So I've poopoo-ed the moon base plan, the question could be asked if I have a better idea.
I've got an idea. A project that would be a worthy successor to the Apollo program. A plan that would require a program of scientific research, technological development, and incidentally encourage the beginning of a revolution in material science.
I'm talking about building a space elevator. For some background on what I'm talking about you can read this wikipedia entry. It's recently occurred to me as an ultimate answer. I'm unhappy about the current moon plans on many levels. I'm unhappy that after decades of talk about developing a better reusable launch vehicle system, including the holy grail of launch vehicles, the single stage to orbit concept, we've abandoned ALL of the plans we'd come up with to fall back on Apollo era technology. Instead of it being a new mission to a new frontier that would require us to develop new technology, we're going back to where we've already gone, using technology we've already established.
But a space elevator would be a different matter. Perhaps the concept lacks the easy popular appeal of walking on the moon, but it WOULD be that combination of a bold development of new technology to give us new capabilities. And this is exactly the right time for it. We're currently poised on the edge of a new era in the world of materials sciences. I'm talking about carbon nanotechnology. In this case, specifically carbon nanotubes. Much like the state of rocket science at the start of the Apollo project, we already have some capability to make carbon nanotubes and are starting to work on ways to use them. But it needs more work, more development.
An often under-appreciated benefit of the Apollo program was the many technologies developed for it that found applications in everyday life here on Earth. All too often these programs are viewed as isolated, expensive projects with no practical value. I can't say I don't understand why, we take our technology for granted. If someone's life has been saved by surgery made possible by magnetic resonance imaging or a CAT scan there's no reason they should know that both of those technologies are offshoots of NASA programs. The cheap quartz clocks that are the basis for the computers that run our world? Thank NASA.
When you undergo a program of intensive scientific and technical research even your failures can produce useful technology.
In the case of a space elevator even the expected technological developments are revolutionary. As I've already mentioned, a key component of the entire program would be carbon nanotubes. To put it simply, as I've already stated, I believe carbon nanotubes will usher in the next material revolution. They behave differently than metal, so I'm not sure it's completely accurate to simply compare tensile strength of nanotubes and various metal alloys, but the numbers themselves are astounding. The listing I referenced lists high carbon steel as having a tensile strength of 1.2GPa, whereas a multi walled nanotube has tested to 63GPa, and can theoretically get up to 140-177GPa.
Imagine the side effects of a program that develops better methods of manufacturing and using such a remarkable material. Again, it behaves differently than metal, you can't just replace a metal structural component with a CNT version, but with suitably altered design techniques it should be possible to make things far lighter and yet still far stronger than ever before. Already the far cruder carbonfiber composite material has made a massive impact in everything from aircraft design to artificial limb construction.
But carbon nanotubes have potential nanotechnology applications. I have seen reports of research still underway that involved using either nanotubes or a similar carbon structure, this time round instead of tubular, the buckyball, in various advanced solar power concepts, either for generating electricity more efficiently than we can now or else in using sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, thus providing a renewable source of hydrogen fuel cell fuel.
It's a new era and we've only glimpsed the potential that the nanoscale carbon structures offer.
But about the space elevator itself. As I said, it doesn't quite have the same traditional romance of a manned base on the moon, but it's still a classic science fiction concept that should appeal to the masses once they understand what it would mean.
A brief trip through google found estimates of the current cost to launch payloads to orbit of at least 15,000 dollars per pound.
Compare that to the rock bottom estimate I've seen for a space elevator of $100 per pound. That's the lowest estimate, they go higher, but clearly they're in another realm altogether compared to traditional rocket transportation.
Imagine that that kind of reduction in cost would mean. Imagine NASA's budget effectively being multiplied many times. Imagine them sending out ten times as many space probes, or else significantly larger and more capable units.
Imagine space tourism reduced to a point where it might cost as much to go BEYOND low Earth orbit (by its nature a space elevator would have to at least go beyond the much higher geostationary orbit) as it would to buy a first class ticket to Japan.
This would not be instantly achieved.. when the first elevator was completed there'd be fierce competition to use it, the limited capacity would be likely to drive the price significantly up if it were run on pure market forces. But once one was up it should serve to drastically reduce the cost of any subsequent elevators. An initial elevator that proved itself useful could find itself almost instantly pressed into service lifting payloads for constructing further elevators.
There are a number of unique benefits that I never even guessed at until I read the wikipedia listing that I referenced. The most striking is that, through a physical mechanism that I don't wish to get into detail here (but which the writers of the article did elaborate on), a space elevator would be used as a catapult. It would be possible to fling a payload out of Earth orbit without actually using any rocket power at all. Combine that with additional rocket power and vehicles could be sent to outer solar system targets far faster than they can now.
And obviously such capability would enable a manned mission to Mars to be made better and cheaper. Imagine sending ten times as much hardware on the trip. How much additional capability could the mission gain?
There are potential problems, of course. The most significant is the statistical guarantee that
any single fixed site elevator will eventually be hit by a satellite or piece of space junk, and the unpleasant likelyhood that that would result in the cable being severed. Imagine a billion dollar structure being completely destroyed as a result of a single collision. Not only that, but the counterweight on the end of the cable would be flung into space unless it were fitted with braking thrusters to allow it to remain in Earth orbit.
It would be a tempting target in any military conflict. I'm tired of what is rapidly becoming a cliche, but there's no way to avoid that it would be a tempting terrorism target as well. The first space elevator would be a high profile target like nothing else in the world.
But these are problems with possible solutions. If we had been willing to turn back from the path of the Apollo program because of possible problems we'd have never bothered. We don't do these things because they're safe or easy. We do them to advance our knowledge, our capability, and indeed ourselves.
We're approaching the end of the era of the Space Shuttle. I'm terrifically disappointed in some aspects of the Space Shuttle program. It was supposed to be more capable and far cheaper than previous disposable launcher systems. There's no denying its capability, but in the cost arena it was a spectacular failure. A single Space Shuttle launch costs about as much as Russia's entire space program budget for a year.
I'll be sad to see the retirement of the Space Shuttle. I have a great emotional attachment to it, it's an incredible symbol of the American space program.
It may be that the Ares launch vehicle system currently being planned would be more efficient than the Space Shuttle program.. but it's hardly revolutionary. It's an Apollo era throwback, an echo of what we had accomplished with the Saturn V. It's less effective because the heavy lift version, the Ares V, is not "man rated", which means it's not supposed to carry people. So any manned mission would require an Ares, and anything heavier than the Apollo Command Module style Orion spacecraft (an overly pretty name for a vehicle with such little capability) would also require an Ares V. Two separate launches for what Apollo managed with just one. It's supposed to be a reduced cost system, but I don't see that happening when any serious mission requires a pair of launches.
Really, compare the options. A revolutionary launch mechanism that cuts the cost to orbit by a factor potentially as high as 100 times, ushering in a new era of space exploration (including, why not, a moon base, a launch mechanism that cheap would make a moon base much cheaper to operate as well) as well as in material science, or a conservative launch vehicle that would require two launches for any single moon mission, and otherwise leave us with less capability than what we currently possess with the Space Shuttle.
I don't disagree with the people pushing the moon and Mars plans in that I think it IS time for a new mission, a major program to push our scientific and technical understanding to the limits and beyond. I just don't think a moon base using decades old technology is anything resembling that. It looks to me to be a tired attempt to gather the interest of a fickle public grown bored with the ISS. Well guess what? We got tired of the moon before as well. The Apollo program wasn't canceled because we'd done everything there was to do, it was canceled because, despite the ever increasing quality of television broadcasts that it was providing (live video from the moon, even in today's era of live TV from the ISS that still amazes me), people weren't watching.
I just don't see the wisdom in trying to plan a space program based on its ability to compete with soap operas and sitcoms.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Boldly going where we've already gone before?
The next big frontier for the US space program is apparently going to be the moon. Again.
I'm tremendously disappointed in this decision and am still hoping that we end up changing the plan and doing something more useful.
Don't get me wrong, a permanent moon base would be an exciting new frontier, but we aren't fully utilizing the capabilities we already have. That's the ultimate example of why I think this plan is such a bad idea. We've spent billions getting the ISS built. The Space Shuttle program is only barely going to last long enough to get the ISS finished. Yet already funding for the experiments on board the ISS is being cut in order to direct money to new projects.
Why bother spending so much money building the damned thing if we're going to start slashing funding before it's even finished? The ISS is a research platform. We're supposed to be using it to run experiments. But now we're to believe that the moon is going to be the next research project, and that we'd learn so much from a permanent base there.
How about making the most of what we have now first before galloping off somewhere else? I feel like a parent telling a child that he shouldn't get a new toy since he doesn't play with the one he already has.
The thing is, the Apollo program was a bold effort. On some (well, MANY) levels it was a part of the cold war, but it was also an intensive scientific and technical venture. It cost a lot of money, but it resulted in the development of many new technologies. It's like the saying about a trip and getting there being half the fun. It wasn't walking on the moon, it was what it took to get there that made it all worthwhile.
I'm just not sure that doing it over again, only with the addition of a permanent base that is supposed to have some bearing on a Mars mission, is really the best way to proceed considering the limited resources we're willing to spend on space exploration.
About the Mars mission, the attempt to link a moon base with Mars goes something like this:
The moon might have water buried beneath the surface in the form of ice. If we can put a base on the location of this ice and dig into it, we could mine the ice. The point isn't the water in an of itself, but what can be done with it. If you pass an electrical current through water you can split it into its component elements, oxygen and hydrogen. Which just happen to be a common choice for liquid rocket fuel.
The suggestion is that you could make space travel more affordable by fueling up outbound spacecraft on the moon. But I fail to see that as being any tremendous advantage. Yes, you could launch the vehicles from the Earth without them being fully fueled, weight reduction equals cost reduction. But the biggest effort is just getting out of Earth's atmosphere. Once you're in orbit you're halfway there. I may be oversimplifying this some, the more reserve fuel you have the faster you can get to more distance destinations. But the thing is if you launch vehicles without enough fuel, you still have to give them enough fuel for the transfer to lunar orbit. You'd also have to design them to land on the moon, or else you'd need a separate fuel ferry to lift the fuel up to the orbiting craft.
I admit, I haven't seen the numbers on the advantage this would confer, but it doesn't seem that it should be significant enough to be worth this overly elaborate plan. To me it reads more like a plan designed to appeal to science fiction enthusiasts who've grown up on stories where the moon functions as a spaceport.
I'm tremendously disappointed in this decision and am still hoping that we end up changing the plan and doing something more useful.
Don't get me wrong, a permanent moon base would be an exciting new frontier, but we aren't fully utilizing the capabilities we already have. That's the ultimate example of why I think this plan is such a bad idea. We've spent billions getting the ISS built. The Space Shuttle program is only barely going to last long enough to get the ISS finished. Yet already funding for the experiments on board the ISS is being cut in order to direct money to new projects.
Why bother spending so much money building the damned thing if we're going to start slashing funding before it's even finished? The ISS is a research platform. We're supposed to be using it to run experiments. But now we're to believe that the moon is going to be the next research project, and that we'd learn so much from a permanent base there.
How about making the most of what we have now first before galloping off somewhere else? I feel like a parent telling a child that he shouldn't get a new toy since he doesn't play with the one he already has.
The thing is, the Apollo program was a bold effort. On some (well, MANY) levels it was a part of the cold war, but it was also an intensive scientific and technical venture. It cost a lot of money, but it resulted in the development of many new technologies. It's like the saying about a trip and getting there being half the fun. It wasn't walking on the moon, it was what it took to get there that made it all worthwhile.
I'm just not sure that doing it over again, only with the addition of a permanent base that is supposed to have some bearing on a Mars mission, is really the best way to proceed considering the limited resources we're willing to spend on space exploration.
About the Mars mission, the attempt to link a moon base with Mars goes something like this:
The moon might have water buried beneath the surface in the form of ice. If we can put a base on the location of this ice and dig into it, we could mine the ice. The point isn't the water in an of itself, but what can be done with it. If you pass an electrical current through water you can split it into its component elements, oxygen and hydrogen. Which just happen to be a common choice for liquid rocket fuel.
The suggestion is that you could make space travel more affordable by fueling up outbound spacecraft on the moon. But I fail to see that as being any tremendous advantage. Yes, you could launch the vehicles from the Earth without them being fully fueled, weight reduction equals cost reduction. But the biggest effort is just getting out of Earth's atmosphere. Once you're in orbit you're halfway there. I may be oversimplifying this some, the more reserve fuel you have the faster you can get to more distance destinations. But the thing is if you launch vehicles without enough fuel, you still have to give them enough fuel for the transfer to lunar orbit. You'd also have to design them to land on the moon, or else you'd need a separate fuel ferry to lift the fuel up to the orbiting craft.
I admit, I haven't seen the numbers on the advantage this would confer, but it doesn't seem that it should be significant enough to be worth this overly elaborate plan. To me it reads more like a plan designed to appeal to science fiction enthusiasts who've grown up on stories where the moon functions as a spaceport.
Monday, July 23, 2007
a positive note on Christianity
Sometimes I worry I'm being too negative on the subject of religion. I accept that some good DOES come of religion, but I think too many negatives have to be accepted in the process.
But as a counter to my last post about people using sex as a recruitment tool for a religion that works to prevent sex, I present a story about the ONE example of an attempt at recruitment that I didn't find offensive.
The individual in question was a classmate. We had gotten together outside of class and were chatting, and somehow had gotten onto the deep subjects like the sense of meaning or direction for our lives.
At the time I was feeling a definite lack of direction. I mentioned that and he brought up how Jesus was his personal direction, and suggested I could consider that for myself.
"Oh no, what have I gotten myself into?" I thought, suddenly worried I was going to have to fend off a raving Christian.
Nope. That was it. I expressed a lack of interest in that particular direction, and that was that.
I have to appreciate what happened there. This was a certain type of Christian, a type I've actually grown fond of. He was very quiet, very soft spoken. He was a nice guy. I'm certain he believed in his own life path, his faith was clearly working out well for him, and he was offering it to me in hopes that it would help me as well. I saw no attempt at manipulation, no indoctrination.
It's because of people like him that I write this. I have no wish to spit in the face of those who use their religion for GOOD. I mean real good, not the campaign of hot button topic intolerance being promoted all too often by the religious voices of the nation's airwaves today.
My criticism of Christianity (and other religions as well) is in the evil that is done in its name. It isn't as simple as it being done by people who aren't "true Christians", the public voice of Christianity is conspicuously silent on such matters, as if they're reluctant to criticize their own.
Until I see today's trendy religious bigotry publicly denounced by ALL levels of Christianity, and see a program of peace, tolerance, and humility pushed as the number one priority, I will continue to be critical of Christianity.
Freedom of religion is something I actually, believe it or not, do believe in. It's just that too many have come to believe "freedom of religion" means "freedom to impose my religion on everyone else". If you choose to worship in your own way, in the privacy of your own home (or church, or whatever), and do not hurt others, then it's no concern of mine. If your faith compels you to go out into the world to try to make it a better place then welcome to civilized society.
If however your faith compels you to go out and force your views, no matter how bigoted or anti social, on others, then that's where we have a problem. If you're unable to tell the difference between improving the world and forcing your religious bigotry on it, then, again, we have a problem.
But as a counter to my last post about people using sex as a recruitment tool for a religion that works to prevent sex, I present a story about the ONE example of an attempt at recruitment that I didn't find offensive.
The individual in question was a classmate. We had gotten together outside of class and were chatting, and somehow had gotten onto the deep subjects like the sense of meaning or direction for our lives.
At the time I was feeling a definite lack of direction. I mentioned that and he brought up how Jesus was his personal direction, and suggested I could consider that for myself.
"Oh no, what have I gotten myself into?" I thought, suddenly worried I was going to have to fend off a raving Christian.
Nope. That was it. I expressed a lack of interest in that particular direction, and that was that.
I have to appreciate what happened there. This was a certain type of Christian, a type I've actually grown fond of. He was very quiet, very soft spoken. He was a nice guy. I'm certain he believed in his own life path, his faith was clearly working out well for him, and he was offering it to me in hopes that it would help me as well. I saw no attempt at manipulation, no indoctrination.
It's because of people like him that I write this. I have no wish to spit in the face of those who use their religion for GOOD. I mean real good, not the campaign of hot button topic intolerance being promoted all too often by the religious voices of the nation's airwaves today.
My criticism of Christianity (and other religions as well) is in the evil that is done in its name. It isn't as simple as it being done by people who aren't "true Christians", the public voice of Christianity is conspicuously silent on such matters, as if they're reluctant to criticize their own.
Until I see today's trendy religious bigotry publicly denounced by ALL levels of Christianity, and see a program of peace, tolerance, and humility pushed as the number one priority, I will continue to be critical of Christianity.
Freedom of religion is something I actually, believe it or not, do believe in. It's just that too many have come to believe "freedom of religion" means "freedom to impose my religion on everyone else". If you choose to worship in your own way, in the privacy of your own home (or church, or whatever), and do not hurt others, then it's no concern of mine. If your faith compels you to go out into the world to try to make it a better place then welcome to civilized society.
If however your faith compels you to go out and force your views, no matter how bigoted or anti social, on others, then that's where we have a problem. If you're unable to tell the difference between improving the world and forcing your religious bigotry on it, then, again, we have a problem.
sex as a Christian recruiting tool?
I used to be a pizza delivery driver, it's an interesting profession that gives you a somewhat unique view of the people in your community. What I mean is you see people in their own homes, you get a glimpse into their private lives. They've spent the day at work and when they return home they're tired and they discard their public facade, I see them in that state.
However this is less about the private lives of the pizza consuming public than it is about a curious recruitment tactic I witness being used by a Christian customer.
Religion is something that you can't avoid as a pizza delivery driver. It's not uncommon to receive a religious tract instead of a tip from the faithful. As a side note I can comment that I've done informal comparisons, and the more religious markings that are on a person's car (I mean like Jesus fish and religious bumper stickers) the smaller the tip they give the delivery driver is likely to be, if they tip at all. The worst sign of all is a bumper sticker advertising a religious radio station, often describing the station as a "family" station. At least 50% of the people whose cars bear such advertisement will stiff the driver, not even letting him keep the change from a dollar.
I find this interesting. I'll bet they shell out the hard currency when the collection plate comes along at church.. but the generosity doesn't extend to people delivering their pizza.
But back to the subject of this post, sex. We all know that the Christianity has a long and proud history of working to keep people from having sex (except their leaders, who have an equally proud history of engaging in among what they consider the more deviant forms of sex in secret while railing against it in public). I've heard too many stories of people who have been raised to view sex as intrinsically dirty, and of what that crippling upbringing has done to their lives.
Sex (at least premarital sex) is sinful. Temptation is the work of the devil. We're supposed to be strong and resist temptation. Denial of pleasure is a virtue.
These should be familiar messages to most.
I mention this because, on one occasion, I found myself delivering pizza to someone who used the brief moment of contact while exchanging pizza for money to invite me to some sort of social function at his church, making sure to mention all the girls they had there that I could meet.
This dismayed me on multiple levels. First off, did he say that to EVERY young male he met, or was there something about me that announced "single and socially awkward"?
The second example is probably the correct answer.
But moving on, the thing that really bothered me was seeing a Christian attempting to use sex as a recruiting method. Sure, you could try to take the position that social contact between the genders is NOT equivalent to sex. But I think that's a weak argument that falls apart upon examination of the basic relationship between men and women (er, the nature of the personal relationships that form between them, I mean). Humans, as animals, are driven by biological urges. We seek out food, water, shelter.. AND the opposite sex. The fundamental concept that lead to our concepts of relationships, love, and all that is sex. To an extent I'll accept a degree of uncertainty here because there can be an awfully vague border between friendship and love, and friendship clearly doesn't have to be driven by sex, but in the end I think it's clear that the standard male-female relationship that starts out as dating and traditionally ends up with marriage is a social construct designed to provide a stable environment to support the children that tend to result from the sort of male-female interaction that we're talking about here.
In other words, sex.
I was kind of disturbed to realize that I was dealing with a religious individual who was basically attempting to use women as a lure to draw me to his church.
I wonder what the women would have thought if they knew about this. Or perhaps they did know, perhaps they've accepted the Christian belief that women must be subservient to men, perhaps they were happy being used as a lure to draw in converts to their religion.
Part of me wonders if, had I gone to the social event, there would have been a group of girls tasked with socializing with me to make me feel welcome, to try to get me to stay by suggesting they were interested in me.
In any case the attempt was self defeating in my situation. When I think of a woman with a strongly religious background, I think of a woman with a lot of baggage that I REALLY don't want to deal with. I don't want to offend people, I'm sure there are a lot of happy, well adjusted religious people out there, but at the same time there's no way to deny that religion DOES screw some people up.
I was just repelled by the hypocrisy of using women's sexuality as a lure to draw loners into a religion that then goes out of its way to demonize sex.
That and I couldn't keep from thinking how much that sounded like a standard cult recruiting technique. You know, isolate a loner and get him to go to a social gathering where you heap attention on him to make him feel welcome, and then later you begin the process of indoctrination (as in brainwashing) once he's relaxed and vulnerable.
I've since found out that this is not an isolated incident. Others have reported similar experiences.
However this is less about the private lives of the pizza consuming public than it is about a curious recruitment tactic I witness being used by a Christian customer.
Religion is something that you can't avoid as a pizza delivery driver. It's not uncommon to receive a religious tract instead of a tip from the faithful. As a side note I can comment that I've done informal comparisons, and the more religious markings that are on a person's car (I mean like Jesus fish and religious bumper stickers) the smaller the tip they give the delivery driver is likely to be, if they tip at all. The worst sign of all is a bumper sticker advertising a religious radio station, often describing the station as a "family" station. At least 50% of the people whose cars bear such advertisement will stiff the driver, not even letting him keep the change from a dollar.
I find this interesting. I'll bet they shell out the hard currency when the collection plate comes along at church.. but the generosity doesn't extend to people delivering their pizza.
But back to the subject of this post, sex. We all know that the Christianity has a long and proud history of working to keep people from having sex (except their leaders, who have an equally proud history of engaging in among what they consider the more deviant forms of sex in secret while railing against it in public). I've heard too many stories of people who have been raised to view sex as intrinsically dirty, and of what that crippling upbringing has done to their lives.
Sex (at least premarital sex) is sinful. Temptation is the work of the devil. We're supposed to be strong and resist temptation. Denial of pleasure is a virtue.
These should be familiar messages to most.
I mention this because, on one occasion, I found myself delivering pizza to someone who used the brief moment of contact while exchanging pizza for money to invite me to some sort of social function at his church, making sure to mention all the girls they had there that I could meet.
This dismayed me on multiple levels. First off, did he say that to EVERY young male he met, or was there something about me that announced "single and socially awkward"?
The second example is probably the correct answer.
But moving on, the thing that really bothered me was seeing a Christian attempting to use sex as a recruiting method. Sure, you could try to take the position that social contact between the genders is NOT equivalent to sex. But I think that's a weak argument that falls apart upon examination of the basic relationship between men and women (er, the nature of the personal relationships that form between them, I mean). Humans, as animals, are driven by biological urges. We seek out food, water, shelter.. AND the opposite sex. The fundamental concept that lead to our concepts of relationships, love, and all that is sex. To an extent I'll accept a degree of uncertainty here because there can be an awfully vague border between friendship and love, and friendship clearly doesn't have to be driven by sex, but in the end I think it's clear that the standard male-female relationship that starts out as dating and traditionally ends up with marriage is a social construct designed to provide a stable environment to support the children that tend to result from the sort of male-female interaction that we're talking about here.
In other words, sex.
I was kind of disturbed to realize that I was dealing with a religious individual who was basically attempting to use women as a lure to draw me to his church.
I wonder what the women would have thought if they knew about this. Or perhaps they did know, perhaps they've accepted the Christian belief that women must be subservient to men, perhaps they were happy being used as a lure to draw in converts to their religion.
Part of me wonders if, had I gone to the social event, there would have been a group of girls tasked with socializing with me to make me feel welcome, to try to get me to stay by suggesting they were interested in me.
In any case the attempt was self defeating in my situation. When I think of a woman with a strongly religious background, I think of a woman with a lot of baggage that I REALLY don't want to deal with. I don't want to offend people, I'm sure there are a lot of happy, well adjusted religious people out there, but at the same time there's no way to deny that religion DOES screw some people up.
I was just repelled by the hypocrisy of using women's sexuality as a lure to draw loners into a religion that then goes out of its way to demonize sex.
That and I couldn't keep from thinking how much that sounded like a standard cult recruiting technique. You know, isolate a loner and get him to go to a social gathering where you heap attention on him to make him feel welcome, and then later you begin the process of indoctrination (as in brainwashing) once he's relaxed and vulnerable.
I've since found out that this is not an isolated incident. Others have reported similar experiences.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Credit card companies, a blight on humanity
One of the things I wish I had a magic wand I could wave to cause happen, just to see what the after effects would be, would be to erase all credit card companies from the face of the Earth. I'm curious what the sudden lack of expensive credit would do to society. We've developed this bizarre economical view where when people spend beyond their means, say for the Christmas shopping season, then we're told that the economy is strong. Somehow the mountain of debt being built up doesn't register.
I'm essentially outraged that credit card companies have managed to embed themselves as far into American society as they have. The problem is that they've managed to oblige people to use them, they've managed to create negative consequences for people who don't bring them profit.
I dislike credit cards and don't use them, as a rule. I simply don't understand the point. You essentially use them for a short term loan to pay for everyday purchases that you could have paid for with cash. THEN you pay them back, often paying back more than you spent because of assorted fees. Yet it's not even limited to that, what people in the modern age seem to have forgotten (except those working in the retail sector) is that not only do you pay fees directly to your credit card company, but you indirectly pay them because all merchants that accept credit cards have to pay money to the credit card companies for every transaction they make. There's only one place this money can come from, the customer. You don't see it, but every price at the supermarket has been marked up to take this into account. What's worse is that people like me who pay in cash essentially subsidize the costs, helping to pay OTHER people's credit card fees.
I'm barely old enough to remember the day when some prices, especially gasoline, were available in both credit and cash versions. I now know that that practice is still (barely) alive today, I saw an interstate highway gas station that listed separate cash and credit prices.
It's not just that that really outrages me though. For people like me who don't see the point of credit cards are penalized in another way for not doing business with those parasites upon modern society. Let's say I find myself in the market for buying a house. My lack of credit history will make it difficult to get a loan. At best it'll mean that any loan I can get will have a higher interest rate. Isn't that convenient for the credit card companies? If I don't voluntarily waste money on an unnecessary service then I have to pay more money for something else. How convenient for the credit card companies that being THEIR customer has become the measure of a good citizen. Of course it's a power structure that they invented from the ground up, the entire thing was planned, but somehow no-one thought that allowing them to do that might be a bad thing.
It's bad enough that that sort of information has become key to getting a loan. Now all manner of businesses are using the information from the credit bureaus. Applying for a job? If you're not a customer in good standing with the credit card companies then you're penalized. Yes, somehow that sort of information is deemed valid for judging the ability of job applicants.
Shopping for car insurance? Guess what? Now they use your credit history to influence your rates. Just one more avenue of society controlled by the credit card companies. Use their product or else you have to pay a premium for other products. It's financial blackmail, fully endorsed by the government that's received thousands of dollars in donations from, guess who, credit card companies.
My feeling on capitalism is simple. It's a fine concept, so long as the government controlling it is willing to step in to protect THE PEOPLE when such protection is necessary. There's nothing about the fundamental concept of capitalism that enforces ethics, it's up to outside regulation to protect the consumers from the corporations. In cases like this the government has been happy to slurp up the bribes.. er, donations, from such entities as the credit card companies and in turn allow them to do as they please, or even rewrite laws to better benefit them (such as the recent reworking of the bankruptcy system).
I have a proposal for the first step that needs to be taken to reign in these leeches. I want all business obligated to separate the extra credit card fees into discrete added costs that are only charged to people using credit cards. It would protect cash paying customers from having to subsidize the credit card costs of others. I'm fully outraged that MY money is going into the pockets of the credit card companies even though I don't use their product (and as such am being penalized for it). Secondly it would make credit card customers aware of the extra fees they're paying without even realizing it.
Such fees are, by the way, the reason that credit card companies are making such a push to get credit cards integrated into everything from purchasing gas to fast food with the RFID tags (radio tags that let you just wave your card close to a reader, it's nowhere near as secure as they pretend it is but this isn't the time to get into that). There's nothing they'd love more than to get people to pay for a $3 fast food snack with credit, they stand to reap millions of dollars from such simple, unnecessary transactions.
There are other things I'd like to see but I'm not holding out for miracles. I want the credit monitoring agencies to be outlawed. They have entirely too much power. If your car is stolen the process is simple. You report it to the police and they try to recover it, and if you have insurance than it can be replaced even if it's not found. And that's it.
If someone steals your identity then you're out of luck. You can be stuck spending thousands of dollars to try to undo the damage. There's no consumer protection. What the credit agencies say goes, presumed guilty, with the considerably heavy burden placed squarely on the shoulders of the individual.
Back to my stolen car example.. Imagine someone steals it and then commits a hit and run, killing somebody and fleeing. The police make almost no attempt to catch the thief, and instead throw you into jail. There's no trial, since it was YOUR car, and you're stuck in jail until you hire a private investigator to track down the person who stole your car.
There are any number of unjust situations like this. As a society we should be interested in making the country a better place to live.
The continuing theme to posts like these is that we COULD make the country a better place if we worked to address things like this. Has all the "greatest country in the world" talk made our society unwilling to consider that anything might not be perfect already? Is that why we're embarked on an obsessive global policing quest which has cost us considerably and benefited nobody?
I can't help but make a parallel to that psychology concept I mentioned earlier, the thing where someone, fearful of some aspect of their own personality, sets out to try to change the rest of the world instead. It's as if we've said that we MUST be perfect, so the rest of the world must be at fault.
Unless the issue has to do with prayer in the schools, or stem cell research, or homosexuality. Then we're only too willing to take action. Protecting consumers from predatory corporations is an unworthy pursuit (unworthy for the politicians who are essentially on the corporate payroll, perhaps), but keeping two people of the same sex from declaring a social union is a top priority.
I'm essentially outraged that credit card companies have managed to embed themselves as far into American society as they have. The problem is that they've managed to oblige people to use them, they've managed to create negative consequences for people who don't bring them profit.
I dislike credit cards and don't use them, as a rule. I simply don't understand the point. You essentially use them for a short term loan to pay for everyday purchases that you could have paid for with cash. THEN you pay them back, often paying back more than you spent because of assorted fees. Yet it's not even limited to that, what people in the modern age seem to have forgotten (except those working in the retail sector) is that not only do you pay fees directly to your credit card company, but you indirectly pay them because all merchants that accept credit cards have to pay money to the credit card companies for every transaction they make. There's only one place this money can come from, the customer. You don't see it, but every price at the supermarket has been marked up to take this into account. What's worse is that people like me who pay in cash essentially subsidize the costs, helping to pay OTHER people's credit card fees.
I'm barely old enough to remember the day when some prices, especially gasoline, were available in both credit and cash versions. I now know that that practice is still (barely) alive today, I saw an interstate highway gas station that listed separate cash and credit prices.
It's not just that that really outrages me though. For people like me who don't see the point of credit cards are penalized in another way for not doing business with those parasites upon modern society. Let's say I find myself in the market for buying a house. My lack of credit history will make it difficult to get a loan. At best it'll mean that any loan I can get will have a higher interest rate. Isn't that convenient for the credit card companies? If I don't voluntarily waste money on an unnecessary service then I have to pay more money for something else. How convenient for the credit card companies that being THEIR customer has become the measure of a good citizen. Of course it's a power structure that they invented from the ground up, the entire thing was planned, but somehow no-one thought that allowing them to do that might be a bad thing.
It's bad enough that that sort of information has become key to getting a loan. Now all manner of businesses are using the information from the credit bureaus. Applying for a job? If you're not a customer in good standing with the credit card companies then you're penalized. Yes, somehow that sort of information is deemed valid for judging the ability of job applicants.
Shopping for car insurance? Guess what? Now they use your credit history to influence your rates. Just one more avenue of society controlled by the credit card companies. Use their product or else you have to pay a premium for other products. It's financial blackmail, fully endorsed by the government that's received thousands of dollars in donations from, guess who, credit card companies.
My feeling on capitalism is simple. It's a fine concept, so long as the government controlling it is willing to step in to protect THE PEOPLE when such protection is necessary. There's nothing about the fundamental concept of capitalism that enforces ethics, it's up to outside regulation to protect the consumers from the corporations. In cases like this the government has been happy to slurp up the bribes.. er, donations, from such entities as the credit card companies and in turn allow them to do as they please, or even rewrite laws to better benefit them (such as the recent reworking of the bankruptcy system).
I have a proposal for the first step that needs to be taken to reign in these leeches. I want all business obligated to separate the extra credit card fees into discrete added costs that are only charged to people using credit cards. It would protect cash paying customers from having to subsidize the credit card costs of others. I'm fully outraged that MY money is going into the pockets of the credit card companies even though I don't use their product (and as such am being penalized for it). Secondly it would make credit card customers aware of the extra fees they're paying without even realizing it.
Such fees are, by the way, the reason that credit card companies are making such a push to get credit cards integrated into everything from purchasing gas to fast food with the RFID tags (radio tags that let you just wave your card close to a reader, it's nowhere near as secure as they pretend it is but this isn't the time to get into that). There's nothing they'd love more than to get people to pay for a $3 fast food snack with credit, they stand to reap millions of dollars from such simple, unnecessary transactions.
There are other things I'd like to see but I'm not holding out for miracles. I want the credit monitoring agencies to be outlawed. They have entirely too much power. If your car is stolen the process is simple. You report it to the police and they try to recover it, and if you have insurance than it can be replaced even if it's not found. And that's it.
If someone steals your identity then you're out of luck. You can be stuck spending thousands of dollars to try to undo the damage. There's no consumer protection. What the credit agencies say goes, presumed guilty, with the considerably heavy burden placed squarely on the shoulders of the individual.
Back to my stolen car example.. Imagine someone steals it and then commits a hit and run, killing somebody and fleeing. The police make almost no attempt to catch the thief, and instead throw you into jail. There's no trial, since it was YOUR car, and you're stuck in jail until you hire a private investigator to track down the person who stole your car.
There are any number of unjust situations like this. As a society we should be interested in making the country a better place to live.
The continuing theme to posts like these is that we COULD make the country a better place if we worked to address things like this. Has all the "greatest country in the world" talk made our society unwilling to consider that anything might not be perfect already? Is that why we're embarked on an obsessive global policing quest which has cost us considerably and benefited nobody?
I can't help but make a parallel to that psychology concept I mentioned earlier, the thing where someone, fearful of some aspect of their own personality, sets out to try to change the rest of the world instead. It's as if we've said that we MUST be perfect, so the rest of the world must be at fault.
Unless the issue has to do with prayer in the schools, or stem cell research, or homosexuality. Then we're only too willing to take action. Protecting consumers from predatory corporations is an unworthy pursuit (unworthy for the politicians who are essentially on the corporate payroll, perhaps), but keeping two people of the same sex from declaring a social union is a top priority.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Internet radio day of silence
This is one of the reasons that I have no problem speaking out as boldly as I do against the record companies and their puppet organization the RIAA. One of their recent tactics is to massively jack up the royalties that Internet radio stations must pay. Not only that, but they've made the changes retroactive! Imagine that you ran a legitimate Internet radio station. Imagine that you've gone to all the trouble of securing enough funding through advertising to be able to legally play the music, and you get rewarded for that by having your rates jacked up several hundred percent, FAR beyond what any normal radio broadcaster has to pay. If that's not enough you have to backpay those absurd rates for 18 months.
It's clear that their desire is to destroy Internet radio. They complain about pirates but when people go about legally licensing the music they decide they don't like that either.
It's what I've argued for a long time. This isn't about money, it's about control. Traditional broadcast radio stations pay a relatively small royalty fee. I have no hard evidence to back this up, but I know it's widely speculated that they in turn are financially supported by the record companies in exchange for playing what they're told to play. If you listen to popular radio it's not difficult to believe that.
I think it's clear that the record companies felt threatened by the net radio stations that played their own independent selections of music, or, in the case of Pandora, allowed the end user to design their own musical selection. Because that's not what the record companies want to do. They want to tell us what we're supposed to listen to and buy.
I direct all those interested to this link, it can tell the rest of the story far better than I could. The short story is that there is currently a bill working its way through both the us Senate and House of Representatives.
If the bills are defeated and they put the majority of legitimate Internet radio broadcasters out of business then I'll have VERY little sympathy when they complain about the remaining illegal broadcasters. How hypocritical can you get?
I love Internet radio. I'm able to hear music I'd never hear anywhere else. I rarely listen to what's become known as terrestrial radio (I'm unhappy with the current terms, I'd prefer dropping the use of radio when referring to internet audio broadcasting altogether). I have the big three music stations tuned in to my car radio and I sometimes flip through them but I rarely stay on any one of them, the music is just too uniformly awful. At best I've got a talk/news station that I often end up listening to. It's a little dry, but still a lot more palatable than what the record companies are trying to force feed me through the other options.
It's clear that their desire is to destroy Internet radio. They complain about pirates but when people go about legally licensing the music they decide they don't like that either.
It's what I've argued for a long time. This isn't about money, it's about control. Traditional broadcast radio stations pay a relatively small royalty fee. I have no hard evidence to back this up, but I know it's widely speculated that they in turn are financially supported by the record companies in exchange for playing what they're told to play. If you listen to popular radio it's not difficult to believe that.
I think it's clear that the record companies felt threatened by the net radio stations that played their own independent selections of music, or, in the case of Pandora, allowed the end user to design their own musical selection. Because that's not what the record companies want to do. They want to tell us what we're supposed to listen to and buy.
I direct all those interested to this link, it can tell the rest of the story far better than I could. The short story is that there is currently a bill working its way through both the us Senate and House of Representatives.
If the bills are defeated and they put the majority of legitimate Internet radio broadcasters out of business then I'll have VERY little sympathy when they complain about the remaining illegal broadcasters. How hypocritical can you get?
I love Internet radio. I'm able to hear music I'd never hear anywhere else. I rarely listen to what's become known as terrestrial radio (I'm unhappy with the current terms, I'd prefer dropping the use of radio when referring to internet audio broadcasting altogether). I have the big three music stations tuned in to my car radio and I sometimes flip through them but I rarely stay on any one of them, the music is just too uniformly awful. At best I've got a talk/news station that I often end up listening to. It's a little dry, but still a lot more palatable than what the record companies are trying to force feed me through the other options.
Monday, June 25, 2007
My UFO experience
I've got another fun story to tell, a story of a subject that's a popular target for skeptics.
UFOs, lights in the sky. Everybody knows they're all easily explainable, right?
Not the one I saw. That doesn't mean I've experienced evidence for the existence of alien life, just that I saw something in the night sky that my collective base of knowledge was unable to explain with the usual rational dismissals.
The story is simply this. I was walking away from a restaurant, through the parking lot. It was a nice, crisp, clear night, I had looked up at the sky to see what the seeing conditions were like. I'm not even really an amateur astronomer, but I'd taken an interest in such things and was just curious what the sky looked like that night.
You see, if you get a map of light pollution for North America you'll see a few spots that have the worst light pollution of the entire country. I happen to live in one of those spots, directly underneath the massive white canopy surrounding Chicago indicating that the area has the worst classification of light pollution. This means that, if I wanted to point my camera at the sky to capture a classic star trail picture, the sky would turn a disgusting shade of vomit-red and overwhelm the stars before I had any significant trails. When I look at the night sky I see only some of the brightest stars. The night sky is never exactly black to me, and the horizon glows as if sunrise was perpetually just a half an hour or so away.
So I was pleased when I looked up and the sky seemed a little bit darker than was normal. Perhaps the air was unusually dry and thus there was less water vapor to reflect the megawatts of street and parking lot lighting perpetually blazing away to banish the dark night from the suburban streets.
In any case, I was gazing up at the sky, and just as I'd had my fill and had turned my eyes back to more mundane terrestrial matters, namely finding my way to the car, a sudden faint memory of seeing something unusual in the sky registered in my brain. I wasn't entirely sure if I had really seen something or if I'd imagined it. But the memory was off a peculiar faint light moving at a highly unusual speed through the night sky. Reflexively I glanced back up, the memory telling me roughly where to look. For a moment I couldn't find it, then I caught it again. Two faint, diffuse light sources moving across the sky at an absurdly high rate of speed.
Any composure I may have had was totally lost. I was out with my parents to dinner, and I attempted to alert them to the rather unusual spectacle unfolding in the heavens to no result. I think I managed to stammer something along the lines of "ohmygodIjustsawaUFO!", only with less clarity. But long before I could direct their attention to the lights they were gone, having faded away into the light pollution haze on the horizon.
Here's what I can say with certainty about what I saw. As I said, there were two lights, both with a visible circular shape. That is it wasn't a point source of light, I clearly saw two circles. They were moving together, but they weren't entirely static compared to each other. It's difficult to explain, but while they moved with respect to each other it still appeared as if they were connected. My crude explanation is that it was as if I was looking at lights located on the wingtips of an aircraft, and if it were to rock its wings slightly from side to side the lights would move towards or away from each other, but in a fixed, predictable pattern. They did not look like, say, a pair of balloons bobbing independently in the breeze.
If you're wondering why my first notice of them was that weird half memory experience, I think I have an explanation for that. For whatever reason we humans have two different types of light receptors in our eyes, cone cells and rod cells. Cone cells need more light to work but react faster and allow us to see color (because there's three different kinds of them), and rod cells are pretty much the reverse, working in less light but producing no color information. The interesting thing is that we have more cone cells in the center of our vision and more rods in our peripheral vision. Astronomers know this well, a standard trick when looking for faint objects in the night sky is to look at the area in question with the edges of their vision to employ the greater density of rod cells.
I found this reference in wikipedia:
"The convergence of rod cells also tends to make peripheral vision very sensitive to movement, and is responsible for the phenomenon of individuals seeing something vague occur out of the corner of his or her eye."
Until tonight I've never seen that explanation, but it does rather a good job of explaining why I had already looked away from the sky before I realized what I'd seen.
I was facing roughly south, and the lights were moving in the direction I faced. Now that I look at the parking lot I see that it's not oriented directly to the south. So if anything it came from slightly East of exact North and went slightly West of South.
I've seen satellites passing overhead. I once managed to see the International Space Station. I've seen an Iridium Flare. I know what those things look like. They do NOT look like large, faint circles of light. Furthermore they move a lot slower than what I saw. So if I was looking at something outside of our atmosphere it was moving far too fast to be in orbit. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, it would have had to be a quite large object or pair of objects for me to see a visible disc from the ground with my naked eyes.
I find the aircraft explanation equally unsatisfactory. Simply because it was moving FAR too quickly, plus, again, the large circle problem. I haven't really done the math to estimate the speed, but unless the object had been quite low and therefore close to me it would have had to be going faster than the speed of sound. Most likely several times the speed of sound. Passenger jets positively crawl through the sky from the perspective of the ground compared to what I saw. First off aircraft tend not to fly that quickly, even military aircraft spend most of their time on the subsonic side of the sound barrier. Secondly when they do go that fast they tend to bombard the ground with a supersonic shockwave that's rather difficult to miss. I experienced no sonic boom.
I also know well what meteors look like. They can show a wide variety of appearances, from brief streaks of very fast moving light to slower, more detailed debris showers that appear when you're closer and it's fallen far enough to have slowed down. They can show enough speed to explain what I saw, but they tend not to travel in symmetrical pairs that travel together across the sky.. and, again, no large, faint circles. A meteor should have been a lot brighter.
So what was it?
There's only one rational explanation I find even slightly persuasive. Spotlights. The suburbs are often loaded with these things, and it's no problem for a spotlight to project a faint circle of light in the sky that moves at speeds apparently faster than the speed of sound.
Two problems with that theory. First off I've already established that it was an exceptionally clear night. No cloud layer to speak of. There would have had to be SOME sort of layer up there to reflect the circles of light while at the same time the air was still dry enough for there to be no visible beam of light emanating from the ground.
Secondly I've seen no spotlight that does what these lights did. There's a very traditional spotlight pattern, four individual lights that trace large circles in the sky and then rejoin in the center of each of their patterns. I've never seen a spotlight pattern that involves two lights sweeping a straight path across the sky and then stopping. There was no repetition, I was looking.
I'm classifying it as a UFO. I think the term is appropriate. By which I mean "unidentified flying object". I can't be certain that it was an object at all, but other than that it was certainly unidentified. You won't find me declaring that I've seen an alien space ship because I don't know what it was. To tell the truth I have no idea why aliens would go to all that trouble to fly through the sky showing faint lights.
But I hope I've demonstrated that I've done the best I can to apply the usual explanations. My nature is to seek explanations. When I see a magic trick my first reaction is to work on figuring out how it was done.
But none of the usual explanations has satisfactorily explained this experience. I'd actually like to present this story to some hard core skeptics some time, if they can come up with a decent explanation I'd have to accept it. I admit I'd be at least a wee bit disappointed, but no more so than when learning the secret of some secret of stage magic (basically a lot of what you see in stage magic is fake, even the alleged restraints are often break-aways that are discarded as soon as the curtain goes down).
For the moment though I have to file this under the category of the unresolved.
UFOs, lights in the sky. Everybody knows they're all easily explainable, right?
Not the one I saw. That doesn't mean I've experienced evidence for the existence of alien life, just that I saw something in the night sky that my collective base of knowledge was unable to explain with the usual rational dismissals.
The story is simply this. I was walking away from a restaurant, through the parking lot. It was a nice, crisp, clear night, I had looked up at the sky to see what the seeing conditions were like. I'm not even really an amateur astronomer, but I'd taken an interest in such things and was just curious what the sky looked like that night.
You see, if you get a map of light pollution for North America you'll see a few spots that have the worst light pollution of the entire country. I happen to live in one of those spots, directly underneath the massive white canopy surrounding Chicago indicating that the area has the worst classification of light pollution. This means that, if I wanted to point my camera at the sky to capture a classic star trail picture, the sky would turn a disgusting shade of vomit-red and overwhelm the stars before I had any significant trails. When I look at the night sky I see only some of the brightest stars. The night sky is never exactly black to me, and the horizon glows as if sunrise was perpetually just a half an hour or so away.
So I was pleased when I looked up and the sky seemed a little bit darker than was normal. Perhaps the air was unusually dry and thus there was less water vapor to reflect the megawatts of street and parking lot lighting perpetually blazing away to banish the dark night from the suburban streets.
In any case, I was gazing up at the sky, and just as I'd had my fill and had turned my eyes back to more mundane terrestrial matters, namely finding my way to the car, a sudden faint memory of seeing something unusual in the sky registered in my brain. I wasn't entirely sure if I had really seen something or if I'd imagined it. But the memory was off a peculiar faint light moving at a highly unusual speed through the night sky. Reflexively I glanced back up, the memory telling me roughly where to look. For a moment I couldn't find it, then I caught it again. Two faint, diffuse light sources moving across the sky at an absurdly high rate of speed.
Any composure I may have had was totally lost. I was out with my parents to dinner, and I attempted to alert them to the rather unusual spectacle unfolding in the heavens to no result. I think I managed to stammer something along the lines of "ohmygodIjustsawaUFO!", only with less clarity. But long before I could direct their attention to the lights they were gone, having faded away into the light pollution haze on the horizon.
Here's what I can say with certainty about what I saw. As I said, there were two lights, both with a visible circular shape. That is it wasn't a point source of light, I clearly saw two circles. They were moving together, but they weren't entirely static compared to each other. It's difficult to explain, but while they moved with respect to each other it still appeared as if they were connected. My crude explanation is that it was as if I was looking at lights located on the wingtips of an aircraft, and if it were to rock its wings slightly from side to side the lights would move towards or away from each other, but in a fixed, predictable pattern. They did not look like, say, a pair of balloons bobbing independently in the breeze.
If you're wondering why my first notice of them was that weird half memory experience, I think I have an explanation for that. For whatever reason we humans have two different types of light receptors in our eyes, cone cells and rod cells. Cone cells need more light to work but react faster and allow us to see color (because there's three different kinds of them), and rod cells are pretty much the reverse, working in less light but producing no color information. The interesting thing is that we have more cone cells in the center of our vision and more rods in our peripheral vision. Astronomers know this well, a standard trick when looking for faint objects in the night sky is to look at the area in question with the edges of their vision to employ the greater density of rod cells.
I found this reference in wikipedia:
"The convergence of rod cells also tends to make peripheral vision very sensitive to movement, and is responsible for the phenomenon of individuals seeing something vague occur out of the corner of his or her eye."
Until tonight I've never seen that explanation, but it does rather a good job of explaining why I had already looked away from the sky before I realized what I'd seen.
I was facing roughly south, and the lights were moving in the direction I faced. Now that I look at the parking lot I see that it's not oriented directly to the south. So if anything it came from slightly East of exact North and went slightly West of South.
I've seen satellites passing overhead. I once managed to see the International Space Station. I've seen an Iridium Flare. I know what those things look like. They do NOT look like large, faint circles of light. Furthermore they move a lot slower than what I saw. So if I was looking at something outside of our atmosphere it was moving far too fast to be in orbit. Plus, not to put too fine a point on it, it would have had to be a quite large object or pair of objects for me to see a visible disc from the ground with my naked eyes.
I find the aircraft explanation equally unsatisfactory. Simply because it was moving FAR too quickly, plus, again, the large circle problem. I haven't really done the math to estimate the speed, but unless the object had been quite low and therefore close to me it would have had to be going faster than the speed of sound. Most likely several times the speed of sound. Passenger jets positively crawl through the sky from the perspective of the ground compared to what I saw. First off aircraft tend not to fly that quickly, even military aircraft spend most of their time on the subsonic side of the sound barrier. Secondly when they do go that fast they tend to bombard the ground with a supersonic shockwave that's rather difficult to miss. I experienced no sonic boom.
I also know well what meteors look like. They can show a wide variety of appearances, from brief streaks of very fast moving light to slower, more detailed debris showers that appear when you're closer and it's fallen far enough to have slowed down. They can show enough speed to explain what I saw, but they tend not to travel in symmetrical pairs that travel together across the sky.. and, again, no large, faint circles. A meteor should have been a lot brighter.
So what was it?
There's only one rational explanation I find even slightly persuasive. Spotlights. The suburbs are often loaded with these things, and it's no problem for a spotlight to project a faint circle of light in the sky that moves at speeds apparently faster than the speed of sound.
Two problems with that theory. First off I've already established that it was an exceptionally clear night. No cloud layer to speak of. There would have had to be SOME sort of layer up there to reflect the circles of light while at the same time the air was still dry enough for there to be no visible beam of light emanating from the ground.
Secondly I've seen no spotlight that does what these lights did. There's a very traditional spotlight pattern, four individual lights that trace large circles in the sky and then rejoin in the center of each of their patterns. I've never seen a spotlight pattern that involves two lights sweeping a straight path across the sky and then stopping. There was no repetition, I was looking.
I'm classifying it as a UFO. I think the term is appropriate. By which I mean "unidentified flying object". I can't be certain that it was an object at all, but other than that it was certainly unidentified. You won't find me declaring that I've seen an alien space ship because I don't know what it was. To tell the truth I have no idea why aliens would go to all that trouble to fly through the sky showing faint lights.
But I hope I've demonstrated that I've done the best I can to apply the usual explanations. My nature is to seek explanations. When I see a magic trick my first reaction is to work on figuring out how it was done.
But none of the usual explanations has satisfactorily explained this experience. I'd actually like to present this story to some hard core skeptics some time, if they can come up with a decent explanation I'd have to accept it. I admit I'd be at least a wee bit disappointed, but no more so than when learning the secret of some secret of stage magic (basically a lot of what you see in stage magic is fake, even the alleged restraints are often break-aways that are discarded as soon as the curtain goes down).
For the moment though I have to file this under the category of the unresolved.
Friday, June 22, 2007
testing psychic powers in high school
A curious belief that I keep running into in the intolerantly faithful is the assumption that the sort of godless people who put their trust in science and, of course, evolution, would also believe in ghosts. This is a bit ironic coming from the church of the supernatural (fundamentalists rely on the influence of the supernatural as an alternative explanation for many things), and more or less completely nonsensical.
But let's see if I can give any support for that assumption.
The story takes place when I was in high school. I was taking a psychology class, which actually provided a limited means of understanding the obsessive quests that the religiously insane undertake. Like the anti homosexuality quest right now. The concept was that when someone can't accept some aspect of themselves, like if they find themselves even slightly curious about homosexuality, but they were raised in an intolerant fundamentalist world, then to deal with it they fight violently against that aspect of themselves.
All I have to say with regards to that is Ted Haggard. It doesn't explain his Meth use, that's a bit extreme even for what I've come to expect.. but basically I suspect the people that rail against things like that the most are doing it out of fear of an aspect of themselves and an inability to come to terms with it.
But anyway, the class. One day we did a quaint little psychic power test. It was kind of like what was shown in the beginning of Ghostbusters, if anyone remembers that.. Bill Murray was testing two people for psychic power by showing them each in turn a card drawn from a deck. The cards had a small number of distinct shapes, like wavy lines, and the person being tested presumably used their psychic power to intuit the identity of the pattern.
Only we just used ordinary playing cards. To make things simple we only tested for the identity of the suit of the card, so we had to pick from four possibilities, hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades. We broke into groups of two and tested each other in turn.
Basically, the idea is that through random chance we should get a right answer roughly 25% of the time, one out of four, since there were only four possible answers.
If you're expecting me to say that I got 60% correct you're in for a disappointment. I don't actually remember my score at all, but I know that the class as a whole averaged close to 25%. We didn't have anyone exhibiting significant accuracy, I'd guess that nobody scored above 30%.
But if you took the results of the entire class and averaged them, the results were slightly above 25%. A small enough number that it COULD be due to random chance.
It turns out that our teacher had kept track of the numbers she'd gotten after doing this for many years. We could see the numbers for each class. The numbers were fairly consistent in that most of them showed that slight but apparently statistically significant advantage over random chance. A truly random situation should get closer to the perfect random number the more times you run it, but this one seemed to prefer staying just ahead of chance.
And that was it. No great explanation from the teacher. We put away the oh so intriguing numbers and moved on to more ordinary subjects. I always liked that, she showed us this very interesting concept, appeared to give us evidence for the existence of a supernatural phenomena, and then put it away. So we were left to form our own conclusions.
So of course I'll say what I think. I'm biased, I'd like to find evidence that such things are real. It'd be neat to believe that the human mind has that sort of potential. You have to be careful with a bias like that, but I try to keep it in check.
I want to believe that the results suggest that everyone has a slight psychic potential. Perhaps it's some innate ability that we have to develop to make use of, and since we don't as a society understand it we never develop it.
I have absolutely no problem with that concept. I have no problem with the possibility that something supernatural could exist, because in all likelihood if it was common enough and widely accepted enough to be studied we could probably find out how it works. It's only supernatural because we don't understand it.
However I can't say that this is undeniable proof that such things exist either. If you want another explanation they do exist. First off I'm not a statistician so I can't offer detailed analysis of the numbers, I can't say how strong the variation was. Secondly there's always the possibility that the person holding the card (who can see it) was somehow unintentionally communicating the identity of the card's suit. I don't think that's very likely, it would have to be a completely unintentional, even unconscious means of communicating.
Basically it would appear that the person being tested had a means of identifying the card that was only slightly effective. Perhaps they were able to unconsciously perceive a hint of color reflected in the eyes of the person holding the cards that gave them a clue as to the hint of the suit.
The experiment gave us no answers, only a question. In a way I have to applaud that, I hear so much about the idea that our schools are training kids to take specific tests, or preparing them to be followers rather than leaders. That's partially why I took the psychology class, it wasn't about knowledge that I'd be expected to have. I wanted a little insight into the workings of the human mind. The fact that I got the teacher to call me perverse was the icing on the cake.
No, that's not really what it sounds like. I was talking about how I'm at least mildly phobic about spiders, and yet deeply fascinated by them at the same time. She said that that was perverse, that's all.
I feel like I'm just asking to be ostracized from the anti creationist community, you tend to get a lot of hard core atheists in there who reject a whole variety of things, with such concepts as ESP and UFOs ranking right up there with creationism. Unfortunately I've also seen a UFO, so I'm not scoring too highly at the moment.
But make of it what you will. I have no definite proof for the concept of ESP, and as a result I can't really say I believe in it. But it wouldn't come as a terrible surprise to me if one day it were proven to exist. Senses that to us seem extra ordinary exist all over the animal kingdom. Sharks (and oddly enough the duck billed platypus, the duck bill is actually loaded with special receptors) have the ability to sense the electrical activity of living organisms. Perhaps if we could do that it might have been interpreted as seeing "auras", before we understood enough about science to know about the electrical fields. Birds can navigate by sensing the magnetic field of the Earth. Astrology was founded on the concept that the "heavens" influence life on Earth, but we now know that the Moon actually DOES influence life.
For a total non sequitur, my desperate attempt to get out of this post now that I'm risking getting stuck in new age mumbo jumbo.. when I was younger still, in grade school, the mother of one of my friends refused to add sugar when she made kool-aid, on the belief that sugar caused diabetes. In private I told my mother (college trained as a med-tech) about that and we shared a superior chuckle at how backward she was.
Well it turns out that exposure to too much sugar CAN bring on diabetes. Doh. If anyone is reading this and feels that that's a gratuitous over simplification, well.. tough.. feel free to comment and explain the issue in greater depth, I don't understand it well enough to describe it even half decently.
In self defense I'll mention that she also believed that getting your feet wet in the winter would give you pneumonia. My friend was walking on ice (over shallow water, just a puddle on the side of the road) and one of his feet broke through and fell into the water. I'm not really sure how wet his food even got, but he was seriously upset because his mother would be mad at him, and he'd get pneumonia.
Needless to say, he remained pneumonia free.
But let's see if I can give any support for that assumption.
The story takes place when I was in high school. I was taking a psychology class, which actually provided a limited means of understanding the obsessive quests that the religiously insane undertake. Like the anti homosexuality quest right now. The concept was that when someone can't accept some aspect of themselves, like if they find themselves even slightly curious about homosexuality, but they were raised in an intolerant fundamentalist world, then to deal with it they fight violently against that aspect of themselves.
All I have to say with regards to that is Ted Haggard. It doesn't explain his Meth use, that's a bit extreme even for what I've come to expect.. but basically I suspect the people that rail against things like that the most are doing it out of fear of an aspect of themselves and an inability to come to terms with it.
But anyway, the class. One day we did a quaint little psychic power test. It was kind of like what was shown in the beginning of Ghostbusters, if anyone remembers that.. Bill Murray was testing two people for psychic power by showing them each in turn a card drawn from a deck. The cards had a small number of distinct shapes, like wavy lines, and the person being tested presumably used their psychic power to intuit the identity of the pattern.
Only we just used ordinary playing cards. To make things simple we only tested for the identity of the suit of the card, so we had to pick from four possibilities, hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades. We broke into groups of two and tested each other in turn.
Basically, the idea is that through random chance we should get a right answer roughly 25% of the time, one out of four, since there were only four possible answers.
If you're expecting me to say that I got 60% correct you're in for a disappointment. I don't actually remember my score at all, but I know that the class as a whole averaged close to 25%. We didn't have anyone exhibiting significant accuracy, I'd guess that nobody scored above 30%.
But if you took the results of the entire class and averaged them, the results were slightly above 25%. A small enough number that it COULD be due to random chance.
It turns out that our teacher had kept track of the numbers she'd gotten after doing this for many years. We could see the numbers for each class. The numbers were fairly consistent in that most of them showed that slight but apparently statistically significant advantage over random chance. A truly random situation should get closer to the perfect random number the more times you run it, but this one seemed to prefer staying just ahead of chance.
And that was it. No great explanation from the teacher. We put away the oh so intriguing numbers and moved on to more ordinary subjects. I always liked that, she showed us this very interesting concept, appeared to give us evidence for the existence of a supernatural phenomena, and then put it away. So we were left to form our own conclusions.
So of course I'll say what I think. I'm biased, I'd like to find evidence that such things are real. It'd be neat to believe that the human mind has that sort of potential. You have to be careful with a bias like that, but I try to keep it in check.
I want to believe that the results suggest that everyone has a slight psychic potential. Perhaps it's some innate ability that we have to develop to make use of, and since we don't as a society understand it we never develop it.
I have absolutely no problem with that concept. I have no problem with the possibility that something supernatural could exist, because in all likelihood if it was common enough and widely accepted enough to be studied we could probably find out how it works. It's only supernatural because we don't understand it.
However I can't say that this is undeniable proof that such things exist either. If you want another explanation they do exist. First off I'm not a statistician so I can't offer detailed analysis of the numbers, I can't say how strong the variation was. Secondly there's always the possibility that the person holding the card (who can see it) was somehow unintentionally communicating the identity of the card's suit. I don't think that's very likely, it would have to be a completely unintentional, even unconscious means of communicating.
Basically it would appear that the person being tested had a means of identifying the card that was only slightly effective. Perhaps they were able to unconsciously perceive a hint of color reflected in the eyes of the person holding the cards that gave them a clue as to the hint of the suit.
The experiment gave us no answers, only a question. In a way I have to applaud that, I hear so much about the idea that our schools are training kids to take specific tests, or preparing them to be followers rather than leaders. That's partially why I took the psychology class, it wasn't about knowledge that I'd be expected to have. I wanted a little insight into the workings of the human mind. The fact that I got the teacher to call me perverse was the icing on the cake.
No, that's not really what it sounds like. I was talking about how I'm at least mildly phobic about spiders, and yet deeply fascinated by them at the same time. She said that that was perverse, that's all.
I feel like I'm just asking to be ostracized from the anti creationist community, you tend to get a lot of hard core atheists in there who reject a whole variety of things, with such concepts as ESP and UFOs ranking right up there with creationism. Unfortunately I've also seen a UFO, so I'm not scoring too highly at the moment.
But make of it what you will. I have no definite proof for the concept of ESP, and as a result I can't really say I believe in it. But it wouldn't come as a terrible surprise to me if one day it were proven to exist. Senses that to us seem extra ordinary exist all over the animal kingdom. Sharks (and oddly enough the duck billed platypus, the duck bill is actually loaded with special receptors) have the ability to sense the electrical activity of living organisms. Perhaps if we could do that it might have been interpreted as seeing "auras", before we understood enough about science to know about the electrical fields. Birds can navigate by sensing the magnetic field of the Earth. Astrology was founded on the concept that the "heavens" influence life on Earth, but we now know that the Moon actually DOES influence life.
For a total non sequitur, my desperate attempt to get out of this post now that I'm risking getting stuck in new age mumbo jumbo.. when I was younger still, in grade school, the mother of one of my friends refused to add sugar when she made kool-aid, on the belief that sugar caused diabetes. In private I told my mother (college trained as a med-tech) about that and we shared a superior chuckle at how backward she was.
Well it turns out that exposure to too much sugar CAN bring on diabetes. Doh. If anyone is reading this and feels that that's a gratuitous over simplification, well.. tough.. feel free to comment and explain the issue in greater depth, I don't understand it well enough to describe it even half decently.
In self defense I'll mention that she also believed that getting your feet wet in the winter would give you pneumonia. My friend was walking on ice (over shallow water, just a puddle on the side of the road) and one of his feet broke through and fell into the water. I'm not really sure how wet his food even got, but he was seriously upset because his mother would be mad at him, and he'd get pneumonia.
Needless to say, he remained pneumonia free.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
the deceit of the creationists
Well I just can't stay away from this topic. Since I made the last post I've been reading more of the two counter creationist web sites I posted links to. They've reaffirmed something I've been suspecting for some time.
At first I used to think of the creationists (and the intelligent design supporters, who let's face it are creationists in disguise) were misguided ignorant people raised with unquestioning faith in the bible that blinded them to the reality they lived in. While I still felt it was important to fight against their efforts to spread religiously motivated ignorance, at the same time I felt somewhat constrained by the whole freedom of religion thing. And no, I don't mean the law, I mean the concept. It's supposed to be a core value of the country, it means respecting other people's views even if you don't agree with them. It was a delicate balance, but I tried to maintain it.
But the more I saw of the creationist arguments, like the video I linked to at the end of my last post, the more I was convinced that they were deliberately attempting to deceive people. So many of their arguments are outright lies, or rely on decades old, outdated research. But check out the creationist propaganda and there it is, being flaunted for all to see. The sites I linked to handily refute a great deal of those arguments. But they continue to use them.
There's one of those arguments in particular I want to focus on. This one.
Basically what Kent Hovind (the guy in the video I linked to at the end of the last post) did was quote Niles Eldridge (paleontologist, evolutionary theorist) in such a way to make it seem like he said that the geologic column (the basic timeline of prehistory derived from the layers of fossils found in the ground) was dated using circular reasoning. But the entire quote, indeed a series of paragraphs on the subject, makes exactly the opposite statement. And also states that in some cases radioactive dating can be used to date a geologic layer (which Kent Hovind strenuously denies in the same segment).
Isn't it interesting how he perverted someone else's words and then continued to make claims that the same person clearly invalidated in the same series of paragraphs?
It's things like this that have convinced me that the creationists know darned well that they're not only incorrect, but are lying. The site I referenced often attempts to be kind to the creationists so far as suggesting that they may simply be incompetent researchers. Which would still be preferable to intentional deceit in the name of religion.
But I think it's clear that they know they're working to deceive people. They're not proposing a scientific theory, they're twisting the words of others, using selective quotes to make it seem like they said the opposite of what they really intended. They make claims that are completely false, either through outdated research or in some cases by making completely baseless claims that are easily demonstrated as being wrong.
They're lying. Plain and simple.
Which I think brings up an interesting point. At least some of these people must be reasonably scientifically literate to be able to come up with the claims that they do. Literate enough to understand the theory of evolution. See, it's my feeling that the people who really doubt evolution simply don't understand it. Once you understand it, it's pretty much common sense. It takes a degree of imagination to be able to extend your thought process to the sort of time scales needed to understand it, but once you're there it's simple.
I think they're attempting to coerce people into embracing creationism even though they themselves are aware of how poor a relationship the bible has with reality (I'm not saying it has no value, but treating it as literal truth in all areas is bound to fail because it was written in a pre-scientific world that lacked a great deal of the knowledge that allows our modern world to function). They may not even believe in creationism themselves.
Let me fast forward to what I think they're attempting to do to society. The fundamentalists are trying to restructure society into an echo of the dark ages.
It's clear that at their top they have an intelligent leadership who are ruthlessly fighting to promote their interests. Their core support comes from ignorant individuals who lack the knowledge to resist the message that the fundamentalist propaganda machine feeds them, but at the top I think most of the organization must know of the sort of deceit they're engaging in. The regular scandals that tend to claim one of their leaders every so often seems to suggest that while the fundamentalists at large may attempt to live by their moral code, their leaders are as corrupt, morally if not spiritually, as those they regularly denounce.
So anyway, where I see them headed if they manage to gain control of the country (an eventuality that, ironically enough, leads me to invoke the name of God in despair even though I'm an agnostic) is this: I think their leadership understand how important science is to our modern society. If they were to take control they'd have to safeguard some degree of scientific understanding while at the same time they worked to sabotage all public knowledge of it. For their interests they want the public at large to be ignorant of the higher forms of science, because as I said they want the people to be ignorant and frightened of the world around them so that they turn to the church for answers. It's clear from the general public level of ignorance of science that we have in this country that the society can exist without the masses understanding the sciences. It's just that at the top we rely on a limited number of individuals who do understand it. And they'd have to have a similar core of knowledgeable experts in the various fields to continue running things.
Sure, the country would lag the rest of the world in scientific research and it would slowly sink into third world status, but that's really not their concern. Misery can be used to strengthen fundamentalist support, just look at the Middle East.
But anyway, my ultimate vision (if they were to succeed in essentially taking the country over) goes like this: They will have to create a new ruling class. By keeping the masses ignorant they'll have made them largely unsuitable for any sort of national or even local leadership position. I suspect they'd need to develop an entirely separate educational system for the new ruling class in order to keep the dangerous information safe. Which also means that the ruling class would probably be hereditary. It might prove to be difficult or perhaps even impossible to take someone raised in the faithful ignorance method and bring them into the fold, the sudden understanding of how much they'd been deceived might prove to cause them to question their faith.
As I said, the model for this society is essentially medieval Europe. A dirt poor working class working themselves to death to support an opulent ruling class while the church secretly controls the rulers from behind the scenes like puppets.
Analysis of the methods of the fundamentalist Christians in the USA has lead me to this conclusion. I honestly believe that their leadership is this deceitful, they've demonstrated it too often now. And as such I have to label that entire movement as basically destructive and counter to the best interests of the country as a whole.
Legally they can't entirely be stopped because of the whole freedom of religion thing. Which, as I said, is basically a good idea, and I'm unwilling to compromise such principles when they become inconvenient.
But I think that makes it our basic civic duty to work to oppose them. They've declared a war on the secular aspects of the country. Even those Christians who do not subscribe to the same maniacal, obsessive devotion to interpreting the bible as literal fact are not safe. Another tactic I've seen used by the creationists is to label evolutionist scientists as atheists (in one case as a marxist as well, almost any slur will do apparently). Basically, if you're not with them then you're against them whether you like it or not.
There can be no common ground because they're unwilling to acknowledge any.
The sooner this subversive movement is stopped, the sooner we can get back to working to make this country a better place for all. So long as they're still out there and possessing the kind of power that they do today they'll still be pushing their agenda of intolerance and fear. I'd hope that whatever the differences among everyone else in the country, we can at least agree that these are not the sort of values we should be embracing.
At first I used to think of the creationists (and the intelligent design supporters, who let's face it are creationists in disguise) were misguided ignorant people raised with unquestioning faith in the bible that blinded them to the reality they lived in. While I still felt it was important to fight against their efforts to spread religiously motivated ignorance, at the same time I felt somewhat constrained by the whole freedom of religion thing. And no, I don't mean the law, I mean the concept. It's supposed to be a core value of the country, it means respecting other people's views even if you don't agree with them. It was a delicate balance, but I tried to maintain it.
But the more I saw of the creationist arguments, like the video I linked to at the end of my last post, the more I was convinced that they were deliberately attempting to deceive people. So many of their arguments are outright lies, or rely on decades old, outdated research. But check out the creationist propaganda and there it is, being flaunted for all to see. The sites I linked to handily refute a great deal of those arguments. But they continue to use them.
There's one of those arguments in particular I want to focus on. This one.
Basically what Kent Hovind (the guy in the video I linked to at the end of the last post) did was quote Niles Eldridge (paleontologist, evolutionary theorist) in such a way to make it seem like he said that the geologic column (the basic timeline of prehistory derived from the layers of fossils found in the ground) was dated using circular reasoning. But the entire quote, indeed a series of paragraphs on the subject, makes exactly the opposite statement. And also states that in some cases radioactive dating can be used to date a geologic layer (which Kent Hovind strenuously denies in the same segment).
Isn't it interesting how he perverted someone else's words and then continued to make claims that the same person clearly invalidated in the same series of paragraphs?
It's things like this that have convinced me that the creationists know darned well that they're not only incorrect, but are lying. The site I referenced often attempts to be kind to the creationists so far as suggesting that they may simply be incompetent researchers. Which would still be preferable to intentional deceit in the name of religion.
But I think it's clear that they know they're working to deceive people. They're not proposing a scientific theory, they're twisting the words of others, using selective quotes to make it seem like they said the opposite of what they really intended. They make claims that are completely false, either through outdated research or in some cases by making completely baseless claims that are easily demonstrated as being wrong.
They're lying. Plain and simple.
Which I think brings up an interesting point. At least some of these people must be reasonably scientifically literate to be able to come up with the claims that they do. Literate enough to understand the theory of evolution. See, it's my feeling that the people who really doubt evolution simply don't understand it. Once you understand it, it's pretty much common sense. It takes a degree of imagination to be able to extend your thought process to the sort of time scales needed to understand it, but once you're there it's simple.
I think they're attempting to coerce people into embracing creationism even though they themselves are aware of how poor a relationship the bible has with reality (I'm not saying it has no value, but treating it as literal truth in all areas is bound to fail because it was written in a pre-scientific world that lacked a great deal of the knowledge that allows our modern world to function). They may not even believe in creationism themselves.
Let me fast forward to what I think they're attempting to do to society. The fundamentalists are trying to restructure society into an echo of the dark ages.
It's clear that at their top they have an intelligent leadership who are ruthlessly fighting to promote their interests. Their core support comes from ignorant individuals who lack the knowledge to resist the message that the fundamentalist propaganda machine feeds them, but at the top I think most of the organization must know of the sort of deceit they're engaging in. The regular scandals that tend to claim one of their leaders every so often seems to suggest that while the fundamentalists at large may attempt to live by their moral code, their leaders are as corrupt, morally if not spiritually, as those they regularly denounce.
So anyway, where I see them headed if they manage to gain control of the country (an eventuality that, ironically enough, leads me to invoke the name of God in despair even though I'm an agnostic) is this: I think their leadership understand how important science is to our modern society. If they were to take control they'd have to safeguard some degree of scientific understanding while at the same time they worked to sabotage all public knowledge of it. For their interests they want the public at large to be ignorant of the higher forms of science, because as I said they want the people to be ignorant and frightened of the world around them so that they turn to the church for answers. It's clear from the general public level of ignorance of science that we have in this country that the society can exist without the masses understanding the sciences. It's just that at the top we rely on a limited number of individuals who do understand it. And they'd have to have a similar core of knowledgeable experts in the various fields to continue running things.
Sure, the country would lag the rest of the world in scientific research and it would slowly sink into third world status, but that's really not their concern. Misery can be used to strengthen fundamentalist support, just look at the Middle East.
But anyway, my ultimate vision (if they were to succeed in essentially taking the country over) goes like this: They will have to create a new ruling class. By keeping the masses ignorant they'll have made them largely unsuitable for any sort of national or even local leadership position. I suspect they'd need to develop an entirely separate educational system for the new ruling class in order to keep the dangerous information safe. Which also means that the ruling class would probably be hereditary. It might prove to be difficult or perhaps even impossible to take someone raised in the faithful ignorance method and bring them into the fold, the sudden understanding of how much they'd been deceived might prove to cause them to question their faith.
As I said, the model for this society is essentially medieval Europe. A dirt poor working class working themselves to death to support an opulent ruling class while the church secretly controls the rulers from behind the scenes like puppets.
Analysis of the methods of the fundamentalist Christians in the USA has lead me to this conclusion. I honestly believe that their leadership is this deceitful, they've demonstrated it too often now. And as such I have to label that entire movement as basically destructive and counter to the best interests of the country as a whole.
Legally they can't entirely be stopped because of the whole freedom of religion thing. Which, as I said, is basically a good idea, and I'm unwilling to compromise such principles when they become inconvenient.
But I think that makes it our basic civic duty to work to oppose them. They've declared a war on the secular aspects of the country. Even those Christians who do not subscribe to the same maniacal, obsessive devotion to interpreting the bible as literal fact are not safe. Another tactic I've seen used by the creationists is to label evolutionist scientists as atheists (in one case as a marxist as well, almost any slur will do apparently). Basically, if you're not with them then you're against them whether you like it or not.
There can be no common ground because they're unwilling to acknowledge any.
The sooner this subversive movement is stopped, the sooner we can get back to working to make this country a better place for all. So long as they're still out there and possessing the kind of power that they do today they'll still be pushing their agenda of intolerance and fear. I'd hope that whatever the differences among everyone else in the country, we can at least agree that these are not the sort of values we should be embracing.
Monday, May 28, 2007
coral clocks
Well that was an unpleasant series of negative posts. But, well, obviously I felt they were things that needed to be said.
So let's turn to a less controversial topic. Actually.. it's still going to be controversial among the creationists, the truth is I found out about this on one of the links I gave in the last post.
But ignoring the anti bible literalist angle that this information could be used for, it's still darned fascinating.
The concept goes like this. We all know that you can count the age of a tree by counting its rings, one for every year, right? Well it turns out that, at least to some degree, you can do the same thing with coral, because as it grows it expands and leaves similar layer patterns. But it doesn't just leave a single layer per year, it leaves a detectable layer every day, as well as patterns that indicate the passing of a year. This in itself blows my mind because much has been made about how coral is an extremely slow growing organism. To think that despite that it leaves behind detectable layers for every day is incredible.
But it gets better. This isn't about measuring how many days old the coral in our oceans is. The method has been used on fossilized coral.
Some of you reading this may just see where I'm going with this. But rather than attempt to ease gradually into the concept I'll just spring it. The older the coral samples get, the more days per year they indicate.
I'm not a scientist, I merely have an extreme fascination with science. I only encountered this coral concept recently. I've attempted to do some research into the concept, but specific information is difficult to find. I've found a research paper that appears to give different numbers for days per year for the same fossils, I'm not sure what's going on there, it seems to be a reflection of different methods or differing formulas or an indication of a margin of error.
But the number of days per year of the older samples gets at least as large as 400.
What this is about, of course, is the fact that the Moon is constantly slowing down the rotation of the Earth through tidal friction. Don't ask me to explain how, I only barely have a handle on the concept myself. The same or at least a similar effect is behind the fact that the same side of the moon faces the Earth at all times (give or take a few percent because of libration, but that's beyond the scope of what I'm talking about).
Ultimately what will happen is that the Earth will rotate slow enough that the same side always faces the moon. The moon will, essentially, appear to stay in the same place in the sky at all times. There'll be some variations to that because its orbit isn't perfectly circular, but basically that's what will happen. I don't know how long it will take off hand, but it will take a VERY long time. Believe me you shouldn't be starting to think ahead to prime real estate if you want to be able to see the moon hanging outside your kitchen window every day of the year. In about 400 million years we've gone from 400 days per year to 365. So we have a bit of time yet before we reach full tidal lock.
But back to the coral. I'm practically giddy with the revelation that it's possible to go so far back in time and count how many days were in the year. If I understood what I read it sounded like they were using the coral research to track tidal cycles from the era of the coral being studied as well.
Perhaps this seems odd that I'd be that impressed by counting layers in coral, but it's the idea that we're able to get this much information about a time so far in the past.
It appears that coral clocks aren't the only way to do this. One of the nearly unintelligible (to the average reader) scientific papers I found on the subject seemed to refer to using bivalves (in other words, things like clams) to do similar research. Or using silt accumulation. Clearly there's much more to this type of research than I'd ever heard about.
But the fact remains that we can look back in time using evidence of when a year was 4oo days long, and conversely each day was shorter. It's not about exactly what the numbers say, it's that we can actually get them in the first place.
I don't think my fascination with this concept is that weird. I'm interested in the past because it's something that I can never personally witness. I wish I could go back in time to see what the ancient Roman empire was really like, I'd even settle for a one way visual portal that would let me see (and preferably hear) without interfering in any way.
But the fact that it's permanently out of reach means it will never lose its appeal, it's a mysterious world that I can only get glimpses of. This is even more true for the pre historic era, including the time before humans were even around at all.
Take for example the Devonian era, roughly about 400 million years ago. Life in the seas was well established, but life on land was still in its infancy. Land plants were well established and becoming more complex, and fish evolved legs to take their first steps onto land (although arthropods, which is to say insects, appear to have been first onto land). I want to know what it would be like to be there to see it. Not to see the changes happening, but just to see a moment in time, just a tiny slice of what the world looked like then. The alien vista of the primitive plants with the comparative lack of animal life variety. A world completely unsuited to humans, that very fact alone makes me want to be able to be standing there, intruding into a place I don't belong. The fact that I can never see it makes it all the more intriguing.
But now I find out that just by looking at coral they can count how many days were in a year, and analyze the tidal patterns of the age. In a way it makes the ancient past seem slightly less out of reach. It suggests that there's a great deal of information out there that I've never even heard of. And in the end I always get a kick out of that. I have a definite "know-it-all" complex, I try to accumulate as much general knowledge as I can. But I'm continuously reminded that there's a great deal more information out there, including stuff that I don't even know exists. And it's so much fun when something pops up out of the blue and surprises me.
I should specify that it appears that the data is actually being used to fine tune the age of the coral. It may be that scientists are actually using the information to figure out how old the coral is, because they already know (or at least have a reasonable understanding of) how fast the Earth's rotation is slowing down. So they can use the rotation information to get another estimate of when the coral lived, to compare with the dates obtained by radiological dating or by using the geologic layer.
The inexplicable complexity of the paper I read on the issue may have been because of the need to compensate for differing tidal levels caused by ice ages and such. I say that because it would seem that having more or less liquid water in the ocean would change the way the tides slow down the rotation. Before I realized that I was baffled at how what would seem to be a simple relationship should call for a mathmatical formula that I couldn't even read.
So let's turn to a less controversial topic. Actually.. it's still going to be controversial among the creationists, the truth is I found out about this on one of the links I gave in the last post.
But ignoring the anti bible literalist angle that this information could be used for, it's still darned fascinating.
The concept goes like this. We all know that you can count the age of a tree by counting its rings, one for every year, right? Well it turns out that, at least to some degree, you can do the same thing with coral, because as it grows it expands and leaves similar layer patterns. But it doesn't just leave a single layer per year, it leaves a detectable layer every day, as well as patterns that indicate the passing of a year. This in itself blows my mind because much has been made about how coral is an extremely slow growing organism. To think that despite that it leaves behind detectable layers for every day is incredible.
But it gets better. This isn't about measuring how many days old the coral in our oceans is. The method has been used on fossilized coral.
Some of you reading this may just see where I'm going with this. But rather than attempt to ease gradually into the concept I'll just spring it. The older the coral samples get, the more days per year they indicate.
I'm not a scientist, I merely have an extreme fascination with science. I only encountered this coral concept recently. I've attempted to do some research into the concept, but specific information is difficult to find. I've found a research paper that appears to give different numbers for days per year for the same fossils, I'm not sure what's going on there, it seems to be a reflection of different methods or differing formulas or an indication of a margin of error.
But the number of days per year of the older samples gets at least as large as 400.
What this is about, of course, is the fact that the Moon is constantly slowing down the rotation of the Earth through tidal friction. Don't ask me to explain how, I only barely have a handle on the concept myself. The same or at least a similar effect is behind the fact that the same side of the moon faces the Earth at all times (give or take a few percent because of libration, but that's beyond the scope of what I'm talking about).
Ultimately what will happen is that the Earth will rotate slow enough that the same side always faces the moon. The moon will, essentially, appear to stay in the same place in the sky at all times. There'll be some variations to that because its orbit isn't perfectly circular, but basically that's what will happen. I don't know how long it will take off hand, but it will take a VERY long time. Believe me you shouldn't be starting to think ahead to prime real estate if you want to be able to see the moon hanging outside your kitchen window every day of the year. In about 400 million years we've gone from 400 days per year to 365. So we have a bit of time yet before we reach full tidal lock.
But back to the coral. I'm practically giddy with the revelation that it's possible to go so far back in time and count how many days were in the year. If I understood what I read it sounded like they were using the coral research to track tidal cycles from the era of the coral being studied as well.
Perhaps this seems odd that I'd be that impressed by counting layers in coral, but it's the idea that we're able to get this much information about a time so far in the past.
It appears that coral clocks aren't the only way to do this. One of the nearly unintelligible (to the average reader) scientific papers I found on the subject seemed to refer to using bivalves (in other words, things like clams) to do similar research. Or using silt accumulation. Clearly there's much more to this type of research than I'd ever heard about.
But the fact remains that we can look back in time using evidence of when a year was 4oo days long, and conversely each day was shorter. It's not about exactly what the numbers say, it's that we can actually get them in the first place.
I don't think my fascination with this concept is that weird. I'm interested in the past because it's something that I can never personally witness. I wish I could go back in time to see what the ancient Roman empire was really like, I'd even settle for a one way visual portal that would let me see (and preferably hear) without interfering in any way.
But the fact that it's permanently out of reach means it will never lose its appeal, it's a mysterious world that I can only get glimpses of. This is even more true for the pre historic era, including the time before humans were even around at all.
Take for example the Devonian era, roughly about 400 million years ago. Life in the seas was well established, but life on land was still in its infancy. Land plants were well established and becoming more complex, and fish evolved legs to take their first steps onto land (although arthropods, which is to say insects, appear to have been first onto land). I want to know what it would be like to be there to see it. Not to see the changes happening, but just to see a moment in time, just a tiny slice of what the world looked like then. The alien vista of the primitive plants with the comparative lack of animal life variety. A world completely unsuited to humans, that very fact alone makes me want to be able to be standing there, intruding into a place I don't belong. The fact that I can never see it makes it all the more intriguing.
But now I find out that just by looking at coral they can count how many days were in a year, and analyze the tidal patterns of the age. In a way it makes the ancient past seem slightly less out of reach. It suggests that there's a great deal of information out there that I've never even heard of. And in the end I always get a kick out of that. I have a definite "know-it-all" complex, I try to accumulate as much general knowledge as I can. But I'm continuously reminded that there's a great deal more information out there, including stuff that I don't even know exists. And it's so much fun when something pops up out of the blue and surprises me.
I should specify that it appears that the data is actually being used to fine tune the age of the coral. It may be that scientists are actually using the information to figure out how old the coral is, because they already know (or at least have a reasonable understanding of) how fast the Earth's rotation is slowing down. So they can use the rotation information to get another estimate of when the coral lived, to compare with the dates obtained by radiological dating or by using the geologic layer.
The inexplicable complexity of the paper I read on the issue may have been because of the need to compensate for differing tidal levels caused by ice ages and such. I say that because it would seem that having more or less liquid water in the ocean would change the way the tides slow down the rotation. Before I realized that I was baffled at how what would seem to be a simple relationship should call for a mathmatical formula that I couldn't even read.
a war on science
Okay, time for talk of another war.
But first, check out this video.
If you don't wish to sit through a 50 minute video I can attempt to recap it. It's the story of the Dover trial, an attempt by the fundamentalist Christians to force their concept of intelligent design on the local school district.
Just to attempt to be thorough, I should attempt to explain the concept of intelligent design. Basically, it's a clear attempt to begin taking over the scientific world, to start denying the theory of evolution. It's creationism in disguise. To me it's clear that if these people were to get intelligent design accepted into the classroom then creationism would be the next step.
I did not follow the Dover trial as closely as I should have, given the critical importance of it. This video gave me much needed background on it.
I had always assumed that these attempts to force creationism into classrooms was a wacky, doomed to fail effort by some poor misguided individuals. Watch the movie and you'll find out that there's a massive organization at work with a terrifyingly subtle plan.
Basically, it goes like this. They claim that they have a legitimate scientific theory. They demand the right to debate the mainstream scientific community with it.
That's where the insidious subtleness begins. They have to know that their arguments are fundamentally flawed. The people working to do this appear to be scientifically educated, if they're as educated as they claim they have to be aware of the flaws in their reasoning.
But that's not the point. All it took was for them to get the scientific community to come out and point out the flaws. And then they had what they wanted. Now they could claim that there WAS a scientific debate. The very fact that scientists had engaged them was enough, they got to claim legitimacy.
It's a publicity scam, not a scientific conflict. They just wanted to get the nation to hear that they had entered into a debate with the scientific community. "Teach the debate" has become the war cry of the creationists.
All of the attacks on evolution have failed. Scientifically speaking, there is no debate. It's clear that these people do not possess a functional scientific concept, they're merely desperately trying to find obscure loopholes that allow them to claim that evolution is disproved.
At it's heart this dispute has nothing to do with science. Even the most dedicated fundamentalist is happy to use any number of results of scientific progress. They do not deny that the world is round, or that it orbits around the sun. If they're diagnosed by a scientific doctor as having some sort of disease which, if left untreated, would prove fatal they're certainly not hesitant to use the medicine that science has created.
It is an attempt to seize power by undermining the very concept of logic and reason. They are working to bring us back to the intellectual level we had sunk to during the dark ages. They want to be the ones who tell us all what to think and what to do. They want people to be confused and frightened by the world around them so that they turn to the church to find answers.
It is about control.
The best example of the sort of logic they're attempting to promote is a short quote by a girl who had been brought up immersed in this irrationality. It was a brief quote aired on the radio, she had been asked what scientific evidence she had for creationism. Her immediate (which I suspect means it was a ritualized phrase) response was "the creator is in my heart". To her that was proof. Belief has become a form of evidence.
This is, to me, of immediate relevance because of the Bush presidency. I've already put forward the fairly simple logical statement that the war on terror has benefited terrorists and hurt our country. Logic would suggest that maybe we should stop it then. But nonetheless the right wingers demand that we must continue or else things might get worse. It's completely illogical. Our actions have made things far worse, but if we were to stop then things might REALLY get bad. Yeah, and the Pope could suddenly convert to Buddhism. Bush and his supporters are desperate to continue the conflict in Iraq until the next administration takes over, then they can dump the problems on them and, at the same time, blame it on them.
To think that that degree of illogic can exist at the highest levels of our government without an immediate outcry tells me that we've already lost a great deal of the ability to think rationally. I think it's worth noting that those arguments always use an element of fear as well, there's always the threat that if we don't do just what they want to do that the terrorists might strike back. Kind of like how the church uses the threat of Hell to attempt to frighten people into doing what they wish. Osama bin Laden has become our own official devil who will deliver punishment if we don't do what we're told.
I can only hope that despite that, the backlash from the Bush presidency will still carry a rational successor to office who can begin undoing the damage that's been done.
For a sampling of other examples of creationist attacks on science I have a few more links to offer.
This one is a page that lists a number of attacks on evolution and refutes them all.
This is a collection of content from a usenet group, talk.origins, that deals with discussion about, well, the origins of things. - Human beings, life on Earth, the Earth itself, the Solar System, and the Universe. It is a treasure trove of counter creationist arguments that point out the flaws in the various tricks the creationists attempt to use to argue their point.
And if you want an example of the methods the creationists use to attack evolution, if you, like I used to be, find it impossible to think of creationists as subtle and clever, here's an example. You can find some of this man's arguments refuted in the talk origins site.
The basic technique used by people like this is to be cute and folksy, exuding charisma, and to bombard the audience with random information which they know little about. Without specific knowledge in the fields covered it's difficult to understand how you're being lied to, besides which these sorts of lectures are aimed at people who already believe in creationism.
If you really want a laugh, continue watching towards the end where he'll present pictures that are supposed to show fossilized human footprints next to dinosaur fossils, and other things like that. Of course he doesn't give any sort of verifiable source for this kind of information, he just happens to have pictures which should change our understanding of the history of the world tucked away in his own private museum.
But first, check out this video.
If you don't wish to sit through a 50 minute video I can attempt to recap it. It's the story of the Dover trial, an attempt by the fundamentalist Christians to force their concept of intelligent design on the local school district.
Just to attempt to be thorough, I should attempt to explain the concept of intelligent design. Basically, it's a clear attempt to begin taking over the scientific world, to start denying the theory of evolution. It's creationism in disguise. To me it's clear that if these people were to get intelligent design accepted into the classroom then creationism would be the next step.
I did not follow the Dover trial as closely as I should have, given the critical importance of it. This video gave me much needed background on it.
I had always assumed that these attempts to force creationism into classrooms was a wacky, doomed to fail effort by some poor misguided individuals. Watch the movie and you'll find out that there's a massive organization at work with a terrifyingly subtle plan.
Basically, it goes like this. They claim that they have a legitimate scientific theory. They demand the right to debate the mainstream scientific community with it.
That's where the insidious subtleness begins. They have to know that their arguments are fundamentally flawed. The people working to do this appear to be scientifically educated, if they're as educated as they claim they have to be aware of the flaws in their reasoning.
But that's not the point. All it took was for them to get the scientific community to come out and point out the flaws. And then they had what they wanted. Now they could claim that there WAS a scientific debate. The very fact that scientists had engaged them was enough, they got to claim legitimacy.
It's a publicity scam, not a scientific conflict. They just wanted to get the nation to hear that they had entered into a debate with the scientific community. "Teach the debate" has become the war cry of the creationists.
All of the attacks on evolution have failed. Scientifically speaking, there is no debate. It's clear that these people do not possess a functional scientific concept, they're merely desperately trying to find obscure loopholes that allow them to claim that evolution is disproved.
At it's heart this dispute has nothing to do with science. Even the most dedicated fundamentalist is happy to use any number of results of scientific progress. They do not deny that the world is round, or that it orbits around the sun. If they're diagnosed by a scientific doctor as having some sort of disease which, if left untreated, would prove fatal they're certainly not hesitant to use the medicine that science has created.
It is an attempt to seize power by undermining the very concept of logic and reason. They are working to bring us back to the intellectual level we had sunk to during the dark ages. They want to be the ones who tell us all what to think and what to do. They want people to be confused and frightened by the world around them so that they turn to the church to find answers.
It is about control.
The best example of the sort of logic they're attempting to promote is a short quote by a girl who had been brought up immersed in this irrationality. It was a brief quote aired on the radio, she had been asked what scientific evidence she had for creationism. Her immediate (which I suspect means it was a ritualized phrase) response was "the creator is in my heart". To her that was proof. Belief has become a form of evidence.
This is, to me, of immediate relevance because of the Bush presidency. I've already put forward the fairly simple logical statement that the war on terror has benefited terrorists and hurt our country. Logic would suggest that maybe we should stop it then. But nonetheless the right wingers demand that we must continue or else things might get worse. It's completely illogical. Our actions have made things far worse, but if we were to stop then things might REALLY get bad. Yeah, and the Pope could suddenly convert to Buddhism. Bush and his supporters are desperate to continue the conflict in Iraq until the next administration takes over, then they can dump the problems on them and, at the same time, blame it on them.
To think that that degree of illogic can exist at the highest levels of our government without an immediate outcry tells me that we've already lost a great deal of the ability to think rationally. I think it's worth noting that those arguments always use an element of fear as well, there's always the threat that if we don't do just what they want to do that the terrorists might strike back. Kind of like how the church uses the threat of Hell to attempt to frighten people into doing what they wish. Osama bin Laden has become our own official devil who will deliver punishment if we don't do what we're told.
I can only hope that despite that, the backlash from the Bush presidency will still carry a rational successor to office who can begin undoing the damage that's been done.
For a sampling of other examples of creationist attacks on science I have a few more links to offer.
This one is a page that lists a number of attacks on evolution and refutes them all.
This is a collection of content from a usenet group, talk.origins, that deals with discussion about, well, the origins of things. - Human beings, life on Earth, the Earth itself, the Solar System, and the Universe. It is a treasure trove of counter creationist arguments that point out the flaws in the various tricks the creationists attempt to use to argue their point.
And if you want an example of the methods the creationists use to attack evolution, if you, like I used to be, find it impossible to think of creationists as subtle and clever, here's an example. You can find some of this man's arguments refuted in the talk origins site.
The basic technique used by people like this is to be cute and folksy, exuding charisma, and to bombard the audience with random information which they know little about. Without specific knowledge in the fields covered it's difficult to understand how you're being lied to, besides which these sorts of lectures are aimed at people who already believe in creationism.
If you really want a laugh, continue watching towards the end where he'll present pictures that are supposed to show fossilized human footprints next to dinosaur fossils, and other things like that. Of course he doesn't give any sort of verifiable source for this kind of information, he just happens to have pictures which should change our understanding of the history of the world tucked away in his own private museum.
Friday, May 25, 2007
strategy
I feel that I should probably write a bit more about my thoughts on the whole war on terror debacle. The usual defense against the sort of thing I've said is to reassert that the terrorists are still a threat and to suggest that people like me are advocating ignoring them.
It didn't take long after the attacks of September 11th for the blowhards to start giving their speeches. The message was that the architects of the attacks had a problem with everything good about the USA, and somehow that they thought that a single suicide attack would just make us surrender.
Assuming that Osama bin Laden was indeed the master architect of the attacks (if you follow foreign news reports you'll see that they always say that the US believes he was behind them, which makes it seem like the rest of the world isn't as convinced), then say what you will about him but you have to give him credit for being a master strategist. There's no virtue in ritualistically discrediting your enemies.
I don't believe that someone with that firm a grasp of strategy would believe that such an attack would simply cause the country to give up. And I'm not sure that he would have gone to all that trouble to just kill a bunch of people. He is trying to change the world.
From the very beginning I said that the attacks were an attempt to elicit a response. Basically a trap. While all our would be "brave leaders" were on television giving their bold speeches promising equally violent responses to the violence that had just been done to us, while everyone was chanting "we will never forget".. I was telling everyone I could that we were falling into a trap. A path had been planned for us by the enemy and we were heading straight down it.
But no. Everyone knew better. The situation called for knee jerk reactionism only. The only thing left was go out and kill a bunch of people. That would make everything better.
Well we're coming up on six years after the event. We've brought two countries to chaos, stretched our military to the breaking point, sent our own country plummeting into debt, and ruined our standing in the global community.
We should have been working to moderate the anger in the Islamic community. Instead we've fed it. We've given power to the fundamentalist leaders who seek to spread their absolute law and enforce their narrow view of their religion on the rest of the world.
The Pentagon and even George Bush himself have had to admit that our actions have resulted in terrorist organizations gaining power. Yet not even the fact that our "war on terror" has ultimately benefited those we're supposed to be fighting has made a difference in the course we're pursuing.
There are, roughly speaking, two problems here. Number one, that a computer geek such as myself has a better handle on the subtleties of global military tactics and diplomacy than the current occupants of the executive branch of our government. And believe me I'm not claiming to be a tactical genius. I'm calling them incompetent hacks who have no real concern for the consequences of their own actions.
Then number two there's the fact that, despite the immediate historical record showing that our actions have achieved results exactly opposite to what they were supposed to do, we're continuing to do the same thing because the people who lead us down this path are still in charge and are attempting to remedy the situation by continuing to do the same thing that got us here in the first place.
The solution to the Iraq quagmire is not an easy thing to find. I have no easy solutions. But the correct approach to the threat of terrorism is simple. This is not a conflict that can be solved by bombs and bullets. Certainly we should be on guard for further attacks, although we're more than capable of doing that without dismantling the bill of rights in the process. The answer is to work to promote peace and stability in the Middle East. Okay so that's not simple. But the basic concept is. It's a slow, unglamorous process of diplomacy.
The extremists feed on violence and conflict. The solution is to work for peace and stability. Defuse the rage and you take away their power. But before we set out on that path we need leaders who are capable of the subtlety and patience that that approach would require.
The deciding point will be the next presidential elections. If we elect someone who talks the talk of the war on terror then we will be turning away from any chance of a positive outcome. I don't have an adequate understanding of the full situation to know how much worse things will have to get before it happens, but sooner or later I fear that a true global conflict will begin if things continue unchanged. Religious fervor is reaching a fever pitch for both the Islamic and Christian fundamentalists, we're entering another oil crisis, and a number of hostile dictatorships either have or are in the process of acquiring nuclear weapons.
It's going to take a bit more than a "mission accomplished" sign to get us out of this one.
It didn't take long after the attacks of September 11th for the blowhards to start giving their speeches. The message was that the architects of the attacks had a problem with everything good about the USA, and somehow that they thought that a single suicide attack would just make us surrender.
Assuming that Osama bin Laden was indeed the master architect of the attacks (if you follow foreign news reports you'll see that they always say that the US believes he was behind them, which makes it seem like the rest of the world isn't as convinced), then say what you will about him but you have to give him credit for being a master strategist. There's no virtue in ritualistically discrediting your enemies.
I don't believe that someone with that firm a grasp of strategy would believe that such an attack would simply cause the country to give up. And I'm not sure that he would have gone to all that trouble to just kill a bunch of people. He is trying to change the world.
From the very beginning I said that the attacks were an attempt to elicit a response. Basically a trap. While all our would be "brave leaders" were on television giving their bold speeches promising equally violent responses to the violence that had just been done to us, while everyone was chanting "we will never forget".. I was telling everyone I could that we were falling into a trap. A path had been planned for us by the enemy and we were heading straight down it.
But no. Everyone knew better. The situation called for knee jerk reactionism only. The only thing left was go out and kill a bunch of people. That would make everything better.
Well we're coming up on six years after the event. We've brought two countries to chaos, stretched our military to the breaking point, sent our own country plummeting into debt, and ruined our standing in the global community.
We should have been working to moderate the anger in the Islamic community. Instead we've fed it. We've given power to the fundamentalist leaders who seek to spread their absolute law and enforce their narrow view of their religion on the rest of the world.
The Pentagon and even George Bush himself have had to admit that our actions have resulted in terrorist organizations gaining power. Yet not even the fact that our "war on terror" has ultimately benefited those we're supposed to be fighting has made a difference in the course we're pursuing.
There are, roughly speaking, two problems here. Number one, that a computer geek such as myself has a better handle on the subtleties of global military tactics and diplomacy than the current occupants of the executive branch of our government. And believe me I'm not claiming to be a tactical genius. I'm calling them incompetent hacks who have no real concern for the consequences of their own actions.
Then number two there's the fact that, despite the immediate historical record showing that our actions have achieved results exactly opposite to what they were supposed to do, we're continuing to do the same thing because the people who lead us down this path are still in charge and are attempting to remedy the situation by continuing to do the same thing that got us here in the first place.
The solution to the Iraq quagmire is not an easy thing to find. I have no easy solutions. But the correct approach to the threat of terrorism is simple. This is not a conflict that can be solved by bombs and bullets. Certainly we should be on guard for further attacks, although we're more than capable of doing that without dismantling the bill of rights in the process. The answer is to work to promote peace and stability in the Middle East. Okay so that's not simple. But the basic concept is. It's a slow, unglamorous process of diplomacy.
The extremists feed on violence and conflict. The solution is to work for peace and stability. Defuse the rage and you take away their power. But before we set out on that path we need leaders who are capable of the subtlety and patience that that approach would require.
The deciding point will be the next presidential elections. If we elect someone who talks the talk of the war on terror then we will be turning away from any chance of a positive outcome. I don't have an adequate understanding of the full situation to know how much worse things will have to get before it happens, but sooner or later I fear that a true global conflict will begin if things continue unchanged. Religious fervor is reaching a fever pitch for both the Islamic and Christian fundamentalists, we're entering another oil crisis, and a number of hostile dictatorships either have or are in the process of acquiring nuclear weapons.
It's going to take a bit more than a "mission accomplished" sign to get us out of this one.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
the futile stupidity of our war on terror
I'm writing this in response to this news story. I don't know how long that link will last, so to summarize it, it's a story about Bush telling the same old story that Iraq is at the forefront of the war on terror.
I'm sick of the idiocy behind that, and astounded and deeply, deeply discouraged that anyone believes that nonsense anymore. All evidence tells us that under the regime of Saddam Hussein Iraq had absolutely no ties to al-Qaida. However after we destroyed the infrastructure of their country and brought them the joys of total civil chaos, THEN al-Qaida moved in.
We gave them a country that was ripe for the taking, and we loaded it up with vulnerable troops that they could strike out at.
How does anyone not know that since we began the so called "war on terror" terrorist causes worldwide have gained considerable power? Are we that dumbed down by the actions of a draft dodging war monger president that we're unable to understand that killing scores of people alone does not constitute victory?
To be fair the news story I referenced does quote some people who have a slightly wider world view than that. They managed to find someone who actually remembered that before Iraq we fought the Taliban in Afghanistan, but unlike Iraq as soon as the fighting slowed down we pulled out so fast we left vapor trails in our wake. The Taliban, who were seen as such a threat, are back in Afghanistan. So why isn't Bush telling us that the mission in Afghanistan isn't complete? Why the single minded tunnel vision focused squarely on a third world nation who's only resource is oil.
Oh yeah. Silly me.
I just want to know why the incompetence of the war in Iraq to date hasn't lead to widespread demands to remove Bush from power. How can we not see how much his actions have weakened the nation? It seems we've become increasingly willing to accept senseless civilian casualties so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at the lack of outrage over the unknown numbers of innocent civilians killed as a result of our invasion. But if we're so concerned about our own country why does it not matter that we've strained our mighty military, funded by an amount of money that no single other nation can come close to matching, so much money that entire groups of other nations can't match, to the breaking point in simply attempting to occupy a single third world nation where the primary resistance is people so desperate that they're willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to strike out at their perceived enemy.
Russia is increasingly showing signs of regressing to the state it was in during the Cold War. North Korea and Iran threaten to bring nuclear weapons into the sphere of global conflict. All around the Muslim world rage is boiling over as a result of our actions in Iraq, supporting a new generation of extremists bent on making the west and the USA in particular feel the force of their rage.
And we're still Stuck in Iraq trying to police a civil war we touched off.
Let's ignore the question of whether we should be staying or leaving for the moment. Let's hold the man who got us into this situation accountable for his actions. And get him and his entire corrupt administration removed from office so that we can find someone else, someone sufficiently in touch with reality to understand that committing our military to a guerrilla war that could last for a decade or more and enraging the Muslim world is not the way to work for our security.
Come on. The Republicans tried to get Clinton removed from office because he lied about receiving oral sex from an intern. That was clearly not his finest hour, but compared to lying about intelligence in order to push the country into a war that's resulted in the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, he might as well have been a celibate priest.
I'm sick of the idiocy behind that, and astounded and deeply, deeply discouraged that anyone believes that nonsense anymore. All evidence tells us that under the regime of Saddam Hussein Iraq had absolutely no ties to al-Qaida. However after we destroyed the infrastructure of their country and brought them the joys of total civil chaos, THEN al-Qaida moved in.
We gave them a country that was ripe for the taking, and we loaded it up with vulnerable troops that they could strike out at.
How does anyone not know that since we began the so called "war on terror" terrorist causes worldwide have gained considerable power? Are we that dumbed down by the actions of a draft dodging war monger president that we're unable to understand that killing scores of people alone does not constitute victory?
To be fair the news story I referenced does quote some people who have a slightly wider world view than that. They managed to find someone who actually remembered that before Iraq we fought the Taliban in Afghanistan, but unlike Iraq as soon as the fighting slowed down we pulled out so fast we left vapor trails in our wake. The Taliban, who were seen as such a threat, are back in Afghanistan. So why isn't Bush telling us that the mission in Afghanistan isn't complete? Why the single minded tunnel vision focused squarely on a third world nation who's only resource is oil.
Oh yeah. Silly me.
I just want to know why the incompetence of the war in Iraq to date hasn't lead to widespread demands to remove Bush from power. How can we not see how much his actions have weakened the nation? It seems we've become increasingly willing to accept senseless civilian casualties so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at the lack of outrage over the unknown numbers of innocent civilians killed as a result of our invasion. But if we're so concerned about our own country why does it not matter that we've strained our mighty military, funded by an amount of money that no single other nation can come close to matching, so much money that entire groups of other nations can't match, to the breaking point in simply attempting to occupy a single third world nation where the primary resistance is people so desperate that they're willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to strike out at their perceived enemy.
Russia is increasingly showing signs of regressing to the state it was in during the Cold War. North Korea and Iran threaten to bring nuclear weapons into the sphere of global conflict. All around the Muslim world rage is boiling over as a result of our actions in Iraq, supporting a new generation of extremists bent on making the west and the USA in particular feel the force of their rage.
And we're still Stuck in Iraq trying to police a civil war we touched off.
Let's ignore the question of whether we should be staying or leaving for the moment. Let's hold the man who got us into this situation accountable for his actions. And get him and his entire corrupt administration removed from office so that we can find someone else, someone sufficiently in touch with reality to understand that committing our military to a guerrilla war that could last for a decade or more and enraging the Muslim world is not the way to work for our security.
Come on. The Republicans tried to get Clinton removed from office because he lied about receiving oral sex from an intern. That was clearly not his finest hour, but compared to lying about intelligence in order to push the country into a war that's resulted in the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, he might as well have been a celibate priest.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Aero Glass fixed
I think I should mention that the main problem with Aero Glass crashing on the one computer that I mentioned seems to have been fixed. It appears to have been caused by the need to install the Via "hyperion" drivers.
For those not familiar with that, hyperion is the new name for the Via 4 in 1 drivers, which in turn are drivers for motherboards that use VIA chipsets.
The one thing that I know for sure that the drivers work with is the AGP interface, which is used by video cards. Annnnnnd to attempt to come to the point, the Aero Glass interface is seriously hardware (video card) dependent. So anyway the drivers seem to have fixed up that little issue.
But in researching that kind of problem one runs into all sorts of disturbing concepts. Apparently some people have run into crashing issues like that if they install video card drivers manually (IE: clicking on a driver install file). The solution for them has been to let Vista install the drivers itself.
Yes folks, Vista is ALREADY forcing people to relinquish control of their computers. This may be inadvertent, but considering that the real point of Vista is to take control of peoples' computers and simply leave them able to use it as a limited appliance, that is only able to do as much as Microsoft and the media companies they're working so hard to support want it to be able to, this is an ominous sign.
It may seem like a small issue, but for power users, especially gamers, video card driver installation has become almost a ritual. There is a specific method that involves uninstalling the previous driver and then using a method to try to wipe out all traces of the previous driver before installing a new one. You can find websites devoted to people discussing each new version of a driver, and often they'll be trading "leaked" drivers, which means drivers not intended for public distribution for one reason or another. Also you can find hacked drivers, modified by end users, typically in an attempt to squeeze more performance out of the video cards.
If you're an average user then this may all seem rather irrelevant to you, but the point is that the PC platform has always been about being OPEN. It was a practically unlimited tool. A commercial grade flight simulator? Sure, with enough money you can add on panoramic simulator style displays, fully simulated cockpit control environments, and even a motion platform if you really wanted to shell out the dough. Recording studio? Of course, with the right interface hardware and recording software you could do anything that a major studio could (mind you I suspect that abilities like that are why the record companies are so eager to see the PC locked down into appliance status, they must understand that the greatest threat to them isn't internet piracy but the ease at which independent artists can produce their own music).
Home built DVR using custom compiled OS designed specifically for recording tv shows and then serving them up later? Why not?
If Microsoft gets their way with Vista all that will come to an end. Hardware will have to be made specifically for Vista, a process that will impose certain restrictions on its functionality as well as make it more expensive overall.
Everything that made the PC great will be gone. It will have come full circle and finally turned into what the Apple fans have been saying all along, a Mac clone.
Except it'll be a clone designed to let the media companies control how you use it.
For those not familiar with that, hyperion is the new name for the Via 4 in 1 drivers, which in turn are drivers for motherboards that use VIA chipsets.
The one thing that I know for sure that the drivers work with is the AGP interface, which is used by video cards. Annnnnnd to attempt to come to the point, the Aero Glass interface is seriously hardware (video card) dependent. So anyway the drivers seem to have fixed up that little issue.
But in researching that kind of problem one runs into all sorts of disturbing concepts. Apparently some people have run into crashing issues like that if they install video card drivers manually (IE: clicking on a driver install file). The solution for them has been to let Vista install the drivers itself.
Yes folks, Vista is ALREADY forcing people to relinquish control of their computers. This may be inadvertent, but considering that the real point of Vista is to take control of peoples' computers and simply leave them able to use it as a limited appliance, that is only able to do as much as Microsoft and the media companies they're working so hard to support want it to be able to, this is an ominous sign.
It may seem like a small issue, but for power users, especially gamers, video card driver installation has become almost a ritual. There is a specific method that involves uninstalling the previous driver and then using a method to try to wipe out all traces of the previous driver before installing a new one. You can find websites devoted to people discussing each new version of a driver, and often they'll be trading "leaked" drivers, which means drivers not intended for public distribution for one reason or another. Also you can find hacked drivers, modified by end users, typically in an attempt to squeeze more performance out of the video cards.
If you're an average user then this may all seem rather irrelevant to you, but the point is that the PC platform has always been about being OPEN. It was a practically unlimited tool. A commercial grade flight simulator? Sure, with enough money you can add on panoramic simulator style displays, fully simulated cockpit control environments, and even a motion platform if you really wanted to shell out the dough. Recording studio? Of course, with the right interface hardware and recording software you could do anything that a major studio could (mind you I suspect that abilities like that are why the record companies are so eager to see the PC locked down into appliance status, they must understand that the greatest threat to them isn't internet piracy but the ease at which independent artists can produce their own music).
Home built DVR using custom compiled OS designed specifically for recording tv shows and then serving them up later? Why not?
If Microsoft gets their way with Vista all that will come to an end. Hardware will have to be made specifically for Vista, a process that will impose certain restrictions on its functionality as well as make it more expensive overall.
Everything that made the PC great will be gone. It will have come full circle and finally turned into what the Apple fans have been saying all along, a Mac clone.
Except it'll be a clone designed to let the media companies control how you use it.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
The wow starts.. when?
Well I've recently had a chance to check out a computer that had Windows Vista installed on it. Ignoring all the objections to the way MS has designed their new OS towards the singular objective of hijacking end user rights for the benefit of the media conglomerates who's support they're trying to gain..
Let's see what's happened with installing the shiny new copy of Vista Ultimate.
I'm told it installed unusually quickly. And then the next thing I heard was that it was randomly causing the monitor to blank with an error message that suggests that it was feeding it a signal that it couldn't sync too (most likely with too high a refresh rate).
So I take a look. First I was shown the "dreamscenes".. animated wallpaper that looks very pretty, except that it ran so jerkily that I practically got motion sickness watching water droplets trying, desperately, to move in a fluid fashion and apparently uses about 20% of the CPU's power. When you add in their DRM management task that has been reported to also use 20% or more power even when you're not doing anything that involves digital rights managed media then you've got almost half of your CPUs time being used already.
And then the screen blanked. And then came back with an info balloon that informed me that the display driver stopped responding. And then the whole system froze solid and required a hard reset to get it running again.
This is a fresh install of Vista with a minimal amount of add on software that could be blamed for causing any sort of instability.
MS has been running a media blitz that informed me that the "wow" would start now. Apparently Vista was supposed to be a bold new user experience. What I saw was a shiny user interface that looks nice but uses obscene amounts of CPU power just to support (and which also is a blatent Mac rip off, and please understand I'm no mac friend, although is MS continues down this path they may force me to defect to the Apple world), and such incredibly bad stability that a fresh install can't even run for twenty minutes without freezing solid.
I've since been told that disabling the Aero Glass interface has fixed the crashing and screen blanking issue. Isn't that lovely, the much hyped new user interface causes the entire OS to crash.
The truth is that chronic instability or CPU hogging is really the least of the problems of Vista. If you take the time to learn the full extent of what MS has done with it you'll start to see just what they're trying to do. They're clearly working towards establishing a legally enforced monopoly on PC operating systems, and are possibly trying to get the record companies to back them up if it comes down to another showdown with the US government on monopolistic behavior charges.
Let's see what's happened with installing the shiny new copy of Vista Ultimate.
I'm told it installed unusually quickly. And then the next thing I heard was that it was randomly causing the monitor to blank with an error message that suggests that it was feeding it a signal that it couldn't sync too (most likely with too high a refresh rate).
So I take a look. First I was shown the "dreamscenes".. animated wallpaper that looks very pretty, except that it ran so jerkily that I practically got motion sickness watching water droplets trying, desperately, to move in a fluid fashion and apparently uses about 20% of the CPU's power. When you add in their DRM management task that has been reported to also use 20% or more power even when you're not doing anything that involves digital rights managed media then you've got almost half of your CPUs time being used already.
And then the screen blanked. And then came back with an info balloon that informed me that the display driver stopped responding. And then the whole system froze solid and required a hard reset to get it running again.
This is a fresh install of Vista with a minimal amount of add on software that could be blamed for causing any sort of instability.
MS has been running a media blitz that informed me that the "wow" would start now. Apparently Vista was supposed to be a bold new user experience. What I saw was a shiny user interface that looks nice but uses obscene amounts of CPU power just to support (and which also is a blatent Mac rip off, and please understand I'm no mac friend, although is MS continues down this path they may force me to defect to the Apple world), and such incredibly bad stability that a fresh install can't even run for twenty minutes without freezing solid.
I've since been told that disabling the Aero Glass interface has fixed the crashing and screen blanking issue. Isn't that lovely, the much hyped new user interface causes the entire OS to crash.
The truth is that chronic instability or CPU hogging is really the least of the problems of Vista. If you take the time to learn the full extent of what MS has done with it you'll start to see just what they're trying to do. They're clearly working towards establishing a legally enforced monopoly on PC operating systems, and are possibly trying to get the record companies to back them up if it comes down to another showdown with the US government on monopolistic behavior charges.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
my what a long tail you have
I tried to find a different species to focus on, I really did. But I like these snow leopards too much.
Not a great picture, but it illustrates something interesting. Their very long tails, which can be used almost as a blanket to help keep warm when it gets very cold out.
There's something interesting that I've noticed about the leopards (this is true for the Amur leopard as well). I tend to pay attention to what everyone else around me is saying when I'm taking pictures of the zoo animals, in particular I'm interested in what the kids say about the animals. I've heard many people call the leopards cheetahs. This always baffled me. I'm sure I'm more aware of feline taxonomy than most people, but still I can't believe that a leopard looks like a cheetah to the average person. Especially the snow leopards, they're clearly built for the opposite environment of the cheetah, that is cold snow covered mountains instead of the African plains. I can almost understand when people call African Wild Dogs hyenas (even though they really are canine, while hyenas are vastly different animals slightly more related to cats than dogs). But leopards look nothing like cheetahs.
I should acknowledge at this stage that snow leopards aren't actually leopards at all. Amur leopards are a leopard subspecies, but snow leopards are their own species and are currently in an uncertain classification. They used to be put in the Panthera genus, but then were put in their own one, Uncia, where they became Uncia uncia. My joke was "the feline so nice they named it twice". But now some are putting them back into Panthera. The zoo in fact has two plaques that give their binomial name (the combination of genus and species used as the scientific name of an animal), and each gives a different one. Perhaps they were installed at different times and the later one used the updated name.
But here's the interesting thing. I'm incensed that zoogoers keep calling them cheetahs. I really have to restrain myself from correcting them, but I think correcting a mother in front of her little kid is kind of rude. But in my reading on snow leopards I've learned that they're thought to be more closely related to cheetahs than leopards.
Could it be that the people who call them cheetahs were picking up on some similarity that I wasn't catching? Maybe they both share longer than average tails, although for somewhat different reasons.
Otherwise I can't imagine why people would think cheetah. Is it just that that's the only spotted cat of the big three of the big cats? By that I mean lions, tigers, and cheetahs, the big cats most often featured in tv shows or in movies (I can think of at least two movies where the plot centered on a particular cheetah).
Maybe I'm reaching for an explanation since they call the Amur leopards cheetahs too.
If it seems like I'm obsessing about this too much, well, maybe I am. But I've always loved the less popular big cats. I've always felt that lions and tigers and cheetahs received an unfair proportion of attention. They're always the token big cats.
Well I feel it's time that the other felines get some attention! Actually, I feel that the jaguars in particular are amazingly beautiful animals, I'd be plastering their pictures all over the place if I could get access to them.
But I can sure do my part to promote Amur and snow leopards. And I'm working on the elusive clouded leopard, which Brookfield also has.
Monday, April 23, 2007
one down, six left
Well, time for another of those downer posts. I'd been wanting to post another zoo shot, and although I just did a big cat picture I really like big cats and wanted to add an Amur Leopard picture. So there it is, thank you Brookfield Zoo for making your enclosures so photographer friendly. This was actually shot through a sort of nylon mesh barrier, but I've gotten quite good results using wide apertures and just blurring the mesh into obscurity.Now for the downer news. The Amur Leopard is critically endangered. There are estimated to be 25-34 of them left in the wild. And until recently there were believed to be only seven females left. Now they're down to six after someone shot one and then clubbed it to death.
Check out a version of the story here
Here's the thing. It's not like it was hunted for a trophy, or for its pelt or anything. Not even for chinese traditional medicine (I try to respect traditional cultures, but when you hunt animals to near extinction in order to supply faith medicine I draw the line). It was killed and the body was left behind. No point to it at all.
I want to stress something about zoos that I think some animal rights activitists are getting tragically wrong. YES, I'll admit that in some cases animals do not have a great life living inside a zoo. I do not enjoy seeing large predators pacing back and forth inside their enclosures. But there's more at stake than just one animal.
Brookfield has what appear to be a mating pair of Amur Leopards. I don't have any inside sources of information so I don't know any details, I can only assume that they're trying to breed them but that they may not be having any luck. Although I couldn't help but notice that for the past few months I've only seen one in the enclosure. I'm hoping that this means that the female is pregnant and has been separated from the male. Captive breeding programs are the last ditch effort to save species from extinction, or restore animals that are already extinct in the wild. What the animal rights extremists seem to fail to realize is that zoos are doing the best they can with the limiting funding they possess. Shut them down and numerous species would suffer. If you want to debate the whole "good of the many being more important than the good of the few" argument then feel free.. but by trotting out individual cases of suffering animals and using them to argue that zoos should be completely shut down they're showing a woeful lack of understanding of the big picture.
Friday, April 20, 2007
the moment I made contact
The fact that you can post pictures to this blog system is actually what finally drove me to start up a blog. I am a compulsive amateur photographer looking for ways to expose my work to the general public in an attempt to validate my abilities.
So here I go. To start off with I present my favorite snow leopard. The explanation of this picture is that my local zoo, Brookfield Zoo, located in Brookfield, Illinois, was going to have a photo competition and I was on a mission to get the best pictures I possibly could to see if I could win.
So on March 26th, 2006, I set out to begin my quest. After stopping by a camera store to pick up a new lens that I felt would round out my lens selection for zoo work I strode boldly forth into the zoo. And since I had little experience in that sort of thing, I basically took pictures of EVERYTHING.
However one event stands out in my memory. Have you ever seen the movie "Fierce Creatures"? In it there's a scene where Jami Lee Curtis' character encounters a gorilla which has escaped from his enclosure. Of course at first she's frightened, but then there's a whole scene where the gorilla gently touches her in a sort of curious manner, never threatening her, and she's overcome by the experience. She walks outside in a daze and a group of zoo employees see her and ask what happened to her. She's at a loss for words, and an employee who recognizes her expression suggests that she'd just "made contact". All the other employees react as if this is a standard thing that happens to people working with animals like that. I'd always wondered if that was a real thing that happens to people who work in zoos. Not suddenly encountering escaped gorillas, of course.. but if there was some moment where people experience a deep connection with animals like that and that moment is a sort of shared experience among zoo workers.
Well here's a picture of that moment for me. I don't work at the zoo, but even from the public side of things the same experience seems to occur.
I had been all over the zoo (except for the bear area, which I completely missed because it's kind of tucked away in one corner), and as I said I was just taking every kind of picture I could think of. At the end of the visit I reached the snow leopards. They have a very good snow leopard enclosure which has a large viewing window, on the leopard's side there's a ledge located right next to the window where the leopards like to perch. It's close enough where you could literally reach out and touch them if not for the barrier of glass.
I had been taking pictures of the snow leopards for some time. I've always been a bit of a feline fan, so it was hardly a surprise to find myself captivated by them. I had to work in cycles, taking pictures when I had the area to myself and then backing away to make room when other groups showed up. I didn't want to block the window for the kids.
All through the day I'd seen people tapping on the glass of the various windows, trying to get the attention of the various animals. During one of my stand back and wait cycles I couldn't help but watch this one particular cretin tapping on the glass, trying to get the leopard to look at him. He was there with children, as an adult he should have been setting an example.. instead the best he can do is tap on the glass trying to wake up a resting leopard, ignoring the signs posted all over the place begging that people such as him in fact do NOT tap on the windows.
The thing is, this leopard was clearly used to this kind of juvenile behavior. I wish I knew if it was the male or the female, I hate simply referring to it as "it".. but it's the best I can do. Anyway, it refused to react to the tapping. It wouldn't even swivel an ear in response. Rather than realize that it was futile (and annoying) this guy decided that the answer was to make more noise. Having exhausted his range of tapping he moved on to pounding on the glass.
Still no response. The thing is he kept on pounding. The leopard wasn't moving a muscle, and this guy kept on pounding on the glass. I had this thought about who exactly was supposed to be the intelligent creature. The leopard clearly understood what was going on, it knew that there was no point in paying attention to the noise. This guy didn't even realize that much, his train of thought appeared to be "the kitty isn't responding to my pounding, must pound more" repeating on an infinite loop. Eventually he gave up, or more to the point his kids had probably gotten bored and they moved on.
Alone once again I walked back to the glass and raised my camera. It was a tricky shot, the glass wasn't exactly clean, besides which to shoot a leopard lying on the ledge you have to shoot through the glass at a strong angle which isn't a good idea overall, you're just asking for chromatic aberration or other distortions.
But the leopard opened its eyes and looked at me. The incessant pounding from the idiot failed to elicit any response at all, but standing there in silence I was apparently worthy of attention. For a moment all I could do was look back at the large, densely furred feline. That was the moment where I made contact. To me it was the feline body language equivalent of saying "hey, how's it going". So I said hello back.. yes I talk to animals. I'm sure they don't understand the words, but there's the possibility that they'll understand the tone I use. In this case of course the words probably didn't even penetrate the thick glass, but.. such considerations did not occur to me at the moment.
Eventually I managed to get back to the task at hand and snapped off some pictures. They ended up being some of my favorite pictures ever, and I came close to entering one in the photo contest. But I could only enter one picture, and I had to make a tactical decision and go with a bear shot that I felt had a stronger emotional impact (my personal experience that gave me the emotional tie to the shot doesn't really help with the judges).
As I take every opportunity to mention, I placed second.
The snow leopards continue to be some of my favorite subjects. They're not always accessible, being cats they do seem to like to sleep for most of the day, often in places where I can't get a good angle on them at all. But every so often I get a really good angle and fire off ten or twenty pictures or more (oh the joys of digital photography) and consider the whole trip worthwhile on that event alone.
I should mention that if you click on the picture you can access a higher resolution version of it.
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