone who puts on their Shatner-face and yells "PASCAAAAL" into the monitor isn't going to win friends.

UPDATE 10/29 - This post assumes that it is intuitive that a debate is like a computer program. I've since written an explanation for that, and linked it here.

Labels: algorithms, misanthropy, religion, science

posted by Zimri on 19:14 | link |

Friday, October 16, 2009

Life is NP-hard

I was just thinking that the Travelling Squirrel Problem is like life.

Sammy goes from home to a bunch of nodes and back again, on the assumption that the "best" route is the overall shortest. He could plot a journey in which he goes from one node to the nearest node to the nearest node etc. That's the easiest to do in transit. But it's demonstrably not always the fastest route and so, for him, not the best.

Sammy's there-and-back is mathematically equivalent to a journey by which Sammy goes from home through those same nodes to any fixed end-point. Also, Sammy's path only involved time; we could turn that into an array of time and acorns. In this path we would take away certain trees as time goes past. So at the end of one given path, there could be more of a total payout than in another.

Map "home" to birth (or now or tomorrow), "end-point" to death (or any arbitrary stopping point), "node" to the goals you set. There might be any number of additional values to top up with and then an equation to decide on "total happiness". All of this adds more complexity to the problem.

Life is NP-hard at best.

Labels: science

posted by Zimri on 17:09 | link |

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Paging Stephen Cook

If you solved the problem Lazy Sammy Squirrel posed for you below, then congratulations. You've won a Fields Medal in mathematics. More: you've got a million dollars for the Millennium Prize. Your name will go down in history with Galois, Reimann, Perelman. Maybe even Newton.

That is because what Sammy had run into was a form of the NP complete puzzle. Finding a polynomial-time solution, or proving that polynomial-time is impossible, remains open. The NP complete class was defined by Stephen Cook as recently as 1971, and traveling-squirrel is just one member of it.

Anyway I would like to talk, today, about what I think is an equivalent in particle physics.

Particle physicists have a "Standard Model" of quarks, gluons etc which Explains Everything... except for the "Everything" part. Mathematically-minded physicists have attempted to refine the model. I am here picking on a branch of these model refineries: the String Theory. This proposes that underneath the Standard Model is a set of multidimensional vibrating strings.

In order for capital-P Physics to take this theory seriously, and not as a glorified Sudoku puzzle, we demand that String Theorists come up with a means for testing. When String Theorists do, they usually propose something hilarious like a hollow titanium donut the radius of Neptune's orbit. Instead of laughing the String Theorists out of the academy as if they were so many Ptolemaists, though, we're still nowhere decades later, and we're still paying these clowns for playing Sudoku. What's up with that, dawg?

I say, stop their funding cold. Absolute-zero cold. They can shop their theories in listservs and blogs like the rest of us kooks.

We need to be funding Stephen Cook instead. (If he's still alive, that is; if not him, then one of his students.) Physics needs to define a class of intractible problems (let's say it needs >1,000,000,000,000,000 eV to test); and to prove that String Theory belongs in that class.

At that point, we can treat all those String Theory hobbyists like we used to treat the guys who solved traveling-salesman in linear time on UseNet. Or, we can demand that String Theorists come up with their version of "approximation algorithms" = tests that show how likely String Theory is.

Until the Stephen Cook of physics comes along, I'm in agreement that it's intuitively clear that the string-theorists are in Internet kook territory.

Labels: algorithms, bullshit, science

posted by Zimri on 17:43 | link |

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

This better not be a hoax

Superconductors are materials which carry a current with resistance of zero (0) ohms. They're made in a lab, and when I was a kid they were made of something with the science-fictiony name "niobium" and they had to be cooled in liquid helium. Then in 1987ish they were catapulted into liquid nitrogen territory, and they became (barely) usable for industrial applications.

Slashdot is linking to some guy in a "1996 style" website, that they're now at freezer temperatures. 254 Kelvin, as the site points out, means -2 Fahrenheit and -19 C. Another way to look at it - room temperature, if your room is dark and has the window open during a north American winter.

It looks suspicious, but then - Perelman solved the Poincare Conjecture just by uploading some stuff into arXiv.

Labels: bullshit, science

posted by Zimri on 13:01 | link |

Sunday, May 05, 2002

Another one bites the dust

Has a Southampton University professor found a proof of the Poincaré Theorem? Paulos has a "layman's terms" version at ABCNews:

Poincare's conjecture says that a certain property of a sphere in space holds for higher-dimensional analogues of a sphere. To understand the property, imagine stretching a rubber band around an orange. We can contract this rubber band slowly, making sure it neither breaks nor loses contact with the surface of the orange. In this way we can shrink the rubber band to a point. We can't do this with a rubber band stretched around a doughnut (either around the hole or around the body).
The orange, but not the doughnut, is said to be "simply connected." Henri Poincaré, who, incidentally, almost discovered relativity theory before Einstein, was aware of the fact that a ball like an orange could be characterized by this property of simple connectivity. He wondered if this held true for balls in higher-dimensional space.

UPDATE 10/13/2009: The short answer was "no he hasn't". I'm enjoying the sweet, sweet irony of this post's title...

I suppose I could have noted the name of the guy who proffered the bogus proof but in retrospect, he's best left to obscurity. I did manage to correct the link at least. The second one. The first dead link, I've deleted.

I do owe an apology: I should have noted Perelman's proof when it happened.

Labels: apology, bullshit, science

posted by Zimri on 14:16 | link |