One wonders if Hitler's Nazis had succeeded and had eliminated every last Jewish-communist-international banker on Earth, just who then would they blame for their problems ?
The Nazis would have kept on killing the 'unfit' until the end of time, but they never credited any of the 'unfit' with being the invisible and super-smart enemy that so hobbled the Aryan Race.
The defectives were just inept and so life unworthy of life --- the Jews were only life unworthy of life because they were so adept at exercising pure evil.
Like Man-oriented Progress in general, with its real life microbes at the bottom of life, Hitler's Hyped-up idea of Progress desperately needed something totally bad and useless at the bottom to contrast with (and hence confirm) the relative good and useless humans at the top.
This ultra high valuation of math-based concepts of symmetry over the joyous yet messy diversity of actual reality is yet another evil sin Hitler got from the theoretical physicists ---- the reason why he and Einstein had much more in common than either was willing to admit...
Showing posts with label einstein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label einstein. Show all posts
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Monday, August 17, 2015
Hitler & Einstein Agreeing
Einstein, like most theoretical physicists throughout history, wanted everything in the Universe to 'fit in', their utopia being a simple unalterable Theory of Everything.
Much more modest, but inspired by the physicists, Hitler saw Germany - and perhaps eventually the world - as a sort of utopian High School where everybody 'fit in'.
Their shared world had no place for the uncool and awkward datum or being .....
Much more modest, but inspired by the physicists, Hitler saw Germany - and perhaps eventually the world - as a sort of utopian High School where everybody 'fit in'.
Their shared world had no place for the uncool and awkward datum or being .....
Monday, August 3, 2015
Hitler searched for "THE" human genome
Remember the delusion behind the search for the essence of the human genome ?
The delusion that there was in fact just ONE human genome ?
Allowing, of course, for a few deviants and defectives and deficients ---that advanced (eu) genetic engineering would quickly excise away, once and for all time.
(Another delusion by the way.)
The fact is, just as ancient religious texts always proclaimed and mothers have always noted, we are all different, all unique individuals.
Even in vastness of the three billion year old world of the bacteria, there has never been two exact clones.
We are all different - albeit often in too subtle ways to be noted by very important men (James Watson ?) cursively glancing at us from the Olympian heights of Vienna's Riesenrad Ferris Wheel, as if we were just a lot of similar 'dots' on the ground.
Even Dr Mengele's identical twins were different, unique, in spite of having the exact same genome in theory.
Now even James Watson easily accepts that highly civilized 'Man' makes many mistakes, down at the bank with his mortgage or at the government office with his new passport.
Why then is it so very hard to accept that 'primitive' Mother Nature makes mistakes too ?
That the supposedly "iron" laws of Nature frequently bend ?
Routinely Nature makes mistakes while copying both the protein-making genes and the turn-on-and-off-tap control genes from the original genome - too many of this, too little of that.
Not just a base here and there but also many, many huge chunks, each thousands of bases long, known as CNVs, copy number variants.
Experienced ward doctors would hardly be surprised to learn all of this as the scientific explanation for their routine experiences of every work day.
An explanation just why so often that two patients, of the same age and weight and at the same stage of the same disease, can react so differently to a drug dosage supposedly standardized to all these factors.
The answer just could be that one patient has three copies of a particular gene segment targeted by this drug and hence almost overdoses.
Meanwhile the other (because of an unusual 'tap' gene) has effectively less than one copy and so the course of their disease remains unchecked.
Because sub atomic particles, atoms and molecules spend all their time bouncing off of each other in an asymmetric fashion, everything in the Universe "jitters" all the time.
We average this out, over trillions of such objects, as a particular heat temperature --- think of it as the supposedly routine temperature for a given pheonomon.
But, in fact, that smoothly analog average that is a given temperature actually disguises huge variants in local energy levels from nanosecond to nanosecond - meaning 'heat' is better described in digital terms --- as 'thermal' zippering, noise and distortion.
All that wide variance in the energy of 'routine' particle jostling means that 'routine' chemical bond making and breaking don't always occur at all, or don't occur in the right order, or takes much more or less time that they 'routinely' should.
Mistakes and asymmetric results are a routine fact of the Universe and even the best error correcting system (itself subject to the same mistake-making environment) doesn't always fully correct them all.
Hard to think of Hitler going along with Einstein and millions of other intellectuals in eagerly advancing The Enlightenment Project's efforts to find all the right answers to all the questions of Reality.
But he did - in spades.
Because he and Einstein and most scientists and philosophers of his day believed, often unconsciously, in "Limited Essentialism".
That is the idea that everything (of substantial size) had a definable list of attributes that uniquely and permanently identified it.
'Close' was not good enough - that was a defective deviant deficient copy.
But Reality is actually an example of "Unlimited Essentialism" - the fact that every single being and object in the Universe is unique and has an (ever changing) definable list of attributes that positively identify it, albeit from moment to moment.
Defined that way, Essentialism is emptied of all of its traditional restraining abilities.
The delusion that there was in fact just ONE human genome ?
Allowing, of course, for a few deviants and defectives and deficients ---that advanced (eu) genetic engineering would quickly excise away, once and for all time.
(Another delusion by the way.)
The fact is, just as ancient religious texts always proclaimed and mothers have always noted, we are all different, all unique individuals.
Even in vastness of the three billion year old world of the bacteria, there has never been two exact clones.
We are all different - albeit often in too subtle ways to be noted by very important men (James Watson ?) cursively glancing at us from the Olympian heights of Vienna's Riesenrad Ferris Wheel, as if we were just a lot of similar 'dots' on the ground.
Even Dr Mengele's identical twins were different, unique, in spite of having the exact same genome in theory.
Now even James Watson easily accepts that highly civilized 'Man' makes many mistakes, down at the bank with his mortgage or at the government office with his new passport.
Why then is it so very hard to accept that 'primitive' Mother Nature makes mistakes too ?
That the supposedly "iron" laws of Nature frequently bend ?
Routinely Nature makes mistakes while copying both the protein-making genes and the turn-on-and-off-tap control genes from the original genome - too many of this, too little of that.
Not just a base here and there but also many, many huge chunks, each thousands of bases long, known as CNVs, copy number variants.
Experienced ward doctors would hardly be surprised to learn all of this as the scientific explanation for their routine experiences of every work day.
An explanation just why so often that two patients, of the same age and weight and at the same stage of the same disease, can react so differently to a drug dosage supposedly standardized to all these factors.
The answer just could be that one patient has three copies of a particular gene segment targeted by this drug and hence almost overdoses.
Meanwhile the other (because of an unusual 'tap' gene) has effectively less than one copy and so the course of their disease remains unchecked.
Because sub atomic particles, atoms and molecules spend all their time bouncing off of each other in an asymmetric fashion, everything in the Universe "jitters" all the time.
We average this out, over trillions of such objects, as a particular heat temperature --- think of it as the supposedly routine temperature for a given pheonomon.
But, in fact, that smoothly analog average that is a given temperature actually disguises huge variants in local energy levels from nanosecond to nanosecond - meaning 'heat' is better described in digital terms --- as 'thermal' zippering, noise and distortion.
All that wide variance in the energy of 'routine' particle jostling means that 'routine' chemical bond making and breaking don't always occur at all, or don't occur in the right order, or takes much more or less time that they 'routinely' should.
Mistakes and asymmetric results are a routine fact of the Universe and even the best error correcting system (itself subject to the same mistake-making environment) doesn't always fully correct them all.
Hard to think of Hitler going along with Einstein and millions of other intellectuals in eagerly advancing The Enlightenment Project's efforts to find all the right answers to all the questions of Reality.
But he did - in spades.
Because he and Einstein and most scientists and philosophers of his day believed, often unconsciously, in "Limited Essentialism".
That is the idea that everything (of substantial size) had a definable list of attributes that uniquely and permanently identified it.
'Close' was not good enough - that was a defective deviant deficient copy.
But Reality is actually an example of "Unlimited Essentialism" - the fact that every single being and object in the Universe is unique and has an (ever changing) definable list of attributes that positively identify it, albeit from moment to moment.
Defined that way, Essentialism is emptied of all of its traditional restraining abilities.
The search for Reality's "right" answers left all lot of shot, gassed and burned wrong answers in its wake
The Enlightenment Project led inevitably up to the selection platform at Auschwitz in late 1944, where the incoming Hungarian Jews were separated into right answers and wrong answers.
While the whole world knew about it, by that date, (YES WE DID) - and still did nothing.
Only a world that had stopped believing in "right answers" would have moved to save them - move to save them all, as uniquely beautiful bits of the human kaleidoscope.
Now Hitler, Einstein and Watson have all been hoisted on their own petard - because their own search for the one right answer about the human genome has instead resulted in revealing billion and billions of unique human genomes.
Nothing that Momma and Jesus - and Martin Henry Dawson - didn't already know ....
Now Hitler, Einstein and Watson have all been hoisted on their own petard - because their own search for the one right answer about the human genome has instead resulted in revealing billion and billions of unique human genomes.
Nothing that Momma and Jesus - and Martin Henry Dawson - didn't already know ....
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Deniers : Triumph of the Will (over the weather)
Hard to imagine - looking over the current crop of harmful climate change deniers - that they are all neo-Idealist determinists.
Most look like they have barely ever seen the inside of a book, let alone a university philosophy class.
But then like the characters in Moliere's play who suddenly discovered they'd been speaking "Prose" all their life, we needn't pass formal academic philosophy courses to be allowed to fitfully espouse a distinct philosophical point of view.
And so it proves so with our deniers cum hubrists : for they don't really deny the possible of harmful human actions.
Merely they deny that we can't fix any problems we might create, quickly, easily and cheaply : like Superman.
Mind, to them, will always master over mere Matter.
Hitler and Einstein, in fact all educated Germans from about 1830 to 1980 , were this sort of Idealist --- it being breed into the very bones of German high school and university education for a century and a half.
Only the working class Germans missed its full baneful effects - getting it only watered down second hand , via tons of popular German culture.
Leni Riefenstahl's popular mountain climbing film epics for example - possibly far more influential internally than her rather better known overt propaganda film , The Triumph of the Will ...
Most look like they have barely ever seen the inside of a book, let alone a university philosophy class.
But then like the characters in Moliere's play who suddenly discovered they'd been speaking "Prose" all their life, we needn't pass formal academic philosophy courses to be allowed to fitfully espouse a distinct philosophical point of view.
And so it proves so with our deniers cum hubrists : for they don't really deny the possible of harmful human actions.
Merely they deny that we can't fix any problems we might create, quickly, easily and cheaply : like Superman.
Mind, to them, will always master over mere Matter.
Hitler and Einstein, in fact all educated Germans from about 1830 to 1980 , were this sort of Idealist --- it being breed into the very bones of German high school and university education for a century and a half.
Only the working class Germans missed its full baneful effects - getting it only watered down second hand , via tons of popular German culture.
Leni Riefenstahl's popular mountain climbing film epics for example - possibly far more influential internally than her rather better known overt propaganda film , The Triumph of the Will ...
Friday, November 28, 2014
Modernity's error : claiming to see a foundational parsimony beneath a surface plentitude
The remains of a war-shattered building , after the armies have moved on, only appears to be complex --- despite the sight of all those building blocks of the edifice tossed about hither and yonder.
For true complexity, one needs to move below the placid surface of those unchangeable-seeming and solid-appearing building blocks.
Down to the level of the atoms and below - deep down down down into a land of dozens of ever more fundamental forces and masses careening about a maybe not so empty vast vacuous space.
Seemingly every other year, a paradox is renewed as the biggest machine ever made by humanity discovers an ever smaller and ever more fundamental sub-sub-atomic building block of the universe.
The scientific consensus that atoms are not in fact atomic (fundamental/indivisible) is far more than one hundred years old.
And yet that consensus still hasn't really penetrated our Junior and Senior High science classes yet : proof indeed that Modernity didn't die in 1945 or in 1965 --- not at least among science teachers.
In fact the scientific consensus that atoms weren't atomic is exactly as old as Modernity itself .
For Modernity pace Einstein and Darwin, in a very real sense, can be said to have arisen in scientists seeking to refute the sub-atomic evidence sparking in the cathode tubes before their eyes.
Evidence that God indeed does 'play dice' - at least down at the sub-sub-sub-sub-atomic level .....
For true complexity, one needs to move below the placid surface of those unchangeable-seeming and solid-appearing building blocks.
Down to the level of the atoms and below - deep down down down into a land of dozens of ever more fundamental forces and masses careening about a maybe not so empty vast vacuous space.
Seemingly every other year, a paradox is renewed as the biggest machine ever made by humanity discovers an ever smaller and ever more fundamental sub-sub-atomic building block of the universe.
The scientific consensus that atoms are not in fact atomic (fundamental/indivisible) is far more than one hundred years old.
And yet that consensus still hasn't really penetrated our Junior and Senior High science classes yet : proof indeed that Modernity didn't die in 1945 or in 1965 --- not at least among science teachers.
In fact the scientific consensus that atoms weren't atomic is exactly as old as Modernity itself .
For Modernity pace Einstein and Darwin, in a very real sense, can be said to have arisen in scientists seeking to refute the sub-atomic evidence sparking in the cathode tubes before their eyes.
Evidence that God indeed does 'play dice' - at least down at the sub-sub-sub-sub-atomic level .....
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Pace Schnaiberg : simplifying science vs complicating science
Canadian-born sociologist of Science Allan Schnailberg , in a seminal article from more than 40 years ago, explained-in-advance today's Science Wars , with his proposed division of scientists into those oriented to production and those oriented to studying the impact of that production.
So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.
I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.
Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.
One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.
The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.
Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.
But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead.
Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.
But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?
Never, never never : trust me.
The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.
More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.
More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.
Very, very, rarely is ever revealed that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.
Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.
So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.
Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.
Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.
In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.
Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.
Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.
May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?
Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?
A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.
But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.
Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .
Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .
Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.
Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.
So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.
This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.
An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...
So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.
I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.
Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.
One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.
The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.
Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.
But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead.
Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.
But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?
Never, never never : trust me.
The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.
More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.
More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.
Very, very, rarely is ever revealed that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.
Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.
So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.
Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.
Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.
In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.
Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.
Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.
May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?
Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?
A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.
But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.
Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .
Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .
Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.
Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.
So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.
This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.
An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
"Family" just means you can't divorce your mother or brother like you can your spouse or business partner...
I don't want to imply some lovey-dovey view of reality when I say all life is family.
After all, us humans and the lions both want to kill and eat baby lambies, not lie down together with them.
I mean instead, for example, that we can't divorce the trillions of microbes that live in and on each of us and are in a very real sense, a muddled-up part of us.
Reductionism ,that shared intellectual bond between Hitler and Einstein, simply fails to work as a metaphor of how the world is built up ---- as opposed as to how it looks when we tear it down...
After all, us humans and the lions both want to kill and eat baby lambies, not lie down together with them.
I mean instead, for example, that we can't divorce the trillions of microbes that live in and on each of us and are in a very real sense, a muddled-up part of us.
Reductionism ,that shared intellectual bond between Hitler and Einstein, simply fails to work as a metaphor of how the world is built up ---- as opposed as to how it looks when we tear it down...
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Like race relations before King, like the Gold Standard, in deniers' minds the climate was supposed to be eternally stable and unchangable
 |
| heat death of the DENIERS' certitudes |
After living a long life safe inside the nice warm milk and cookies of certitudes, to now - in their declining years - to face yet another lose of certitudes is all a little too much for the average - aging - climate denier.
Life used to be so stable : the negro, hebrew, homosexual or career woman used to know their place and knew how to mind their manners.
Money was stable, based on the solid gold standard.
Economists and scientists assured them that matter and energy was stable, indestructible and eternal: it could be changed but never destroyed.
Droughts came ,yes, in a few small areas and for only a short time, replaced by floods also in just a few areas and for just a short time.
Like the rise of volcanoes and the fall of earthquakes, recessions and booms / war and peace came and went, came and went : moderated oscillations but always around a strictly defined - and maintained - norm.
In the Victorian mindset, there could be no science of climate CHANGE
Weather was ceaseless in its oscillations but the climate - the climate was eternal , as eternal as God and the Sun and the Universe.
As Spencer Weart points out, the idea of climate change literally didn't exist and couldn't exist : there were no departments of Climate Change at universities, no Society for the Study of Climate Change, no Journal of Climate Change.
Deniers thought they hadn't asked much out of life, only a level playing field to play out their life upon.
And modernity's science - for its own selfish, greedy reasons - appeared to give that to them.
Until recently, until the rise of post-modernity science : the new young whippersnappers.
Because, in fact, there is no such thing as a level playing field, never was and never will be : all fields, like it or not, must tilt subtly but inevitably downward, tracking the great arrow of time's long slow plunge into Heat Death.
Because the one thing the deniers were never taught in school was that the First Law of Thermodynamics (the claim that neither mass or energy can ever be created or destroyed but merely altered) was to the Second law of Thermodynamics as Einstein's Special Law of Relativity was to Einstein's General Law of Relativity.
Which is to say, very much the junior partner in this particular law firm.
The Second Law's Entropy ensures nothing ever really stays the same but rather is always changing : energy and matter are not destroyed true, but their utility to us became steadily degraded - and to us, that is as good as destroyed.
The centre of the Earth is very hot, just as it was 4 billion years ago - but it is less hot today than back then : day by day, millennium by millennium, it is steadily getting colder and colder - and this will one day mean less magnetic fields, less atmosphere and less Life on Earth.
The deniers' Victorian credo (Lyell's Uniformitarianism) is nothing more than errant nonsense : the present is a guide to nothing more than the present and presents no certitudes as to the past or our future.
Shat happens : suck it up....
Friday, August 10, 2012
LYELL emerges from grave to deny climate change , as Yankee deniers crow "we knew he would!"
Actually Sir Charles Lyell is dead - long dead - with no sign his body has yet risen from the grave. But what about his intellectual spirit ?
Because, in fact, Lyell's spirit, his soul (the theory of uniformitarianism) does live on (and on and on).
Lives on and on in the minds of the climate deniers - and never more strongly than in that heartland of climate denialism : among many of the old school American geologists.
No coincidence that, because in its heyday uniformitarianism also thrived strongest in America geology.
Geological and meteorological deniers today claim that the climate hasn't changed, because it can not change but merely oscillate over a constant central value, if viewed over geological time periods.
If this sounds even vaguely familiar, it is because American deniers back in uniformitarianism's heyday said exactly the same thing to explain why in their view the geology of the earth hadn't changed and couldn't change.
The American geological elite's favourite words were the food and drink of modernity itself, so these geological deniers were then fully of the mainstream , in fact the mainstream of the mainstream.
Words and phrases like : normal,norm, average, static, unchanging, balance, equilibrium, eternal,universal, oscillating deviations of a local and temporary nature.
Nature was a passive backdrop : unchanging, eternal, universal.
Einstein, one of the clearest examples of 19th century scientific thinking, believed that the universe had always been there and always would be there : it was neither birthed nor would it die.
Against this 19th century static theatre backdrop, the minds of human actors were the active, changing elements of reality.
Peasants, by contrast, extrapolated from their miserable and uncertain lives to see the forces of nature as still all powerful and dynamically uncertain and us humans powerless to do much more than strive to survive its storms and earthquakes.
But upper middle class males, highly educated in western values , saw reality as very certain and predictable, again extrapolating from their extremely privileged lives.
(They, it can be safely assumed, never had to deal with even the minor uncertainties of life such as just when and how baby would choose to spoil her last remaining clean diaper !)
So if we threw Fred Singer out of a plane over Sub-Saharan Africa and told him to hunt and gather for himself, it would be pretty safe to assume we would find him a few years later, not just thinner and fitter, but also with a totally reversed view on whether Climates - and Nature in general - can and do change.
It is no coincidence that the Rich think reality is stable and unchanging and the Poor feel it is unstable and unpredictable....
Because, in fact, Lyell's spirit, his soul (the theory of uniformitarianism) does live on (and on and on).
Lives on and on in the minds of the climate deniers - and never more strongly than in that heartland of climate denialism : among many of the old school American geologists.
No coincidence that, because in its heyday uniformitarianism also thrived strongest in America geology.
Geological and meteorological deniers today claim that the climate hasn't changed, because it can not change but merely oscillate over a constant central value, if viewed over geological time periods.
If this sounds even vaguely familiar, it is because American deniers back in uniformitarianism's heyday said exactly the same thing to explain why in their view the geology of the earth hadn't changed and couldn't change.
The House Wine of Modernity (& Denierism) is Uniformitarianism
The American geological elite's favourite words were the food and drink of modernity itself, so these geological deniers were then fully of the mainstream , in fact the mainstream of the mainstream.
Words and phrases like : normal,norm, average, static, unchanging, balance, equilibrium, eternal,universal, oscillating deviations of a local and temporary nature.
Nature was a passive backdrop : unchanging, eternal, universal.
Einstein, one of the clearest examples of 19th century scientific thinking, believed that the universe had always been there and always would be there : it was neither birthed nor would it die.
Against this 19th century static theatre backdrop, the minds of human actors were the active, changing elements of reality.
Peasants, by contrast, extrapolated from their miserable and uncertain lives to see the forces of nature as still all powerful and dynamically uncertain and us humans powerless to do much more than strive to survive its storms and earthquakes.
But upper middle class males, highly educated in western values , saw reality as very certain and predictable, again extrapolating from their extremely privileged lives.
(They, it can be safely assumed, never had to deal with even the minor uncertainties of life such as just when and how baby would choose to spoil her last remaining clean diaper !)
So if we threw Fred Singer out of a plane over Sub-Saharan Africa and told him to hunt and gather for himself, it would be pretty safe to assume we would find him a few years later, not just thinner and fitter, but also with a totally reversed view on whether Climates - and Nature in general - can and do change.
It is no coincidence that the Rich think reality is stable and unchanging and the Poor feel it is unstable and unpredictable....
Monday, April 30, 2012
why global commensality is/isn't ROMANTICISM
In a commensal world ,humanity dines with reality - not upon it.
Hitler cherry-picked much from the Romantic Era - above all he saw that humanity could, be sheer force of will , create vast mental universes.
But is was his great error was to imagine he - or anyone - could successfully impose these mental universes upon the physical universe (or universes).
Romantics saw the physical universe, Nature, as endlessly dynamic , a constantly changing kaleidoscope of possibilities.
They imagined the human individual was also a kaleidoscope of mental possibilities.
The Modernists, such as Hitler and Einstein, had a great weakness .
It was to presume there was something they could drag into this Romantic Era from earlier (Plato to the Enlightenment) ages.
They envisioned that one could fully know this natural kaleidoscope, fully know it to the point of freezing it and then re-molding it in your own mind-created kaleidoscope.
They saw all of Nature's unceasing variety as a mere rococo surface, a showiness, because deep underneath, fundamentally, Nature was made up of a few knowable laws.
Compared to the human mental universe, the physical universe they saw as much simpler.
Now commensality agrees with the modernists that a single human mind might not just be able to convince itself, but all humanity, that cherry trees bloom year around on the top of Mount Everest.
Virtual Reality behold yourself !
But commensality argues that the physical reality remains equally successful in insisting that that no cherry tree ever blooms on the top of Mount Everest.
Our mental universes are as free as the Romantics and their foes, the Modernists,said they were, but they remain in, horizontal with, the physical universe, not superior to it.....
Hitler cherry-picked much from the Romantic Era - above all he saw that humanity could, be sheer force of will , create vast mental universes.
But is was his great error was to imagine he - or anyone - could successfully impose these mental universes upon the physical universe (or universes).
Romantics saw the physical universe, Nature, as endlessly dynamic , a constantly changing kaleidoscope of possibilities.
They imagined the human individual was also a kaleidoscope of mental possibilities.
The Modernists, such as Hitler and Einstein, had a great weakness .
It was to presume there was something they could drag into this Romantic Era from earlier (Plato to the Enlightenment) ages.
They envisioned that one could fully know this natural kaleidoscope, fully know it to the point of freezing it and then re-molding it in your own mind-created kaleidoscope.
They saw all of Nature's unceasing variety as a mere rococo surface, a showiness, because deep underneath, fundamentally, Nature was made up of a few knowable laws.
Compared to the human mental universe, the physical universe they saw as much simpler.
Now commensality agrees with the modernists that a single human mind might not just be able to convince itself, but all humanity, that cherry trees bloom year around on the top of Mount Everest.
Virtual Reality behold yourself !
But commensality argues that the physical reality remains equally successful in insisting that that no cherry tree ever blooms on the top of Mount Everest.
Our mental universes are as free as the Romantics and their foes, the Modernists,said they were, but they remain in, horizontal with, the physical universe, not superior to it.....
Monday, April 2, 2012
Pierre-Simon Laplace is NOT a Commensalist
 |
| Michael Marshall |
Well Stephen Harper is not and neither is Ricky Santorum , but you probably already guessed that.
More importantly, people like Albert Einstein, that icon of the tired old left, isn't one either.
Nor is his intellectual mentor, Pierre-Simon Laplace.
Laplace, and Einstein, thought of themselves as fully Modernist and firm advocates of the Enlightenment.
Laplace famously claimed that since he believed he already stood above and outside Nature and Reality for all practical measure, only a current lack of sufficient calculating power prevented him from perfectly predicting the present, past and future right down to the atomic level.
But both Chaos Theory (Henri Poincare) and Quantum Theory (Paul Dirac) show that if you are in anyway a participant within the system you are studying (and we finite humans are definitely within the Universe --- as even Einstein and Laplace would have readily admitted that), then even your tiniest efforts to measure it, act upon it and feedback to alter those measurements.
Thus, as with the food we eat and the air we breath , "all measuring instruments (and the beings operating them) dine at a common table" --- that is they are embedded fully into the systems they are tryong to measure -- thus, in point of fact, they are commensalist with it.
But until someone accepts this, emotionally as well as intellectually, they do not act upon that knowledge or try to temper their hubris.
I do not believe that Einstein would have ever found it easy to accept that a small weather measurement taken in the brazilian jungle could trigger a big twister in Texas....
Thursday, September 10, 2009
The 1940 Peace Bomb joins the 1800 Peace Mine...
In any other circumstances, pacifist Leo Szilard might have been best remembered as the inventor (along with fellow pacifist Albert Einstein) of the modern fridge.
Instead he joined some others (sometimes pacifist others) in working on a super weapon that would so frighten the planet's militarists that they would instantly sue for permanent world peace.
Unfortunately, it was agreed that the backward militarist mind would require a convincing demonstration project, before being convinced.
So in the end a few hundred thousand people ended up dead in radiation and fire, all for 'the greatest good of the greatest number' ---but universal peace still did not break out - far from it.
So poor Szilard is today primarily remembered for instigating the Manhattan Project rather than inventing the perfect fridge ....or the perfect peace.
By contrast, Robert Fulton, a fellow New York City area resident like Szilard, (albeit from a hundred and fifty years earlier ), is best known today for building the first commercial steam boat service in the world, between New York City and Albany.
But as H. Bruce Franklin points out in his ground-breaking book "War Stars" , Fulton had had his utopian pacifist weapon scheme as well.
This submarine and sea-mine system was designed to destroy the British navy, freeing the high seas for universal free trade and commerce and thus introducing an era of permanent world peace.
This was/is standard centuries-old Liberal dogma, still much spouted today.
Fulton's willingness to sink a few real ships (along with their real crews) is also right on par with all the many Liberal peace bomb efforts: in the utilitarianism-driven willingness to see a 'few' die (unwillingly and unasked) for the greater good of the greater number.
Between Fulton and Szilard, New York has thrown up a number of Liberal pacifist and their peace weapons - perhaps most notably that shy pacifist Carl Norden.... and his precision WW II bombsight of the same name.
All these plans start off as efforts to design a totally new advance on weapon systems.
But these superweapons are not for profitably continuing sales in continuous wars.
Rather they are to 'demonstrate' their horrific effects just once and then usher in world peace forever.
All of them have a scope and gravitas and a vision about them that seems perfectly cut to fit Manhattan's taste in grandness-for-the-sake-of-grandness, thus becoming 'the Empire State Building of New York intellectual conceits'.....
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