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Uncle Don's Notebook16 July 2002Each of us needs a notebook in which to jot down those flashes of insight, one-liners, bad jokes, Nobel-prize-worthy ideas, and provocative tidbits and scraps read or heard. This is mine.This document is the natural successor to my regular column Scraps From The Editor's Wastebasket in The Vector, published from 1976 to 1991.
Signs of Boredom [Aug 2002]
We got suckered by reviewers into seeing the movie Signs. That
Newsweek cover story on director Shyamalan may have had some
influence, too. Now I've seen some bad movies in the past. Nashville,
Magnolia, The Mask and Welcome to the Dollhouse sit
at the bottom of the barrel of movies I should have walked out on. This
new stinker isn't that bad, but it leaves a bad taste just the same.
Signs is a shameful exploitation picture, mining cliches from many
movies of the
past. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (also a dissappointment) comes
to mind. The movie's several explicit references to War of the Worlds
just remind us that that was a better story (though not a great movie).
Here we have the theme of the kid with asthma, which is surely a set up for
something later in the picture, and also
the other kid with the water purity phobia. The ex-minister who has lost his
faith is another cliche, but when he regains it, it's totally unclear what
in this story motivated that.
Then there's things which just don't add up.
We have an alien trapped in a kitchen storage
closet, inexplicably lighted well enough so that the closet's
contents and the alien are
visible in the reflection of a kitchen knife. Water is poisonous to the
aliens, so why do they come so far across space to a planet which has so
much of this poison? And how did they survive for several days without
clothing or protective suits? Were they having a drought all over the world,
so they never got caught in the rain? And for all the business about
crop circle designs all around the world, we never got a believable explanation
of why the aliens should do that. I could go on, but why dignify this
proliferation of cliches by discussion?
This movie is an insult to the intelligence of moviegoers. The director/writer
has slickly thrown together elements from other (and better) movies, tried
to give them some "logical" connections, but not out of any conviction or
passion for the story.
They are used only to manipulate the popcorn munchers in the audience.
This is a cold exercise by a director who would like to be a Spielberg or
Hitchcock, but hasn't the intelligence to do it.
Perpetuum Mobile [Aug 2002]
Since I created web pages called
The Museum of Unworkable Devices
I've gotten a surprising amount of email from people who submit their
pet perpetual motion machines for analysis. Apparently many people
tinker with this in their spare time. These are not con-artists like
Dennis Lee, but simply folks who like to construct machines for their
own amuseuemt. Everyone needs a hobby, they say.
My pages are somewhat different from most other books and web pages
about perpetual motion. I treat each case as a puzzle, the object being
to find the flaw in physics or reasoning which prevents the device from
working as the inventor intended. It's always a simple misapplication of
elementary physics. So these puzzles are useful ways to test and
strengthen one's ability to apply physics principles.
But even when I do this, some inventors still have faith that their idea
can be made to work by some modification or other. It's a triumph of
blind faith and hope over reason and experiment.
I find it noteworthy that most of these proposals come to me with no
calculations, equations or experimental measurements to support the claims.
Many are no more than pencil-and-paper
exercises, totally unsupported by any laboratory experimentation. One person
did offer to send me a set of blueprints! I told him a simple sketch
and description would be quite enough.
One person hinted that my pages do a disservice, for by showing all those
examples of machines that don't work I am discouraging inventors and
stifling their faith and optimism as they try to devise perpetual motion
machines that do work. Well, repeated failure does that, too.
Every perpetual motion machine inventor I've encountered
is also religious. This isn't surprising. The religious mindset, especially
that of the Christian Fundamentalist, doesn't really trust science, and
firmly believes that "With God, all things are possible." The scientist
has learned better, that nature does some things with relentless regularity,
but refuses to do certain other things. Science is the process of determining
what nature does, and how it does it, and what things nature does not do.
Nature is under no obligation to behave as we'd like it to. No amount of
faith, hope or perseverance can alter the fundamental laws of nature.
Our time is better spent trying to find out exactly how nature does
work, then exploit that understanding to accomplish new and useful things within
those limitations.
The folks who hope to make machines with unlimited energy output bristle at
the laws of thermodynamics, which are usually stated in a manner which tells
us what isn't possible in nature. They don't like "negative" statements of laws.
But every law of physics does that. A law which specifically tells
us precisely what will happen in certain circumstances is also telling us
what will not happen.
What's new? [Aug 2002]
Again, my lame excuse for neglecting these Notebook entries is that
I've been making additions to my other web pages. For example:
When I was a teenager I
experimented with the family box Brownie camera, and later with
my first $15 folding camera which took 120 film. I shot close-ups,
stereos (by moving the camera horizontally)
and panoramics (by taking overlapping
pictures, then carefully cutting and dry-mounting the prints into a
picture four feet long).
All that has changed now that photography has gone digital. Digital
pictures taken in an overlapping sequence can be stitched together
with software. I've just discovered some remarkable software to do that:
PanaVue.
It can alter the perspective of the pictures cylindrical
or spherical (your choice), stitch the pictures together, blend the stitch
area and do color correction.
It can usually do all this automatically. But you can
do it manually if necessary. The results? Well, here's one:
I photographed this Pennsylvania covered bridge with an inexpensive digital
camera in very low lighting conditions. The only good vantage
point was too near the bridge for an ordinary camera lens to see more than
about 1/5 of the span of the bridge. So I shot seven pictures, overlapping.
This picture covers only a modest visual angle, but
the PanaVue system can assemble much larger panoramics,
even up to 360°, horizontal, vertical, or any other way, and even
stitch photos in a matrix (useful for aerial photos). I give this
software four stars.
The Fundamentalist Mindset [July 2002]
The tragic events of last November ought to stimulate a sober re-examination of
the perversion of religion by fundamentalists of all stripes and the dangers
of religious fanaticism and religious dogmatism. But instead it
has fueled the flames of religious conservatism in our own country.
It has encouraged
zealots who wish to impose prayers and their own brand of religious instruction
into our public schools,
and who seek to reaffirm the religious symbolism which has already
corrupted our government and political life, such as the "under God" addition
to the "Pledge of Allegiance".
As an outsider to religion, these trends are alarming to me.
Fundamentalist religion of any variety has one central characteristic.
The fundamentalist is passionately convinced of the "rightness" of his
or her beliefs.
The fundamentalist is right, and everyone else is wrong.
This isn't a matter of opinion or reason
for the fundamentalist, but is a matter of divine inspiration.
Once one has that conviction, most any actions against nonbelievers can
be justified, for unbelievers are by definition, wrong.
While such religious fundamentalists
may live relatively peacefully with neighbors of other religious views in
secular countries which respect diversity, they look for any opportunity
to seize control of the social or government structure
and bend it to their own beliefs.
And when they are in a position of power, any respect for other views
vanishes.
It's easy enough to say that the fundamentalist fanatics who engage in terrorism
have "perverted" their religion, and easy for us to
dismiss their actions as aberrations.
But what spawned their particular religious views?
Every fundamentalist religion
is an offshoot of a "mainstream" religion, and every "perverted" belief of
a fundamentalist has its roots in elements of mainstream religious thought.
Have not these mainstream religious had their own sordid history of
violence, injustice, inhumanity and intolerance?
Have we forgotten the crusades, the
inquisition, and even the Jim Jones and Heaven's Gate tragedies of recent past?
What religion today can claim an unblemished record?
The root problem is belief itself—the
kind of belief which admits no possibility of being wrong.
This is industrial-strength religious belief. Most religions
encourage unquestioning belief, considering such belief to be a necessary,
noble and desirable thing. I consider it to be
the root cause of many of the evils which mankind has inflicted upon itself.
"Belief" is a word with many shades of meaning. We say "I believe
it's going to rain today."
That indicates no more than a probability of something
happening. The scientist, in casual conversation, may say "I believe in the
laws of mechanics." This represents a "provisional" or tentative belief,
saying that so far as any experiment has shown,
these laws seem to work, and they have theoretical
underpinnings in other laws which are well tested and also seem to work.
The scientist
admits that future scientific developments may cause us to modify these laws
to accommodate new discoveries, so his "belief" in the laws isn't absolute.
But the belief of the religious person, particularly the fundamentalist, is fundamentally
different. For fundamentalists, religious belief is considered
absolute, and religious
"truths" are not subject to test or verification—they can never
be refuted by any experiment, event, or argument. The "true believer"
knows they are right because they feel right. It's an
emotional, not a rational commitment, though many believers are quite adept
at concocting rational-sounding arguments (rationalizations) to support their
convictions
in arguments with non-believers. Theology is the "academic" manifestation
of this empty exercise in apologetics.
In my view, such absolute beliefs are not only dangerous, but
they are totally unwarranted. We simply have no way to discover or test
absolute truths. We can only invent them, then believe them, then impose
those beliefs on others. The ancient Greeks spoke often of the
impossibility of finding absolute truths:
But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Though some of this country's founding fathers were of religious inclination
(many of these were Deists),
they knew very well the "tyranny of religion" as practiced in Europe.
They sought to
invent a government immune from the abuses which religion, allied with
government, can inflict upon those who think differently. Their motives
were sound, and we benefit from their efforts. But they probably did not
imagine how their work would be eroded and compromised by the
religious fervor of later centuries.
Religious symbolism and slogans were added to our coinage,
to our oath of allegiance, prayers are said at government functions,
many seek to inject religion into education, and
politicians of all parties pander to religious voters. It is a shameful
exercise of the religious majority's oppression and suppression
of minority views,
so shameful that even sober and responsible religious leaders have spoken
against it. But they are in the minority, especially in these times of
patriotic excess.
Amidst the furor of press coverage of the "under God" phrase in the
pledge of allegiance, one voice
of reason stood out. Anna Quindlen (whose commentary is usually insightful)
wrote in Newsweek (July 15, 2002, p. 64) reminding Americans
that the pledge arose late in our history, in 1892, and the words
"under God" only added by act of Congress in 1954 during the excesses and
fervor of the "Red scare". She was one of
the few journalists brave enough to point out the obvious:
The news is filled with corporate accounting scandals, corporate bankruptcies,
and continually declining stock market performance. Discouraging, yes, but surprising?
It shouldn't be. For quite a few decades the conventional 'wisdom' was a vision
seen through rose-colored glasses of a booming economy, continued growth and general
good times ahead. People forget that such things are cyclic, if history is any
indicator. Yes, history does repeat itself, but usually when you least
expect it.
Of course we blame this whole mess on greedy CEOs, insider information sharing,
and a lack of ethics at the higher levels of corporate management. It's not
that simple. Corporate greed is nothing new in our history; look at the
machinations of the 19th century robber barons.
Overlooked is something I see as a central issue in all of this. The stock
market has always been a gambling game, and those who think they have magical
"systems" for beating it are deluding themselves. Any system works when things
are booming, if you have enough cash for a stake in the game. The trick is
to keep things booming. Since those who run this gambling establishment also have
a stake in it, it's to their advantage to make things look as if they are booming
even if they aren't. So clever accounting is used across the board to make
everyone think that all is well, all is rosy, even when it's actually stagnating,
or even if it's on the way down the tubes. It's an elaborate game of self-deception
which pays off for those heavily invested in it, if they are privy to knowledge that
the average dupe investor can't obtain.
The bottom line is that this economic boom of the last few decades was largely
a paper fraud. Everyone involved, from the corporations to the government had
an interest in perpetrating the illusion, and no incentive to blow the whistle.
At the same time many new investors entered the market (buoyed by hopes of
fantastic returns), some of them invested through mutual
funds and their pension plans, totally innocent of the real state of affairs.
But it didn't take a crystal ball to see signs that the economy was not as
healthy as it was pictured. Many saw, and said, that a downturn or worse
was to be expected, but no one could pinpoint precisely when.
In the meantime, let's invest and get rich.
All of the classic con-games take advantage of human greed.
But of course, this illusion produced real financial gains—for a while.
Most scams and con-games do.
Good returns spur one to invest more and more, and suck in other investors,
which all fuels even better returns, until it all falls flat. We've seen this
in the past, with the notorious economic "bubbles" of the 18th centuries which
almost brought down some European governments. We would do well to read
Charles Mackay's classic 1841
"Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds." The latest
reprint edition I've seen (Bonanza Books) has a new foreword by Andrew Tobias.
How appropriate.
Even now some optimistic "experts" predict a recovery. If there is a recovery,
it will be a slow one and may be short-lived, for the economic fraud of recent
decades managed to hide very
entrenched weaknesses in our economy (and the "global economy")
which won't be quickly fixed by new regulations
on accounting, and won't respond to mere hype and hope.
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