A Question of Scale

They are called "nanoblock", but the smaller-print description below says "micro-sized building block". Which is it, 10^-9 or 10^-6? Make up your mind, there are three orders of magnitude difference between nano- and micro-! (That's a factor of a thousand, stupid. And factor means that you multiply not add, you idiot.)

It is no wonder that neither the electorate nor those they have elected to represent them can reliably distinguish between millions, billions, and trillions in our national budget/debt. I guess this is what you get when you spend an order of magnitude more on wars than you do on schools. Oh well, Happy New Year. I hope that November can restore some measure of sanity on Capitol Hill.

Synchronicity

Repetitive alliterative assonance and consonance:

Today, 8/8 (11), the Dow closed down 5.55% and the S&P 500 closed down 6.66%.

Oh, and onomatopoeia too: sick, sick, sick.

Dark verse from the stock market.

Now is it buy-buy-buy or bye-bye-bye?

Fratricide

Here we go again: The Kyrgyz are killing the Uzbeks. (and/or vice versa this time or next)

Get over it, grow up, use your brain, open your eyes, talk; you are the same. You are all descended from the same set of nomads, invaders, traders, missionaries, colonialists, etc. One group does not have feathers and fingers and the other fins and fangs; you are literally brothers.

You are not the first and sadly probably not the last: Hutu - Tutsi, Serb - Croat, Israeli - Palestinian, ...; all brothers, all identical.

The other day in the UK, the Bloody Sunday Inquiry report findings were presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister. In my opinion it was an extraordinary speech. (Admittedly it may be somewhat less extraordinary in the UK Parliament than a similar one would be in the US Congress, but I digress.) Besides the fact that it was clear, succinct, unequivocal, and uninterrupted, I thought that one of the more interesting aspects was the perspective. I was an adult on Jan 30, 1972, but most who may read this were not. David Cameron was five, Bono was eleven (the U2 was a spy-plane); to them this happened on the ragged edge of history. Perspective shows clearly how stupid it was.

Watch the video.

Overall these conflicts are not not right against wrong, only wrong and wrong. They are about mine vs. yours, not about ours and ours. My version of god, not yours. Whatever. Intellectually we know that anything that is not win-win is in fact lose-lose. It is not a zero-sum game. We get so blinded by prejudice, ignorance, pride, hate, faith or history that we cannot see how our victory could be our loss. Nothing is really black-and-white. Be careful what you wish for. Imagine walking in your opponent's shoes. And always make it a rule never to say always or never!

U2 - Bloody Sunday.

I hope that the message is not lost in the din of other news. Doing wrong in the name of right is never right, it is always wrong.

Spinning [or Why vs. How]

Jacob, now 4, wrote me an email asking "Why does the world spin?" Then he went on to suggest his own answer, "I think maybe the world spins because that's how the sun turns out the lights so we can go to bed and the universe can make a new day for Earth." Wow, such a good answer! I can't top that; even though the spinning turns out the light rather than the Sun, he has the correct idea. But, ...

There is a problem embedded in what I will call "big WHY" questions, and Jacob's question is in some ways one of those big WHY questions. Some would respond with words like "God made it that way", or some other platitude that provides no practical or usable information. It is exactly these WHY questions that science carefully avoids. The problem is that science can only answer questions such as:

• "How did the world start to spin?"
• "How does the world's spinning affect things?"
• "How does the world keep spinning?"
• "How ... etc. ?" You get the idea.

Science and scientists can figure out HOW stuff works and HOW it is made and HOW it changes over time, and HOW it does this, and HOW it does that, and HOW, and HOW, and HOW ... Science isn't so good at WHY. Not so good at:

• "WHY is there stuff at all?"
• "WHY does stuff follow these exact rules?"
• "WHY are we here to observe all this?"

Sure, science can answer "why" questions, but they are "little why" questions. Like "Why does it make a splash when I drop a rock in the pond?" If you think about it for a minute, you will realize that this is really a "how" question in disguise. Our language often makes it convenient to ask "why" when we really mean "how" -- "How does the rock cause the water to splash when I drop it in; and how is it that the rock drops when I let go; and how ..."

Those big WHY questions are the questions that religion "answers". Some [most, all, maybe every] big "R" religion has had a problem with science at one time or other. Their problem is that sometimes the WHYs that they have "answered" don't line up well with the HOWs that science discovers. And since they believed and had faith in their "answer", the truth is hard to swallow. It turns out that they had answered a "how" question with an explanation that seemed OK at the time, but was shown to be wrong when tested. They could believe it without proof, but when contradicted by reality they can only deny reality - argue that the facts are in fact not the facts, or explain that there is [must be] a higher law at work that we human mortals cannot [ever] understand.

Don't get me wrong, we need beliefs. There is a lot we don't understand, and even though we may not understand everything around us, we still have to get by from minute to minute; so we have to make assumptions about stuff. And we have to take it "on faith" that what we are doing will work out OK. BUT when we learn that our best guess was wrong, the smart ones will adjust quickly to the new old reality, and move on all the wiser - ready for the next "revelation".

So, "Why does the world spin?" As Jacob said, its spinning is how we have night and day.

The way it began spinning (i.e., how) is for the same reason that all the planets do, and on a grander scale the same way that all the planets go around the Sun in the same direction, and the way that the whole Milky Way galaxy spins too.

We and everything on Earth, and the Earth itself and the Sun and the Solar System are all made of the same stuff - stardust. When you take stardust and it gets all mixed up into the cosmic soup, after a while instead of going every which way, it settles down and begins to slowly spin all in the same direction. And the spinning makes it flatten out. Then after another long time, gravity pulls the dust closer and closer together into bigger and bigger lumps. Since the dust was spinning, the lumps spin too; and as the dust lumps get pulled tighter and tighter together by gravity they gather up more dust faster and they spin faster until they have gathered in all the nearby dust and they have become a big spinning ball - like the Earth or the Sun.

You can do this experiment to see how it starts:
(Mom should try this on her own first to perfect her lab technique.)
Sprinkle some pepper into a bowl of water and then stir it quickly in random mixed-up directions every which way. After a little while the water molecules will bump into each other enough times so that the motion will average out into a slow rotation one way or the other. The pepper will let you see the water's rotation. Try it several times stirring the water differently each time.

Of course this does not answer WHY. Jacob did not answer WHY either - smart boy. He answered a little "why" - a how. Every time we answer HOW, we push back the boundaries of WHY and we learn more, and we find evermore questions that beg to be answered. Why? I don't know; but I can explain how.

If everything we know is inside a big balloon, and everything we don't yet know is the air outside the balloon, then the rubber skin of the balloon represents all the questions we have and are trying to answer. Now every time we figure out an answer to one of our questions it is like putting another puff of air inside the balloon. This makes the rubber skin of the balloon stretch bigger; but the skin is all the questions we have, so every question we answer gives us more new questions that we didn't have before.

This is really why the world spins.

Who vs. What

Patricia Stiles in her introduction of Barack Obama in Philadelphia's 30^th Street Station this morning uttered a phrase that caught my attention because it succinctly captures a key part of the change that is afoot. Paraphrasing she said, [Barack Obama] embodies change from the politics of who is right to [doing] what is right.

There is no doubt that Barack Obama is an extremely powerful "who", yet his focus on facts and honest reflection is the polar opposite of the Blink approach of his predecessor. We are seeing the disastrous results of exercising The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. What we need and what we believe we will experience in the next administration is actual thought. I suspect that it will be a difficult challenge for his own party to accept this change, but the people are clearly in the lead on this. The continued low opinion of Congress contrasted with Obama's numbers demonstrate this point.

In his farewell address the other day, George Bush said, "... I've always acted with the best interests of our country in mind. I have followed my conscience and done what I thought was right." Unfortunately this is not what the oath he took as President required him to do. In a segment on NPR's Morning Edition last week the careful wording of the Presidential oath in the Constitution was discussed. In particular it was noted that the President swears "... to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." The oath clearly directs the President to do what the Constitution says is right, not what the President thinks is right.

This brings us back to the point: it is more important what is right than who is right.

Elitist

I must be an elitist. Who else but an elitist would ignore common sense [and marketing 101] and use a Latin word as the name of a blog, or anything else for that matter -- much less a Latin word in an unusual form whose pronunciation is not obvious? I do not intend this blog only for those who are comfortable with Latin or other "foreign" words: Catholic clergymen, medical professionals, lawyers, or practitioners of classical science or history. However, since this is not a photo or audio blog, it is intended for those who read. So in that respect, it may be elitist.

The truth is that I think arrows are a good symbology. They can indicate position, direction, velocity, momentum, intensity, acceleration, and more. These are the kinds of things I hope this blog will convey as it evolves. Besides that, the word looks like it has something to do with wisdom, as in sage or sagacity, and maybe it does. After all, in anatomy sagittal refers to the structure uniting the two parietal bones of the skull; and the sagittal plane divides the body into right and left: dexter and sinister; yang and yin.

Speaking of yang (light) and yin (dark), and right vs. left brings me to McCain and Obama. Interesting that Obama is maligned by the right as having sinister connections (I will not link McCain to Dexter). Then there is the "elitist" moniker pinned on Barack Obama by those who actually are elitists. Never mind that of the two, John McCain's background is unequivocally elitist compared to Obama's.

It is sad that we have the two best candidates, but not on the same ticket. In my view McCain's top three problems are the Republican Party, his mediocre executive abilities, and his age. His top three strengths are perseverance, tactical agility, and his past. On the other hand, I think that Obama's key strengths are his mass communication ability, strategic vision, and his education both formal and informal. His top problems are the Black community, the Democrat Party, and voter apathy.

Having said that, I must come down on Obama's side. Both McCain and Obama want to be postpartisan, but in my opinion the only way that the U.S. can move beyond the current extreme partisanship is from the bottom up. In order for that to occur, the leader must be able to effectively exhort the citizenry to force their representatives to behave that way. On this count Obama's celebrity should trump McCain's perseverance. As an aside, I had a similar issue with Hillary; e.g. (oops there's Latin slipping in again), she wanted to "work hard every day" with Congress, businesses, unions, and the insurance, pharmaceutical, and medical industries to achieve universal health care as she envisioned it, while Obama wants to get the people to lead their government to make the needed change inevitable.

For leader of the free world, I prefer someone strong on strategy. Great tacticians can be hired, but strategic thinkers are hard to find. Obama has proven himself as an effective executive and excellent manager. Consider the campaign organization he created and administers. Metaphorically, Obama is commanding an aircraft carrier that he built from the ground up, while McCain is still flying around alone in his fighter plane.

McCain's past is so powerful that he cannot conceive the world of the future, whereas Obama is a child of that future.

Then there is literacy - I so want a President that has a vocabulary, can structure a sentence, write a book on his own without a ghostwriter, ... Look at the flawless execution of Obama's recent overseas trip; could the current President have done the same? Could MaCain do it without Liberman on his elbow?

Finally there are the opportunities that only Obama may be able to capture: resetting the world's perception of America, and moving toward making race another sweet ingredient in the American melting pot rather than a bitter pill.