Irrational

In mathematics, a rational number is one that can be expressed as a fraction of two integers--for example, 1.4 (7/5), 0.333... (1/3), 2.85714286 (20/7), all of the whole numbers (e.g. 4=4/1), and so on.

An irrational number is one that cannot be expressed as a fraction of two integers. Some of the most famous irrational numbers are π, e, √2, and φ.

In other words, rational numbers can be expressed simply and exactly, but irrational numbers cannot. They are irreducibly complex.

Some of the most useful, important, and beautiful numbers in mathematics are irrational. But if you want to make use of them, you must strip them of context, and when you do, you're using an approximation at best.

When faced, as we are, with the overwhelming rationalism of bureaucratic capitalism, which seeks from its centralized perch to dictate to everyone else what makes sense in different localities, which seeks to define what is rational and to define everything else out of existence, I think it can help to remember these definitions.

Unusual Event followup

In comments on my post about floodwaters around nuclear power plants in Nebraska, respjrat had this to say. You should read it:

i'm a resident of the omaha metro area. there are two nuclear power plants along the river being affected by the flood waters.

the fort calhoun plant, twenty miles north of omaha is in cold shutdown. an assessment last year concluded that it was at risk being compromised in a worst-case flooding event (the flood in 1993 was supposed to have been a thousand-year flood and it pales in comparison to what we're seeing now). apparently "corrective measures" have been implemented as of early 2011.

pulling from wiki some more "The Army Corps of Engineers indicated that with average precipitation, the Missouri River would not go above 1,008 feet (307 m) above sea level and OPPD officials stated that the current flood protection efforts would protect the plant to 1,010–1,012 feet (310–308 m) feet above sea level. Officials indicated the spent fuel pool is at 1,038.5 feet (316.5 m) above sea level." their precipitation models in relation to determining the release of waters from reservoirs upstream account for an inch of precipitation a week. we've had two nights of thunderstorms, blessedly short-lived, back-to-back. this week's forecast shows rain for four of the next 6 days. all rain that falls in the region is going to drain into the missouri.

since it's in cold shutdown, the spent fuel pool is the biggest concern. thankfully it is not fukushima-style and is elevated and not on the ground level, and the flood waters rising nearly 40ft is inconceivable. but then there's fun snippets like this.

[june 9th] "A fire in an electrical switch room on Tuesday briefly knocked out cooling for a pool holding spent nuclear fuel at the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant outside Omaha, Neb., plant officials said."

http://planetsave.com/2011/06/19/electrical-fire-knocks-out-spent-fuel-cooling-pool-at-nebraska-nuclear-plant/

the fire extinguishing systems apparently took care of it before the cooling pool water could rise more than two degrees, but it does not fill me with confidence that random fires can break out in the spent fuel pool at ft. calhoun. and by the way, ft. calhoun is where the spent fuel for all of nebraska's nuclear power plants is stockpiled.

the official word is that there is little to no risk of an event. anyone who reads blog like this would obviously be skeptical of such statements. keep in mind, this entire flood is more or less man-made. we have not seen particularly heavy rains this season (in fact up until this week it's been pretty dry). all of the water is coming from releases from reservoirs upstream, reservoirs that were well over normal capacity as far back as december. however, the large controlled releases started less than a month ago. for me it stands to reason that if you've got a lot of fucking extra water, you might wanna, you know, let it go? maybe not wait six months?

i've got pottasium iodide, an escape route the fuck out of here that doesn't include the only interstate still open (between I-80 and I-29, only I-80 is open), and i'm sure as fuck not drinking the water.

Much gratitude to you, respjrat, for providing some essential, local information. Very glad to hear you have supplies and plans.

So, this situation might not (yet!!!) be as dramatic as the one at Fukushima*, but to me I think it's an even better indicator of the astonishing stupidity of civilization. Fukushima was merely the astonishingly stupid placing of an unimaginably deadly technology directly in the known vicinity of frequent unpredictable natural disasters. But the situation in Nebraska is much more than that--it's so complicatedly stupid that I'm going to have to abandon the parallel structure I was going to use and say: it's going into an area which naturally has regular flooding--which we call a disaster, which the river calls life--and littering it with incredibly destructive technologies which in addition to the destruction they cause on their own also change the natural pulsation of the river into an unpredictable chaos of disastrous flooding, mismanaging this already unmanageable system, and then placing an unimaginably deadly technology directly in the vicinity of these human-made disasters.

*Which, you know, just incidentally, a "former nuclear industry vice president" described the other day as "the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind." Which if you even just consider only the extremely recent competition is saying a fucking lot.

As respjrat says, the waters rising another forty feet seems inconceivable. But what seemed inconceivable has happened before--indeed, is happening right now--and even so, those forty feet are only necessary if everything we've been told is true. Which it always is, right? I'd bank on it!

Meanwhile, back at the comment thread, an Anonymous left two CommonDreams links, first to an article about tritium leaks at nuclear plants around the US, and second to a video from Russia Today about Fort Calhoun specifically (I unfortunately don't have a transcript for it). Gratitude to you as well, Anonymous.

The article is terrifying, but routinely so:

Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The number and severity of the leaks has been escalating, even as federal regulators extend the licenses of more and more reactors across the nation.

As I said to the Baronette the other day while we put on some sunblock that most likely had nanotechnology with unknown human-body repercussions in it, "Everything in the world we've made for ourselves causes cancer. What's one more thing?" Ha ha!

Then there's the video. The anchor, whose name I don't know, sensibly points out that in the wake of the Fukushima disaster all the trusted experts said everything was fine, so even if we don't reflexively distrust the trusted experts, maybe we should be a bit suspicious when they say the same thing now about Fort Calhoun. She also mentions the terrifying fact that there is an "ongoing no-fly zone" in the area, supposedly having nothing at all to do with the plant, but, uh, well, what does it have to do with then? It seems like a bad idea to impose a no-fly zone over a flooded disaster area, no? And that's just the prelude to the rest of the video, which admittedly is speculation--but speculation is the only thing we have open to us, because as Tyson Slocum, the interviewee (director of the "Public Citizen's Energy Program" which I admit I know nothing about), points out,

The bottom line here is that the lack of public information about our nuclear power plants, particularly after September 11, 2001, it was designed to keep critical information about vulnerable energy infrastructure like nuclear power plants away from terrorism, but what it's done is keep this critical information away from us.

(Apply sics as necessary; he was speaking extemporaneously and wasn't on one of the mainstream news networks, so he most likely wasn't groomed for television appearances from birth.)

Of course, you and I have a slightly different perspective on what this secrecy is "designed" for. Terrorism never stops being useful, ever.

So anyway, there's a lot of talk about working with congress (ha!) and more "cost-effective" renewable energy (ha!), but one valuable point they bring up is that even the insane evil geniuses who built these damn horrible things in the first place thought they would become dangerously in need of repair or replacement about....ten years ago.

Ha ha ha!

I guess really my summation of this whole thing is that no matter what level you look at any of this at, the whole situation is fucked. It's fucked when you look at the whole damn system of civilization, it's fucked when you look at individual pieces of it, and it's even fucked when you use the fucked assumptions of civilization to examine little bits of the ways that it's fucked.

FYI

In case you were wondering, Isaac Asimov:

I thought maybe you could do that with human beings too. You could tell what huge masses of human beings would do, provided they didn't know what the predictions were so they couldn't distort their own behaviour, and provided you had a large enough number, and I felt that with the galactic empire you'd have a large enough number. I don't really believe it's going to work, but it made a good background for the stories, and I was always able to use my "psychohistory" to show how things became inevitable, economically or sociologically and so on. It made for interesting historical novels.....

Not only are there not enough people, but actually their behaviour is far too complicated. They're not like individual molecules. Molecules have limited modes of behaviour and human beings are far less limited, so that human history is more chaotic. In fact, so chaotic that it probably can never be predicted, and in my later Foundation novels I dragged this in. But of course when I first started I didn't know anything about this new theory of chaos.

was much smarter--and vastly more humane--than Paul Krugman:

It is one of the few science fiction series that deals with social scientists—the “psychohistorians,” who use their understanding of the mathematics of society to save civilization as the Galactic Empire collapses. I loved Foundation, and in my early teens my secret fantasy was to become a psychohistorian. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing (yet). I was and am fascinated by history, but the craft of history is far better at the what and the when than the why, and I eventually wanted more. As for social sciences other than economics, I am interested in their subjects but cannot get excited about their methods—the power of economic models to show how plausible assumptions yield surprising conclusions, to distill clear insights from seemingly murky issues, has no counterpart yet in political science or sociology. Someday there will exist a unified social science of the kind that Asimov imagined, but for the time being economics is as close to psychohistory as you can get.

Clifford D. Simak, A Choice of Gods

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

The ability seems to be inherent. Man probably had it for a long time before he began to use it. For it to develop time was needed and the longer life gave us time. Perhaps it would have developed even without the longer life if we'd not been so concerned, so fouled up, with our technology. Somewhere we may have taken the wrong turning, accepted the wrong values and permitted our concern with technology to mask our real and valid purpose. The concern with technology may have kept us from knowing what we had. These abilities of ours could not struggle up into our consciousness through the thick layers of machines and cost estimates and all the rest of it. And when we talk about abilities, it's not simply going to the stars.
page 20

"I don't know why," said Jason, "but when you talk about the People I have the feeling that you are describing a monstrous alien race rather than humanity. Without knowing any of the details, they sound frightening."

"They are to me," said John. "Not perhaps because of any single facet of their culture, for some of these facets can be very pleasant, but because of a sense of the irresistible arrogance implicit in it. Not the power so much, although the power is there, but the naked arrogance of a species that sees everything as property to be manipulated and used."
page 77

And what had she done, she wondered. What had happened to her? Trying to recall it, she could discover only fragments of it and she was sure that when it had happened there had been no fragmentation and that the fragments she could recall were no more than broken pieces of the whole. The world had opened out and so had the universe, or what she since had thought must have been the universe, lying all spread out before her, with every nook revealed, with all the knowledge, all the reasons there--a universe in which time and space had been ruled out because time and space were only put there, in the first place, to make it impossible for anyone to grasp the universe.
page 138

Things remind me of things

Apologies for the lengthy quotations and dearth of commentary, but I find these quite valuable and they speak for themselves. All emphasis is mine.

This is from James C. Scott's beyond excellent Seeing Like a State:

It goes without saying that the farmer was familiar with each of several varieties of any crop, when to plant it, how deeply to sow it, how to prepare the soil, and how to tend and harvest it. This knowledge was place specific in the sense that the successful growing of any variety required local knowledge about rainfall and soils, down to and including the peculiarities of each plot the farmer cultivated. It was also place specific in the sense that much of this knowledge was stored in the collective memory of the locality: an oral archive of the techniques, seed varieties, and ecological information.

Once the farmer was moved, often to a vastly different ecological setting, his local knowledge was all but useless. As Jason Clay emphasizes, "Thus, when a farmer from the highlands is transported to settlement camps in areas like Gambella, he is instantly transformed from an agricultural expert into an unskilled, ignorant laborer, completely dependent for his survival on the central government." Resettlement was far more than a change in scenery. It took people from a setting in which they had the skills and resources to produce many of their own basic needs and hence the means of a reasonably self-sufficient independence. It then transferred them to a setting where these skills were of little or no avail. Only in such circumstances was it possible for camp officials to reduce migrants to mendicants whose obedience and labor could be exacted for subsistence rations.

Although the drought that coincided with forced migration in Ethiopia was real enough, much of the famine to which international aid agencies responded was a product of the massive resettlement. The destruction of social ties was almost as productive of famine as were the crop failures induced by poor planning and ignorance of the new agricultural environment. Communal ties, relations with kin and affines, networks of reciprocity and cooperation, local charity and dependence had been the principal means by which villagers had managed to survive periods of food shortage in the past. Stripped of these social resources by indiscriminate deportations, often separated from their immediate family and forbidden to leave, the settlers in the camps were far more vulnerable to starvation than they had been in their home regions.

It reminded me of these passages, spread out over about ten pages in Derrick Jensen's beyond excellent Endgame vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization:

Civilization has only been on this continent a few hundred years. There are many parts of this continent, such as where I live, that became subject to civilization far more recently. Yet in this extremely short time this culture has committed us and the landscape to this technologized path, in so doing shredding the natural fabric of this continent, enslaving, terrorizing, and/or eradicating its nonhuman inhabitants, and giving its human residents the choice of civilization or death. Another way to say this is that prior to the arrival of civilization humans lived on this continent for at the very least ten thousand years, and probably much longer, and could drink with confidence from rivers and streams everywhere. After this culture's short time here, not only has it toxified streams and groundwater, but even mother's breast milk. That's an extraordinary and extraordinarily quick commitment to this technologized way of being (or rather non-being). ...

Dependency. One of the advantages of not having to import resources is that you need depend on neither the resources' owners nor on the violence necessary to eradicate these owners and take what's theirs. One of the advantages of not owning slaves is that you need not depend on them for either your "comforts or elegancies" or even the necessaries of life. We have at this point become dependent on oil, on dammed rivers, on this exploitative way of being (or, once again, non-being). Without it many of us would die, most all of us would lose our identities. ...

To mask our powerlessness in the face of this destruction, many of us fall into the same pattern as those abused children... we turn the focus inward. We are the problem. I use toilet paper, so I am responsible for deforestation. I drive a car, so I am responsible for global warming. Never mind that I did not create the systems that cause these. I did not create industrial forestry. I did not create an oil economy... [W]e did not create the system [and] our choices have been systematically eliminated (those in power kill the great runs of salmon, and then we feel guilty when we buy food at the grocery store? How dumb is that?).

And this is just one photogenic example

Despite my opinions on the urge to punish, I secretly want to make all politicians and CEOs make this same swim. If I was more old-fashioned, I'd say they would have to take their kids along, too, for the symmetry, but instead I say leave the kids in the care of someone who will raise them not to be sociopaths.

TWO SUNSMAGEDDON

This here is a screenshot of CNN's home page at one point on Friday afternoon. Clicking will give you the full-size image.



The big horrible wretched mess is of course that main article, about Ben Roethlisberger's "road to redemption," which is just as awful as it looks and really is about how winning the Superbowl would totally make up for his "bad behavior," aka raping lots of people. The awfulness of this is obvious enough, and unfunny enough, that I will leave it at that. (Though I will pause to note the second story listed on the "latest news" feed off to the left; apparently when it's a reason for deporting Mexicans, rape can be called rape.)

Currently one of my favorite features on the CNN homepage is the "popular on Facebook" sidebar on the right, mostly because of its regularly hilariously infelicitous phrasing. For example, here we see that "23,081 people recommended Singer-songwriter Teena Marie dies at 54." One wonders if, absent the unimaginable cruelty of those 23,081, Teena Marie might still be alive today. The last one on the list, though, is perhaps the very best of them all: "116,510 people recommended Funeral protests to be met by 'angels'" which I admit made me laugh for longer than it probably should have. Interestingly, when I clicked on the link it took me to an article about lawmakers making it illegal to protest at their funerals, featuring only a glancing mention of that whole Fred Phelps counter-protest trend of wearing twinky angel wings rather than doing the sensible thing and ignoring them until they run out of people to sue for assault (or battery? whatever) and starve to death.

Moving along, we come to the reason for the post title. Direct your eyes, if you will, to the item five from the bottom of the "latest news" list: "Will Earth have 2 suns by 2012?"

Being big nerds, the Baronette and I (we were reading together) already knew just from reading the headline that the article would be about the imminent supernova of the star Betelgeuse, which when it occurs will briefly be as bright to a (naked eye) observer here on Earth as a second sun. Considering that Betelgeuse could, according to our understanding, go supernova anytime between now and about a million years from now ("imminent" means different things in human and universe scales), the 2012 shoehorning is of course silly, stupid, pandering, and entirely predictable.

When we actually read the article, we discovered that while the pandering had reached approximately its zenith in the headline, the silliness and stupidity had only just begun, and would soon reach levels that just moments before we never would have predicted. In the interest of brevity (too late!), here's a list of things the article says or implies rather than a discussion of them:

1. George Lucas invented the idea of binary star systems, and it's actually a far-fetched notion
2. A supernova being sun-level bright temporarily would be the same as us being in a binary star system
3. The Mayan calendar really really predicts the end of the world in 2012
4. This is relevant to supernovas somehow
5. Betelgeuse's name has "strong associations with the devil"
6. Betelgeuse is the second biggest star in the universe
7. The supernova will launch neutrinos at Earth, and since neutrinos are the building blocks of heavy elements like gold and uranium this will be beneficial to us, as it will enrich the planet with more valuable elements

All in an article of about 350 words. Numbers six and seven (which are, together, wrong in more ways than there are letters in this post), by the way, were in the article when I first read it, but have since been removed without comment, the cowardly fuckers.

All this is delightfully demolished in the comments, which for once on a mainstream news article are an absolute joy to read. My favorite (it was hard to pick) was one that Echo's incredibly annoying comment management system won't let me get to at the moment, so I can't credit it or quote it directly, but it was something along the lines of "Just because Betelgeuse's name comes from Arabic doesn't mean that it has to do with the devil."

Anyway, after we read the article (which, I should point out, was featured on CNN's home page but was actually hosted on Time's site), the Baronette and I saw that the story came to the attention of the writer via the Huffington Post, and, curious, we followed the link to that article, which we discovered was about 2% less completely misguided and misleading, but featured most of the same claims (Huffy at least had the decency to issue corrections about the goofy neutrinogold claim rather than just pretending it never happened) and also featured a bizarrely unnecessary Star Wars reference. Not only that, but it was actually drawing on an article from news.com.au. So we followed the rabbit to that article, which, we discovered, was about 2% less stupid than the Huffer article, but featured many of the same claims, joked about 2012, and mentioned Tatooine by name in the headline.

OK, maybe you had to be there, but neither of us could breathe for like an hour because we were laughing too hard.

So, some innocent scientist guy (whether you think "innocent scientist" is an oxymoron or not, he's an innocent in this situation) gives an interview. The interviewer, misunderstanding a lot of what the scientist says, writes up a flawed article, makes a weird Star Wars comparison, and jokes about 2012. A Huffing Hack copies and pastes the article and shifts the words around enough to make it technically not plagiarism, in the process misunderstanding the joke and taking the 2012 stuff seriously, because it's the Huffington Post and their charter requires all articles to feature credulous references to the worst aspects of New Agery. A Time writer picks that article up, copies and pastes, rearranges to avoid plagiarism, misunderstands things and gets all confused, and passes along the 2012 claim unquestioned, adding in a whole lot of other some-people's-weird-ideas-presented-as-fact claims for good measure, because it's Time and they exist to not question things and turn weird ideas into fake facts. And then CNN, too lazy to even rearrange the words, just links to that article because it's also too lazy to pretend that Time and CNN are two different news sources. Each of these steps maintains the Star Wars reference, because god forbid information get distorted.

Your news media, everybody. And if they do this with sciencey fluff pieces, just imagine what they do with everything else!

MORAL OF THE STORY: You will always, always, always be better served by not reading, listening to, or watching major news services, even if you don't replace them with anything.

PS I know it's extraordinarily unlikely, but I would love it if Betelgeuse went supernova within my lifetime.
PPS One of the funniest things about the whole thing, at least for me, is that the Baronette and I had been looking at the cheesy Gawker sci-fi blog, io9, before she jokingly said "Now let's see what's going on in the real world" and clicked over to CNN. And we found this.

Stanislaw Lem, "Non Serviam" in A Perfect Vacuum page 172

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

A man may interpret the real world in a variety of ways. He may devote particular attention--intense scientific investigation--to certain facets of that world, and the knowledge he acquires then casts its own special light on the remaining portions of the world, those not considered in his priority-setting research. If first he diligently takes up mechanics, he will fashion for himself a mechanical model of the world and will see the Universe as a gigantic and perfect clock that in its inexorable movement proceeds from the past to a precisely determined future. This model is not an accurate representation of reality, and yet one can make use of it for a period of time historically long, and with it can even achieve many practical successes--the building of machines, implements, etc.

When humans talk about "discovering" things...

...we're fucking stupid.

Turtles swim from Africa to South America regularly, arctic terns go from pole to pole and wherever else they want, pterosaurs used to fly literally halfway around the world without stopping, and we think Columbus was some kind of a big deal.

Good stuff from recent days

The hellhole I work in makes me fall way behind on my internettization for the first half of the week, and other aspects of life made me behind to begin with, so here's some good things ("good" referring to the posts themselves, not always their subjects) I would have responded to in the past week or so had time allowed:

what the Tee Vee taught on monogamy. An excellent and hilarious discussion of what's insane in our attitudes towards sex, and as is so often the case, wtTVt can say in a tangential aside what it would take me a thousand words to say. Here, it's this: Yes, it's pop-sci. Smart folk will hate it (assuming, since it's a book, that they — and only they — are the intended audience, adorable smart folk will write squawking reviews: "I already knew all of this!! Not groundbreaking!")

Jack on Mehserle and Grant, summing up the difference in the treatment of violence directed upwards and violence directed downwards in as few words as possible.

For Rhode Island-interested people, stupid Dave Segal posted some pretty cool proposals for a walking bridge where the old 195 bridge used to be. My favorite is the second one he posted, if you take the awful "The Creative Capital!" slogan off of the wall. Team 10's design is also pretty great, and Team 3's would be good if it didn't assume that there would always be swans and lots of fog on the Providence River, which in my experience is not a safe assumption.

I approve of this Postsecret.

Justin's unfinished Ballroom Dream is one of my favorites of his that I've seen. Very cool layering effect achieved just by painting over someone else's mostly-bland painting.

Dr. Boli misinforms us about the French. Nutella On Toast in comments reminds us that the same is unfortunately true of all foreigners.

We kill other species in lots of different creative ways. Increased UV exposure is burning whales.

Eric Garris on the FBI's detention of David House and seizure of his computer, not even for any bullshit criminal charges, only for working with the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Save me from yourself

Recently I've been seeing a lot of variations on the formulation "In order to really solve the global warming problem, we're going to need strong international government intervention."

Which is funny. Because, OK, I understand that the people who say this stuff come from a reflexive position of "Government is always necessary," so simply eliminating the single biggest contributor to and facilitator of the problem doesn't present itself to them as an option. But even in that context, why leap immediately to government intervention rather than government reform like liberals are usually so fond of? Like, passing a law requiring the government to buy carbon credits for all of its predator drones or something, which has the usual advantage of being completely fucking useless.

Also, why do my fingers consistently try to type invertention?

Just a quick bit of trivia

More substantial posting tomorrow, probably.

A couple weeks ago the stupid gawker sci-fi blog io9 that I read despite how dumb it is posted an interview with Steve Vogt, the astronomer whose team discovered that awesomely earth-like planet 20 light years away. He insists that this planet must have life on it, which is fairly unscientific of him but I tend to agree, because I love the idea of life on other planets, no matter what, and because it just seems so probable to me; after all, we have pretty decent suggestions of life, past or present, occurring on a pretty large number of bodies just in our solar system alone, so this rocky planet right in the "habitable" zone of its star seems like a good candidate, you know?

Anyway, Vogt was talking about his reasons for being so sure that there's life on this planet, and he described things in a way that had never really presented itself to me before, and I liked it, so here it is:

[T]he universe is a vast place and most of it is totally unavailable for life as we know it. There are two things in the universe you can't get around: Temperature and gravity. So if you are in interstellar space you're at 2.7 degrees kelvin. Your atoms are hardly vibrating and you're not going to be alive. Life as we know it can't survive. So you have to be near a star. That's good, but stars have gravity and you can fall into them. Your only hope is to be near a star but not falling into it – you need an orbit. And that's magical. That's where you can have enough warmth, but not turn into a cloud of plasma because you've fallen into the star. So when you have a planet in orbit and it's the right size and in the right orbit [like Zarmina], it's a very special place. There are many planets like that but we didn't know that [until our discovery].

Being civilized means not being able to see anything else as a possibility

A Guardian article about the rise and spread of multi-drug resistant bacteria features a list of scary things that will become commonplace in a post-antibiotic world. And you know, I'm not going to lie, I don't want to live in that world, but there are worse things, you know? And this one is just silly:

Pneumonia becomes once more "the old man's friend". Antibiotics have stopped it being the mass-killer it once was, particularly among the old and frail, who would lapse into unconsciousness and often slip away in their sleep. Other diseases of old age, such as cancer, have taken over.

OK, picture this:

You're old. You're frail. You're near the end of your life. You're going to die sooner rather than later. You're magically given the option of two different ways this death can come:

1. You will lapse into unconsciousness and slip away in your sleep.
2. You will linger painfully for months or even years as your own body turns on itself and grows a poisonous devouring mass that destroys you from the inside out.

I know which one I prefer.

PS I should also point out that although the article is vaguely about a real problem, it's also deeply inaccurate and scaremongering. In case that wasn't obvious.

Shit sucks

So, the problem is, one group of people comes in and destroys another group of people's way of life by demolishing the forests they live in, and then when the vampire bats decide to strike back, they strike back at the wrong people.

Shit sucks.

Two things

1. A blog note: is the comment form giving anyone else trouble? When I submit my comments it gives me an error message. The comment still shows up, but it's damned weird.

2. A McEwan/CNN note: So, yes, the female condom headline is really weird, but frankly I'm more bothered by the one that says "Opinion: are we killing all the sharks?" because a) it's not an opinion, and b) it's not a question.

Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, They'd Rather Be Right pages 23-24

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

Although, in a narrow sense, his field was far from the dangerous social sciences, early in his career Hoskins had realized that no field of science is remote from the affairs of men, that there is a sociological implication inherent even in the simple act of screwing a nut on a bolt.

There'll always be what now?

I read Slaughterhouse Five years ago, and, having been an idiot, didn't get much out of it. I've just started rereading it today, which is turning out to be an excellent decision.

Unrelated to its intrinsic merits as a book, this early passage (on page 3 in the old-timey $1.25 paperback edition I have) struck me as, well...read it:

Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, "Is it an anti-war book?"

"Yes," I said. "I guess."

"You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?"

"No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?"

"I say, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?'"

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.

Though he really couldn't have known it at the time, Vonnegut's specific choice of analogy here has turned out to be dreadfully, dreadfully ironic.

War has crushed glaciers in this little competition.

Long and horrible

Via ASP I see this article, which is terrible, terrible, terrible.

Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.

Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah, said it is difficult to pin down the exact cause of the cancers and birth defects. He added that "to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened".

...

Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British commander serving with the American forces in Baghdad[, said] that the US commander who ordered this devastating use of firepower did not consider it significant enough to mention it in his daily report to the US general in command. Dr Busby says that while he cannot identify the type of armaments used by the Marines, the extent of genetic damage suffered by inhabitants suggests the use of uranium in some form. He said: "My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside."

Here's Derrick Jensen on depleted uranium, writing before the 2003 escalation in Iraq:

So-called depleted uranium is what's left of natural uranium after the "enriched uranium"--the fissionable isotope uranium 235--has been separated to produce fuel for nuclear reactors. The term depleted uranium is something of a misnomer in that it implies that the remaining uranium has become significantly less dangerous, more, well, depleted. But depleted uranium--99.8 percent uranium 238--is just as toxic...as natural uranium...

The United States has made a lot of it, well over a billion pounds. Beginning in the 1950s, the feds started trying to figure out what they were going to do with all this stuff. Providentially, uranium is extremely dense--about 1.7 times heavier than lead--and so can be used to make an artillery shell that easily penetrates steel. Even better, it's pyrophoric, meaning heat from the impact causes it to vaporize, releasing huge amounts of energy. If you don't mind toxifying and irradiating the surrounding countryside and its human and nonhuman inhabitants, depleted uranium makes a tank-busting shell extraordinaire.

What this means in practice is that leaders of government and industry solved the problem of disposing of U-238 in typical win-win (for them) fashion by giving it away free to both national and foreign arms manufacturers...

The list of countries using or purchasing weapons or shells made with depleted uranium is long, and includes, among others, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Russia, Greece, Turkey, Israel, the monarchies in the Persian Gulf, Taiwan, South Korea, Pakistan, and Japan.... And they are used often. In 110,000 air rads against Iraq during the so-called First Gulf War...USA-10 Warthog aircraft fired about 940,000 DU projectiles. When a depleted uranium projectile hits a target, about 70 percent of the round vaporizes into (hot) dust as fine as talcum powder, as does part of the target, which may also have been constructed of depleted uranium. Three hundred tons of DU are estimated to be blowing in the wind from this particular desert storm...

...DU has probably already harmed 250,000 Iraqis. The same can be said for residents of Bosnia, and soon we'll be saying the same for the people of Afghanistan. Leukemias and cancers have gone up by 66 percent in recent years in southern Iraq, with some locales experiencing a 700 percent increase. And there have been birth defects. Oh, how there have been birth defects. One doctor began her report, "In August we had three babies born with no heads. Four had abnormally large heads. In September we had six with no heads, nine with large heads, and two with short limbs. In October, one with no head, four with big heads and four with deformed limbs or other types of deformities." [from Endgame vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization, pages 61-63]

He goes on and it gets worse. "Worse" in the sense of the next paragraph containing a quote from someone who has seen "death squads in Haiti" and "the wholesale butchery of Rwanda" who "thought [he] had a strong stomach [but] nearly lost [his] breakfast" at a children's hospital in Iraq.

The United States is in Iraq because of its insatiable thirst for energy in the form of oil (Jensen takes great pains to remind us that by far the largest part of this thirst is the province of industry, commerce, and war, rather than individual people), and it is doing this unimaginable evil with the byproducts of its thirst for energy in the form of nuclear power. The combination of the two is even more deadly than either in isolation would be.

I was going to comment further, maybe say something about the intrinsic needs of a society focused on relentless capitalistic expansion, but I can't find any words that work better than the ones ASP used to close her post: "I mean... fuck. What else is there to say about this? Fuck fuck fuck. Fuck everything. Fuck us and fuck them and fuck everyone else. Just, fuck."

On religion and goat fucking

And now, commentary on the Pharyngula post that led to chaos, destruction, and the near dissolution of my blugfriendship with BDR.

Here's PZ Myers' latest imbecility. (Just kidding! He posted it two mornings ago, so there have been plenty of imbecilities since.) Take a look at it. See the problem? Apparently, PZ thinks the only significant difference between Pakistan and, say, the United States that might have an impact on online behavior is....religion. Is that so.

Take a look at this list. I'm not 100% clear on how Wikipedia defines "internet user," but regardless it seems like a good starting point. We see that 10.6% of the Pakistani population is online. In the US, it's 76.3%. There is one factor in any country that will consistently separate internet users from non-internet users, and it's not religion. I'll leave it to you to figure out what I might be talking about.

And that is of course just the beginning. When you're talking about Pakistan, for fucking hell's sake, you can't disregard its, uh, relationship with the US. Now I don't have statistics handy, but it's a good bet that those members of the Pakistani population who have internet access are more likely to have US ties, while the primary interaction between the US and those who do not have internet access is more likely mediated by predator drones.

And another thing: PZ's argument seems to be that the more repressive a person or a society is about expressions of sexuality, the more interested individuals are going to be in it in private, and that this means everyone should be open about sexuality. And while I have no particular opinion on this line of reasoning in specific, I'm certainly in favor of sexual openness, no fan of sexual repression. However, it is an easily observable fact that PZ Myers himself is not in favor of open expressions of the kind of sexuality directly relevant to the post, which are in fact bestiality and pedophilia. I'm always open to a discussion about these things, and I think their morality or lack thereof is far from a settled question, but Myers is definitively of a different persuasion. So what, exactly, is his point here?

And finally. There is an argument similar in structure to PZ's "the more someone says they're against sex, the more they're into it in private" that I do think is pretty consistently valid, and that's this: "the more someone says they're committed to rational evaluation of the world based on empirical evidence, like, oh, say, capital-A Atheists, the more they are absolutely idiotic, smugly ignorant, and completely unaware of their massive, massive blind spots." This post and its lengthy comment thread are excellent examples. About the first half of the thread is taken up by discussion about whether the methods used to attain and analyze the data are valid, but with no mention of the fact that the data sets for different countries with different types of social and economic stratification are not directly comparable and that therefore the entire premise of the whole discussion is nonsense. Then, a commenter using the name "Pakistan" comes in to berate the commenters and the original post for their racism, which, yes, absolutely. It's only part of the problem with the whole thing, but in any Pharyngula discussion there are going to be so many things to object to that it would be impossible to cover them all. (And I love his response when people point out that the only person who has used the phrase "sand nigger" is him: "I apologize profusely for suggesting that any of the good people of Pharyngula would say something ignorant and potentially racist straight out." Accurate!) Then the rest of the thread mostly consists of people haughtily pointing out that it's simply impossible that they might be engaging in racism (none of them, incidentally, aware of the distinction between "being racist" and "being a racist"). I leave you with this comment, which might be one of the most breathtakingly ignorant and awful things I've read in a good long while. She says that Pakistan

as a whole IS a fundamentalist hellhole though, largely due to Islam and ignorance. The Taliban seem to be ramping up, the government is a corrupt US puppet, and no one seems to care.

To paraphrase someone or other, what do you mean "no one," paleface?

Crutches for brains

When he can pull himself away from, for example, being "rather worried" by "violent action against property" (and my god, even if you are going to take that ludicrous construction seriously as something to be worried about, does spray painting a billboard even count?), PZ Myers is occasionally able to say something interesting.

The article is about the limitations of the human brain, many of which I was familiar with already. If you aren't, I don't recommend starting with this brief, snotty article; I'd say go for a book by V.S. Ramachandran or someone like him, who unlike friend Myers is genuinely, consistently interesting, and feels no need to be a dick to make up for his own inadequacies as a human being.

What I like here is this brief passage, ignoring the miserably failed attempt at goofy humor that concludes it:

We even build crutches for brains. Math is a crutch. Science is a crutch. Philosophy is a crutch. Artists, too, use learned heuristics to get their minds to operate reliably in that unnatural mode. We rely utterly on these kinds of intellectual tools to focus our brains efficiently on problem solving, rather than doing what comes naturally, which usually involves snarfing down cheeseburgers and having wild monkey sex with other bipeds.

This might make me dumb, but I had never, ever thought to frame things that way. Leaving aside the art and philosophy for the moment, I was of course aware of the essential incompleteness and blundering nature of scientific inquiry, and I've long had a layman's fascination for the mystery of how it is that math, an abstract, constructed system totally disconnected from reality, seems to be very, very good at describing the way the universe works. But it never occurred to me to think of these things as crutches, with all that implies.

Imagine, being able to see the workings of the universe we live in directly, without the assistance of math and science. To be able to just understand. It's kind of a breathtaking thought.