Climate Change : An Uncertainty Principle

I have hesitated to write about Climate Change for a number of reasons. The big one is that I know many people who I associate with do believe we, that is human activity, is to blame for Climate Change. But if I don't give your religious views any respect to critique, then your views on atmospheric climate certainly deserves the same.

Let me state this from the get go : I do not believe we understand enough about atmospheric climate patterns and behavior to make any definitive long-term predictions or assumptions on how the future of the biosphere will turn out. Let me repeat that : we do not understand enough about the earth's atmosphere to make any good predictions about what it will be like in a few years. Hell, meteorologist can't even accurately predict the weather for next week, let alone next decade.

I say we don't understand enough, simply because that is the damn truth. For instance, what is the worst green house gas of them all? Methane? Worse than methane... It is WATER VAPOR. That's right, humidity! (Just think it over a bit). Humidity is so ubiquitous and ever in flux that it is hard for meteorologist to model it's behavior, hence why humidity predictions are usually highly erroneous or absent entirely. Modeling humidity in atmospheric science can be done, but the effects of it's presence and fluctuations is a bit like trying to model the results of psychic activity, i.e. consciousness, in political revolutions. Consciousness is present, it can be modeled and followed individually and collectively, but the results of consciousness's presence in political revolutions is a bit hard to predict (particularly when we are just watching conscious activity).

Now, I'm no meteorologist, but if I know a few things about thermodynamics, then there shouldn't be much flaw to my argument here. Five years ago the mean global temperature was on the rise since that volcano in the 1980's erupted and cooled down the earth from over 50 years of warming. Everyone was all worried about the ice caps melting and where the polar bears would live. What happens when ice melts into water? The water cools down. Ice caps were melting, and lo and behold we receive one hell of a winter this year. Am I on to something or am I not doing this right?

Numerous Bostonians have been telling me that this by far the worst winter they have experienced yet (just like my mother says this year's summer in SC is the worst yet (every year)). We have had something like three times more snow this year than the average for the past decade. Really? I'm from South Carolina and I am getting along just fine. Aside from more snow than last year, this year doesn't seem as bad as last year to me. Grow a set of balls. Boston is next to the Atlantic Ocean. As the sun moves from east to west it takes longer for the land next to ocean to warm up because of the oceanic thermal mass. This is why California is much warmer than we are.

But wait! Isn't this a good thing? It's cooling down. It was suppose to be getting hotter and hotter and hotter. Why are we complaining? Now, as for the ice caps coming back from their melted state, that seems to be something I don't have an answer for (because I'm not a meteorologist). My guess is that with cooler ocean temperatures they will come back. And since no one has been talking about ice caps melting for the past two years, I assume they are getting along fine.

Let me give a bit of recent history on the earth's climate. Anyone remember the weather five years ago? Of course you don't, memory doesn't hold on to discomforts. But remember all those hurricanes? They kept getting worse and worse, and then Katrina hit and everyone thought the end was near (literally). Just like the predictions for massive, unrelenting, anarchic crime waves in the 1980s, we were predicting hurricanes to be absolutely outrageous and monstrous terrors. Then 2007 rolled around and what happened? NOT ONE HURRICANE. Well, there was one, a Cat 2 and it hit Texas from the Pacific. And the next two years were pretty pathetic with hurricanes as well.

Just because it snowed more this year doesn't make it a pattern. In fact, just because it gets colder each year for four years in a row doesn't make it a pattern. Climate change is a long-term event, remember? Now, if it kept getting colder (or warmer) each year for 50 years running, then there is something different all together. We are jumping the gun when we call these events "climate change".

That's not climate change, that's weather, and it has anomalies, fluctuations and changes as well. I'm not saying that it isn't happening, nor are we to blame. I am simply saying we don't have the slightest clue how the atmosphere works. Hell, it took us 6,000 years to figure out that the earth was spinning and that's what made the sun, moon and stars (appear) to move. It also took us about 13,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.  We've been studying the atmosphere for maybe about a century.

One thing's for sure, no one is worried about Santa Claus.

Darwin Awards : Architects Learning from their Mistakes

I was recently reviewing some of the most recent nominees for the Darwin Awards. Whenever I do read the Darwin Awards I always flashback to certain moments in my past in which I have done some plain, good ole fashion dumb things. Many of those things certainly could have lead to my own demise (and they probably would have landed me on the Darwin Awards had I actually kicked the bucket). None of them I am going to recount here. But needless to say I lived, and because I lived, I learned. For some people this doesn't happen : some live and don't learn, while others don't live and certainly don't learn. But for those who don't live, we who live to hear about their stupidity do learn from their misjudgment.

The same might be said for designer, though usually fatality is normally not a factor. We learned a lot of how cities work and how people live in cities when we started building Cobusian Radiant Cities. What are these Radiant Cities? They are the housing projects, or more commonly called The Projects. They are that bad end of town that is nothing more than government funded slums. They were originally conceived as Utopian cities where everyone can live comfortably and happily ever after. The Pruit Igo housing project taught us that they are certainly one of the worst ideas ever rendered by the Modernist. Pruit Igo, three years after it was built, underwent major structural renovations... that is it was demolished, because of the massive amounts of vandalism, rape, murder, theft, and drug dealing it propagated.

Now do we blame Minoru Yamasaki for designing Pruit Igo? (Yamasaki design the World Trade Center, which so happened to be destroyed in a similar fashion under different circumstances). Or do we blame Le Corbusier for even thinking up the Unite prototype? OR... do we thank them for teaching us a thing or two? Do we thank them for risking and ruining their reputations to teach us such things?

How about a different example. I'll stay with architects. The John Hancock Tower in Boston, MA designed by I.M. Pei (he designed the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre) was a major disaster. He wanted to maximize the glass glazing and minimize the mullions that hold the glass in place. Turns out that the sizing of mullions simply was not enough. In short, what happened was that temperature fluctuations caused the glass panes to fail. Although this was a huge and costly failure, engineers certainly learned plenty about engineering glass facades from the John Hancock Tower's mistakes. In fact, the engineering of full-glass facades would not be where it is today if Pei and Partners had not stuck their reputations out on the line. Although Pei's reputation was tarnished, most engineers don't really blame him that much, simply because they learned a lot from these failures.

So what about other architects? Ones that we love to point and wag the finger at for their mistakes? Frank Gehry is particularly under the gun right now, since a good deal of his buildings are leaking. Do we wag the finger at him for designing buildings that are inevitably going to have faulty construction? Really, we should be thanking him for giving us a plethora of designs that we should never repeat. Renzo Piano teaches us something at the California Academy of Sciences that inverted glass domes naturally create waterfalls (no, the wet-floor signs did not come with the architecture). We should thank him for teaching us that.

I always enjoyed this particular quote from Frank Lloyd Wright : "If it doesn't leak, then it's not architecture."

We thank individuals of the Darwin Awards for teaching us to not do stupid things like depressurizing your anus with six atmospheric units of pressure, or trying to muffle the noise of a firecracker by placing it between your thighs. We also thank them for displacing themselves from the gene pool. Why shouldn't designers be thanked for having bad ideas that turn out to monstrous? Why not thank them for placing certain design ideas outside the design "idea pool"?

Sometimes faulty designs aren't the worst that can happen to a building. For Peter Eisenman this is certainly the case :

My Informal Fallacy Is YOUR Problem

It has been evident throughout human history (at least since the bicameral period) that humans don't like to be the ones to be blame, and we often send the blame to someone else. Evidence : Nuremberg Defense, Twinkie Defense, Charles Manson Defense, and What-should-I-do? Defense (see my The New Defense : What Should I Do? posting). A new one I have just recently encountered with one of my roommates is : if I am at fault it is because it is your fault, therefore I have no fault whatsoever. To see how this informal fallacy plays out, some background is needed.

About two months ago I had a suspicion that one of my roommates or one of their friends / significant others was using my soap and shampoo. Of course, because I was using the soap and shampoo it was hard to tell if it was only me. So about three weeks ago I bought a second reserve of toiletries and kept them in my room until I needed to shower. After a week it was quite clear that soap and shampoo have a half-life of about two weeks, that or someone was using my shampoo and soap without my permission! I could have confronted them about it. But I decided that since the soap and shampoo in the shower is my property, then I can do whatever I want to it. So I add some urine to the shampoo mix, and micturated on the soap. I kept this up for about two weeks.


Then one of my roommates approached me last night and angrily inquired as to if I was "pissing" in the shampoo (that is my shampoo). Well, now the guilty has been revealed. But, oh no, that's not my roommate's problem, it's my problem. Then my roommate proceeded to tell me : "How dare you piss in shampoo bottles!" Great red herring fallacy. The problem clearly isn't that they were essentially stealing from me, it's that it is blasphemous to urinate in shampoo. Therefore I am at fault. I am at fault for defiling something at was mine. 

It's right on par with killing my cat (even though I don't have a cat). It's my cat, I can do what I want with it, and if I want to poison it, then that is my right. NO! The cat is a living sentient entity, and you can't kill it. Therefore I cannot urinate in my shampoo (this is a generalization of what actually was said). Nice straw man fallacy.


It is as if we are all living like children being blamed or commanded by parents with illogical fallacies (parents typically use fallacious dialogues to rear their children, typically with bifurcation, or false dilemmas).


If I may redirect towards a previous posting Do You Know What You Are Asking For?! If people really want to return to the "Golden Days", to a time of simplicity, then our manners of interacting with one another need to be simpler. I have a suggestion : Take responsibility for your own actions. It makes things far more simpler, because then we don't have to navigate the blame web.

In the words of Bill Maher:
"Grow up or die." (Yes, that is a bifurcation fallacy)

Are We Building an Advance Boredom?

Lately I have been working on the Vitruvian Man problem with a fellow co-worker; the problem of how the human fits into a circle and a square, while still accounting for all static and dynamic anthropometrics. During our research and geometrizing we encountered the question of creating a measurement system (like Le Corbusier's Modulor, as well as Albrecht Durer) from our proportioning system. We ultimately decided we would leave that for ergonomists.

Now ergonomics is a study of human measurements, i.e. anthropometrics, in relation to everyday products, such as a chair, or a door knob, or a bottle of water, and even buildings, airplanes, and cars. Ergonomics is a study the roots back to ancient Greece, simply because the ancient Greeks had enough time to just sit around and think about things.

What else did the Greeks think about? Well, philosophy was a profession, on par with farming, governance, teaching, and construction. They invented numerous subjects of study (that is any kind of -ology), many of which we still use today : economics, politics, physics, metaphysics, rhetoric, grammar, ecology, biology, et cetera. It may be safe to say that the Greeks were one of the most bored civilizations in ancient history.

I believe the peak of their boredom hit when they built the Parthenon, the temple to Athena on the Athenian Acropolis. The Greeks recognized that due to visual perspective that objects appear smaller as they recede into space. So if one looks at a wall head-on (perpendicular to the wall) the left and right sides of the wall begin to curve back in space away from the viewer. This is because the flanks of the wall are farther away than the center of the wall. So when they built the Parthenon everything on the facade was curved outwards, and curved upwards towards the top of the structure. So when one looks at the facade head-on the curved edged are corrected by optical perspective, and so appear straight. The columns all have a slight bulge to them known as entasis. If the curve of the columns on the Parthenon are considered the arc of a circle, and the arc is continued downwards, the trough of the circle will be one mile underground.

Yes, the Greeks, indeed were some very bored people.

It appears the whole structure of civilization and society is based on being incredibly bored, so one just fills their time with thinking and coming up with activities that in no way directly encourage the survival of our species. I say "directly" with emphasis, because some bored person at some point felt like studying fungi and invented penicillin (I know this isn't exactly how the discovery of penicillin happened, it's call hyperbolization of narrating).

Just think of all the useless things we do to fill up our time from the day we are born to the day we die; things we make sound important and pertinent to our lives : football, The Cooking Channel, figuring out how to trisect an angle, golf, starting a band, or writing a blog posting on the boredom of civilization. In the case of the latter, I was bored and trying to work out dynamic anthropometrics of the body, and found my self bored again, so I began thinking about being bored. I was meta-bored. At some point in history (the Greeks) someone was bored and starting thinking meta- things, like metaphors, metacognition, meta-language, and meta-meta-whatever. One of my favorite books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was devised by Charles Dodgson to keep his three girls from being bored while they traveled from Cheshire to Oxford.

We play and fill our time with activities of no practical value to the survival of our species. There is another name for that : domestication. Dogs don't have to survive, they have human masters to pamper them from birth to death. So most dogs play and beg for attention, which is nothing practical for their survival, save that their owner continue to take care of them. We don't survive, we play golf, do yoga, and talk about wines and cheeses. We are not all that different from the very animals we take care of. A bored dog wants to play fetch as much as a successful Wall Street CEO wants to play eighteen holes.

Anytime we start considering truth, beauty, peace, and love we are within the confines of domestication. Nature is ambivalent, both caring and deadly, peaceful and dangerous, beautiful and ugly.

A music theory teacher of mine once told me : "Boredom is self-satisfied ignorance." This has a good deal of truth to it. But then again, if the advancement of society is based on boredom, then is the advancement of society the augmentation of stupidity? That may be a fallacy, but it has a good deal of truth to it.

Then again, the irony of it all is : the advancement of civilization was founded on boredom, and this boredom birthed a civilization that has become dependent on the products of its boredom. So the survival factor has inherently resurfaced : if we don't maintain the products of past boredom, while also producing new products as a result of further boredom, then society will fail.

And Other Crack Pot for South Carolina

I must admit, I love South Carolina. It's my home state after all. I was born and raised there. But my love for my home state is kind of like my love for people : I want to love them, I want to have faith in them... but, dear lord, every time I give them a chance they go and blow it. Hence my constant deposition of disappointment.

Aside from Governor Mark Stanford's affair, and him deliberately making the whole thing worse after Michael Jackson died; or SC democrats nominating Alvin Greene, a complete moron, for the Senate seat; or House Representative Joe Wilson calling the President a liar in front of Congress; or Senator Jake Knotts calling Nikki Haley a "towelhead"; or even in 1844 SC Senator Preston Brooks beating a Massachusetts Senator with his cane in front of Congress (Charles Sumner had it coming)... and so on... South Carolina has a new one to add to their list : Miriam Smith : Link Here.

Miriam gives a whole new definition to the term "Bible Beater", and, consequently, what happens to Bible-Eaters. Her nephew's pitbull was chewing on her bible and she hung the bitch from a tree with an electrical chord and burned the dog alive. I believe Adolf Hitler would have had a hard time stomaching this act. She claims she did it because the dog could be a danger to the neighborhood children. Right, just like the Jews were a danger to the State of Germany. Bullshit.

This so happens to be another instance of the pure ignorance brought about by the devoutly religious. We only need to consider what happened to the promising young scientist Kurt Wise, who turned down everything for the Word of God.

Not to bash on religion, but the devoutly religious can be absolutely stupid. But then again I have met some really stupid Atheist before, but they at least never did anything incredibly moronic on account of their lack of faith. Then again, two of my closest friends happen to be Catholic (both believe in evolution, but only one believes in the Big Bang).

It's not so much of a question as does religion make people stupid? But more so where does stupidity come from? Thanks to Miriam Smith religion has happen to hit an new low thanks to you, as does South Carolina. I want to love you SC, but you constantly disappoint me... hence why I moved to Massachusetts.

Impossibility of Visual Synchonicity

Dream Theater, one of my favorite bands, has one album that I consider to be the nexus of all their album  Metropolis Part 2 : Scenes From A Memory (although most albums that apply to this nexus album follow MP2 : SFaM, though a few albums prior to it do still link to it). One particular piece of evidence is in the first song on the album, the song "Regression" :

"Hello Victoria, so glad to see you my friend".

The next song, "Strange Deja Vu" has the following lyrics :

"There's a room at the top of the stairs.
Every night I'm drawn up there.
And there's a girl in the mirror.
Her face is getting clearer"

To give some background, SFaM is a single story of love, murder, hypnotherapy, past life regression, and strangle loops. The main character Nicolas is being haunted by a girl in his dreams, a girl named Victoria. Victoria is him in a past life. The girl in the mirror is Victoria, so what he sees in the mirror is his past.

The former set of lyrics is reused on their album Train of Thought in the song "This Dying Soul" :

"Hello mirror, so glad to see you my friend.
It's been a while."

"This Dying Soul" was written by Mike Portony about recovering from alcoholism, because he was an alcoholic, and it is number two of five songs written about recovery from alcoholism ("Glass Prison", "This Dying Soul", "Root of All Evil", "Repentance", and "Shattered Fortress", and each song is broken into movements so that there are twelve movements in all, as there are twelve steps for recovering from alcoholism). What these lyrics refer to is the past seen in there mirror, namely his past as an alcoholic.

But the mirror always reflects the past. Always. Consider the Mitch Hedberg joke :

"A guy hands me a picture of himself and says, 'Here's a picture of me when I'm younger'... Every picture is of you when you younger!"

But every reflection of yourself in the mirror is of you when you're younger. I'm reaching into Einstein's relativity here, but there is a certain amount of time it takes light travel across a certain distance (assume that we are not moving, because if we were on a moving train that only complicates matters). So there is an x amount of time it takes for light to bounce off your face towards the mirror, and then bounce off the mirror into your eyes. Then there is a certain amount of time it takes to your eyes to process the information, encode it, send it to the brain, and for the brain to decode it. Albeit all of this time is very minuscule and negligible, but there is a certain amount of time that elapses in this time period, which is dependent on the distance from the mirror (as well as, if applicable, how drunk you are).

So the reflection in the mirror is always of the past, though a very recent past. But there is another implication to this theorem : you can never see yourself in the exact same instance in time as you are in currently. There is always a delay. So if you could see a neutrino pass through your face, the moment that it occurs isn't seen and processed in the brain until a minuscule fraction of a second later (assuming you're looking in a mirror and that neutrinos are visible).

The past is the only thing that can be seen ever, so visual synchronicity is impossible; that is, so long as we live in an expanding universe. This all so happens to make M. C. Escher's Hand With Reflecting Sphere all the more fascinating, particularly in breaking the fourth wall.

Ephimenides & Doctor House

Doctor Gregory House, played by Hugh Laurie, has several key concepts that dictate his practice, his demeanor, and ultimately his general philosophy of everything. But one thing he constantly says (usually in obtaining patient history) is : "Everyone lies".

In looking at some of Hofstadter's concepts of strange loops, one that echoes precisely what House is saying was infamously uttered in ancient Greece. The Cretan Ephimenides once said : "All Cretans are liars." But in the subject of strange loops we must remember that Ephimenides is a Cretan, and therefore he is also saying "I am a liar." Hofstadter points out that this also means "This statement is false."

So House lies (which is typical of him to get his way). But he also makes false statements (he typically is wrong about twenty times before he is finally right). Ontologically House is Holmes. Strange.

But then again, if he lies, then is the statement "everyone lies" false? If that was so then everyone tells the truth. If everyone tells the truth then House would never say "everyone lies". Or, if he did then the statement would be true, and therefore false. It is like superposition in metaphors, and therefore superposition and entanglement in conceptual du(re)ality. In that case, all reality is in one position, transparent, and that one position of transparency (i.e. two or more bodies occupying the same space independently) is everywhere... and infinite everywhere is one place.

So the mind of House is a superposition conceptual metaphor in the confines of infinite singularity. Way to go Hugh.