We always knew this.

Run to Stay Young

A Thought for Thanksgiving

On November 18 of this year, Bishop Blase J. Cupich of Spokane, Wash., was installed as the ninth archbishop of Chicago, America’s third-largest Roman Catholic diocese, with 2.3 million members.

In an interview given shortly before his installation, he said this: “The pope is saying some very challenging things for people. He’s not saying, this is the law and you follow it and you get to heaven. He’s saying we have to do something about our world today that’s suffering; people are being excluded, neglected. We have a responsibility, and he’s calling people to task.”

Finally, somebody gets it right.

Blase J. Cupich

Harveys in the News

Giving credit where credit is due.  Report examines shared fire chief for New Salem and Wendell.  (And I always thought that MMA stood for Mixed Martial Arts)

The Card Game That Must Not Be Named

It turns out that for many years Bill Clinton's favorite card game was Hearts.  That all changed when he visited Steven Spielberg during the 1996 presidential campaign and was introduced to an even better game.  Spielberg Deals Bill Clinton Into a Beloved Card Game.

Barbie Does Daemons

Who says you can’t change the world…a little. Recently Mattel released a new children’s book titled “Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer.” (Later, they claimed it was released in 2010.) Wow! Barbie’s coming into the late twentieth century…until one starts reading it. I’m not sure how it got started, but it may have been Pamela Ribon who discovered the book and wrote about it on her blog. She found the book beyond banal, to being breathtakingly abominable.

Shortly, it caused such popular persecution and parody on the web that Random House pulled the book and Amazon dropped it. Now Mattel has apologized.

Thus in our internet age, democracy (or pop culture) voting works in magical ways. Whimsically, someone hacked up a way to write alternate versions of the book. Here are some geeky examples.

Serial

Many of the better quality blogs are touting the relatively new show by This American Life, called Serial. If In Progress is not in the "better quality" realm, then it is probably I who is dragging it down. As reparations,  I'll recommend the show. Be sure to start with episode 1.

Bigger Than Ebola

The U.S. panic over ebola is dwarfed by the Parisian tiger scare. Sure ebola may kill you, but so can a hungry tiger, and it is 155 pounds. For those living east of Paris, it is as mysterious as the killer virus, as no one knows where it came from. "The unbelievable tiger alert" dominates Parisian news. "It's been running for 48 hours and it hasn't eaten, so yes, I'm worried," said local resident, Jean-Francois Ameur.

Tiger expert Gilbert Edelstein, from the Pinder circus, said the best response to coming face-to-face with the stripy beast, thought to weigh around 70 kilogrammes (155 pounds), was to “scream as loud as possible.”
“Even better, scream in German. The guttural sounds could scare him away,” added Edelstein.

Leave it to the French to always come up with the appropriate use of German awareness. 

How are you affected by Nightly News?

Here is a short, painless quiz about your perceptions of your country (if you click the U.S.). It's nothing earthshaking or traumatic, but just another reality check that we are often led slightly astray. I didn't do too badly except about the percentage of Americans over 65.

This blog is on the internet, so I feel I can post this

Annual Report from the Edge of Science, aka 'Cold Fusion'

Last year’s post on the state of “Cold Fusion” or “Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction” (LENR) ended with the lines, “for such possibly breakthrough technology, events are progressing rapidly. Hopefully we will soon see if this is a false positive or not.” That turned out to be enigmatically prescient. Two significant events happened last year.

1. Defkalion’s LENR device, the Hyperion, was tested in a public demonstration streamed on the internet. Apparently, when the results were in, the device failed to produce any excess heat at all, reminiscent of the original Pons-Fleischmann experiment. That was the conclusion of high energy physicist Luca Gamberale in a report on the demonstration. The company, as a result, seems to have all but collapsed.

2. Andrea Rossi’s device, the E-Cat, also had a demonstration. Six researchers from Italy and Sweden tested the device for 32 days. The extended time allowed more rigorous testing than previously, and would help determine the long termed stability of the device. The team concluded:

“The quantity of heat emitted constantly by the reactor and the length of time during which the reactor was operating rule out, beyond any reasonable doubt, a chemical reaction as underlying its operation.” 

“The isotope composition in Lithium and Nickel was found to agree with the natural composition before the run, while after the run it was found to have changed substantially. Nuclear reactions are therefore indicated to be present in the run process, which however is hard to reconcile with the fact that no radioactivity was detected outside the reactor during the run.” 

“In summary, the performance of the E-Cat reactor is remarkable. We have a device giving heat energy compatible with nuclear transformations, but it operates at low energy and gives neither nuclear radioactive waste nor emits radiation. From basic general knowledge in nuclear physics this should not be possible.”

The scientists, being trained in ‘known’ physics, are almost comically skeptical and at one point in the report say:

“However, as discussed above, it is of course very hard to comprehend how these fusion processes can take place in the fuel compound at low energies. Presently we should therefore restrict ourselves to merely state that an isotope shift has occurred in Lithium and Nickel. We refrain from speculations in any dynamic scenario making this reaction possible at low energies. The reaction speculation above should only be considered as an example of reasoning and not a serious conjecture.”

To repeat, their explanation is an “example of reasoning and not a serious conjecture.”
Here is a copy of the report.

You may purchase one of Rossi’s 1 mega-watt E-Cat plants for a reported $1.5 million.

There are many, many organizations working on this technology, but, as far as I can tell, all are very poorly funded with the exception of Rossi’s E-Cat. I continue to hold no belief (one way or another) in the practicality of the technology, but report what I find.

You are free to speculate on your own as to its practicality, and also as to why the press does not report on LENR activities.

Addendum: I probably should add that, as you would expect, the results of the report are not without controversy, which is a good thing (re: faster than light neutrinos). There are those who argue that the 6 scientists, though respected, did an inadequate job, especially in measuring input energy to the system.

Lies About Aging

You know, they… they say that age kills the fire inside of a man.  That he hears death coming.  He opens the door and says, “Come in.  Give me rest.”

That is a pack of old damn lies!  I’ve got enough fight in me to devour the world.  So I fight.

                    -- Zorba the Greek

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.

                    -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Dr. Ellen Langer is a social psychologist and a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University.   Interestingly enough, she studied under Philip Zimbardo, seen in this recent post about the power of authority to get people to do evil.  Anyway, she suggests that we may have more power to control aging than we think:  What if Age Is Nothing but a Mind-Set?

Yet Another Captivating Map

I recommend viewing on Full Screen.  Otherwiser it's difficult to see.

Another Captivating Map

I suggest hitting play and enjoying the ride.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/30/geography-of-jobs_n_6069856.html

A very slow news day

"Pope Reminds Catholics: evolution, Big Bang are true"

"God is not a Magician"

This is news?

Thinking Milgram, Once Again

We have discussed it before. It should be discussed again, and often. But here are a couple of videos without further comment. One is disturbingly serious, the other disturbingly funny. Both recall the famous Milgram experiments.

Historical Perspective

Martin will be studying in Granada, Spain for his last semester at college. After getting our dates correct, Bill and I started to appreciate a more grand sense of history. These dates and events will be familiar to you, but I’ll refresh. In October 732, the Frankish and Burgundian forces of western Europe fought the Muslim army of the Umayyad Caliphate (the Moors) near Tours and Poitiers. The famous Battle of Tours (or Battle of Poitiers) pitted the forces of Charles Martel against those of ‘Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi. The Frankish army has been estimated at between 15,000-80,000, the Moors at a similar number. Both sides have accounts of the enemy at 400,000.

What is undisputed is that the Christians crushed the Moors and stemmed a 21 year advance of Islam through Europe. Charles was given the name Martellus (“The Hammer”), and the battle became a landmark in history preserving a Christian Europe.

Now we fast forward to where Martin will be studying. On January 2, 1492, Muhammad XII of Granada (King Boabdil) surrendered the City of Granada to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. If Martin gets there by January 2, he can participate in the annual celebration. After the battle of Granada, all Muslims had to convert to Christianity, become slaves, or be exiled. This was the end of the conquering Moors in Europe.

So, Bill and I finally saw our history in a little better perspective. It took 760 years for the native Europeans to expel the invading Moors after the famous Battle of Tours (about 800 years after the first invasion). This country is only a few hundred years old since the European invasion. Native Americans still have three or four hundred years to drive out the invaders and reclaim their country, and history will record this brief foreign occupation state as only just that.

When Secularists and Fundamentalists Agree, Part Deux

I've already blogged on this before, see when secularists and fundamentalists agree, so I hope not to detain you too long here.  But this latest kerfluffle between Bill Maher and Ben Affleck over Islam really has me in a swivet.  Not that either of these two really know much about religion or that they deserved to to be listened to at all (although Affleck presumably has gained familiarity with the subject from his role as Bartleby, the fallen angel, in Dogma).
  
But, we find once again this unholy alliance between Christian defenders of the faith and the  militant atheists joined in the common mission of denouncing Islam.  Here, as Exhibit 1 (and the only exhibit) is an article from Townhall.com (a website self-described as "the leading source for conservative news and political commentary and analysis"), in which Dennis Prager in essence defends Bill Maher, along with Sam Harris, in their wholesale attack on Islam.  See Bill Maher, Ben Affleck and Islam.  Of course, the article is nonsense.   For one, because it invokes the Nazis -- right off the bat we can invoke Godwin's Law and discount it. 

But the depth of Prager's ingorance is revealed in his question: "Where, sir, are the Christian and Jewish jihadists?"  While I confess that, because Judaism is a relativist and not a triumphalist religion, it doesn't have a tradition of killing heretics.  It accepts that not everyone believes as Jews do.  But, like Islam, Christianity is a triumphalist religion and it would be interesting to conduct an historical study on which religion has more blood on its hands.  Although, it's not really fair because Christianity had a 600 year head start.

In any event, the violence of Chritianity is well-documented.  Even thoughtful Thomas Aquinas believed in the execution of heretics:

With regard to heretics two points must be observed: one, on their own side; the other, on the side of the Church. On their own side there is the sin, whereby they deserve not only to be separated from the Church by excommunication, but also to be severed from the world by death. For it is a much graver matter to corrupt the faith which quickens the soul, than to forge money, which supports temporal life. Wherefore if forgers of money and other evil-doers are forthwith condemned to death by the secular authority, much more reason is there for heretics, as soon as they are convicted of heresy, to be not only excommunicated but even put to death.

And, any student of history is well aquainted with a many examples of Christians putting this principle into practice.  For a quick review, see European wars of religion.  As late as 1899, Pope Leo XII issued an encyclical condemning the Heresy of "Americanism," a term used to describe the American principles of separation of church and state and freedom of religion.  It was not until Vatican II (1965) in the publication of Dignitatis Humanae, that the Church officially came out in support of the idea of religious freedom.

Anyway, now we get to the real reason for this post: here is a much more thoughtful approach to the issue of Islam and violence, and worth reading.  Bill Maher's Dangerous Critique of Islam, written by Peter Beinart.  I can't really improve on this, so here it is.

The Possibilities of Tech

This story on Siri ... reminds me of why I got into tech in the first place. Moving stuff.   Sriram Krishnan  

Here's the article: To Siri, With Love

What Would a Black America Look Like

The Atlantic Monthly recently posed the question, If black America were a nation-state, how would it stack up against other countries?   See What If Black America Were a Country?    It does not compare well, I'm afraid.  Despite electing a Black president, we have not solved our race problem.  

 

 

 

 

 

SAT: Student Affluence Test?

Sure, we like to brag about how smart we are and have SAT scores to back it up. Not so fast. Those scores, in general, are also a reflection of how wealthy our parents are. 

The Wall Street Journal has an article, "SAT and Income Inequality: How Wealthier Kids Rank Higher." The article was statistically interesting but not all that enlightening. Of course money is used to make our lives better, which includes better schools and homes for children so they can continue the same cycle. It’s not news that a free enterprise system rewards the rich—even in the area of SAT scores. 

What I did find enlightening were the comments to the article. They are insane! The WSJ writer was vilified for being ignorant, having a politically correct agenda, trying to dumb down education, and, in general, writing an un-American "ridiculous article." 

“IQ is at least 50% inheritable.”
(I’ll make allowances for the unreferenced stat, but IQ is a test just like SAT.)

“The concept of income inequality, it self (sic) is a fake issue. Are you saying if the income was equal you would have an equal SAT score?”
(Well, yes! If income was equal it would not affect SAT scores!)

“All this article shows me is that poor people give less of a sht (sic) about the value that education provides, and are therefore less likely to pursue every avenue possible to maximize that value and demand excellence from their offspring. Pure and simple.”
(Pure and simple, that’s the problem all right. Of course “every avenue possible” may be limited.)

Finally I found a comment by an intelligent person:

“I came from a family who did not graduate from high school. Their vocabulary was poor and they could not help me with my homework. I lived 10 miles out of town and if there had been tutoring I had no transportation to get there. My verbal score on the SAT while above average was not near the top. It was same for the math. I did much better on the ACT being in the upper percentile. I graduated from Cornell University. If Cornell had gone by my SAT scores instead of my ACT scores I would have never gotten in.”
(And this, in my mind, is what the article was all about. Colleges must recognize the wealthy bias in the SAT and correct it when admitting students. This is also pointed out by Harvard Prof. Michael Sandel in his “Justice” course.)