The Cameron Hoppe Project is an archive, probably forever. Now that I've finished school, I have time to work my new blog--The Sexy Universe. Hope to see you there!
Friday, May 24, 2013
Sunday, November 4, 2012
L'Histoire
These are equally our heritage and our estate. One who would know history must not just read--but must examine, analyze and empathize. This may be the greatest gift Guttenberg has bequeathed us.
In the words of my brother, asking German philosophers to be concise is like asking cows not to pass gas. But sometimes someone else says it better than you ever could:
We moderns are just beginning to form the chain
of a very powerful, future sentiment,
link by link.
We hardly know what we are doing.
It almost seems to us as if it were not the question of a new sentiment,
but of the decline of all old sentiments:
the historical sense is still some thing so poor and cold,
and many are attacked by it as by a frost, made poorer and colder by it.
To others it appears as the indication of stealthily approaching age,
and our planet is regarded by them as a melancholy invalid who,
in order to forget his present condition,
writes the history of his youth.
In fact, this is one aspect of the new sentiment.
He who knows how to regard the history of man in its entirety as his own history
feels in the immense generalization all the grief
of the invalid who thinks of health,
of the old man who thinks of the dream of his youth,
of the lover who is robbed of his beloved,
of the martyr whose ideal is destroyed,
of the hero on the evening of the indecisive battle
which has brought him wounds
and the loss of a friend.
But to bear this immense sum of grief of all kinds,
to be able to bear it and yet still be the hero
who at the commencement of a second day of battle
greets the dawn and his happiness,
as one who has an horizon of centuries before and behind him,
as the heir of all nobility, of all past intellect,
and the obligatory heir (as the noblest) of all the old nobles
while at the same time the first of a new nobility
the equal of which has never been seen nor even dreamt of:
to take all this upon his soul:
the oldest,
the newest,
the losses,
hopes, conquests, and victories of man kind.
To have all this at last in one soul,
and to comprise it in one feeling:
this would necessarily furnish a happiness which man has not hitherto known,
a God’s happiness,
full of power and love,
full of tears and laughter,
a happiness which, like the sun in the evening,
continually gives of its inexhaustible riches and empties into the sea.
And like the sun, too, feels itself richest
when even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars!
This divine feeling
might then
be called
humanity!
---Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom 4:337
Sunday, October 28, 2012
J'adore Halloween
"When ghosts and goblins by the score
ring your bell or pound your door
you better not be stingy or
your nightmares will come true! Boo!"
--Some Disney Writer
Some holidays are celebrated soberly and somberly as a matter of duty, gratitude--Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Easter, etc, etc. But the only pure fun one is Halloween, my favorite. Thanksgiving and Christmas suck, Easter blows, too much work and expectation. Independence Day is also good, but it's a lazy good.
Halloween is perfect. No expectations. All the creativity and fun you can stand. A perfect excuse to be as dumb and excited as you want.
So God Bless Halloween, and God Bless Pumpkin Pi....
ring your bell or pound your door
you better not be stingy or
your nightmares will come true! Boo!"
--Some Disney Writer
Some holidays are celebrated soberly and somberly as a matter of duty, gratitude--Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Easter, etc, etc. But the only pure fun one is Halloween, my favorite. Thanksgiving and Christmas suck, Easter blows, too much work and expectation. Independence Day is also good, but it's a lazy good.
Halloween is perfect. No expectations. All the creativity and fun you can stand. A perfect excuse to be as dumb and excited as you want.
So God Bless Halloween, and God Bless Pumpkin Pi....
 |
| Pumpkin Pi |
Sunday, October 14, 2012
le Saut de Baumgartner (Baumgartner's Jump)
"And He will raise you up on eagle's wings,
bear you on the breath of dawn,
make you to shine like the sun,
and hold you in the palm of His hand."
-- Josh Grobman "On Eagle's Wings"
Felix Baumgartner completed his much pre-hyped jump from 128,100 feet, achieving a top speed 1.24 times the speed of sound. It must have been an amazing ride, with the bill footed by Red Bull and everything. I am neon green with envy. Sure, it could be death to try, but it would be worth it just to see the blue-glowing world one time. Besides, the life insurance is paid.
Gravity creates constant downward acceleration. Friction with air produces drag that runs the opposite direction in which one is moving, and is proportional to velocity squared. So the sum of all the forces on Felix, as with any skydiver, during his fall were equal to his mass times his actual acceleration. Since drag is proportional to the square of velocity, the drag force and the gravitational pull become equal, and acceleration reaches zero. This is known as terminal velocity. Not nearly as exciting as the name sounds. I know; I was disappointed, too. In equation form it looks like this:
The drag coefficient includes half the surface area of the guy in the suit and a proportionality constant. Based on his reported time in freefall and an area of 4.3354 square meters I found this to be 1.15, which is actually quite reasonable.
The next issue to deal with in the problem is the air density. Anybody who's ever been up a tall mountain or a plane ride knows air gets thinner with elevation. As a result, drag forces are higher near the ground than at the elevation Baumgartner jumped from. Without that included, we're only left with the beautiful sky, without any interesting math. So we can expect that Felix's speed went way up, and then it actually decreased until he pulled his parachute at 270 seconds. Then it really dropped.
There's a ton more I just didn't have time to do. For example, the drag coefficient is dependent on the velocity and density of the air, the gravitational force decreases as elevation increases, etc, etc. But I just didn't have time. Sigh!
Enough of all that. I drew it out on paper and coded it out in Matlab. Let's see what it looks like. First, his position with time:
The scale of this is in tens of thousands of feet, so you can see where he pulls the cord at 270 seconds and about 8400 feet. At that point, his descent slows way down. Now, the velocity of the fall:
Two important spots here. On the right, you can see where his chute deploys. On the left, you can see where he reached terminal velocity in the upper atmosphere about 50 seconds in. This was his terminal velocity. After that, the rising density of the atmosphere continually slowed him down. Kinda like being married.
As you can see, the model is a little off; the maximum velocity should be closer to 850 feet per second, while I've got him maxing out a little over a thousand. That is probably due to my crude modeling of gravitational and temperature gradients at high elevation. What can I say? There's only so many hours in a Sunday afternoon. Oh--one last thing. The modeling on this is highly non-linear, so I saw no way to punch out an analytical solution. Really, I don't think there is one, but maybe someone out there knows better than I do.
The equations and code are posted here: http://thesexyuniverse.com/2012/12/08/baumgartners-jump/
Cheers!
bear you on the breath of dawn,
make you to shine like the sun,
and hold you in the palm of His hand."
-- Josh Grobman "On Eagle's Wings"
Gravity creates constant downward acceleration. Friction with air produces drag that runs the opposite direction in which one is moving, and is proportional to velocity squared. So the sum of all the forces on Felix, as with any skydiver, during his fall were equal to his mass times his actual acceleration. Since drag is proportional to the square of velocity, the drag force and the gravitational pull become equal, and acceleration reaches zero. This is known as terminal velocity. Not nearly as exciting as the name sounds. I know; I was disappointed, too. In equation form it looks like this:
The next issue to deal with in the problem is the air density. Anybody who's ever been up a tall mountain or a plane ride knows air gets thinner with elevation. As a result, drag forces are higher near the ground than at the elevation Baumgartner jumped from. Without that included, we're only left with the beautiful sky, without any interesting math. So we can expect that Felix's speed went way up, and then it actually decreased until he pulled his parachute at 270 seconds. Then it really dropped.
There's a ton more I just didn't have time to do. For example, the drag coefficient is dependent on the velocity and density of the air, the gravitational force decreases as elevation increases, etc, etc. But I just didn't have time. Sigh!
Enough of all that. I drew it out on paper and coded it out in Matlab. Let's see what it looks like. First, his position with time:
As you can see, the model is a little off; the maximum velocity should be closer to 850 feet per second, while I've got him maxing out a little over a thousand. That is probably due to my crude modeling of gravitational and temperature gradients at high elevation. What can I say? There's only so many hours in a Sunday afternoon. Oh--one last thing. The modeling on this is highly non-linear, so I saw no way to punch out an analytical solution. Really, I don't think there is one, but maybe someone out there knows better than I do.
The equations and code are posted here: http://thesexyuniverse.com/2012/12/08/baumgartners-jump/
Cheers!
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Gagner au Blackjack
"Mystical explanations are regarded as profound;
the truth is that they do not even go the length of being superficial."
--Nietzsche, The Gay Science 3:126
I hate my Prius for the reasons it's hard to hate. The gas mileage is impeccable. When gas prices go up or down I barely notice it. Everything in it is electronically guided. The electronics are well made, and even better programmed. When I turn the wheel, I feel the same resistance, get the same angle from the tires, and move through every curve identically every time. Pressing the gas yields the same experience. The vehicle does exactly what you expect it to do. Easy driving? You bet. To say the transmission is automatic is an understatement. The gearing is practically continuous: it shifts without you even feeling a thing.
You can eat, talk on your cellphone, and paint the Mona Lisa while inebriated in your Prius, and do it in perfect safety. Here's why:
Here is the trade--a little bit of unpredictability in the drive for predictability in the machine's operation. In the world of an engineer or an economist, this is the sacred trade-off--instability where it is cheap for stability where it costs. The Prius does the opposite. It's the perfect first car for someone who has no interest in knowing anything about how the car works. The difficulty of vehicle repair may be the greatest hoax ever played in the modern world. A well-made vehicle is no more than an array of coupled linear systems. Systems where input a leads to event b and follows inexorably to consequence c. Easy to understand. Easy to analyze. Easy to fix. A good car should require no more than a socket and screwdriver set.
Non-linear and random systems defy human understanding. At the scale of human sight and human life, linear movements are the stuff of survival. A thrown rock moves roughly in a straight line until gravity overcomes it. The sun moves around the earth at the same speed, day after day after day. Seasons come and go, and it's not hard to predict a range of days when frost will set in or when the air will become hotter. Common sense is suddenly good enough to live on.
Except when it's not. Common sense has kept farmers alive for tens of thousands of years and hunter-gatherers for at least a few million years before that. But when it comes to understanding the real workings of the very large or very small world, it is useless. It's common sense, for example, that the sun circles the earth. I see it circle the earth every day. It is only through imagination, art, and mathematics that the real nature of the sun and earth can be understood.
The reason is because these systems are random and/or non-linear. And while it's hard to fathom processes like mountain forming, and aging, the human mind has a tremendous advantage over other minds in a non-linear world. The human brain is big for the same reason a dog's brain is big--so it can predict the emotions and behavior of other humans. Seems like a terrible waste of grey matter, but it is through unconscious emotions and intuitions that we begin to understand the unpredictable.
Randomness and non-linearity are mathematically described by probability curves, partial differential equations, chaos theory, and stochastic calculus. In the realm of human knowledge this is just about as new as it gets. Many of the mathematical operations can never be carried out on paper, and chaos theory itself was impractical until the advent of personal computing.
When we encounter non-linear systems we understand them by humanizing them. We anthropomorphize--see a man where there is none. A pilot, a driver, and a ship captain call their respective vehicles "her" and christen them with names. They become the equivalent of the Cylon fighters in Battlestar Galactica--"more of an animal, maybe, than the human models... like a pet". More powerful ones--the weather, the sea, the sun, the crops, the rivers--become the realms of divinity. Notwithstanding Feuerbach, God is often seen in the non-linearity and randomness the conscious mind is insufficient to analyze. That which is not human at all must become woman and man, as these are the non-linear, stochastic systems every human mind can posit and understand. Like Ginger Guardiola mentions in her lectures, civilizations where weather patterns and crop yields are plentiful and predictable develop pantheons mimicking that experience. And where the weather and crops are unreliable, the pantheons are vindictive and barely sane.
This is why intuitive thinking leads to faith. This is why scientists and believers must struggle to reach agreement. The analytical mind and the religious mind seek to understand the same systems, and encounter many of the same difficulties. When Stephen Hawking stated his hope to "understand the mind of God", he was neither being profound nor faithful. For Hawking, the mind of God is no more than the collection of constants that govern the physical universe. He's not being anymore profound than feelgoodism and self help. The beliefs that survive and thrive are often those which generate the easiest profit. Barf!
Which all leads to Blackjack. Blackjack is an excellent game for one who plays it astutely and attentively. It destroys the timid and elevates the player from the shallow mysticism of luck. The fastest way to lose at Blackjack is to play scared and rely on fortune.
Playing Blackjack is like hiking across a mountain range. When one looks at the crags and peaks, it's easy to think they fall randomly, but they do not. Instead they follow a pattern dictated by non-linear differential dynamics. But each pebble on the mountain, it's size, and composition, is a result of random distribution. A hiker moving at a relatively set pace will find mountain, mountain, mountain over time, and a predictable distribution of rocks and pebbles. In Blackjack, each shuffle of the shoe can be thought of as a mountain, and each set of hands as the pebbles on it.
There is some argument as to whether the house has a built-in advantage in Blackjack. I don't believe there is an inevitable advantage inherent to the cards and the game itself. Rather, the advantage lies in the collected psychology of the players. There will always be a supply of players who don't know how to play, drink while they play, or think their winning or losing depends on "luck". Because of this, virtually anyone can find or learn a system that will allow him or her to come out even or close to it over a period of several hands. Blackjack is like intercollegiate wrestling--even if your opponent is bigger, stronger, and smarter, there are still things you can do to avoid total disaster.
Beginning from a perfectly shuffled deck (or shoe of decks) from which no cards have been taken, the chances of winning or losing the first hand is about even. The chance of the first card having a value of 10 is 4/13, of 1 or 11 is 1/13, and the same for each of 2 through 9. If the dealer is showing 10, it is 53.4% likely that s/he is holding 18 or better. Once the dealer checks, if you survive, the chance drops to 46.1%. A simple system of playing each hand based on probability is the key to Blackjack survival.
If perfect shuffling existed throughout the deck and players played rationally every hand, it would be impossible for either the house or the players to come out ahead over time. In reality, though, perfect shuffling is a virtual impossibility, just as a perfectly smooth distribution of energy throughout the cosmos is virtually impossible. The possibility of coming out ahead lies only in strategic betting before each hand is thrown. There are many card-counting and betting systems out there, but each is flawed because they attempt to linearize a non-linear, stochastic system. Instead, one must learn to play Blackjack as if the game is a brilliant and lovely Queen.
Each hand has a range of probable outcomes based on the cards remaining in the shoe. The mean and the variance of the hands in a given deal follows a non-linear pattern as the shoe is dealt. You must develop a true Gnosis, a true intuition, a true feel for the cards themselves. You must foreknow the hands that will come, and predestine the hands for big wins or small losses. I could give you a set of rules, I'm sure. But that would be like following rules for dating, living, or getting rich. It wouldn't be any fun, and probably wouldn't work out anyway. Self-enslavement never does. You might just as well go drive a Prius.
the truth is that they do not even go the length of being superficial."
--Nietzsche, The Gay Science 3:126
I hate my Prius for the reasons it's hard to hate. The gas mileage is impeccable. When gas prices go up or down I barely notice it. Everything in it is electronically guided. The electronics are well made, and even better programmed. When I turn the wheel, I feel the same resistance, get the same angle from the tires, and move through every curve identically every time. Pressing the gas yields the same experience. The vehicle does exactly what you expect it to do. Easy driving? You bet. To say the transmission is automatic is an understatement. The gearing is practically continuous: it shifts without you even feeling a thing.
You can eat, talk on your cellphone, and paint the Mona Lisa while inebriated in your Prius, and do it in perfect safety. Here's why:
- The car is so dang responsive that even if you notice an impending collision when there's only one second to impact, you've still got plenty of time to come to a complete stop.
- Even if you don't avoid the collision, the Prius doesn't weigh anything. So whatever you hit will be barely scraped.
- The car might as well be a sled for what it weighs, but I still don't think you can die in it. It's a moving series of arches--designed to bounce back while preserving survival space. There are so many airbags, and aircurtains, and air teddy bears pervading the thing...the entire compartment is a cushion waiting to happen.
Here is the trade--a little bit of unpredictability in the drive for predictability in the machine's operation. In the world of an engineer or an economist, this is the sacred trade-off--instability where it is cheap for stability where it costs. The Prius does the opposite. It's the perfect first car for someone who has no interest in knowing anything about how the car works. The difficulty of vehicle repair may be the greatest hoax ever played in the modern world. A well-made vehicle is no more than an array of coupled linear systems. Systems where input a leads to event b and follows inexorably to consequence c. Easy to understand. Easy to analyze. Easy to fix. A good car should require no more than a socket and screwdriver set.
Non-linear and random systems defy human understanding. At the scale of human sight and human life, linear movements are the stuff of survival. A thrown rock moves roughly in a straight line until gravity overcomes it. The sun moves around the earth at the same speed, day after day after day. Seasons come and go, and it's not hard to predict a range of days when frost will set in or when the air will become hotter. Common sense is suddenly good enough to live on.
Except when it's not. Common sense has kept farmers alive for tens of thousands of years and hunter-gatherers for at least a few million years before that. But when it comes to understanding the real workings of the very large or very small world, it is useless. It's common sense, for example, that the sun circles the earth. I see it circle the earth every day. It is only through imagination, art, and mathematics that the real nature of the sun and earth can be understood.
The reason is because these systems are random and/or non-linear. And while it's hard to fathom processes like mountain forming, and aging, the human mind has a tremendous advantage over other minds in a non-linear world. The human brain is big for the same reason a dog's brain is big--so it can predict the emotions and behavior of other humans. Seems like a terrible waste of grey matter, but it is through unconscious emotions and intuitions that we begin to understand the unpredictable.
Randomness and non-linearity are mathematically described by probability curves, partial differential equations, chaos theory, and stochastic calculus. In the realm of human knowledge this is just about as new as it gets. Many of the mathematical operations can never be carried out on paper, and chaos theory itself was impractical until the advent of personal computing.
When we encounter non-linear systems we understand them by humanizing them. We anthropomorphize--see a man where there is none. A pilot, a driver, and a ship captain call their respective vehicles "her" and christen them with names. They become the equivalent of the Cylon fighters in Battlestar Galactica--"more of an animal, maybe, than the human models... like a pet". More powerful ones--the weather, the sea, the sun, the crops, the rivers--become the realms of divinity. Notwithstanding Feuerbach, God is often seen in the non-linearity and randomness the conscious mind is insufficient to analyze. That which is not human at all must become woman and man, as these are the non-linear, stochastic systems every human mind can posit and understand. Like Ginger Guardiola mentions in her lectures, civilizations where weather patterns and crop yields are plentiful and predictable develop pantheons mimicking that experience. And where the weather and crops are unreliable, the pantheons are vindictive and barely sane.
This is why intuitive thinking leads to faith. This is why scientists and believers must struggle to reach agreement. The analytical mind and the religious mind seek to understand the same systems, and encounter many of the same difficulties. When Stephen Hawking stated his hope to "understand the mind of God", he was neither being profound nor faithful. For Hawking, the mind of God is no more than the collection of constants that govern the physical universe. He's not being anymore profound than feelgoodism and self help. The beliefs that survive and thrive are often those which generate the easiest profit. Barf!
Playing Blackjack is like hiking across a mountain range. When one looks at the crags and peaks, it's easy to think they fall randomly, but they do not. Instead they follow a pattern dictated by non-linear differential dynamics. But each pebble on the mountain, it's size, and composition, is a result of random distribution. A hiker moving at a relatively set pace will find mountain, mountain, mountain over time, and a predictable distribution of rocks and pebbles. In Blackjack, each shuffle of the shoe can be thought of as a mountain, and each set of hands as the pebbles on it.
There is some argument as to whether the house has a built-in advantage in Blackjack. I don't believe there is an inevitable advantage inherent to the cards and the game itself. Rather, the advantage lies in the collected psychology of the players. There will always be a supply of players who don't know how to play, drink while they play, or think their winning or losing depends on "luck". Because of this, virtually anyone can find or learn a system that will allow him or her to come out even or close to it over a period of several hands. Blackjack is like intercollegiate wrestling--even if your opponent is bigger, stronger, and smarter, there are still things you can do to avoid total disaster.
Beginning from a perfectly shuffled deck (or shoe of decks) from which no cards have been taken, the chances of winning or losing the first hand is about even. The chance of the first card having a value of 10 is 4/13, of 1 or 11 is 1/13, and the same for each of 2 through 9. If the dealer is showing 10, it is 53.4% likely that s/he is holding 18 or better. Once the dealer checks, if you survive, the chance drops to 46.1%. A simple system of playing each hand based on probability is the key to Blackjack survival.
If perfect shuffling existed throughout the deck and players played rationally every hand, it would be impossible for either the house or the players to come out ahead over time. In reality, though, perfect shuffling is a virtual impossibility, just as a perfectly smooth distribution of energy throughout the cosmos is virtually impossible. The possibility of coming out ahead lies only in strategic betting before each hand is thrown. There are many card-counting and betting systems out there, but each is flawed because they attempt to linearize a non-linear, stochastic system. Instead, one must learn to play Blackjack as if the game is a brilliant and lovely Queen.
Each hand has a range of probable outcomes based on the cards remaining in the shoe. The mean and the variance of the hands in a given deal follows a non-linear pattern as the shoe is dealt. You must develop a true Gnosis, a true intuition, a true feel for the cards themselves. You must foreknow the hands that will come, and predestine the hands for big wins or small losses. I could give you a set of rules, I'm sure. But that would be like following rules for dating, living, or getting rich. It wouldn't be any fun, and probably wouldn't work out anyway. Self-enslavement never does. You might just as well go drive a Prius.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Cinquante Ans de Changement et Encore Non Fini
"You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by."
--Graham Nash
I don't normally do this, but Dr X has a great post discussing Governor George Wallace's inaugural speech in 1963:
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father's hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you'll know by."
--Graham Nash
I don't normally do this, but Dr X has a great post discussing Governor George Wallace's inaugural speech in 1963:
It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.I don't agree at all with his statement at the end. The reality is that most of the way politics is practiced in the US is about evoking feelings of anger and fear, unfortunately. But it's still amazing to think how much real progress has been made for civil rights and freedom in my country, and in only one generation. What a blessing.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
la Gnosie de Renee Descartes, The Tazo, et Rebecca Black
"Jesus said, "Come, that I may teach you about secrets no
person has ever seen. For there exists a great and boundless
realm, whose extent no generation of angels has seen, in
which there is a great invisible Spirit
which no eye of an angel has ever seen,
no thought of the heart has ever comprehended,
and it was never called by any name."
--The Gospel of Judas
During one of my periodic grocery store jaunts a couple weeks ago, I noticed the Tazo brand "Zen" green tea and picked it up for one of my friends. As I was handing it over to her the next day, I noticed that on the box top was this logo:
I realized that I was looking at the Gnostic cross. The precious irony of all this is that the Zen tradition and the Gnostic tradition are just about as opposite as any other two I can think of.
As a practice, Zen is pretty unique. While it falls under the general category of Buddhism, it only faintly resembles the Indian tradtions. In fact, there has been a 1000+ year debate as to whether or not Japanese Buddhism is even Buddhism at all. But I think the starkest line is drawn by the difference in their 3-D renderings of the Buddha himself.
Zen Buddhism has tremendous appeal, especially in the United States, mainly because one doesn't have to abstain from worldly possessions to pursue it. On the contrary--one of the primary doctrines of Zen is that every morsel of life is sacred and numinous. Even more basic to Zen is that the deepest and most universal meaning escapes intellectual pursuit. It is found, rather, in emptiness. According to Osho:
The Zen practice reaches incessantly toward this understanding. Gnosticism points in the opposite direction. In Gnostic belief the material world is completely separate from the Ultimate. The objective of the practitioner is to learn the sacred truths that will allow him or her to escape the material realm and enter the Heavenly domain. Gnosticism is a treasure trove of ancient thought, in which the Phoencian-Jewish-Greco-Egyptian mythos is told and retold with interest. In fact, the entire Christian and Islamic traditions, along with all their offshoots, cannot be really understood outside the Gnostic context. The Gnostics recognized that their mythology was just that, a series of stories within which one could look for truth--truth more real than can be physically seen. More importantly, they recognized that underneath all perception was a deeper, more meaningful reality that can never be seen, but must be felt and known.
It doesn't take much to realize this is the real basis of mathematical and scientific modeling and experimentation. It's the basis of anthropology, archaeology, and most philosophy and art. In a distillation column a gas rises to the top while a liquid falls to the bottom, and in ideal conditions there is virtually no temperature difference between the two. In fact, you cannot measure the energy exchange between phases with a thermometer. That which one can perceive is a mere thousandth of the activity, energy, and information exchange occurring in the column.
It's difficult to find a fusion of Zen and Gnosticism because the of their different approaches. But they are out there, sometimes as banal as the Tazo Tea logo. For the ambitious and self-flagellant, there is the Meditations on First Philosophy. But there's also Rebecca Black singing Friday. The character in the video lives the life of an upper middle class American girl. There are no special problems, no special learning, in fact, beyond the historical and global rarity of her lifestyle, there's nothing unique about her.
I had a conversation recently on Mark Thoma's blog. The subject was higher education and it's use. The discussion centered on the value of higher education and the quality of students. A commenter mentioned that virtually all college students don't work, party non-stop, and generally learn nothing useful. I can't speak to the last point. But I had to tell the commenter that in my university experience (at the school ranked third on Playboy's party school list) virtually no one lived that way. If I had to guess, I'd put the number of people who had the time and resources to live the Hollywood stereotype around 5% and maybe closer to 1% of the student population. Most college students (at public universities, anyway) come from middle class homes and live a younger, more single version of their parents lifestyles. In other words, most of their waking time is taken up by classes, studying, and working. Most earn barely enough money to pay their bills and buy food. "Partying" and social life are a side note to daily life, as they are for most Americans. This is not anything to boo-hoo about. It is just reality, and it is fine.
This leads back to Friday. In the video, nothing is real. The main character "wakes up" even though she was never asleep. Her hair and makeup are already done. She consumes breakfast without eating. Her friends pull up without actually being in the car. At the party scene later, a large number of people are there, and they are all the same. There are no rejects. Everything is fine. The singer's voice isn't even real. It's all image, all artifice. How many people actually live that way? None. How common is the experience? Rare, so rare there may not be anyone who has it. What hidden knowledge is behind the work? Nothing. I think that's the whole point.
person has ever seen. For there exists a great and boundless
realm, whose extent no generation of angels has seen, in
which there is a great invisible Spirit
which no eye of an angel has ever seen,
no thought of the heart has ever comprehended,
and it was never called by any name."
--The Gospel of Judas
During one of my periodic grocery store jaunts a couple weeks ago, I noticed the Tazo brand "Zen" green tea and picked it up for one of my friends. As I was handing it over to her the next day, I noticed that on the box top was this logo:
I realized that I was looking at the Gnostic cross. The precious irony of all this is that the Zen tradition and the Gnostic tradition are just about as opposite as any other two I can think of.As a practice, Zen is pretty unique. While it falls under the general category of Buddhism, it only faintly resembles the Indian tradtions. In fact, there has been a 1000+ year debate as to whether or not Japanese Buddhism is even Buddhism at all. But I think the starkest line is drawn by the difference in their 3-D renderings of the Buddha himself.
Zen Buddhism has tremendous appeal, especially in the United States, mainly because one doesn't have to abstain from worldly possessions to pursue it. On the contrary--one of the primary doctrines of Zen is that every morsel of life is sacred and numinous. Even more basic to Zen is that the deepest and most universal meaning escapes intellectual pursuit. It is found, rather, in emptiness. According to Osho:
A haiku of Basho is The ancient pond....When you hear the haiku you have to visualize it. It is so small that it is not a question of understanding, it is a question of entering into it....:
The ancient pond
A frog jumps in
Plop
...Basho has said so much: the ancient pond, the ancient trees, the ancient rocks....and there must be silence....and a frog jumps in. For a moment the silence is disturbed, plop. And again the silence is restored....What does he want to say in this haiku? His saying, This ancient world...and your existence is just a plop, a little sound in the silence. And then you are gone, and the silence deepens....That great silence is your very being. Is is also the very being of the whole universe.
The Zen practice reaches incessantly toward this understanding. Gnosticism points in the opposite direction. In Gnostic belief the material world is completely separate from the Ultimate. The objective of the practitioner is to learn the sacred truths that will allow him or her to escape the material realm and enter the Heavenly domain. Gnosticism is a treasure trove of ancient thought, in which the Phoencian-Jewish-Greco-Egyptian mythos is told and retold with interest. In fact, the entire Christian and Islamic traditions, along with all their offshoots, cannot be really understood outside the Gnostic context. The Gnostics recognized that their mythology was just that, a series of stories within which one could look for truth--truth more real than can be physically seen. More importantly, they recognized that underneath all perception was a deeper, more meaningful reality that can never be seen, but must be felt and known.
It doesn't take much to realize this is the real basis of mathematical and scientific modeling and experimentation. It's the basis of anthropology, archaeology, and most philosophy and art. In a distillation column a gas rises to the top while a liquid falls to the bottom, and in ideal conditions there is virtually no temperature difference between the two. In fact, you cannot measure the energy exchange between phases with a thermometer. That which one can perceive is a mere thousandth of the activity, energy, and information exchange occurring in the column.
It's difficult to find a fusion of Zen and Gnosticism because the of their different approaches. But they are out there, sometimes as banal as the Tazo Tea logo. For the ambitious and self-flagellant, there is the Meditations on First Philosophy. But there's also Rebecca Black singing Friday. The character in the video lives the life of an upper middle class American girl. There are no special problems, no special learning, in fact, beyond the historical and global rarity of her lifestyle, there's nothing unique about her.
I had a conversation recently on Mark Thoma's blog. The subject was higher education and it's use. The discussion centered on the value of higher education and the quality of students. A commenter mentioned that virtually all college students don't work, party non-stop, and generally learn nothing useful. I can't speak to the last point. But I had to tell the commenter that in my university experience (at the school ranked third on Playboy's party school list) virtually no one lived that way. If I had to guess, I'd put the number of people who had the time and resources to live the Hollywood stereotype around 5% and maybe closer to 1% of the student population. Most college students (at public universities, anyway) come from middle class homes and live a younger, more single version of their parents lifestyles. In other words, most of their waking time is taken up by classes, studying, and working. Most earn barely enough money to pay their bills and buy food. "Partying" and social life are a side note to daily life, as they are for most Americans. This is not anything to boo-hoo about. It is just reality, and it is fine.
This leads back to Friday. In the video, nothing is real. The main character "wakes up" even though she was never asleep. Her hair and makeup are already done. She consumes breakfast without eating. Her friends pull up without actually being in the car. At the party scene later, a large number of people are there, and they are all the same. There are no rejects. Everything is fine. The singer's voice isn't even real. It's all image, all artifice. How many people actually live that way? None. How common is the experience? Rare, so rare there may not be anyone who has it. What hidden knowledge is behind the work? Nothing. I think that's the whole point.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
les Enfants de Fritz et Carl
"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."
--Genesis 1:28
The commandment to be fruitful and multiply was was completely unrealistic and I have a feeling that everyone at the time knew it. How could humanity compete with the vastness of nature and her vagaries? Layered beneath that understanding was an even darker reality--those ancients were at least 40,000 years into the Quaternary Extinction begun by their unwritten ancestors. They had no idea those ancestors had ever existed. As far as they knew, the gods had formed the earth a few generations prior to their own.
Whether the words were taken literally by our ancestors or were merely re-interpreted (mis-interpreted) by their progeny, we can be certain that they never lived up to it. The proof is in this chart (lifted from Kruse Kronicle):
As the chart shows, it took more than 5000 years for human population to rise from 50 million to 350 million. Most of this growth was due to the spread of agriculture and farming technology. For example, European population was stable from 800 AD to 1100 AD, prior to the invention of the wheelbarrow (already in use in China) and the horse collar. These inventions spurred population growth, which in turn created ripe conditions for the Black Death.
Gods call from the starry sky:Prophets and Pontiffs call for frequent and Holy WarWhile clerics and priestitutes admonish the wounded, bless their sores.Often emanates from the barrack recitation of deific writ
But where from comes the bullet?The sword, armory, the bomb, and radio?When the wound is dressed, whence the gauze?
Regardless of commandment, magic, or animal sacrifice, the demand that human beings go forth, multiply, and subdue the earth was destined to never be achieved, until two researchers changed that destiny--Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. It had been known for nearly a century that adding nitrates to soil increased crop yields, and beginning in the 1830s, European farmers had been seeding their fields with sodium nitrate. Even though global population had reached 1 billion by 1800 AD, it had risen by only 50% by 1913.
In 1909, Haber perfected a laboratory process that fixed atmospheric nitrogen in the form of liquid ammonia. Four years later, an industrial process for producing economically significant amounts of ammonia was created by Carl Bosch. Today, this process consumes approximately 2% of global energy production. The graphical changes in global population following it are striking:
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In the 100+ years prior to it, the human population increased by 50%. Here we sit 100 years later and global population has grown by another 400%. More people have been born, survived to reproduction, struggled, built, destroyed, loved, hated, and died in the last 100 years than in all of human history before it.
What sort of lives have those people lived? It's very difficult for me to say. I would venture that I know a fair amount about the history and aspirations of first-world people. But when it comes to developing and 3rd world cultures, I really don't, and I can't say I know anyone who does. My guess is that they are less technological, deal with more disease, and less literate than most of us who read this. I would also bet they tend to be more superstitious and less formally logical. However, I would also bet that they are more like myself, my family, and my friends than either I or they would initially believe.
Thomas Malthus postulated that animals and plants reproduce much more than their habitats can ordinarily support. He also guessed that human beings were the same way. He reasoned that human population would always grow at exponential rates, while agricultural output would only grow at linear rates. He was a brilliant ecologist for his time, but he was unfortunately born before the invention of barrier prophylaxis. By the time the Haber-Bosch process came to dominate the human chunk of planet Earth, this kind of birth control was already in widespread use throughout Western Europe, Canada, and the United States.
I believe this is the reason population growth in the industrialized world proceeded at a linear rate (as the chart shows), while exploding geometrically in the undeveloped world. Sending food to the starving is an obvious solution to an immediate and pressing need. Sending them birth control was a bridge too far. Malthus was partially right. Partially right makes him better than most.
Human population exploded, but mainly in areas and among people who could least afford it. We now live in a time of porous borders, becoming more porous every year throughout the entire world. Global capital moves from one center of power to another within minutes....or seconds. First Worlders of every profession are everyday locked in greater competition with a developing world population outnumbering them by three to one.
100 years ago, two German researchers discovered 90% of the solution to world hunger. The next 100 years will tell the story of how the world solved the problems created by it. 100 years from now our counterparts will talk about how we stopped the population explosion, how we preserved and expanded human rights, how economic, academic, and personal opportunities and freedoms extended around the planet. It will take more than two men playing with catalysts and condensers. As is often the case, the problems of global competition must be addressed by the will to globally cooperate.
What Malthus did not realize, and could not have known, is that human beings have a natural tendency to limit their offspring to a number they can manage. This is well-explained by r/K selection theory. More importantly, recent history tells us that when societies have access to birth control, they tend to use it. And the more types they can access, the more they use. If barrier prophylaxis was effective prior to 1960, the birth control pill doubled that effectiveness:
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The conventional wisdom in the United States, at least as I've heard it, is that men care nothing about birth control, and only giving women access is effective. I don't believe the historical data support this. Birth rates in nations with easy access to barrier methods had half the birth rates of those without them in 1960, and access to birth control pills halved that rate again. Interestingly, fertility rates seem to converge at two births per woman across all or most cultures. Even the poorest nations have seen significant increases in standards of living in tandem with falling fertility rates.
Back in March, Gary North mused on what he terms "The Most World's Important Unanswered Historical Question: 'What Changed in 1800?'" Dr. North opens his article this way:
The economic historian Gregory Clark summarizes a remarkable fact.
". . . there is no sign of any improvement in material conditions for settled agrarian societies as we approach 1800. There was no gain between 1800 BC and AD 1800 -- a period of 3,600 years. Indeed the wages for east and south Asia and southern Europe for 1800 stand out by their low level compared to those for ancient Babylonia, ancient Greece, or Roman Egypt."
Then, around 1800, this all changed. Economic growth began about 2% per annum, compounded. That brought our world into existence.
To me the answer is obvious. James Hutton happened. Often called "The Father of Modern Geology", Hutton discovered and proved the theory of geologic uniformitarianism. Over the course of 25 years he showed that under varying environmental conditions sediments are laid down and/or eroded at constant rates. From this basis, he and his contemporaries were able to determine the ages of continental strata around the globe. Once formations could be aged, natural philosophers, miners, and entrepreneurs around the world were able to determine where (and how deeply) to dig for geologic resources.
Based on Hutton's work, coal beds were discovered throughout North America and much of Europe, along with vast quantities of iron ore, and even the saltpeter mines of Chile--the same saltpeter mines eventually put out of business by Haber and Bosch. As Dr. North correctly points out, the legal and educational institutions needed for the industrial revolution had already existed for nearly 200 years. What was lacking--reliable access to minerals and energy--Hutton found.
I shared my opinion with Dr North by email, but I don't think he was impressed. He's a brilliant economist--one of the best IMHO--but he's also a very fundamental in his faith, as were many in Hutton's time. It's his right to be and I don't fault him a bit. God Bless him, even. Every discovery Hutton made contradicted not only the two creation stories of Genesis, but also those of every culture that existed when he lived. When faith and evidence collide, faith usually wins. It's best to avoid the collision.
Of all the nuts to be cracked, this may be the most important. Religious movements proved wonderful when they ended Communist domination of Eastern Europe and Jim Crow laws in the Southern United States. However, as Christopher Hitchens points out, they also facilitated the rise of fascism in pre-WWII Europe and have stymied contraception and anti-poverty initiatives in the Third World. I would also argue that in the last 40 years many religious institutions have sought to become gatekeepers and justifiers of privilege and indifference. They've been darn successful, too, I'm sorry to say.
The point is not to defame religion; on the contrary, I love theology and religious practice. My point is that the challenges to this world will require technical and scientific solutions that religion must embrace. They will require social changes that popular religions can and must facilitate. I hope they will.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
la Crise Financière II
"The Tao of heaven is like the bending of a bow.
The high is lowered, and the low is raised.
If the string is too long, it is shortened;
If there is not enough, it is made longer.
The Tao of heaven is to take from those who have too much
and give to those who do not have enough.
Man's way is different.
He takes from those who do not have enough
to give to those who already have too much."
--Lao Tzu
The high is lowered, and the low is raised.
If the string is too long, it is shortened;
If there is not enough, it is made longer.
The Tao of heaven is to take from those who have too much
and give to those who do not have enough.
Man's way is different.
He takes from those who do not have enough
to give to those who already have too much."
--Lao Tzu
I ended the last post by linking to the animated version of David Harvey’s lecture. It’s a good jumping off point for this second (and hopefully last) part of the discussion. Harvey unabashedly analyzes social phenomena from a Marxist perspective. This is useful because there are only two aspects I still want to touch on—the predictability of the crisis and the exercise of social power within it.
Think for a moment about the people who surround you in your daily life. The people you work with regularly, the people you interact with through social media, your family, friends, etc. How many of them are significantly wealthier than you are? How many are much poorer? How many have positions of way greater responsibility than you do and how many have much less? How many of them have mental or physical capacities different from your own? What about the age factor?
The thrust of the thought experiment is that you probably know very few people whose lives are extremely divergent from your own. Rich and or powerful folks tend to hang out with each other, poor and weak folks tend to do the same, and the pattern repeats all the way across the in-between. The predictability of the financial collapse is related to this in no small way.
Lots of national leaders, corporate leaders, and mainstream media folks have said in one way or another that the financial crisis was not predictable. I think the best example of this is from an interview with Dick Cheney:
AP: So let's start with the economy. Did you ever think that you'd be—that we'd be finishing a two-term Republican presidency with a federal budget deficit so high, with bailouts and government spending sort of run away?
VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: No, obviously, I wouldn't have predicted that. On the other hand I wouldn't have predicted 9/11, the global war on terror, the need to simultaneous run military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the near collapse of the financial system on a global basis, not just the U.S.
Normally I’m pretty skeptical about the words that come out of the mouths of national politicians. In this case, I take him at his word. Here we have the most powerful, most policy-involved Vice President in the history of the US. He had been given complete access to the entire American Intelligence apparatus, had unfettered access to the President and his advisers, a staff of very smart people, and could call up virtually any businessman or academic on the planet. For all this, he knew of no one who could have predicted the financial crisis.
Another example: Luke O’Connor outlines a pamphlet from Zurich Advisors where they had deemed the financial crisis as an event that could happen, on average, once every 10,000 years. This is an organization whose very existence is justified by its ability to measure and mitigate risk. As Dr Lo pointed out, financial engineers needed to only look back 25 years to the housing market of the early 1980s to understand their risk position.
Borrowing a number from the National Small Business Association, 25% of Americans are directly employed by small businesses. If we assume another 10% are either supported by non-profit organizations or underground markets, that leaves 65% of the population employed and/or provided-for by large corporations and government entities. Here's the rub of all this--the decision makers in the upper hierarchies of these organizations are all living and working in the same sliver of our social world. Our economic and political systems cloister them from those who are poorer (99.9% of us) and therefore differently informed.
This interview with Maria Bartiromo is a perfect example. She spends the first five minutes outlining her privileged position in the financial media. At twenty minutes in she describes the reasons she believes public assistance to financial firms was justified. Her reasons culminate in the statement that in this country we don't leave those in poverty on their own or let them go hungry. I gasped when I heard her say this--because most of the millions of Americans in poverty in the US are left to fend for themselves in very substantial ways. Those in poverty do not live in safe neighborhoods, stay in decent houses, go to good schools, receive adequate health care, and many, many go to bed hungry. But being wealthy and well connected means she never confronts it. The social mobility numbers for the United States tell us that she probably never will. Her material success makes her a less informed, less capable journalist and she doesn't even know it.
Which brings me to my first point--there were many people who saw the Wall Street collapse coming. Quite a few bloggers and media personalities saw it coming: Nouriel Roubini, Paul Krugman, George Soros, Gary North, and Peter Schiff (my favorite) all predicted it. Quite a few people on wall street predicted it, and made a killing. Doing manual labor, poor person's jobs for the last 18 years, I personally know several people who saw the financial crisis coming--a couple of them were even able to time it. However, those in powerful policy-making positions, those with the most influence in mass media, and even the best-known religious leaders in the United States and in the world had no insight.
Part of this can be chalked up to confirmation bias--the neurological tendency of the human mind to preserve it's networks, and it shows up as cognitive inertia. This is closely related to the maintenance of social position. In fact, if individuals guessing at trends and values know ahead of time what others are guessing, they have a tendency to conform to the group mean. As J.M. Keynes notes in chapter 12 of The General Theory, "Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally then to succeed unconventionally."
Which brings me to my more important point; that the financial crisis allowed for an international display of social power. In his film, Inside Job, Charles Ferguson makes the case that the world's leading economists and financiers had to have known how risky the global financial system had become and deliberately mislead the public and government officials around the world to facilitate large-scale looting of the financial infrastructure. While I didn't find his case convincing, he powerfully illustrates the depth of corruption and conflicted interest within the economics profession. He also shows that elected officials either lack the knowledge or the will to resist conventional economic wisdom. By the end of the movie, I couldn't deny that the decade of the 2000's is clear evidence that the economics profession is undeserving of my trust or anyone else's.
I don't go as far as Ferguson does to indict the financial industry in general. To be honest, the folks in charge of it just ain't as smart as their detractors make them out to be. What wealthy executives and investors do have, however, is a vast amount of collective social power. So when their businesses and bonus pools were endangered they cried to governments around the globe for immediate capital assistance. In the United States, it took 10 days from initial proposal to Presidential signing to create the Troubled Assets Relief Program.
For comparison, it took nearly 10 years to pass the dirt-cheap 9/11 responders health care bill. In total, more than $8 trillion has made available to the financial industry by the United States government. But an amount equal to less than 2% of that has been made available to assist local school districts dealing with the aftermath of the financial meltdown. I'd argue that virtually the entire chain of events leading up to and following it can be understood in terms of Isaiah chapter 1, chapter 77 of the Tao Te Ching, and chapter 5 of the Dhammapada.
My final observation is that during the financial crisis, as with natural disasters, the only reliable sources of insurance were sovereign governments. Go figure.
This interview with Maria Bartiromo is a perfect example. She spends the first five minutes outlining her privileged position in the financial media. At twenty minutes in she describes the reasons she believes public assistance to financial firms was justified. Her reasons culminate in the statement that in this country we don't leave those in poverty on their own or let them go hungry. I gasped when I heard her say this--because most of the millions of Americans in poverty in the US are left to fend for themselves in very substantial ways. Those in poverty do not live in safe neighborhoods, stay in decent houses, go to good schools, receive adequate health care, and many, many go to bed hungry. But being wealthy and well connected means she never confronts it. The social mobility numbers for the United States tell us that she probably never will. Her material success makes her a less informed, less capable journalist and she doesn't even know it.
Which brings me to my first point--there were many people who saw the Wall Street collapse coming. Quite a few bloggers and media personalities saw it coming: Nouriel Roubini, Paul Krugman, George Soros, Gary North, and Peter Schiff (my favorite) all predicted it. Quite a few people on wall street predicted it, and made a killing. Doing manual labor, poor person's jobs for the last 18 years, I personally know several people who saw the financial crisis coming--a couple of them were even able to time it. However, those in powerful policy-making positions, those with the most influence in mass media, and even the best-known religious leaders in the United States and in the world had no insight.
Part of this can be chalked up to confirmation bias--the neurological tendency of the human mind to preserve it's networks, and it shows up as cognitive inertia. This is closely related to the maintenance of social position. In fact, if individuals guessing at trends and values know ahead of time what others are guessing, they have a tendency to conform to the group mean. As J.M. Keynes notes in chapter 12 of The General Theory, "Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally then to succeed unconventionally."
Which brings me to my more important point; that the financial crisis allowed for an international display of social power. In his film, Inside Job, Charles Ferguson makes the case that the world's leading economists and financiers had to have known how risky the global financial system had become and deliberately mislead the public and government officials around the world to facilitate large-scale looting of the financial infrastructure. While I didn't find his case convincing, he powerfully illustrates the depth of corruption and conflicted interest within the economics profession. He also shows that elected officials either lack the knowledge or the will to resist conventional economic wisdom. By the end of the movie, I couldn't deny that the decade of the 2000's is clear evidence that the economics profession is undeserving of my trust or anyone else's.
I don't go as far as Ferguson does to indict the financial industry in general. To be honest, the folks in charge of it just ain't as smart as their detractors make them out to be. What wealthy executives and investors do have, however, is a vast amount of collective social power. So when their businesses and bonus pools were endangered they cried to governments around the globe for immediate capital assistance. In the United States, it took 10 days from initial proposal to Presidential signing to create the Troubled Assets Relief Program.
For comparison, it took nearly 10 years to pass the dirt-cheap 9/11 responders health care bill. In total, more than $8 trillion has made available to the financial industry by the United States government. But an amount equal to less than 2% of that has been made available to assist local school districts dealing with the aftermath of the financial meltdown. I'd argue that virtually the entire chain of events leading up to and following it can be understood in terms of Isaiah chapter 1, chapter 77 of the Tao Te Ching, and chapter 5 of the Dhammapada.
My final observation is that during the financial crisis, as with natural disasters, the only reliable sources of insurance were sovereign governments. Go figure.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
la Crise Financière I
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
W B Yeats, The Second Coming
Since I want this blog to be about big ideas, large events--the heavy game, trapped in the mad woods, beaten to death by human fists, freshly stuffed in a grimy shed--I don't think it can be complete without saying something about the financial collapse hat punctuated the 00's. And as Dubya used to say, I'm The Decider.
I work for a very large bank here in the U.S., and I have no desire to rip on my employer. Furthermore, I don't want to get into the tawdry, petty, or political. There's plenty of other places people can go for that. Instead I want to look at a few of the patterns, some of the folklore, and try to outline some of the deeper implications. Furthermore, this isn't the time for me to get into deep monetary theory, so that'll have to wait as well.
One of the best explanations of the proximate causes is by Dr. Lo of MIT. I don't have the inclination to break his explanation down when he does it so much better. Watch the video yourself and see what I mean. There are all kinds of other explanations: greed, hubris, lack of common sense, the older generation, the younger generation, deadbeats, the rich, the poor...in the United States many of us blamed President Bush while many others blamed the Democrats in Congress, as in other lands where political partisans blasted blame back and forth. The problem is, this thing was global. The capitalist societies suffered the same as the communist ones, well-regulated economies weren't spared and neither were the deregulated ones. Fiscally responsible nations like Spain got pounded as bad as the spendthrifts. There was no political party, religious entity, or age group whose members were exempt. Furthermore, these patterns had been around for millenia before the train wreck, and it will be for many more. The only folks that didn't get the horns (as far as I can tell) were in two groups:
My second point: the financial crisis, up to now, has actually catalized very little social change. David Kotok remarks that investors and workers were scarred by the events, and many others join him. It's certain that a couple billion people experienced negative impacts, but I've seen no evidence of cultural upheaval. In fact, most societies responded the same way they always have, usually by doing more of what they were already doing.
We hear it often, at least in the US, that the Financial Crisis changed everything, that 9/11 changed everything, that the AIDS epidemic changed everything. But really, little has changed. If anything, these events have caused our preexisting prejudices and habits to become even more entrenched. I think it's ultimately for this reason that the financial crisis of 2007-20?? is not unique and will be repeated; as Dr Harvey points out, they're endemic to capitalist (and many non-capitalist) systems.
At this point I have to stop part I. There'll be a part II, if not tomorrow then the next day. Cheers!
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
W B Yeats, The Second Coming
Since I want this blog to be about big ideas, large events--the heavy game, trapped in the mad woods, beaten to death by human fists, freshly stuffed in a grimy shed--I don't think it can be complete without saying something about the financial collapse hat punctuated the 00's. And as Dubya used to say, I'm The Decider.
I work for a very large bank here in the U.S., and I have no desire to rip on my employer. Furthermore, I don't want to get into the tawdry, petty, or political. There's plenty of other places people can go for that. Instead I want to look at a few of the patterns, some of the folklore, and try to outline some of the deeper implications. Furthermore, this isn't the time for me to get into deep monetary theory, so that'll have to wait as well.
One of the best explanations of the proximate causes is by Dr. Lo of MIT. I don't have the inclination to break his explanation down when he does it so much better. Watch the video yourself and see what I mean. There are all kinds of other explanations: greed, hubris, lack of common sense, the older generation, the younger generation, deadbeats, the rich, the poor...in the United States many of us blamed President Bush while many others blamed the Democrats in Congress, as in other lands where political partisans blasted blame back and forth. The problem is, this thing was global. The capitalist societies suffered the same as the communist ones, well-regulated economies weren't spared and neither were the deregulated ones. Fiscally responsible nations like Spain got pounded as bad as the spendthrifts. There was no political party, religious entity, or age group whose members were exempt. Furthermore, these patterns had been around for millenia before the train wreck, and it will be for many more. The only folks that didn't get the horns (as far as I can tell) were in two groups:
- Societies too poor, or too hunter-gatherer, to notice
- Australia
We hear it often, at least in the US, that the Financial Crisis changed everything, that 9/11 changed everything, that the AIDS epidemic changed everything. But really, little has changed. If anything, these events have caused our preexisting prejudices and habits to become even more entrenched. I think it's ultimately for this reason that the financial crisis of 2007-20?? is not unique and will be repeated; as Dr Harvey points out, they're endemic to capitalist (and many non-capitalist) systems.
At this point I have to stop part I. There'll be a part II, if not tomorrow then the next day. Cheers!
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Nouvelle Année
"Therefore if any man [be] in Christ, [he is] a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."
--2 Corintians 5:17
The earliest I remember hearing about New Years Resolutions was from Ms. Rivera, my second grade teacher. She's not Ms. Rivera anymore. She got married, transferred to another school, and everytime I saw her after that she was pregnant. I think she must've had four or five little ones by the end. The Resolutions thing I carried on intermittently with mixed results. From what I can tell of the culture in general, about 90% of 'em either blow up or wither on the vine. Expensively, sometimes.
If you've never gotten the chance read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, you should take your next opportunity. Professor Pajares lays out most of the main ideas here. The entire book is pretty damn insightful, but the most important chapters, IMHO, are five and nine. Kuhn uses them to describe the landscape of science; how virtually all scientific work is done in support of a handful of overarching ideas. Those ideas, the paradigms, rarely change. It takes a Herculean measure of predictive insight or a major crisis of discovery for a paradigm to go away. They are never erased--one falls from use when it's supplanted by another.
Kuhn notes that a new paradigm, even when it's got obvious value, usually takes a generation to be accepted by normal science. Even when one proves to be less effective than its predecessor, it's still incredibly stubborn to uproot. It's not hard to see in historical and popular culture that this doesn't just happen in the realm of science. Every generation defines itself, and to do so it must reject at least part of the identity of the one before it. Politically speaking (for example), the Greatest Generation embraced the ideas of Roosevelt and the New Deal, The Silent Generation and Early-Wave Baby Boomers became hipsters and hippies, and the Late Boomers embraced the ideals of Rand and Coolidge, as resurrected by Ronald Reagan. As Eisenhower and Johnson presided under the shadow of Roosevelt, the Bushes and Obama preside under the shadow of Reagan. In the next decade we will see the ideals of the Late Boomers replaced by those of their Millennial children.
This phenomenon often takes the form of the grizzled veteran vs the young upstart--in Da Vinci's bitter displacement by the the younger Michaelangelo, and Darius III's downfall at the hands of Alexander the Great. Are these so different from the conflict in physics between Niels Bohr and Richard Feynman? In these great collisions, winning and losing are beside the point. What an incredible moment, just to be in the fight, just to be in the room.
Some extend far beyond the generational limit: it was 300 years before Newton's laws of gravitation were supplanted by Einstein's relativistic model. Even more durable has been Paul's Christianity. Regardless of what has been added or taken away, it's Paul's work that defines the doctrine and practice of Christianity. The cannonical and non-cannonical Gospel writers purported to tell their stories, but they were judged on the ideas of Paul. For at least 1800 years now, many have worked around the edges (the Popes, Gnostics, Reformers, and Restorationists), but it's all been under the framework of Paul's theology.
Kuhn doesn't speculate about the reasons for this ordinarily generational phenomenon, the paradigm. My explanation is that paradigms strut the stage of human analysis and imagination. They seem larger-than-life and spectacular beyond man, but beneath this maya, they are only us, comprised of fats and proteins in organic neurons. This is what makes them simultaneously fragile and durable. From Howard Bloom in The Lucifer Principle:
Six years ago, I had a conversation about cartoon watching with one of my old friends. He was describing how it took him until the tenth grade to quit watching after school cartoons. I had a similar experience when I was twelve. I thought that upon entering Junior High I would lose the desire. My magical thinking was not reflective of reality. Instead, the habit was broken when I transferred to a different foster home. The reception on the black and white tv I was given was just too poor to make the cartoon-watching experience enjoyable. As 12-steppers, Priests, and Drill Sergeants know, change of environment and change of habit are fast lovers.
Barring that, we often have to be content to nip around the edges. I think this is what Paul was getting at in 2nd Corinthians and Martin Luther was getting at it in the 95 Theses. Changing ourselves is a struggle that can and should take all our lives. Seeking deep understanding of the world, contributing to our global culture, and working for justice should all take at least that long.
So Cheers to you on this amazing New Year
May your resolutions be fruitful
And your paradigms grand
--2 Corintians 5:17
The earliest I remember hearing about New Years Resolutions was from Ms. Rivera, my second grade teacher. She's not Ms. Rivera anymore. She got married, transferred to another school, and everytime I saw her after that she was pregnant. I think she must've had four or five little ones by the end. The Resolutions thing I carried on intermittently with mixed results. From what I can tell of the culture in general, about 90% of 'em either blow up or wither on the vine. Expensively, sometimes.
If you've never gotten the chance read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, you should take your next opportunity. Professor Pajares lays out most of the main ideas here. The entire book is pretty damn insightful, but the most important chapters, IMHO, are five and nine. Kuhn uses them to describe the landscape of science; how virtually all scientific work is done in support of a handful of overarching ideas. Those ideas, the paradigms, rarely change. It takes a Herculean measure of predictive insight or a major crisis of discovery for a paradigm to go away. They are never erased--one falls from use when it's supplanted by another.
Kuhn notes that a new paradigm, even when it's got obvious value, usually takes a generation to be accepted by normal science. Even when one proves to be less effective than its predecessor, it's still incredibly stubborn to uproot. It's not hard to see in historical and popular culture that this doesn't just happen in the realm of science. Every generation defines itself, and to do so it must reject at least part of the identity of the one before it. Politically speaking (for example), the Greatest Generation embraced the ideas of Roosevelt and the New Deal, The Silent Generation and Early-Wave Baby Boomers became hipsters and hippies, and the Late Boomers embraced the ideals of Rand and Coolidge, as resurrected by Ronald Reagan. As Eisenhower and Johnson presided under the shadow of Roosevelt, the Bushes and Obama preside under the shadow of Reagan. In the next decade we will see the ideals of the Late Boomers replaced by those of their Millennial children.
This phenomenon often takes the form of the grizzled veteran vs the young upstart--in Da Vinci's bitter displacement by the the younger Michaelangelo, and Darius III's downfall at the hands of Alexander the Great. Are these so different from the conflict in physics between Niels Bohr and Richard Feynman? In these great collisions, winning and losing are beside the point. What an incredible moment, just to be in the fight, just to be in the room.
Some extend far beyond the generational limit: it was 300 years before Newton's laws of gravitation were supplanted by Einstein's relativistic model. Even more durable has been Paul's Christianity. Regardless of what has been added or taken away, it's Paul's work that defines the doctrine and practice of Christianity. The cannonical and non-cannonical Gospel writers purported to tell their stories, but they were judged on the ideas of Paul. For at least 1800 years now, many have worked around the edges (the Popes, Gnostics, Reformers, and Restorationists), but it's all been under the framework of Paul's theology.
Kuhn doesn't speculate about the reasons for this ordinarily generational phenomenon, the paradigm. My explanation is that paradigms strut the stage of human analysis and imagination. They seem larger-than-life and spectacular beyond man, but beneath this maya, they are only us, comprised of fats and proteins in organic neurons. This is what makes them simultaneously fragile and durable. From Howard Bloom in The Lucifer Principle:
"The worldview you build from childhood is carried in billions of cells whose connecting threads are precisely adjusted to give you your picture of the world. The late Dr. Donald Hebb...called those networks 'cell assemblies'. He described these circuits through which stimuli flow like waters through the delta of the Mississippi....[it] helps us comprehend why, though we're hit with thousands of random perceptions, very few stick to us.
If we believe that life is a battle between Satan and God, some small event can seem proof positive that Satan is out to snare us. If we believe, as the Chinese and Romans did, that the heavens are filled with messages about our fate, the sight of a shooting star may trigger a sense of imminent calamity....We hunt, over the next days or weeks, for the event it forecasts.
A neural network like this takes a lifetime to build....It's easy to see why humans are willing to fight to the death to defend...their belief systems. To allow a faith or ideology to be overthrown would be to abandon a massive neural fabric into which you've invested an entire life, a network that cannot be easily replaced, perhaps that cannot be replaced at all."This is one of the theme's of that small-time self-help hit, What the Bleep Do We Know. Very often the emotions and reactions we experience as adults are really to events that happened during childhood. Obliterating them means some innocent part of ourselves must be made to suffer. The shortcomings of the paradigm are intimately related to the shortcomings of the neural network, and are the reason so many New Year Resolutions fail. To rail against those failures is to rail against fifteen or so billion years of molecular thermodynamics.
Six years ago, I had a conversation about cartoon watching with one of my old friends. He was describing how it took him until the tenth grade to quit watching after school cartoons. I had a similar experience when I was twelve. I thought that upon entering Junior High I would lose the desire. My magical thinking was not reflective of reality. Instead, the habit was broken when I transferred to a different foster home. The reception on the black and white tv I was given was just too poor to make the cartoon-watching experience enjoyable. As 12-steppers, Priests, and Drill Sergeants know, change of environment and change of habit are fast lovers.
Barring that, we often have to be content to nip around the edges. I think this is what Paul was getting at in 2nd Corinthians and Martin Luther was getting at it in the 95 Theses. Changing ourselves is a struggle that can and should take all our lives. Seeking deep understanding of the world, contributing to our global culture, and working for justice should all take at least that long.
So Cheers to you on this amazing New Year
May your resolutions be fruitful
And your paradigms grand
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Raison d'Etre
"As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived. "
--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
In the way-back reaches of hominid history, an ancestor of mine sat on a dusty hill overlooking the African grassland. Time began when she was born (or maybe when her grandmother was born). The entire universe was 2000 square miles she'd covered on foot or seen with her eyes. I bet her conversations were just like the ones I have: some deep, many superficial, with lots of glossings-over, simplifications, and a few bare-faced lies. I can see her in eye of my mind: on that hill, seated in the dirt, skin filthy, hair matted...
It's kinda hot, like most late-afternoons there, and she's been working all day. Everything was work. Without boiling water even eating's a chore. She's spent several hours right here on this hill today, chipping a softball size chunk of obsidian. I don't know if she came up with this by accident, or cobbled it from a panoply of conversations with erstwhile friends and lovers. I like to think she figured it out yesterday, dreamed it up last night.
A hundred or so yards away was the object of her intention--the bloody carrion of an antelope or giraffe. One that had known an incredible life--marked by cool mornings, comfortable rests, full bellies....--all ignobly ended in five really bad minutes. Here she would remain for a couple hours, this ancestor of mine. She'd wait for the jackals and buzzards to pick the bones. Once they were gone she would descend the hill. She'd lift the sharpened stone high in the air and split open the thigh bones of the convenient beast. She'd take the biggest one and stuff the broken end into her mouth, greedily consuming the metallic-tasting marrow. No hesitation. No thoughts of dirty-germs, or better-ways, or self-consciousness. Not a moment of doubt. Thoreau has nothing on this incredible woman.
It would make all the difference. By the time it was over she had developed the most important tool in the history of human evolution, and added the most important marginal component of human diet. Her innovation would dominate the next million and a half years of human history.
I wonder what she traded for her discovery. How many lovers and friends were alienated. How much leisure she gave up. How much status she lost in her community for crushing bones and drinking blood. How bad her stomach hurt after that first feast. The courage (or desperation) it took to do it again. Or maybe it cost her very little. Maybe she would have just wasted that time anyway, and maybe her neighbors were themselves too hungry to judge her.
Here I sit on the other side of the agricultural, scientific, and industrial revolutions, fatter and more comfortable than she ever was. I have time and means to read, smoke, think, pray, drive, listen to music, and on it goes. In my world of plenty, every action can be quantified against a thousand trade-offs, comforts, and could-be's. Surely I must have some motivation to write and converse, speculate and ruminate, curse and bless.
Which all brings me to the reasons for this blog. I'm borrowing the first one from Aristotle--that the attempt to understand the world is one of life's highest goods. I don't know what Holmes would say to this: is the simple act of thinking about the world really the boldest way of interacting with it? The second is borrowed from Tim Burton's Big Fish. In it, the main character inhabits a world of his own understanding and tells about it in colorful ways. If we don't tell our own story, packed sickeningly full of our own ideas, then it will be told by nasty, prejudiced others. Forget 'em! Of course, I also want to talk about big things and adopt tall notions. I want to explore grand worlds that can't be seen in five minutes of banter, no matter how intense. Finally, I want petulant strangers, critical friends, and the rancid ignorant Others who journey the wastes of digital nihilism--all to step forward, vomit their psycho-socio dregs across the plank of my words, to drop their dysentery on the dinner plate of my knowledge. I want you to do this because, as Whitman said:
What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely forever.
I stole this blog's name from Julia Sweeney. Shoot me, you Mindless Pigs.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
In the way-back reaches of hominid history, an ancestor of mine sat on a dusty hill overlooking the African grassland. Time began when she was born (or maybe when her grandmother was born). The entire universe was 2000 square miles she'd covered on foot or seen with her eyes. I bet her conversations were just like the ones I have: some deep, many superficial, with lots of glossings-over, simplifications, and a few bare-faced lies. I can see her in eye of my mind: on that hill, seated in the dirt, skin filthy, hair matted...
It's kinda hot, like most late-afternoons there, and she's been working all day. Everything was work. Without boiling water even eating's a chore. She's spent several hours right here on this hill today, chipping a softball size chunk of obsidian. I don't know if she came up with this by accident, or cobbled it from a panoply of conversations with erstwhile friends and lovers. I like to think she figured it out yesterday, dreamed it up last night.
A hundred or so yards away was the object of her intention--the bloody carrion of an antelope or giraffe. One that had known an incredible life--marked by cool mornings, comfortable rests, full bellies....--all ignobly ended in five really bad minutes. Here she would remain for a couple hours, this ancestor of mine. She'd wait for the jackals and buzzards to pick the bones. Once they were gone she would descend the hill. She'd lift the sharpened stone high in the air and split open the thigh bones of the convenient beast. She'd take the biggest one and stuff the broken end into her mouth, greedily consuming the metallic-tasting marrow. No hesitation. No thoughts of dirty-germs, or better-ways, or self-consciousness. Not a moment of doubt. Thoreau has nothing on this incredible woman.
It would make all the difference. By the time it was over she had developed the most important tool in the history of human evolution, and added the most important marginal component of human diet. Her innovation would dominate the next million and a half years of human history.
I wonder what she traded for her discovery. How many lovers and friends were alienated. How much leisure she gave up. How much status she lost in her community for crushing bones and drinking blood. How bad her stomach hurt after that first feast. The courage (or desperation) it took to do it again. Or maybe it cost her very little. Maybe she would have just wasted that time anyway, and maybe her neighbors were themselves too hungry to judge her.
Here I sit on the other side of the agricultural, scientific, and industrial revolutions, fatter and more comfortable than she ever was. I have time and means to read, smoke, think, pray, drive, listen to music, and on it goes. In my world of plenty, every action can be quantified against a thousand trade-offs, comforts, and could-be's. Surely I must have some motivation to write and converse, speculate and ruminate, curse and bless.
Which all brings me to the reasons for this blog. I'm borrowing the first one from Aristotle--that the attempt to understand the world is one of life's highest goods. I don't know what Holmes would say to this: is the simple act of thinking about the world really the boldest way of interacting with it? The second is borrowed from Tim Burton's Big Fish. In it, the main character inhabits a world of his own understanding and tells about it in colorful ways. If we don't tell our own story, packed sickeningly full of our own ideas, then it will be told by nasty, prejudiced others. Forget 'em! Of course, I also want to talk about big things and adopt tall notions. I want to explore grand worlds that can't be seen in five minutes of banter, no matter how intense. Finally, I want petulant strangers, critical friends, and the rancid ignorant Others who journey the wastes of digital nihilism--all to step forward, vomit their psycho-socio dregs across the plank of my words, to drop their dysentery on the dinner plate of my knowledge. I want you to do this because, as Whitman said:
What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely forever.
I stole this blog's name from Julia Sweeney. Shoot me, you Mindless Pigs.
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