Last days of 2014

It was a beautiful day, the sun beat down

I had the radio on, I was drivin'

Trees flew by, me and Del were singin' little Runaway

I was flyin'

                               -- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Runnin' Down A Dream"

We, my wife and I, escaped the sub-zero flurries in Virginia to flee to Florida and a resplendent 25 degrees Celsius, literally the scientifically defined room temperature. All the niggling hiccups notwithstanding, I declare vacation accomplished.

I like what I do, and if I got paid a little more I could do it all my life. Even though I am but a microscopic pinprick in the vast expanse of scientific endeavor, I believe the very contemplation of the fact unites me with the expanse. I suspect this belief (being an insignificant yet irreplaceable part of a larger plan) is fundamentally similar to a profound spiritual or religious faith except that it does not contradict logic or common sense. 

And common sense says that much as I like having equations and conjectures floating in my head, I would do well to periodically wipe the slate clean. Every six months a week long vacation away from the daily grind does wonders for my psyche. Not checking e-mail is the modern age tapasya, a cathartic penance for those seeking to rise above the world-wide-web-ly desires. 

Of course that does not mean that it is even possible to turn the mind off even on a vacation. Give a man a fish and you have fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish for meaning in every unassuming nook of an indifferent cosmos and you have given him food for thought for a lifetime.

What does a manatee do but sleep all day and eat when its bored? As my wife asks, why does it exist? Why is a 3000 pound lumbering hulk nibbling on my hand like a puppy? Is a manatee a metaphor of existence - either pointless, caught in an endless cycle of self gratification, or blissful, uniting with rather than conquering its environment.

A circle, no matter how vicious, has no direction.

I felt so good, like anything was possible

Hit cruise control and rubbed my eyes

                               -- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Runnin' Down A Dream"

Florida keys are a group of islands stretching out more than a 100 miles south of mainland US connected by a thin highway practically at sea level. On either side of the road, the ocean is an infinite expanse. Water as far as the eye can see, water as green as blue can be, water so perfect, so serene and so infinitely deep, it inspires and terrifies me...

I can watch waves crashing for ever. In nature where most beautiful things are ephemeral (sunsets and snowflakes) and most things terrible eternal (death), crashing waves and open flames can bring me endless joy. Each wave or lick of flame that stands out from the rest seems to be the last great one, one that could not be bettered. I wait for a while, then eventually resign and let the juvenile antics of squabbling licks and middling waves amuse me.

Yet if I wait long enough, there is always a bigger, longer, higher, better one. Always.
And yet, if I wait long enough, the average is always the same. Always. 

Bell curves can make life worth living...

The last three days and the rain was unstoppable

It was always cold, no sun shine

                              -- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Runnin' Down A Dream"

Speaking of eternal, stars. The stars are out all night in the everglades campsite. Sure I have seen better starlit nights before, but that never seems to disappoint me. Seeing any more than the five stars I can see from the city is exciting.

I meet relatives on this trip who have been around the world more times than they can remember, even though every trip has left a mark in their life. I would like to go all around the world someday, eat all the crazy foods and listen to all the weird languages. And I want to look at their stars and say... "We are not so different, you and I. See that star, it sings to me too."

I try to show off some star trivia to my wife to look smart. However, when its midnight and a raging thunderstorm threatens to rip your tent off, or flood it at the very least, I feel dumb. Why did I not check the weather and book a hotel instead? Why did I not buy a better tent fortress? Why did I not get the electric dipole question right in JEE and get a job at Google, it <probably> does not rain like this in California? 

And then my wife rolls over to tell me she's okay and I should go to sleep. To let me know that I am not "that" dumb. That I could do a million dumb things a day and they would all still not match up to the smartest decision I made. To sit next to the chirpy dimpled girl in class all those years ago. I won't go to sleep. I'll stay awake to make sure we are warm and dry. 

That is what a smart person would do, and I is smart.

Wooo ooooo...

Wooo ooooo...

Wooo ooooo...

Wooo ooooo...

                              -- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Runnin' Down A Dream"

How fast can you go in a car before you start contemplating the fragility of your mortality? Physically, the human body was never designed to move faster than 45 km an hour. An impact or slip at that speed, which cheetahs and gazelles routinely experience, would shatter the human body like glass. Our bodies are uncomfortable with motion, we get jetlagged, seasick, carsick or just plain injured. Yet our minds seem to be perfectly comfortable with the idea of moving at 50 or 500 mph. That is why we have a need for speed, our minds yearn to go beyond our bodies' limits.

It is a rush to hurtle down from an airplane at terminal velocity, or to be spearing the wind down the interstate with a blistering guitar solo piercing the heavens in the background.

Its a high that has no crash.

Wooo ooooo...

A great 2015 to yoooo....

Philosophy vs Science

In recent times we seem to be a entering a new argument characterizing our time, the one between Philosophy and Science. I have read a whole slew of articles and posts on this issue lately. Most of these posts have been in defense of Philosophy sparked by incidents where famous physicists like Stephen Hawking and Neil de Grasse Tyson seem to be disparaging and dismissing philosophy as a worthless enterprise. I recently read another post by a scientist sparking me to write this post providing a counter-view.

When Hawking or Feynman or NdGT criticize philosophy it seems disingenuous, since these minds have produced sentences of great philosophical earnest and profundity in recent times. I myself am incredibly partial to philosophical speculation and conjecture, this blog can easily convince you. Yet I find myself agreeing with these "critics" of philosophy. So I will pretend I understand what they mean by their dismissal and try to elucidate it.

Also I will limit myself to natural philosophy, philosophy that seeks to explain the natural world around us. For sure, there is philosophy of morality and behavior and politics and others that I am unaware of, but I presume no physicist is trying to comment on that, nor am I qualified to comment. 

Much of the debate between philosophy and physics seems to be muddled by the semantics of what philosophy is. Both science and natural philosophy can be said to be the love and pursuit of truth as it pertains to the natural world around us. Science, in fact, is a descendant of natural philosophy in the sense that all the old world fathers of science were philosophers of their time. For most defenders of philosophy, the shared heritage and eventual divergence seems to be a positive argument justifying why philosophy is relevant. I do not agree. Just because we have a different word to define two nuances of the pursuit of knowledge doesn't mean they need to be done by two separate classes of people. 

The problem is that natural sciences have so far surpassed the realm of common knowledge that it is impossible to ask meaningful questions, much less answer them, without a long and intricate study of the natural sciences.

As a result, today there can only be two constructive kind of philosophers. 

1. Active scientists who are of an intellect and courage required to see the larger picture and ask questions that may or may not be easily answered. 

2. An individual who is well trained in science, enough to reach the frontier of human knowledge, but chooses to not engage in active scientific research preferring the more contemplative and speculative method of philosophy.

Regardless of which camp you are in, you qualify to be called a scientist. The designation of philosopher can be applied to the second class only with full knowledge that they are ex-scientists or at worst, amateur scientists, but never non-scientists. Any non-scientist, one who did not go through training in science simply cannot understand what is already known and therefore cannot even ask the right questions about the unknown.

The point is beautifully made in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, although about religion, not philosophy. Physicists and scientists often deflect unanswerable philosophical questions by saying that is not the purview of science but of theology. And Dawkins asks, why? What expertise does religion bring in the attempt to answer the question?

A similar question could be posed to philosophy. If you have an individual who is not trained in the science and is asked the question why the universe exists, how good can we really expect the answer to be? If you do not understand string theory or the standard model or relativistic field theory, what expertise about the nature of the universe can you bring to that question as a philosopher versus a scientist? My feeling, and perhaps the view of the famous scientists in question, is that a natural philosopher without training in science has nothing to add to this conversation. 

Another notable spat in the philosophy science tussle was the one between David Albert and Lawrence Krauss, wherein Albert criticizes Krauss' book for dismissing that the philosophical question of why the universe is as it is compared to the scientific question of how the universe came to be as it is. I personally do not dismiss the question, in fact, I would side with Albert on his criticism of Krauss (I am not a fan of Krauss, that's why I don't count Krauss in the list of physicists I'm defending here). Albert is a professor of philosophy but has a PhD in theoretical physics. He represents the second method for practicing constructive philosophy. I am fairly sure his kind is not the one physicists have a problem with nor do I. 

Remember, Feynman, Hawking and NdGT are huge public faces of science and face vastly more of the general non-scientists populace than most others. I am sure they have to face questions everyday from "philosophers" who would like to stump scientists in an attempt to prove that science does not have all the answers. The anti-science ignorance is betrayed by the presumed non sequitur that if scientists cannot answer the question, someone else has to do it. Bringing us back to Dawkins' question, who? Who is qualified to ask or attempt answers to these questions? A philosopher? The famous scientists, in my opinion, are dismissing amateur philosophy by non-scientists who can easily be misled into believing that a difficult question is a profound question.

As the post points out, Hawking, Feynman and NDT themselves are philosophers in many respects and we are all wiser for it. In fact philosophy, in so much as it is questioning every aspect of knowledge and attempting to formulate answers, is the fundamental building block of science. I believe philosophy of science should be a required learning for all scientists, to either excite and unleash their inner philosopher or at the very least, inform them of the thought process of the giants in their fields. Science encompasses and surpasses all of natural philosophy, one could say philosophy has grown into modern science, hence the observation that philosophy is dead and replaced by science. 

A final confusion here is the difference between philosophy is dead vs philosophy is unimportant. Latin and Sanskrit are dead, yet a study of these languages is essential in liguistics. They are essential to understand how the currently alive languages evolved and to understand broader aspect of the civilizations they thrived in. They also might provide insight into the future of language evolution and methods of language construction.

Similarly a study of philosophy is essential, not only to understand the history of science and philosophy but also to understand the evolution of human thought in the past, present and future. More importantly, philosophy for a non-scientist is introduction to scientific thought and for scientists, a source of great foresight and insight.

But natural philosophy, as a separate entity and not as an attribute of scientific thought, making any meaningful contribution in understanding the physical world is just as likely as Latin making a comeback as a practical language. 

A scientist with a philosophical bent is a great scientist. A scientist who is not a philosopher is a good scientist. A philosopher who is not a scientist (and not trained as one) is just "dopey".

Interstellar is awesome, People are depressing!

I just watched Interstellar this weekend. I went in with very low expectations, even lower than the cautious intrigue I express in my previous post, thanks to a flurry of negative reviews on my various newsfeeds. I did not read any of them before I saw the movie for fear of spoilers, but I was prepared to be disappointed.

But I was not.

By far the best movie I have seen in quite some time, Interstellar solidly redeems Chris Nolan from the ghastly TDKR. I am just going to forgive him that one and never mention it again.

In the aftermath of the movie, I unfortunately let myself devolve. Out of morbid pitiable curiosity, I wanted to see what all the negative reviews were about. A precious few of those critics have anything worthwhile to say. I almost wrote a massive rant in answer but then thankfully caught myself. So I will just briefly mention the broad classes of irritating Interstellar criticism and not waste my too much of my time on pointless banter.

1. The Petty Fault Finding

"What causes the food to go scarce, why can't the blight be cured? Won't the X-Rays from the black hole killed the ships and life? How can a planet with frozen clouds be stable?"

The people who watch movies and notice "bloopers" like "the table cloth was a different color in the two scenes" come out in full force to greet every science fiction movie.

Science fiction, by its very definition, takes liberties with science and shows things we may not think are physically or practically possible. As I read on Twitter, "the plot holes of a science fiction seem to be just the fiction part". One of the reasons for this attitude might be the proliferation of hard science fiction, sci-fi where the science is used accurately. The reason hard sci-fi has become a separate genre in the last few decades is because fiction that details any science, accurate or inaccurate, is now too complex for mainstream fiction readers. Some of the hard science fiction can be called just fiction. But this is just semantics and not important. 

What is important is that existence of hard sci-fi does not take the license of true 'soft' science fiction away. Interstellar is not a documentary, it is fiction, art. Would you say you do not like Van Gogh's screamer because the person's head is not realistic? The painting is not intended to be realistic, it is meant to make the artist's point. Sci-fi is allowed to imagine worlds or rules that may differ from the rules of real life because it is just that, imagination.

Then there are other "plot holes" which are not holes at all, but opinions. "Scientists don't talk like like they do in the movie", "Love transcends space and time" speech is so stupid, "If Cooper loves his daughter, why does he go to space/to Brand at the end". These are the dumbest plot holes because more often than not these opinions are wrong and misinformed. Or they go away when you think deeper into the subject - e.g. the "Love" speech is brilliantly done to expose Brand's own emotional frailty and willingness to say anything, even compromise rationality to see her lover. It never seemed like a stupid and sappy attempt to prove that love is a physical force of the universe.

There are bunch of other non-scientific plot holes like "if entire video communications could be sent to Cooper's ship, then why couldn't the Lazarus ships send more information about the planet back to Earth than just a beacon signal" and "who made the tesseract" so on. I admit, some of them do seem like contrivances, but not large ones. Suspensions of disbelief this small are fairly easy for me when so much else is going right. If you can't swallow even these tiny incongruencies for the sake of a larger story, well, good for you.

I will not go through other "plot holes" since mentioning some of them is an insult to a reader's intelligence.

2. The Lazy Entertainhog

One review I read says, "His movies are numbingly sexless...Characters gabble on about taking risks, about needing oneanother, but they never leap toward anything so dangerous as intimacy."

Nolan's three most famous movies, Inception, The Dark Knight and Interstellar are indeed 'sexless' and are clear examples of why they must be so. All three movies are set in a setting where the bulk of the action happens within a few days of constant action (the long travel years in Interstellar are spent in cryo-sleep). All the protagonist are (Cobb, Gordon, Cooper, Brand) were married or committed (or dysfunctional like Bruce Wayne) and are brought together for a short intense mission. Whether by design or coincidence, the story does not require "sex", or more broadly, intimacy.

Scientists, mercenaries, police commissioner and vigilantes don't really feel the need to build intimate relationships when on a fast-paced mission to save the world. Hot single ultra-skilled prodigies do not really hang around waiting for the most dangerous moments in history to form intimate relationships with other conveniently paired hot single prodigies. If the story makes said intimacy work within its framework, good for it. But the idea that nothing in this world happens without deep intimate relationships forming between complete strangers shows an extreme myopic view of movies and reality. Given my experience of everyday American life, the necessity of intimacy in a story reveals a level of hypocrisy that I thought did not exist outside Bollywood's depiction of "real Indian women".

3. The Snooty Art Critic

These critics are harder to please, because they are right in their own way. Yes the character development is not too great. And the musical score sometimes overdoes it a bit. My personal opinion is that the setting of the movie did not have any scope for character development. Most characters in the movie have defects but they seem to be aware and in acceptance of their character flaws. So while the characters don't really evolve (except perhaps Murphy) and grow through the movie, they are still multi-dimensional. Not much time was wasted in the 3 hour movie and so any more development would put this story beyond the scope of the movie medium itself. So there is some truth in the decree that the movie was perhaps ambitious for the medium, but I liked it for that very same reason.

2001, the art critics' fav sci-fi. Interstellar has suffered the most being compared to 2001, a pity we are not allowed to like both.

To the movie's credit however, it does not try to bamboozle the audience with physics. Every physics term is mentioned in the shortest words possible - time dilation, black hole and wormholes. No MichaelBay-BigBangTheory-ish fake words like Lepto-Chrono-Transmogrification. The movie tries hard to be accessible and if its not, it is just a reflection of how far the common populace is from hearing, much less understanding, basic truths about how their GPS-Facebook-LED world works. If you still think the movie is too laden with science, I would only say that you go easy on this critique because they tried and this is the best they could have done. Banishing such topics from ever entering the public zeitgeist will only further the divide. If you could not follow the movie even on its face value as a piece of fiction, then the movie is perhaps not for you and you can take solace in that only a Nolan is allowed to do something like this once in a while.

4. The Juvenile Revolutionary

Of course a movie with such overt socio-political theme atleast in the first half of the movie will attract its fair share of "intellectuals". Many of them might find their beliefs validated by the movie, while others might simply be picking and choosing. However, I do not think it entirely fruitless to find validation in art, since Nolan clearly did want to just make a summer blockbuster. I do believe a true artist can't help but make ideological statements which can certainly influence the public opinion.

The obvious one is environmentalism, and they will find validation in Nolan's imagery of a bleak future for Earth. The anarchists and libertarians will find great joy by their paranoia of suppression of speech by big govt being given its due by Nolan's schools rewriting the history of Apollo lunar landings, calling them a hoax operation intended to bankrupt the Soviets. I have written before on why I agree with these groups about some of the problems in society, but disagree on their proposed solution so I will not extol it here.

But I was quite amused by another review I read which said "If there is anything that Christopher Nolan represents, it is the belief that technology trumps everything else. ...I think that Bezos [advancing space tourism, super-rich in space]... should be encouraged but not exactly for the same reasons. Given the bestial behavior we can expect from the super-rich bent on destroying just such a rational system, there will be a need to quarantine the Koch’s and Bezos’s of the world. What better place than a colony in outer space where they can live in comfort and be of no possible danger to the rest of us?"

Millionaires who are pushing for space travel.

Wow, that's the stupidest thing I have read in a while. Where did the rich spring out of? I decry the hyper-capitalist system of inequality as much as the next guy, but to pretend that the rich are somehow evil and separate from "the rest of us" is just as juvenile as hippies and anarchists. The rich are just like everyone else, some are good, some are bad and all just respond to the socio-economic system we build around us. Even if you managed to vaporize all of the rich, it would not save the Earth, other people would just take their place. Science, technology and education is the only way any progress has ever been made in any direction. Whenever there is any form of scarcity, someone will always try to exploit it, whether it is a capitalist, socialist or any other form of society. And the only way to mitigate, and hopefully someday eradicate scarcity, is technology.

5. The Misguided Educator

The last class of critics is the hardest to stomach. Various newsfeeds are full of people who are science literate and lambast the movie for being scientifically inaccurate. These people are not petty or lazy, they are intelligent people who understand some if not all of the science in the movie and are simply misguided imo.

The goal of a science educator is to broaden the horizons of a person by exposing them to what humans have discovered about the universe. Technology is the second step of harnessing said knowledge to invent tools to benefit humanity. Together they show how beautiful and awe-inspiring our universe is and at the same time how powerful a force human ingenuity and curiosity is. Anyone who believes that science/technology is the key to the future, regardless of whether they themselves are in the field, I will bunch broadly in the category of science educator.

The critique that most annoyed me was Phil Plait's (science writer at Slate) review. Apparently he "really really did not like the movie". And then in his post he goes on to "debunk" the time dilation construct and numerous other scientific leaps in the movie. He says that such a large time dilation would only literally on the edge of the horizon of the black hole and could not be a stable orbit for a planet. Stable orbits around black holes must be at least 3 times the size of the black hole and therefore cannot have such strong time dilation.

Another one - Where is the matter for the bright accretion disk coming from, no other star is visible?

That is your problem with a movie? Phil Plait, I have been a follower of your science journalism for a while and I find it quite enjoyable, but this is far out. Firstly, Nolan is not educating people on where stable orbits of black holes can be. As I have already said before, its fiction, so get over it. 

Secondly, when challenging an art form on the basis of unrealistic depiction you have to be careful. The art form has no onus to be accurate, but you the critic of said accuracy, do. Are you confident enough in your claims that your knowledge is so sound and true that you cannot even admit the remotest possibility of such a thing being invented or is covered or happening? Remember, any sufficiently advanced technology might seem like magic to the unimaginative. 

Just over a hundred years ago, no one would consider that anyone or anything could walk through walls. Yet today, we know that particles passing through walls is possible and happens every day, a.k.a. quantum tunneling. I personally work with quantum teleportation and particles that are in multiple places at the same time every day. Are you sure there can never be an untreatable blight? Are you so absolutely sure, so unshakeably sure that not stable orbit can exist with a large time dilation can exist for a black hole? As it turns out, Phil should not have been so sure. He later learnt that his calculation had not accounted for spinning black holes, which would allow such orbits and he had to issue a retraction.

But I wish Phil Plait was not wrong. Because now he can apologize for not checking his math. The point I am making is that even if Phil had been right he was still wrong. 

So does the qualification of fiction give complete freedom to show anything with no regard to reality? Well yes, because freedom of speech ideal gives every idiot the right to say whatever wrong things they want to say. However, the same freedom also gives other sane people the right to call the idiot an idiot. So when you should you exercise that right?

Every one will have their own opinion here for sure. In my opinion, a science educator should only be critical of science-fiction is the fiction does harm to science education. The reason is very simple.

Science is intricate, with many prerequisites necessary to reach the frontier of current knowledge. If scientific concepts were taught as currently understood, no kid would ever learn Newton's gravitational law or Bohr's model of the atom. Saying half truths is not an incorrect method of instruction, it is often necessary because the complete truth might be beyond the scope of the current method of instruction. If a movie that exposes millions of people to concepts such as time dilation and wormholes for the first time used an exaggerated time dilation to make the effect interesting, I don't think it is not doing anything wrong. Educators such as Phil Plait should use this opportunity and point out the correct intricacies of the scenario without saying the movie was bad because of the inaccuracy. This shows off their knowledge and educates those who are capable of following the calculations to learn even more without bashing the movie that tries so hard to make "nearly" accurate science interesting to the people. 

But if a movie uses artistic license to spread a patently false message, then the above excuse obviously does not apply. Say a movie introduces the idea of black holes and then tries to scare people saying false things like the LHC might make a black hole tomorrow and destroy us all, sure criticize the movie for using bad science to spread fear and discredit. Even if a movie is positive using ridiculous excesses like heroes throwing black holes to fight villains and running faster than light to bring back their one true dead love, the criticism would be well deserved, even if hilarious. If someone made a documentary or an educational movie with bad science, that would be worthy of the exact criticism leveled by Phil. 

But Nolan is not doing any of the above. He is staying close to the rules of science we know while bending some to make a entertaining, fictional movie. Educators and science literates who do not realize this and try to score cheap points rather than use the opportunity to educate have lost sight of the reason why they do what they do. 

In fact the movie does something far more valuable than just educate about science or entertain. It portrays science as the savior of mankind, but not scientists. Every scientist in the movie except maybe Murphy, is fallible and given to bad, sometimes irrational, decisions. The fallacy in the argument against science is that scientists are somehow different than non-scientists, which leads to either elitism or irrational opposition to reason, depending on where you stand. The movie treats scientists as humans and science as the key to the future, and manages to separate the two, something not many movies can or even aspire to do.

Anyway, that was the massive Interstellar rant I thought I was not going to write. You don't want to read when I do rant. I pity my wife for having to listen to many of my diatribes.

On more movie news, The Imitation Game looks promising.

Should we privatize the Government?

Just finished reading this book called Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. It is interesting how I found more to think about in direct continuity from the last post after I read Superfreakonomics which talks about altruism.

The book traces the life of Fred Koch, the founder of what would become the U.S corporate behemoth Koch Industries and the father of the four Koch brothers, the enigmatic billionaires considered to be the power and the money behind the Libertarian movement in America. It is extremely well written, and it helps that the life and times of the Koch family reads like a gripping TV drama. The book is quite impartial and does not take a political stance, which is commendable given the extremely polarizing political profiles of the subjects.

The main side benefit of this book, besides the fascinating story of the Kochs, is a peek into the origins and ideologies of the Libertarian movement in the American politics. The Koch dynasty has funded this movement since the 1950's into its current form. The book depicts them as passionate individuals, who truly believe that the government is source of corruption and the enemy of progress in modern civilization. They believe that anything that a government does can, and should be, done better by a private enterprise. Ironically, in a curious circular argument, the Koch corporations political activities against govt. regulation on private enterprise has become the strongest argument for regulation against corporations like Koch getting too much power and running amok.

Such arguments have quite naturally existed in India as well, given how much more apparent the Indian government's red tape and inefficiency is. With Modi coming to power, many express doubts/fears/hopes (depending on who you ask) that he will attempt to rectify the ineffectual Congress govt by privatizing everything. I will mostly use the American political scene as examples but the main discussion is relevant in every nation in the world today.

Is privatizing everything the solution to the worlds problems? Is government regulation what is holding us back from the progress highway?

Here are my thoughts

The libertarians philosophy, at least for Fred Koch, really stems from a 70 year old communist paranoia. And to some extent, in its time, it was required. Communism as practiced by USSR and its satellites were truly a destructive force and the paranoia was quite justified. However it is important to understand why rather than be blindly paranoid about everything government.

When a company is motivated only by profit, there is nothing really preventing it from taking advantage of unethical means and morally grey areas to benefit from. Even if we assume that all companies obey the basic minimum laws such as do not kill or steal (which they do not) there will always be gray areas to exploit. The idea that the market can self-regulate is quite ridiculous.

An obvious example is De Beers and diamonds. Is it against the law to monopolize, or create artificial scarcity, so that you can extract whatever price you want for your commodity? No one is killed or robbed, no one is forced to buy diamonds so why should it be illegal. All they are doing is making sure there are no competitors and no knowledge of their business process. If either was allowed there would immediately be competitors who could undersell De Beers and the market to stabilize to a better state more friendly to customers. As a result, the producers of the diamonds, hypothetical competitors and the ultimate buyers of the diamonds, all have be kept ignorant of the options available to them.

That doesn't seem illegal, does it? So no regulation is required. Then is it o.k. to lie to keep the ignorance? At what point is it illegal? What if to keep the secret you have to kill one person who knows about this 'technically not illegal practice'? What is the one person's life worth? What if the person is a beggar? What if the company is not De Beers but say Bank of America, which if did not silence the whistleblower would not only lose its money, but likely go under and cost millions of innocent people their life savings and possibly a national/global recession? Surely the lives of those innocent people is worth sacrificing that one person. What if it was the healthcare industry, which can literally kill people by inaction?

By the way, you can see that I have not made this hypothetical scenario up. This is exactly the current situation of the world market and the stakes are exactly that high. I used murder to exemplify that even that extreme step seems almost acceptable, surely smaller crimes can be justified far more easily.

In my opinion, the idea of reducing government regulation on private enterprise, at least in the US, is an idiotic one. India might need reduce government regulation, cautiously. The scale of corporate activity is so large, affecting millions of lives and of trillions of dollars (units of national GDPs) that a few people cannot be allowed, unregulated, to have the power to influence entire nations. The idea that these few people have succeeded in a competitive environment and have thus earned their power or somehow deserve to have this power is flawed in two very fundamental ways.

1. It can never be true without regulation. Imagine two people, one a billionaire tycoon, and the other a garage start up company who is a direct competitor of the tycoon. If there were no rules, how can the start up ever possibly beat the tycoon. There is simply no way. The only reason it happens in our world, sometimes, is because there are some rules as to what the players of the game can and can not do. Without rules, the rich will do everything in their power to stay rich. Success will be a gift from the existing rich, bestowed more often than not on undeserving relatives and favorites. We do not need to try out this idea, it has been done countless times in history. This path inevitably leads to oppression, suffering and eventually revolution. 
2. Many times it is true... people might have made it rich through their own efforts and skill. These people truly are special and deserve 'something' more. But if history has taught us anything, it is that 'something' is not power to control other people. Good businessmen make more money, because money is an adequate reward befitting their skills and contribution to society. 

There have been many kings and leaders in history who rose their position due to some skill that made them better than the average droll. Napoleon and Hitler come to mind. It was their skill in exploiting their environment, leadership and belligerence that got them their power. So when they got said power, they continued on, on their exploitative belligerent ways, to great detriment to society as a whole. They might have made great entrepreneurs or inventors or planners, just not great rulers.

Individuals who are great at one thing might not be right about other things. Michael jackson was a great artist. But he also went crazy later in his life. His skill, and all the money accrued in one field should not be allowed to influence public policy on, say, pediatric care. The Kochs' skill in entrepreneurs and engineering, brilliant as it might be, has no bearing on public policy and they should have no more of a say in the political process than the average joe. Therefore, the socio-political system which has enabled the Koch corporation to earn billions of dollars from petroleum products should also insure itself against the influence of said dollars from changing the socio-political system for its own benefit. 

That is the very description of democracy, a system by which the people decide on candidates whose public policy is better by voting for them. Regulation of private enterprise, taxation and really everything that the government does is simply an evolution of that idea. To have a more stable state/nation/world where the selected few are given power not because they are good at math or oration or combat or singing or making money but something that is beneficial for the the long term good and stability of the nation, i.e. framing and implementing good public policy. If richer people have more political power then you have a plutocracy not a democracy.

Therefore any logical argument defending unregulated capitalism/Libertarianism eventually has to dispose of democracy itself to be consistent.

Most libertarian/tea party ideals involve reversing centuries of knowledge and complexity added on the government and going back to 18th century, or at the very least pre-cold-war-era of corporate freedom. I assume then they would have society go through all the mistakes of the last century - slavery, imperialism, labour exploitation, environmental destruction - before rediscovering them.

If the government has become entrenched and filled with corrupt and/or inept bureaucrats then its a good idea to try to cleanse the government, but not by going back a century, undoing all the checks and balances on corporate avarice. Therefore in my opinion the Libertarian ideas are at worst foolish and misleading, or at the very least naive. 

There is, however, a more coherent and persuasive argument than government ineptitude to privatize everything. Which is the proposition that public policy "should not" be different from Darwinian capitalist rules. That the welfare of everyone is not natural, and that democracy is a flawed mutation, a diseased organism that needs to die for humanity to evolve into the future unfettered. This is at least an idea that is logically consistent. For sure, a social welfare system, even basic democracy, is highly unnatural. Such a system does not exist in nature. In nature might is right, irrespective of whether said might was achieved through skill, treachery or random luck.

The question is do you really want to live in that dog-eat-dog world, always watching your back against everyone else? Or do you, like me, think mankind can achieve far more by working together?

Grief

I did not pine when I lost my love, for what is love save chemistry and comfort, it can be substituted.

I did not mourn when my hopes were crushed, for hope is mere fantasy, essential and unattainable, it can be always be regenerated.

There is no sorrow in my impending death, my friend, for death takes us all, this day or next.

What is death after all but an impetus to think and act, for only our ideas and deeds can live on, perpetuated.

No, it is only you who should grieve, you who are content with what you can buy, for you are the one who never lived, just existed.

_______________________________________________________

Written as a Five Sentence Fiction exercise at Lily McFerrin Writes. 

_______________________________________________________

The Freakonomics of Altruism : Are we selfish?

I recently read SuperFreakonomics, the 'sequel' to the bestselling book Freakonomics. The book does not really have a coherent overarching point to make, rather it is a collage of various concepts and experiments used by economists to understand human behavior, particularly economic behavior. It is actually quite an interesting read. The titles of the chapters are obviously only meant to be obscenely eye catching which has a tendency to disappoint when the rationale for the title is explained in the chapter later, but that a minor detail. 

There is a chapter where the authors discuss global warming and the concept of human altruism. Are humans intrinsically altruistic? Or are they primarily selfish creatures? The book explores this through the famous Dictator Game. Subject A is given x amount of money and given the option to share it with another anonymous person Subject B. There is no obligation on A to share, he is also free to choose the amount he wants to share, if at all. When the experiment was done the results indicated that a majority of subject chose to share the money, with the average share being around 20-25%. Children tend to donate even more... close to 50%. So humans are definitely altruistic by nature, right?

Apparently there is an actual dictator card game. Is this a trump card game? People murdered 4 million CLASH!!

You can't run an experiment like this and expect a physicist to listen and appreciate. This experiment obviously has dozens of massive sources of error and bias. Thankfully the book points them out and goes on to redeem economists. 

First of all, the subjects were all volunteers. We would obviously expect  that the people who would volunteer for studies do not represent the average population. In fact you would expect people who volunteer to be decidedly more altruistic than the average population. Secondly the subjects knew they were part of an experiment. Obviously their psychological responses will be modified by that knowledge. Who wants to appear cheap and selfish when specifically part of a psychological experiment?  Therefore the responses given by a biased subject in an academic environment clearly will far from the natural behavior of the average subject.

More importantly, even if the subjects were truly random and were observed secretly, the experiment itself is designed so poorly. To illustrate this, an alternate version of the Dictator experiment was run, but this time A and B were given an equal amount of money. Once again A had the choice to do whatever he wanted, he could share some of his money with B, but more importantly, A could also take whatever amount from B he wanted. This time, it was seen, that on an average people chose to take money from B, around 20-25%, rather than give or do nothing. 

This completely deflates the altruism result from the first version. It can be explained though from the simple observation that people like to do something rather than nothing. Given the choice to either give or do nothing, people would give. But the choice to give take or do nothing, which is a far more realistic choice, completely flips the result. The experiment is still extremely limited in what it can tell us about the true psychological nature of its subjects, but at least its better than the first version. 

A more accurate view, in my opinion and mentioned in the book as well, is that it is possible to design experiments in such a way that you could get whatever result you wanted to get. You could easily show humans as angels as in the Dictator game, of you could show humans as monsters capable of heinous acts, such as in the Stanford prison guard experiment. 

The 1971 Stanford psychological experiment, you should definitely visit the site and wiki it, I have nothing to add.

So is man utterly selfish? Or is he fundamentally altruistic?

The question relates to a deeper question, is there such a thing as good or bad in the absolute sense, intrinsic to our nature? Or is all of morality just rules that we have made up for our societal construct?

I will write about that in the next post since this one is too long already :P

Does Death make us Human?

Last time I wondered if free will is what makes us human. That was too serious a post, so I will lighten it upa bit with Death. Does death make us quintessentially human?

Well, obviously not, in its most literal meaning. After all, plants die, animals die. In some sense, even stars and galaxies die. But we all know human death is not quite like any of these, right? Right?

Most animals have no cognizance of death as a concept. Sure, they run from danger to avoid death, and mothers may protect their young from predators. But when a member of the pack dies, animals, even biologically related ones, seem not to understand. They continue to prod the dead as if expecting them to suddenly wake up from the slumber, and when it becomes apparent that the condition is irreversible, simply drop the issue and go about their own business. There may be occasional cases of animals, most likely chimps or some dogs, who experience some 'emotional' responses that seem to be pseudo-human. But at best, they express grief and anger at the death of a close companion, something they might even express had the companion just gone away rather than died.

Chimps seemingly mourning a fallen relative, Cameroon

But humans, and their ancestors, have been consecrating death for millennia. We do not understand death, and hence we fear it, and hence we worship it. Rituals of death are probably mankind's oldest surviving symbolic activity. The cornerstone of practically every religion is what happens after death. Reincarnation, heaven-hell, purgatory... all largely imaginative constructs meant to ease our mind on earth so we do not fear the 'afterlife' much. Incredible human feats of engineering and creativity have been temples of the dead... the Egyptian pyramids, Taj Mahal, the catacombs... and countless others.

Most unique is the nature of the fear of death. Animals fear death, but it is mostly a self preservative instinct intrinsic to all life. But humans have another, seemingly far greater, fear. We seem to fear that our work on earth would get cut short by death. As if we had any greater purpose to our existence, than mere existence. One of the greatest forces driving human evolution is the need for humans to somehow make an impact on the future. "To make such an end, as to be worthy of remembrance" as Theoden, son of Thengel would say. Why is that? Is this what makes us human? No animals have this need for sure. No animal has ever expressed a desire to leave behind something that will leave its indelible individuality on the canvas of history.

Death Note - anime series about a schoolkid who finds a notebook that kills the person whose name is written in it, recommended watch.

I do believe however that this uniquely human feature is an extension of the same basic instinct, that of self preservation. Just think about it!

Humans have long superceded the system of incentives and constraints imposed by the biological vagaries of our bodies and our ecosystem. 

Once upon a time natural selection was in control, the strongest survived and procreated and the weak executed. But man subverted evolution; the weak found a way to survive by finding favor with the strong. Compassion is a virtue; at best the strong find more success, if that, and the weak are to be nurtured into strength, not culled. 

Once upon a time, nature was in control and man was subject to the elements. The earth was flat and infinite, the skies were filled with vengeful gods and the five elements were fickle beasts. But man subverted nature; nothing on this earth has escaped our leash... plants animals earth water wind fire and the sky. Even the vast silent darkness of space does not petrify us anymore. 

And so it was that once upon a time man feared death just like the animals because he did not want to die. He wanted to live. But soon he learnt that death can be defeated, or at least delayed. 

It seems natural that the value of a man's life and its worth is not measured in its how many genes he could pass on but what he accomplished during his lifetime. Therefore the death should also be defined not in biological but intellectual terms.  And in that sense, the desire to impact future generations, leaving a legacy is simply the desire to live longer, as long as possible. 

Archimedes, Aryabhatta and Albert Einstein are all still 'alive' today in every sense of the word except biological. They probably have more impact on your life than your neighbor; and you probably know more about their life than your neighbor's as well. Sure biologically we may not be alive much longer (even though life expectancy is tripled in a few centuries), but through our actions we could be remembered centuries, even millennia in the future. 

After all, who doesn't want to live forever...

Playing God : Can Man Create Life?

Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!

Incredible news I read today.

Itsy bitsy bacterium gets a bigger genetic code (2014) published in nature here

First truly artificial organism engineered (2003)

Be sure to read the article in its entirety... after you read this post of course. So you should know hopefully that all life on earth seemingly exists only to propagate their genetic information to the next generation... information written in a chemical language called DNA. The alphabet of this language has 4 letters or bases, A T G C, which stand for 4 distinct chemical compounds, Adenine, Thymine, Guanine and Cytosine. Each cell of the human body contains a DNA sequence that is approximately 3.2 billion base pairs, (pairs because DNA is almost always present as a pair of strands twisted around in a helix).

That pretty much sums up all life on earth from bacteria to rats to pterodactyls to humans... all life we have ever known to have existed has the exact same genetic makeup made up of ATGC bases pairs. 

Until now.

The Human Condition : Free Will

What exactly is the human condition?

Wikipedia says the human condition encompasses the unique features of being human.

It has some suggestions... "meaning of life, the search for gratification, the sense of curiosity, the inevitability of isolation, and the awareness of the inescapability of death."

Popular culture and art has always bothered itself with this question. What does it mean to be human? 

Movies like the Matrix have addressed this in spades, where machines conflict with humanity. Fallibility, and the potential to outperform logical perfection, is what separates humans from machines. The mechanism of this weakness and strength, is said to come from the ever-uncharacterizable free will, something that no artificial intelligence can replicate.

Free will breaks all computer programs!!

Free will is one of the biggest tropes in artistic definitions of humanity, followed closely by the fighting human spirit and human mortality. Love is the other contender (the undisputed winner in cinema at least). In the more religious context, the soul is the signature of humanity. Vital essence.

I will ruminate on the various aspects of the human condition in multiple posts. This is the first one, concerning free will.

Is free will human? Can a machine have free will? And what is free will anyway? 

SpaceX and Man's Journey to the Heavens

Today April 20th, around 10 am EST in the day, the Dragon capsule docked at the International Space Station. Photos/Video

Dragon capsule 100m and closing in to dock at the ISS... Awesome!!

A little background info for those living under the proverbial rock...

A Sciencey Horror Story

There was once a boy who lived in a small town. He lived in a small sleepy town, a town of only a five thousand families. A town where everyone worked on their own farm or garden. Sure some people owned a small store, and the whole town went to them when they had to; but there were not many of them, just enough to sustain the small sleepy town.

One day the boy asked his father, "When was the town built, daddy?"

"Oh a long time ago, before the time of my grandpappy. As far as I know, the town has always been."

"What is outside the town, daddy. What happens if we go outside?"

"Hush boy, you ask too much. Ah well. If you must know, the world outside is just like this town. There are many towns just like ours and there many states with many towns and many countries with many states with many towns just like ours. Indeed if you go further out, there are many worlds out there, and many galaxies and many universes with many many galaxies with many worlds. And all of those worlds have many countries with many states each with their many states, with their many towns just like ours. There is no reason to ever go outside this town my boy, for there is nothing outside that is not here as well."

"Woooww!!! How did this happen daddy?? I have read in the history books of a time before time, daddy. It says that once upon a time there were many different people, many different towns and cities, many different countries.. and each was unique and new in their own way... the world must have been so amazing back then, when there was so much to learn and find and discover."

"No my child, the world was not better then. Sure it was a time of discovery, but it was a time of ignorance as well. Sure it was a time of great advancements, but it was also a time of great discord and war. The great men of that time, they struggled and fought for our freedom, for our knowledge and now we are free. And now we know everything. And if we know everything, we can make everything right. There is no more war, no disagreement. There is no tragedy because there are no accidents. True that means there are no accidental discoveries, but then, there is nothing left to discover. We know what makes people, so make people who are equal, and they realize that fighting one another is more like fighting themselves, and so they don't fight at all. Every town is just like every other town so there is no pressure anywhere in the universe for any one to move to another and exchange goods and services."

"Why dad why? Why make everything equal? Equal is boring"

"Equal is fair my son."

"But I have read that in the times before time, survival was the prime motivator of mankind. Winning was paramount, honor a distraction. Why doesn't some town do something to make themselves better than all the others? It would not be fair, but they would win."

"You brat!! Stop these questions right now, before I smack you in the head.... har... har... stop running.. come back, I wont smack you. I can't be mad at you for that, you are getting older so sooner or later you will know from some place or the other.

Well... the truth is... we have to be equal... more accurately random... to survive. If we tried to join and structure among ourselves, our whole race, humanity, possibly even life itself, will lose."

"I can't tell if you are being philosophical or meta or literal right now."

"I wish I was just being philosophical, my son. The truth is much stranger than any fiction you ever read. You have read about the old Gods that men used to believe in in times before time. Those Gods were all false. Forces of nature that men did not understand, they simply gave them names to and prayed that they would not be struck down. Thunder, Wind, Fire and Water... we understand all that now. We can control them all now, they cannot hurt us, and so we don't pray to those old Gods. But there are still some forces that we have not been able to tame. There are rules that we cannot bend, cannot control. There are still forces of nature that are stronger than us."

"Stronger than us? Why have we never heard of this at school, it seems... important."

"Son, this is sensitive information. Schools are not allowed to teach this, but you will learn this in college.

"In your school you learnt that work dissipates heat because we don't have perfect heat engines that can do work without heat loss. But the truth... the truth is that we made perfect heat engines a long time ago. Perfect refrigerators, perfect heaters, perfect engines... they exist. It was more out of necessity than anything else. In the time before time... we were running out of energy... fast. Everything was tried... even solar power harvesters on the moon... but nothing was efficient enough. It was a really violent and dark time in history. Wars broke out over fuel and the world was thrown into chaos. Finally scientists unveiled the first perfect engine, and it was the dawn of our time. The energy crisis was finally solved... since every day of sunlight harvested from the moon could fuel the earth for a whole year. For a while. Humanity prospered, we spread across the galaxy and then the whole universe. Of course this needs more and more energy. And for a while that did not seem to be a problem. With our perfect engines we have traveled far and wide across the universe, and understood the deepest mysteries of the universe."

"But knowledge, has a price of its own." 

"Entropy is a measure of the randomness of a system, and if you know the system exactly then its not really random but unique. The indefatigable force of nature that we have not been able to defeat is simply the second law of thermodynamics. Every act of measurement, every piece of information extracted, must raise entropy somewhere else consequentially. For example, even if we had a perfect computer which was able to use all the energy efficiently, it will still dissipate enough heat so as to raise the entropy of the system to compensate for the information gained."

"So here we are, forced into submission by nature once again. Knowledge is on a need to know basis, and 99.9% of the world does not need to know. We have spread our population into the whole known universe so that there is more degeneracy of our existence. The top 0.1%, we are the intelligentsia. We are responsible for progress of the human race. But there has been no progress for a long time... we know too much already. Every further  piece of information is exponentially more expensive. We had to isolate the different worlds, because just the act of exchanging information between two worlds dissipates enough heat to destroy at least one of those worlds... or at least dissipate a hundred years worth of energy usage of that world. Even the towns now find it too expensive to talk to each other. Scientific progress is stalled, nor can knowledge be shared. And what does not grow, will die. We are losing our knowledge, slowly... but surely. And there is nothing we can do about it. The only conceivable way we can even move forward is to find a way to defeat or circumvent the second law of thermodynamics. But the amount of research that would take to do that would surely destroy millions if not billions of worlds. But at this point even debates between the various worlds on how to tackle this issue causes so much information dissemination that many worlds are consumed before we even decide if it was worth it. Inertia has settled in. Doing nothing is the safest option."

"Ironic isn't it son. We know so much now... that we can never know anything more. And that's the ultimate frontier, when we have to choose between survival and knowledge."

Is there any other way? We will never know. Because we will die if we try to find out...

Why The Universe Is What It Is : A Conjecture

The interwebs is full of krayzeee...  

This post was inspired by yet another crazy website/book I found : Galileo was Wrong, Church was Right. I am not really in the mood to discuss this website. It claims that Earth is the center of the universe, even relativity is false propaganda... etc etc. Read it till you are bored, or don't... whatever... I am not going to. Rather, I will talk about the science of what we know about the universe and our place in it and go on to make some pseudo-philosophical conjectures.

The Geocentric model or the Ptolemaic principle advocates that the earth is the center of the universe. It was the dominant world-view since probably the dawn of man at least up until the 15th century. Even though it was completely wrong, it is hard to be too harsh on this model even from a scientific standpoint. The best observations people could make pre-15th century were naked eye observations of the sun, moon and the stars, and yeah... it does kind of look like the earth is static and the sky resembles a back-lit canopy with holes punched in it that is revolving around the earth. But the philosophical/social/moral/cultural implications of this idea are profound and conversation-worthy. In particular, it is easy to extend this empirical observation to imply a general idea, that humanity, or life, or mankind is the central premise of the universe, its purpose even. That leads to the obvious question... why? If we are indeed special, we must have been created for a reason, for some purpose. But whose purpose, whose reason... a line of reasoning the undoubtedly led our ancestors to create the oldest Gods. 

This methodology of philosophy (love of wisdom) where thinkers and ponderers would sit in great halls and muse over the great questions is, after all is said and done, not much more than fantastic imagination. To understand or even contemplate the nature of the universe we must first study it. Thus began science, initially to supplement, but eventually entirely replacing philosophy. Philosophy as is understood by most people today, as it is taught now in schools and universities is actually just the history of classical philosophy. Ideas of a time before knowledge was rigorous, before the invention of logic. 

Philosophy of the modern world is through science, for there can be no wisdom without knowledge, no comprehension without information. Science is the ultimate quest of understanding who we are and our place in the universe, and it took many millennia before humans could develop a consistent method of elevating ideas and observation to undeniable truths that could then be used as the basis for further understanding . 

Proper Scientific discourse in the time of Copernicus and Galileo

And 19th century science could not find any evidence about the universe that suggests that humanity or life has any special place in it.