Karlek's Blog

PhotoTrick

2012-01-06T05:57:00.001-04:00

JANUARY 2, 2012, 5:46 AM
Q&A: Deleting Multiple Photo Copies

By J.D. BIERSDORFER
Q.
Is there an easy way to find and trash duplicate pictures in the Adobe Photoshop Elements program without having to manually search through my entire hard drive?

A.
The latest version of the program, Adobe Photoshop Elements 10, now includes a Duplicate Photo search feature in the program’s Organizer component that rounds up duplicate (or near-duplicate versions) of a picture. If you do not have the latest version of the software, there are other methods.

An unofficial (but informative) guide to several earlier editions of Photoshop Elements at bit.ly/umpoHt has step-by-step instructions for a way to seek and delete duplicate photos in your collection. And among the tips and tutorials for photographers on the PhotoKaboom site, you can also find a page devoted to finding and deleting duplicate files — mostly by using third-party programs to hunt down the extra copies floating around your computer’s folders.

My Interpretation of the Keith Olbermann Affair

2010-11-13T22:29:00.005-04:00

On Friday, November 5, three days after the midterm election of 2010, an election that was widely considered to be an indication of an overwhelmingly popular referendum for conservative points of view, Keith Olbermann, a liberal political commentator on a cable broadcast station, MSNBC, was "indefinitely suspended" for making campaign contributions to liberal democratic candidates, one of whom had appeared on his show. One might have assumed that he had impressed Olbermann during his appearance.

Olbermann did not mention the contribution on the air nor did he ask permission of the executives of MSNBC. This was in violation of the policy of the NBC Network so he was ordered to cease broadcasting indefinitely .

By monday some 318,000 signatures were obtained on a petition requesting his return and he was returned to the air as of tuesday, November 9th.

In the context of the evolution of human society from the paleolitic to the present, this was a significant event--not only because it indicates that there is a sizeable, computer active group of people who at least tolerate liberal views immediately after a so-called conservative "landslide" , but because it provides a prototype mechanism for direct democracy working on a global scale.With this kind of mechanism we do not have to depend on honest representation by professional politicians.

The Lesson of Keith

2010-11-08T09:14:00.001-04:00

MSNBC ends suspension of host Keith Olbermann

By Paul Farhi Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, November 8

Keith Olbermann's "indefinite" suspension from MSNBC turns out to be definitely short: two days.

The liberal host will be back on the air Tuesday, the cable news network said Sunday night. Which means that Olbermann's punishment for violating NBC's policy against making contributions to political candidates amounted to being taken off the air for only two shows, on Friday and on Monday . Olbermann, the host of the prime-time program "Countdown," was suspended by MSNBC on Friday after news broke that he'd contributed a total of $7,200 to three Democratic candidates in October.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin said in a statement that "after several days of deliberation and discussion, I have determined that suspending Keith through and including Monday night's program is an appropriate punishment for his violation of our policy." MSNBC had been deluged with protests over the suspension of Olbermann, who vies with Rachel Maddow as the network's star attraction, with more than 1 million viewers a night. Like many news organizations, including The Washington Post, NBC News prohibits its employees from making political contributions, a ban designed to prevent the appearance of partisanship by a news organization.

Olbermann's "indefinite" suspension without pay touched off a debate about the limits of political involvement by journalists, particularly in an era when many news organizations are erasing the lines between news reporting and advocacy. Partisanship is on particular display each night on the cable news networks, which typically cover the day's political developments from a single point of view (Olbermann's or Bill O'Reilly's programs, for example) or as a debate between talking heads from rival parties.
The issue becomes further blurred when opinionated hosts shuttle back and forth as anchors for major news events. Olbermann and Chris Matthews, who hosts "Hardball" on MSNBC, have both anchored the network's election coverage. Anchors have traditionally tried to stay impartial.
Some -- including Maddow, who follows Olbermann's program each night -- used the episode to attack rival Fox News, which places no restrictions on its commentators' contributions.

"Let this incident lay to rest forever the facile, never-true-anyway, bull-pucky, lazy conflation of Fox News and what the rest of us do for a living," she said on her program Friday. "Hosts on Fox News raise money for Republican candidates. They endorse them explicitly, they use their Fox News profile to headline fundraisers. . . . We are a news operation, and the rules around here are part of how you know that."

The liberal media watchdog group Media Matters found that more than 30 Fox News hosts and contributors had donated to conservative candidates.

But others saw much ado about nothing, in view of the fact that Olbermann is an avowed liberal who is not bound by the same standards of neutrality as traditional news reporters.

"Watch 'Countdown' for five minutes and it's clear that Olbermann is a fierce partisan who uses his program to bolster liberal causes," wrote Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review, in a Web column. "It's an approach that has worked big time, hugely increasing MSNBC's audience during Olbermann's time slot." But he added, "Let's face it: neither Fox nor MSNBC is really a news organization, at least not in the traditional sense. Their primary mission is to espouse political causes. . . . Political activity is what Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and [MSNBC host] Ed Schultz do for a living."

………………………..

There are two interesting points about this story. First, it shows that corporate bureaucrats like Phil Griffin are right-wing even at MSNBC (as their bosses are) but respond to noisy public protest. Two days is not even a slap on the wrist and the whole even ended as a triumph for Olbermann and an embarrassment for Griffin. If Griffin had simply told Olbermann “gotcha” it would have had more effect. This will simply tell Olbermann that he can safely go farther than he imagined. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Second, it tells the rest of us, “The Great Unwashed”, that things like facebook and twitter and the like have returned to us the power of the old town meeting, but at a scale that Norman Rockwell never imagined. The professional politicians are merely a particular division of the professional management bureaucrats. They have to do a ritual dance so that the Republican Politicians look like they are working for the people who happen to be wealthy (and those who suck up to them), and the Democratic Politicians are working for the rest of us (and the ones like Jim Demint who pretend to be us); but they are all working for themselves and their secret sympathies are with the rich they hope to be. They control and manipulate the electoral system and keep it so expensive that ordinary people can’t afford to get involved except for organizations that are controlled by the Pros.

But a storm of protest on the sites like facebook, twitter and the Blogs blew Keith back on the air in two days. Hardly gave him a long weekend to rest up in.

We could use the same method to move the Democratic Party over to the Left where it used to be when I was a kid. The Democrats used to be a Farmer-Labor Party, and even if the children of the farmers and laborers have turned into Dilberts, we can use the internet to remake the Democrats into a party oriented toward Dilberts, rather than the pointy haired managers.

A “Tea Party of the Left” perhaps.

Pass it on. Get your friends talking about it. We don’t have to depend on professional politicians to express our opinions, we just have to get them pointed in the right direction. We got Keith back on the air in two days, without any support from corporate money. What else can we do? Make Obama into a real Democrat of the FDR or Truman variety? Stranger things have happened.

Barrouallie Whalers in New England

2010-05-31T00:04:00.003-04:00

The Barrouallie Whalers
Authentic Whalers and Shantymen from St. Vincent & the Grenadines June 2010 Appearances in New England

• June 10 Whaling National Historical Park – New Bedford, MA
Visitor Center on Williams St. 7:00 PM www.ahanewbedford.org

• June 11-13 • Mystic Seaport Museum, CT www.mysticseaport.org

• June 15 •Sylvester Manor Farm (unconfirmed) Long Island, NY

• June 16 Schooner Quinnipiack - New Haven, CT 7:00 pm www.schoonerinc.org

• June 17 Hibernian Hall, Roxbury, MA 8:00 pm www.madison-park.org

Dan Lanier The Barrouallie Whalers Project, Inc. dan@barrwhalers.org

New Essay

2010-05-21T10:17:00.001-04:00

I have been modifying my ideas as a result of watching Barack Obama and his opponents, and the result can be found at http://uniso.karleklund.net.

Caribbean Reference Laboratory

2010-03-31T13:55:00.001-04:00

A medical laboratory on Paul"s Avenue in Kingstown. Excellent phlebotomists and skilled in making diagnostic tests. I go there for testing related to diabetis and heart disease. Telephone:(784) 457-1552

In Massachusetts

2010-03-31T10:30:00.001-04:00

Our house in Massachusetts

Soup Poem

2010-01-18T16:51:00.001-04:00

For some reason the word "roux" came up in conjunction with "stew" and I kept fiddling around until I came up with:

Roux, roux, roux your stew
If a thick sauce pleases you.
But if gravy that is fluid
Is the way you want to do it
You will rue the roux you do.

Darpa Balloon Challenge

2009-12-07T05:21:00.001-04:00

Our team won! See http://balloon.mit.edu
for updates.

Balloon Project

2009-12-05T22:25:00.001-04:00

The DARPA Network Challenge is a competition that will explore the
roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely
communication, wide-area team building, and urgent mobilization
required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems. The Network
Challenge winner will be the first individual to submit the locations
of 10 8-foot balloons moored at 10 fixed locations in the continental
United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and
visible from nearby roads. More information available at
http://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/

If you know the location of one of the balloons tell me at:

http://balloon.media.mit.edu/Karlek/

and I'll tell the Balloon project and we'll both get a reward in the hundreds of $

Facebook

2009-06-16T23:08:00.001-04:00

I joined Facebook, but I haven't figured out what to do with it, or how.

New Blog: Going To Utopia

2009-01-29T06:39:00.001-04:00

Any materials relative to global or US politics and the evolution of human society will be located here

New Blog: Going To Utopia

2009-01-29T06:29:00.000-04:00

I have compiled a summary of my description of the evolution of human society into a book that includes the effect of the election of Barack Hussein Obama as the President of the United States and de facto leader of Western Civilization.
This can be found here.

That book isn't going to be revised soon, if at all, but it seems that there will be more things to say, such as why the Republican Party doesn't like the Democratic Party's economic revival plan. These notes can be found in the blog here.

Eventually the blog will contain pretty much everything I have written about human society, as well as analysis of new developments.

Obama & Evolution

2009-01-22T10:42:00.002-04:00

I've put an essay called: "Barack Hussein Obama and the Evolution of Utopia" on the web at
http://bho.karleklund.net

It is too long to put on a blogsite.

Proclamation

2009-01-22T10:31:00.003-04:00

NATIONAL DAY OF RENEWAL AND RECONCILIATION, 2009
- - - - - - -
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:A PROCLAMATION

As I take the sacred oath of the highest office in the land, I am humbled by the responsibility placed upon my shoulders, renewed by the courage and decency of the American people, and fortified by my faith in an awesome God.

We are in the midst of a season of trial. Our Nation is being tested, and our people know great uncertainty. Yet the story of America is one of renewal in the face of adversity, reconciliation in a time of discord, and we know that there is a purpose for everything under heaven.

On this Inauguration Day, we are reminded that we are heirs to over two centuries of American democracy, and that this legacy is not simply a birthright -- it is a glorious burden. Now it falls to us to come together as a people to carry it forward once more.

So in the words of President Abraham Lincoln, let us remember that: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim January 20, 2009, a National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation, and call upon all of our citizens to serve one another and the common purpose of remaking this Nation for our new century.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twentieth day of January, in the year of our Lord two thousand nine, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-third.

"Decline and Fall"

2008-10-10T09:34:00.001-04:00

I suppose that people thought me crazy for talking about the "Decline and Fall of Western Civilization", but now that we have experienced the first stage it may not seem that ridiculous. We won't see a literal collapse for a while yet, when Obama wins the presidency that will break the "Glass Ceiling" for people of color just as Hillary and Sarah Palin have (in their various ways) broken the Glass Ceiling for women, the pressure from the Internal and external proletariat will be somewhat reduced. But the spiritual basis of Western Civilization is wealth as the primary status symbol, and we can no longer believe in the value of wealth.
Even if the financial system recovers to a certain extent, the middle class will not be able to easily forget how trillions of dollars of wealth simply vanished in the course of an afternoon. And everything about the basis of our civilization is as ephemeral.

Consider a share of General Motors (or Apple, for that matter). It is only worth something if there are people willing to purchase what the company manufactures. There are fixed assets in buildings and machinery, but if they aren't being used they are merely scrap, some of which is recyclable and a lot that isn't. And if the spiritual value of wealth evaporates, and people aren't willing to buy a new car or computer for its prestige value, the wealth represented by shares in the company vanishes.

So we have suffered a fatal blow to the spiritual basis of our civilization, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. The only questions left are when it dies completely and what it is replaced by. There is the possibility that we will evolve into a civilization that is globally egalitarian, ecologically responsible and creative; but that may require a "dark age" to rub in the lesson of using wealth as a spiritual basis.

LIAT

2008-10-07T11:42:00.002-04:00

We got to St Vincent, finally, after taking two days and three airplanes to get from San Juan PR to SVG.

We arrived in San Juan in late morning after leaving the house at 3:30AM. The American Airlines flight from Boston to San Juan was crowded but functional.

We waited around in the San Juan terminal for the 3:30PM "direct" flight (which now includes a stop in St. Lucia) and watched a whole bunch of LIAT employees walk around the plane. Finally the Captain arrived and decided the fuel pump was busted. We were given food and hotel vouchers (in terminal fast food & hotel). Even the McDonalds is clearly in PR.

On friday we went to the terminal again and watched everyone walk around the plane, including an FAA official, for greater assurance. Finally a Captain came in and they boarded the plane that was supposed to leave before ours. Then our captain came and we went on board.

About an hour into the flight the captain spoke saying there was somthing wrong with the ventilation system and we were going to land in Antigua--LIAT headquarters -- so they could fix it. We had to go through the x-ray dance (Sally's cane, two carry-ons, two laptops and my shoes, all in seperate trays) to get into the departure lounge. But we had waited only minutes before they bundled us on a new plane along with the Antigua-SVG passengers. Packed full. We got here after dark, i.e. after 6pm.

Two days, three planes for what should be a 3 hour trip.

Hooray for LIAT

After The Debate: Impressions

2008-09-27T08:01:00.001-04:00

I'll have to admit that I didn't listen to every word, but I did get two strong impressions that hadn't really caught my ear (so to speak) previously. I'm of the left, if anything, so you shouldn't be surprised that they were negative for McCain; but I was surprised that Obama didn't really grab me. His polls must really put him in the lead, because he was very cautious in his subject matter. Make no mistakes, I guess, "You probably won't win any votes but you can lose some" would have been the advice from the professional advisors.

But McCain did surprise me, and you might easily accuse me of agism. (Of course I'm almost a decade older than McCain so that might not stick.) In the early part of the debate he hardly spoke one sentence that referred to a single idea. He would start a sentence about something and. before that idea was fully expressed, he would jump to another idea, and often a third or forth in the same sentence. It was a mineature version of his itinerary for the week: first one idea and then another, nothing ever completed before he was on to the next thing. And the only thing that was clear was that he was conspiring with the right-wing republican legislators to disrupt, and hopefully torpedo, the negotiations. Their payment for that, supposing that McCain wasn't really in favor of the right-wing agenda, was to try to give McCain a "Hero" role in the bailout negotiations.

So that jumping around made sense in the light of his actions. But several topics in the same sentence without finishing any of them? If he weren't a youngster I'd say he was senile. He was talking like my mother did when she was 99.

But later in the discussion, when he found a topic that really interested him, he was sharp as a tack. I may have disagreed with him but I had to admire the intensity with whch he pursued the subject. Unfortunately the subject was war. Give McCain a chance to think about combat and the fuzzy thinking clears away. His thinking may be wrongheaded from my standpoint, but he was thinking.

That wasn't true of my mother. In the last few years before she died at 99 she would tell me that I just missed seeing my father or grandmother, both of whom had died many years previously. But she was consistent, and the doctors thought it was organic. So I suspect that McCain's incoherence is not senility (he's too young for that, anyway) but simply a lack of interest in anything but war.

So, if anything, while the debate hasn't made me any more passionate for Obama, it has certainly confirmed my sense that he is less likely to involve me in military violence. And that's the only thing that makes much difference these days: I'm certainly not worrying about what I'm going to be doing in 20 years.

Next Stop Utopia

2008-09-19T23:44:00.001-04:00

"I fear the government has passed the point of no return," financial historian Ron Chernow told the New York Times. "We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams."

"Nothing will be like it was before," said James Allroy, a broker who was brooding over his chai latte at a Starbucks on Wall Street. "The world as we know it is going down."

“SPIEGEL ONLINE - Druckversion - US Financial Crisis: 'The Wo…As We Know It Is Going Down' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International”

......................

I apologize because I hadn't seen the possibilities.

Some time ago I wrote a novel called UTOPIA [http://utopia.karleklund.net] that described a global civilization in which the greatest sin was waste and was based on Norbert Weiner's notion that when computers and robots were mature nobody would be ALLOWED to work unless they did something better than a robot or computer. The "Working Class" were the elite (but couldn't show off) and the "Leisure Class" were those who couldn't make it into the Working Class and had to find ways to amuse themselves.

But I finessed the transition between our world and that one because I couldn't imagine how that could happen. But Bush is going to go down in history as having provided the precedent for that world. In order to save the red necks of Wall Street, the US government is going to end up owning most of the corporations in the US, and other governments are going to do the same, until we have a globally Fascist infrastructure that will be based on democracy by revolution. Because the infrastructure will be so complex and easily sabotaged, the global government will have to do things in such a way that most of the people are satisfied most of the time--and that should be the way things work. Gilbert and Sullivan, in "Utopia, Ltd." described it as "despotism tempered by dynamite" in which the despot was followed by a couple of dynamiters who would blow him up if the citizens got unhappy.

And only an idiot like Bush could do this. No intelligent liberal would think he could get away with it. I am amazed at the subtle ingenuity of human evolution. It makes me proud just to watch it work.

McCain & Hillary

2008-08-24T14:52:00.003-04:00

The talking heads have been worrying about why some of the Hillary supporters (29% of them) say they are going to vote for McCain. McCain has taken advantage with an ad (quoted in the LA Times -- {http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/}. However, like I did, they probably forgot that the Republican talk show heads suggested that Republicans register as Democrats and vote for Hillary because she'd be easier to beat. So it isn't surprising that some Hillary supporters would go back to being Republicans when the primaries were over.

This new Sunday ad is titled "Passed Over." Aimed clearly at the 18 million disappointed Democrats who voted for her during the long primary season, the ad asks why Clinton was passed over for the No. 2 spot.

It shows Clinton and says:

"She won millions of votes.

"But isn't on his ticket.

"Why?

"For speaking the truth.

"On his plans:

HILLARY CLINTON: "You never hear the specifics."

ANNCR: "On the Rezko scandal:

HILLARY CLINTON: "We still don't have a lot of answers about Sen. Obama."

ANNCR: "On his attacks:

HILLARY CLINTON: "Sen. Obama's campaign has become increasingly negative."

ANNCR: "The truth hurt.

"And Obama didn't like it.

JOHN MCCAIN: "I'm John McCain and I approved this message."

In the last few years of her life my grandmother (my mother's mother) used to bus back and forth from Los Angeles, where my Uncle Andy had gone in the '30s to draw for Walt Disney and my parents' house on Long Island. She was a Seventh Day Adventist and she worked hard to convert the relatives. When I went up to LA for a weekend (the Army having sent me out to the Yuma (AZ) Test Station) they were very surprised to find that I wasn't a Seventh Day Adventist, too. Evidently my grandmother had been telling the Los Angeles relatives that all of us on the East Coast had converted to Adventism, just as she told us that all of the West Coast relatives had joined Adventist Churches. Sally reminded me of that when I mentioned the Republican Hillary-followers.

Evidently to some people it doesn't matter whether what you say is the truth or not so long as it serves your ideological purpose. In politics that works fairly well as long as you can get the media to go along and just ignore the things you say that aren't true, and mostly they do. That's the American Way, I guess.

Neanderthal

2008-08-09T09:38:00.002-04:00

Leg bone yields DNA secrets of man's Neanderthal 'Eve'

* Ian Sample, science correspondent
* The Guardian,
* Friday August 8 2008

Strands of DNA recovered from the fossilised leg bone of a Neanderthal have shed light on the fragility of the ancient population and pinpointed when they first split from what were to become modern humans. The 38,000-year-old bone was unearthed in a cave in Vindija in Croatia, and has since become part of a landmark project to read the entire genetic sequence of an ancient human ancestor, a feat scientists believe will help reveal how modern humans evolved into the world's dominant species.

Researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, read the complete sequence of DNA held in tiny biological powerhouses called mitochondria, which provide energy for cells. The mitochondria are only passed down the female line, so can be used to trace the species back to an ancestral "Eve", the mother of all Neanderthals. The team analysed the DNA of 13 genes from the Neanderthal mitochondria and found they were distinctly different to modern humans, suggesting Neanderthals never, or rarely, interbred with early humans. The genetic material shows that a Neanderthal "Eve" lived around 660,000 years ago, when the species last shared a common ancestor with humans.

Further tests on the DNA revealed surprisingly few evolutionary changes, which suggests that the Neanderthals may only ever have existed in relatively small numbers, with less than 10,000 alive at any one time.

"This has implications for our picture of Neanderthals and perhaps the reasons for their extinction. If the population was teetering on the brink for hundreds of thousands of years, it maybe changes our impression of what it would have taken to make them go extinct rather than if there were millions of them," said Adrian Briggs, a molecular biologist who co-authored a report on the work in the journal Cell.

Theories of what drove the Neanderthals to extinction range from an inability to adapt to a quickly changing environment, to genocide by early humans. The species is though to have died out in Europe around 30,000 years ago, shortly after the arrival of early humans.

Neanderthals were short and stocky and well adapted to a cold climate. The tallest male, found in a cave in France, was only 5ft 5in (1.71m). Despite having barrel chests, strong ridges above their eyes and a lack of chins, their brains were on average larger than those of modern humans. Some fossil evidence suggests that they were occasional cannibals, though more commonly hunted large animals including horses and mammoths. Remains of Neanderthals dating back 400,000 years suggest they crafted tools and weapons and buried their dead. The last Neanderthals died out nearly 40,000 years ago, as Homo sapiens migrated to, and eventually settled throughout, Europe.

The Leipzig team has read 4% of the Neanderthal's entire genetic code and hopes to complete the full sequence by the end of the year. Comparing the Neanderthal genome with the human genetic sequence should highlight subtle genetic differences, such as genes for improved brain capacity and other traits that underpin what it means to be human.

This article appeared in the Guardian on Friday August 08 2008 on p10 of the UK news section. It was last updated at 00:32 on August 08 2008.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/08/evolution.genetics/print

* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Getting Ready For The Olympics

2008-08-06T23:40:00.001-04:00

A sign

Gospel Song

2008-08-06T23:36:00.002-04:00

This blog needs reviving so I'm going to put stuff in it that strikes my fancy, like
THIS

Evolution and Politics

2008-06-13T22:55:00.000-04:00

Around 1950 (I just use that date as a half-century mark, but it is when I graduated from MIT so it is more or less when my life got serious) the establishment instinctively reacted to the then-present stage of the Industrial Revolution and started to keep the rest of the lower-middle-class from being upwardly mobile. Since the 1500s there had been layers of the lower middle class that had become part of the establishment by getting money through new technology: traders & Bankers, colonial planters and respource exploiters, industrialists after the Civil War and bureaucrats after the World Wars. The bureaucratic class (managers and engineers) became a population by virtue of the Post-World-War-II G.I. Bill, which changed a generation of young white men from industrial workers to bureaucrats.

These new bureaucrats demonstrated their upward mobility by copying the style of their superiors, i.e., by demonstrating their ability to waste resources by conspicuous consumption.

There aren't enough resources to allow the global population to waste resources the way American and European bureaucrats do, so the next layer sceduled for upward mobility (white women and people of color) had to be repressed by glass ceilings. The reaction to this repression was expressed politically in the feminist and civil rights movements so that in only 50 years it was possible for a woman and a person of color to compete for the Democratic Party candidacy for President of the United States.

This was not quite as revolutionary as it seemed. The Democrats in the 1930s were a Farmer-Labor party and even now are not the party of the establishment. The woman candidate symbolically wore trousers and acted as "one of the boys" and the person of color was half white and brought up as white, and his father was African and not African-American (i.e., his ancestors had not been enslaved) so that neither candidate was completely excluded from the male, white establishment. But from the standpoint of the non-establishment internal proletariat there was a crack in the glass ceiling that was wide enough to let a little air in.

Interestingly enough the situation created the best possible circumstance for the establishment in that the candidates representing women and people of color spent much of their energy battling each other: a classic example of the tactic of "divide and conquer". The battle started early enough, however, to serve to toughen the candidates rather than weaken them.

It seems likely that the remaining candidates, Barak Obama representing the internal proletariat and John McCain representing the establishment, are such as to allow the next president to be a person of color. This opening of the establishment to include persons of color may actually take some support away from the insurgent Islamic and Bolivarian groups representing the external proletariat. There is just the faint possibility that this will delay the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization that would normally have been expected to mark the division between the Post-Neolithic and Post-Industrial phases of our evolution, and allow that transition to be less traumatic. That seems to be too much even to hope for, but hope does not require much of a fingerhold.

Pete Seeger

2008-06-08T17:17:00.001-04:00

I had a nostalgic afternoon today--PBS did a begging stint around the "American Masters" program about Pete Seeger. You can read about it at:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/seeger_p.html

I first got to hear him on Senior's Day in my high school. My economics teacher figured out that the best way to keep us under control was to bring in a record player and some records. They included "Talking Union" by the Almanac Singers, started by Seeger and Woodie Guthrie. He lifted the pickup on one record, so I had to buy a copy to hear what it was. You can download the songs, and some others, at"

http://joski56.blogspot.com/2008/04/almanac-singers-talking-union.html

That collection includes some of the anti-war songs from before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, and the pro-war songs from after, before Seeger left the CPUSA.

When I was in graduate school Seeger gave a series of "Evening Classes" in the continuing studies program at Columbia; where I got a chance to sit in the front row.
Years later, when I was working at Stony Brook, they stopped by for a concert while bringing their Hudson River Sloop from Maine to the Hudson. Since several of the crew were friends of ours many of them stopped by our house; but not Pete.

But the program allowed me to reminisce about more people than Pete and it was interesting to see those old folkies who are still alive. And to hear songs that we haven't heard for a while.

Up North Again

2008-05-21T22:43:00.002-04:00

We are in Massachusetts after a 23 hour layover in Puerto Rico. I'm not using the word "home" because I'm more at home in St. Vincent these days. Besides it is cold enough (for us) that we have to have the furnace on and we are still cold!

2008-05-17T09:16:00.000-04:00

Sugar maple tree in our side yard in Myricks, Massachusetts after a windstorm in mid-May, 2008. We will be going there in a few days. Pictures taken by neighbor Janine Perry.

A Universal Basis for Science and Religion

2008-01-21T01:23:00.001-04:00

What I said was:

"I will be posting comments that are not ready for the webpage at [ub.karleklund.net] here for the time being."

I didn't

"I may end up creating a new blog for it depending on how many notes pile up."

I did: see http://qt.karleklund.net

"The other blogs may or may not wither on the vine."

They did.

A Universal Basis for Science and Religion

2008-01-20T17:07:00.001-04:00

I've put together these notes into a website that can be found....except I changed it.

See http://qt.karleklund.net

A Universal Basis for Science and Religion, Part 9

2008-01-10T06:06:00.000-04:00

Universal Basis: Part 9

One of the quotations that stuck in my mind long before I understood its significance was one that, in several versions, is attributed to Albert Einstein. He explained his objection to quantum mechanics by saying: "God may be a rascal, but he is not a gambler". It can be taken to refer to the gedanken-experiment of Schrodinger's cat, where a radioactive source is set up to trigger a lethal experience for a cat in a closed container. Clearly the cat is either alive or dead when the container is opened, but what is its state while the container is closed? Quantum theory would say that the cat is both alive and dead but, of course, the human observer can only observe a dead cat or a live one.

But Schrodinger's cat is a paradox only because the postulated observer is human. To a Deus ex Machina of the kind we defined earlier, the cat is clearly alive on one branch of its lifeline, and dead on another. Since the DeM observes both, there is no paradox. The paradox only exists if we expect that the human experimenter has the same powers as the DeM, which is clearly false to fact.

In the case of Einstein's quip, the false assumption is reversed. Since "God" is not limited to human perceptions, and would have at least the perceptions of the DeM, which is merely a mathematical model, there is no necessity for God to gamble: if there are two possible outcomes, God observes both. (At least the DeM can observe both if it cares to.) The assumption that God is as limited in its perceptions as we are, which is at the implicit basis of most, if not all, quantum paradoxes, is entirely unnecessary. Einstein's God clearly had feet of clay.

This kind of theological assumption, that the qualities of God should be restricted to something that has already been imagined by some human being, is what makes historical theology inferior to science as a species of intellectual endeavor. There is no reason for this limitation.

If we consider the evolution of human beings from a theological standpoint, there is no reason that God should have created us (presumably through the process of evolution) with a facility for thought that stopped with some particular theologian or prophet. Just as in science we keep poking at the present accepted set of natural laws to see if we can find a glitch, I suspect that God would have created in us a facility for doing our best to understand our experiences. We have an obligation to God (if there is one) to do the best we can, and not get intellectually lazy just because somebody has had a particularly striking theological insight. Jesus, Gautama and Mohammed were great contributors to the relationship between us and the universe, but they weren't gods, no matter what some may believe. If we can do better, if we can incorporate the understanding of new experiences into their insights, then we have the obligation to do so.

This essay has illustrated how science, as the study of the natural world, and theology, as the study of the order in the universe that we call "God", can work hand in hand to point a way for the human species to live in accord with the workings of the planet we reside on. We can hope that other creative scientists and theologians will work together to make these notions deeper and more universal.

A Universal Basis for Science and Religion, Part 8, The Industrial Revolution (1500-1950)

2008-01-08T15:33:00.000-04:00

A Universal Basis for Science and Religion, Part 8, The Industrial Revolution (1500-1950)

When Roman Civilization collapsed there was no longer a civil service to bring back status symbols from far places. Individual traders replaced them, and they got rich. This wasn't entirely satisfactory because the status symbols only worked for the descendants of the warlords of the middle ages, which left the traders and bankers rich but still common.

Calvin solved this problem. He invented a new kind of aristocracy, the Elect, who were directly appointed by God over the heads of the existing social and religious hierarchy. The sign of being elect was God-given prosperity, so Calvinism became a religion of upward-mobility for the middle-class through the acquisition of money. This process continued for the next few centuries.

The traders had taken advantage of the new technology of sailing ships and traded junk or cheap hardware for status symbols. The planters used the technology of slavery on big plantations to become the new establishment. In North America they fought a war to get out from under the old aristocracy.

Meanwhile, english mechanics like Sam Slater had brought over textile machinery and adapted it to New England's water power and, later, steam. These industrialists made machinery that could be operated by women and children and got very rich. In the American Civil War they broke the power of the southern planters and became the establishment.

By the turn of the century they were building mansions in Newport and marrying their daughters to impoverished european aristocrats and they left their factories to be run by the clerks and mechanics. By the World Wars they had been replaced by the corporate and government bureaucracy. They also used the G. I. Bill to turn a generation of potential workers into junior bureaucrats who aped their betters by conspicuously consuming imitation status symbols.

By 1950 it was clear that there weren't enough resources to waste the way the bureaucrats of Western Civilization were wasting them, so there was a concerted effort to prevent the external proletariat and the internal proletariat of women and people of color from being upwardly mobile. Western Civilization became more and more closed to immigrants (now stigmatized as "illegal"), and wars and dictatorships were encouraged among undeveloped countries. In the mideast the rebellion against this repression stimulated fundamental Islam, and in Latin America it stimulated revolutionary movements. In both areas certain groups were able to use oil resources to become difficult to exterminate.

It is not clear whether the U. S. elections of 2008, which will probably end with a president who is female or a person of color, will serve to provide a solution to the world crisis in class conflict and waste of resources, which are closely connected. There is a significant chance that there will be no solution short of the decline and fall of Western Civilization. The decadence of the existing establishment, and the resurgence of religious fundamentalism among the internal proletariat are certainly symptoms of a collapse; but it is possible that the enthusiasm of young entrants into politics who recognize the potential for disaster of the status quo will provide time to find a future that will be based on global egalitarianism and ecological responsibility. That may not be possible without first experiencing a complete collapse of Western Civilization, but there is no theoretical reason for it to be impossible.

Right now it seems unlikely because there is no religion, or even political ideology, which advocates global egalitarianism and ecological responsibility. Even the "Green" parties that advocate environmental conservation do so within a context that maintains the status difference between the western establishment and the external proletariat. There are no parties or religions that advocate egalitarianism except in symbolic terms (e.g., elections) and in giving the internal and external proletariats equal opportunity to be exploited. Again, it is possible for egalitarian ideologies or religions to be invented, but there isn't enough motivation for that to happen.

So it may well be that an ideology or religion of global egalitarianism and global ecological responsibility will not be invented until it is necessary, for instance as a rallying cry for the next "Creative Minority" to meet the challenge of rebuilding a civilization on the ruins of the present one. Only when the cooperative effort of all the talent and resources of the world is necessary for our species to survive will it be likely for that kind of religion/ideology to become popular.

A Universal Basis For Science And Religion, Part 7

2008-01-08T05:52:00.001-04:00

Universal Basis, Part 7- Neolithic

About ten thousand years ago we discovered that we could eat the grains of some grassy plants. This had some advantages that we couldn't say "no" to. A farmer could (in the right environment) produce more grain than he, or even his family, could eat. Even more important, grain could be stored in a dry environment so that the tribe could survive through a season of bad crops.

But this created a problem. The more farmers the more surplus, which created a strong motivation for an increased population. If we continued to govern ourselves by mutual conformity this would result in an unstable society. In addition we could not move our crops easily, so that the traditional method of fission and migration was not available.

The method of stabilization we chose still remains active. Our shaman said that we all had to worship his muse, who was a supershaman like Hermes or Odin. That
put us in a Bose-Einstein distribution in behavior space so that our society was stable as long as we had a central religion. The shaman, who represented the tribe to the muse, became a priest who represented the god to the tribe and partook of the god's authority.

This allowed him to take the surplus grain and store it for bad years and also use some of it to support technical specialists like potters and metalsmiths.
Eventually the village had to hire barbarians to guard the reserve grain and their leader became the king. The King's muse took over and became the top god.

Although we retain aspects of the post-Neolithic civilizations such as community religions with a Superking as the top god and authoritarian priests, in recent years priests have to share authority with secular bureaucrats.

According to Wikipedia, "Arnold Joseph Toynbee CH (April 14, 1889 – October 22, 1975) was a British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934-1961, was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline, which examined history from a global perspective." It contained a description of the life-cycle of a [post-Neolithic] civilization in five steps:

(1) The creation of the civilization by a "Creative Minority" meeting a challenge.

(2) When the challenge is met the civilization is taken over by the "Dominant Minority".

(3) The "External Proletariat", affected by the civilization but not in it, maintain pressure at the boundaries.

(4) The External Proletariat provides mercenaries to the Dominant Minority. The Palace Guard takes over the civilization and runs it into the ground.

(5) The "Internal Proletariat", the alienated non-elite of the civilization, seek escape through new religious cults.

The post-Neolithic civilizations were replaced by Western (i.e., euro-american) Civilization whose terminal period we are experiencing.

a Universal Basis For Science And Religion, Part 6

2008-01-08T05:51:00.000-04:00

A Universal Basis, Part 6; Specialists

In ordinary times when there are no crises the normal social structure, a discussion leading to a consensus, works quite nicely. Sometimes, however, it isn't fast enough.

If the tribe, or a sub-group like a hunting party, has to act in a cooperative way in a rapid timescale; the most effective method is to have one person in charge and the others simply obey his tactical commands. This is particularly the case when the prey (or predator) is a "barbarian"; an animal that looks pretty much like us but doesn't speak a human (i.e., our) language. (The greeks thought barbarians only said "bar...bar".) This hunting chief (or war chief) has executive power only during the crisis, but it is still a role that is strongly nonconformist. The hunting chief has to act in a way that compensates for the nonconformity or his actions will destabilize the mutually conformist tribe.

In a similar way a crisis may occur that does not respond to action and creates anxiety in the tribe. If someone gets sick, or a grove of trees doesn't bear like it used to, or a storm keeps the gatherers home till the stores are used up, someone needs to respond to the situation. Nowadays we use the siberian word "shaman" for such a person. The shaman tells everyone what to do. The person gets well or dies, the grove bears late or we switch to another nut or fruit, the storm eventually ends. But the shaman has to act in a magical way that restores the tribe's confidence without being nonconformist in a way that destabilizes the tribe.

The shaman and the hunting chief have two tricks that allow them to live in equilibrium with the conformity of the rest of the tribe. First they are "equal-on-the-average" in that they take actions that the rest of the tribe considers very risky. That risky behavior assures that 'on the average' they are not better off than everyone else. Typically the hunting chief takes actions in the hunt (or in combat) that are more dangerous or "heroic" than ordinary hunters (or warriors). Typically the shaman goes through a trying apprenticeship and often goes into a deathlike trance that is heroic on the spiritual level.

If the hunting chief or shaman does not act so that the tribe believes that he or she is not "equal on the average", the tribespeople become alienated and the social structure falls apart.

This takes care of the public relations part of the actions of the chief and shaman, it makes them right with the tribe. There is also a psychological action that they take to make them right with themselves. They typically have a "spirit helper" or "muse" that is superhuman and gives them permission to be nonconformist. These muses are personal, however, and the ordinary members of the tribe, who don't break any major taboos, have no need to relate to a muse.

Agriculture changes the whole picture.

A Universal Basis For Science And Religion, Part 5

2008-01-08T05:50:00.001-04:00

A Universal Basis for Science and Religion, Part 5, The Paleolithic

We cannot observe the first humans, but there are things we can use as reasonable assumptions: they lived in Africa by gathering fruits, nuts, roots and tubers, scavenging carrion and, when their technology was up to it, hunting and fishing. They took care of their children because human children need care for a few years before they can do useful things. We know about these kinds of things because we do them ourselves and are aware of them.

There were people in the 16th to 19th century who were still in a relatively primitive state because they had been pushed to the fringes by others and had to spend all their energy on survival. From what we know about them we can assume that they shared their resources and made their decisions by consensus most of the time. They didn't have an authority to regulate behavior, but used teasing and nagging to control those who did not behave properly.

This is all characteristic of people whose behavior is based on mutual conformity. And there is a very good reason for that.

The characteristic that distinguishes homo sapiens sapiens from the other still extant primates is that we communicate by using abstract mouth-noises. Other species use mouth-noises to communicate emotions, but homo sapiens alone can communicate abstractions.

That kind of communication has one strong requirement: everyone in the communication group must use the same noises to mean the same thing. This is the significance of the parable of the Tower of Babel--if we don't all use the same mouth-noises for the same thing we can't take advantage of the sophisticated cooperation that mouth-noise communication makes possible.

Thus is is extremely important that we be mutually conformist in order to survive as human beings.

Mutual conformity is not uncommon in animal species. Ants and bees, for instance, are highly conformist because it is a genetic trait. But humans can't be conformist to that degree. Ants, bees, schooling fish, and other conformist animals are born as clones and are conformists from birth. Humans take a long time to be a contributing member of the tribe, so they represent a large community investment. They have to learn to survive independently between the time when they move by themselves and they contribute to the tribe. The species can't tolerate the possibility that a mistake will take several children who made the same mistake.

So we have an inherent problem. We have the advantage of mouth-noise communication, but it requires us to be bivalent: individualistic and conformist at the same time. This can be represented by a Fermi-Dirac distribution in behavior space; we want to conform to the centroid of the group, but the need for individuality keeps us from all being in the same cell.

Immediately it sets a limit on local group population. If there are too many individuals there will be two who are so different that there is a lot of tension. The tribe tends to fission to preserve tranquility.

When we are surrounded by other tribes and can't fission we have to control population by infanticide of those infants who don't look like us.

The result of a series of fissions, migrations and infanticide is that, as a species:

(a) we will be found more widely distributed than other related species who don't use mouth-noise communication,

(b) we will have a strong local resemblance which will probably be correlated with dialect. We call the local resemblance "race".

(c) Although there will be a variety of appearance in our distribution we remain one species.

That characterization is unique to homo sapiens sapiens.

We lived for 50- to 100,000 years in such a small group governed by mutual conformity, with no hierarchy. If anything, that is the most "natural" form of human society. As we will see, the other systems we have tried are not stable. What we need to do is invent a social infrastructure compatible with technology and as democratic and stable as a
paleolithic tribe.

Universal Basis for Science and Religion: Part 4, Mathematical Interlude

2008-01-07T10:10:00.000-04:00

Universal Basis for Science and Religion: Part 4, Mathematical Interlude

We have used geometric arguments to show that the Darwinian Model (Survival of the Just-Barely-Fit-and-fitter) makes the Intelligent Design model unnecessary because it provides a mechanism for evolving complexity; and it is better at explaining observed evolutionary phenomena than the Spencerian Model (Survival of the Fittest). It is also possible to use algebraic arguments but that is too complicated for this format. It is given on [http://homepage.mac.com/karlek/.Public/WE/WEA1P01.html].

We will, in the next part, apply the Darwinian model to homo sapiens sapiens (i.e., us), but we will be implicitly using a mathematical description of behavior. The full argument is given in [http://we.karleklund.net] and it, too, is too complicated for this format; so I will just give a description of the argument without showing the mathematical and physical details. "Physical", because some parts are deliberate analogies to quantum physics.

We start with the representation of behavior. As we noted earlier it is possible to represent the life experienced by an entity as a sequence of events observed by a Deus ex Machina or "DeM". Each of the decision points has a number of possible inputs and a number of possible outputs. We can represent these as vectors whose elements constitute the repertoire of events observeable by the DeM. We can make this in terms of events we can observe if we divide the decision point into two steps: a stimulus to the entity results in a response; and then that response acts as a stmulus to the entity's environment, whose response acts as the next stumulus to the entity. The life-sequence is thus a sequence of vectors that are related to one another by two transformation matrices: the P-matrix describes the behavior of the entity and the N-matrix describes the behavior of its environment.

We can define a space in which the P-matrix is a point, so that a change in the pattern of behavior represented by the P-matrix is represented by motion in that space. We note that since observations are finite, the elements of the P-matrix will be "fuzzy" and it makes sense to represent the fuzziness by quantizing the P-space and define the dynamics of the entities by occupation rules for the quantum "boxes". This will provide two situations analogous to the rules for particles: the Fermi-Dirac rule which says that one, and only one, particle can occupy a box; and the Bose-Einstein rule which says that any number of particles can occupy a box.

Aside from the occupation rule, the other factor that will cause (or prevent) a change in behavior pattern is the attractve force between two occupied points in P-space; where the force is observed as a pattern of conformity. The Fermi-Dirac rule would apply where there was a tendency for mutual conformity and also a tendency for individuality. The Bose-Einstein rule would hold where the force toward conformity with a reference point was much stronger than the tendency toward individuality.

We can expect, therefore, that with some adjustment for the effects of the environment, we would expect human behavior to be characterized by Fermi-Dirac or Bose-Einstein rules; depending on what environmental factors strongly affect survival.

The first situation is where the humans have a relatively primitive economy, i.e., are primarily dependent on gathering and
scavanging.

Universal Basis For Science And Religion, Remark 1

2008-01-05T10:28:00.000-04:00

Universal Basis, Remark 1

A sense of the import of the Spencerian and Darwinian Models can be obtained from looking at the Gaussian probability curve. The Spencerian model that says "Survival of the Fittest" says, in effect, that fitness can be represented by a single number with a probability distribution something like the gaussian in the figure. Then "The Fittest" would be something like the dark section on the right and only they would contribute to the future population of the species. The rest of the existing population is "junk" and can be discarded as far as evolution is concerned.

The Darwinian model, on the other hand, says "The Non-survival of the Unfit", which says that the dark area on the left makes no contribution, and all the rest of the population contributes to future populations. This not only avoids classifying most of the present population as junk, but it says that cooperation and altruism would decrease the number that are "unfit" and garner their possible contributions to the species.

The American Presidency is an interesting experiment in the Spencerian model: two families, the Adams' and the Bush's have demonstrated genetic successors in that office, and the Adams line faded after one generation and the Bush line resulted in a disasterous war. If nothing else that would demonstrate the inadequacy of the Spencerian model.

Dodo

2008-01-05T02:10:00.000-04:00

I want to use this for a logo for something, maybe Western Civilization. Lets see what it looks like.

It may be a Tenniel copy of a Dodo that he used as an illustration in Alice. I like it. He knows as little about what's coming as we do.

Universal Basis For Science And Religion, Part 3b, Evolution (Continued)

2008-01-04T11:11:00.000-04:00

Universal Basis For Science And Religion, Part 3b, Evolution (Continued)

If the environment changes there is no provision exept extinction under the Spencerian model because the individual who is "fittest" in the original environment, i.e., the one who best fits that circumstance, is not likely to fit the changed environment. Therefore the only things that survive in the Spencerian model are those whose environment never changed. Since even the creationists believe in the flood, it is unlikely that the environment all over the earth never changed.

Let us consider a species that is more tolerant of environmental changes. This is represented by Fig. 3. In equilibrium, the survival zone will be filled with individuals who are just barely able to survive or fitter. If the environment changes, there will be some individuals who will not be able to survive, but there will be others who will survive more easily. Eventually the survival zone will fill. If the environment continues to change, as long as it changes less than the dimension of the survival zone in a generation, the survival zone will continue to be filled. It is thus possible to get a new population that is different enough from the original population as to constitute a new species.

In some cases the survival zone will expand, for instance when a flood connects two bodies of water or a land bridge opens up. In the period after that the new survival zone will fill up with as many variations on the original population that will just barely survive in the new zone, as shown in Fig. 4. This provides an explanation for the variety of creatures in the Burgess shale. That would not happen under the Spencerian model because none of the variants would be "the fittest" in the original environment.

This provides the difference between the Spencerian and Darwinian models with regard to variations and mutations. In the Spencerian Model a mutation cannot survive unless the mutant is is "the fittest" in its present environment; but in the Darwinian Model the mutation merely needs to be barely able to survive in the original environment. A Spencerian mutation has to provide an immediate advantage; a Darwinian mutation merely has to avoid doing significant harm. A Darwinian mutation can be carried in a population for generations before it provides a survival advantage.

In fact this shows that complexity, by itself, has an evolutionary function, because a complex structure can tolerate many more variations that may not be advantageous but do no particular harm.

In addition, this provides an explanation for the advantage of cooperative behavior. Cooperation increases the survival zone for the breeding population, even if it does not provide a competitive advantage for a particular individual. Cooperation, and even altruism, are survival qualities for a population. There are animals that survive as individuals, but there are also many animals that live in groups and derive a survival advantage from that behavior. This is consistent with the Darwinian Model but not with the Spencerian Model.

The Intelligent Design Model is unnecessary because the Darwinian Model provides for complexity of form without the assumption of a supernatural designer. The Spencerian Model is unscientific because it does not explain phenomena like the Burgess Shale and cooperation as well as the Darwinian Model. But why do these models retain their popularity?

The Spencerian Model is popular among academic, and other, bureaucrats because it provides a justification for hierarchical systems. That allows the bureaucrats to consider themselves superior (i.e., more "fit") than the people they are supposed to serve. It also provides a justification for racism and classism. Similarly, Intelligent Design provides a basis for belief that the status quo was created by a divine fiat, and that therefore those in high status were placed there by divine decree. The Darwinist Model explains that all the individuals in a breeding population contribute to its survival, so that democratic rather than feudal institutions are more natural.

It will, therefore, be difficult to get people in authority in the present bureaucratic systems to adopt the Darwinist Model as "scientific". It does, however, provide an explanation for the evolution of human behavior.

A Universal Basis For Science And Religion, Part 3a, Evolution

2008-01-04T08:35:00.000-04:00

A Universal Basis For Science and Religion, Part 3a, Evolution

As we said in part 2, the best way to make choices among the repertoire of human behaior is to use the methods of science. As far as we can tell there were three general periods which were characterized by styles of behavior: the paleolithic, in which we survived by gathering and hunting, and which laster 50,- to 100,000 years; the post-Neolithic, in which we practiced agriculture, and which lasted 8- to 10,000 years, and the Industrial, which has lasted the last 500 years or so and in which we made extensive use of devices in manufacturing. In the paleolithic we organized ourselves into small, conformist groups; in the post-Neolithic we created urban structures with a hierarchical organization. The industrial era may only have been a transition that might yet return us to the egalitarian organization of the paleolithic but on a global, rather than tribal, basis; but we can't be exactly sure how we will get past the present period of regression. It may be that the whole time since the Neolithic Revolution was a transition period between two stable periods, the paleolithic and post-Industrial, but we won't be sure for a while. In any case the most stable period we know of, and the one least influenced by the accidents of technological development, is the paleolithic; so we can use that to provide the key to the systematics of human behavior.

Unfortunately, we can't observe ourselves in a paleolithic state. Peoples that still live in a hunter-gatherer economy are to some degree in contact with modern technology, even if that is only metal implements. What we can do is find a theory of evolution that will describe human development from the most primitive cultures to the present, and see if that will give us some indication of what the fundamentals of behavior are like.

There are three models of evolution that can be applied to human behavior. All claim to be scientific, but only one is accepted by academic students of evolution: the Spencerian model based on "Survival of the Fittest". In the New York Times of January 13, 2007, Dr. Michael Tomasello, the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology wrote: "Evolutionary theory tells us that, in general, the only individuals who are around today are those whose ancestors did things that were beneficial to their own survival and reproduction". This is a weak form of Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest". He also wrote:
"We are still a long way from figuring out why humans evolved to do so many complicated things together: from building houses to creating universities to fighting wars."

There is a distinct difference between science and ideology and it is demonstrated by these quotes. We can be grateful that Dr. Tomasello was naive enough to see nothing wrong in what he said. If the Spencerian model was actually judged by scientific criteria it would have been junked because it doesn't explain cooperation, the primary basis of human survival. It is accepted because it allows academics to believe that they are superior to (i.e., "fitter" than) their students and the student's parents.

Unfortunately they are "fitter" as surviving in the academic bureaucracy, so that the non-academics have no response except religion. The model based on the creation of all present living forms by an "intelligent designer" who also created artificial fossils to fool paleontologists is primarily a religious model, but it makes an argument that sounds scientific when it says that complex forms will not evolve without special creation.

The third model is based on Darwin's initial concept: "Non-survival of the unfit". This phrasing seems like it states the same principle as Spencer's model, but we will see that there is a significant difference. If we put it in the same form as Spencer's model it is: "Survival of the Just-Barely-Fit and Fitter". That shows the difference: Spencer's model says that the only one that survives is "The Fittest"; whereas Darwin's model speaks to the survival of a substantial fraction of the breeding population. Since this is what normally happens, it is clear that Darwin's model is more descriptive of experience than Spencer's.

{There are explanations on [http://we.karleklund.net] and [http://whatnow.karleklund.net] if the explanation below is inadequate.}

We can represent the way evolution works by considering Fig. 1. A prey animal will be more likely to be found if it is colored like the environment: if it is too light or too dark it will be seen too easily. But even if it is seen it may survive if it can run faster, but if it is structured to run too fast it will need more calories to survive. This will produce a "survival zone" in the space whose dimensions are coloration and speed. Individuals from any part of the zone may meet and their offspring may fall within the zone and survive to have offspring of their own, or outside the zone and leave no offspring. In the long run this will let the whole zone be populated on the average.

Figure 2 shows the case where the environment is intolerant of variation in one dimension: if the environment changes none of the then present generation will survive. This is what happens when a species goes extinct.

Universal Basis For Science and Religion, Part 2

2008-01-02T23:59:00.000-04:00

Universal Basis, Part 2 - Free Will

Aside from a lack of imagination, there would be no reason not to assume that we have free will. We certainly feel like we have free will because we are upset when we can't do everything we want. We certainly act like we have free will because we make choices whenever we are allowed to by circumstances. We act like other people have free will because we expect them to take responsibility for their actions. The only reason to assume that we don't is because we have a primitive religion with an omniscient God that has the same perceptual limitations that we do. A more sophisticated religion has no trouble accommodating free will and omniscience.

Consider a sequence of events that represents the life of an individual. At each point that represents a decision, there will be different sequences that represent the repertoire of choices allowed by the circumstances. The next point on each of those sequences that represents a decision will have its own repertoire of choices. But there is no reason why an omniscient entity (who we will call a "Deus ex Machina" or DeM) can't be aware of all of them. We can also look backward at all the paths that connect the initial point to the various past point that might precede it in a sequence. Finally we can consider all the points in the life-sequence of anything that has a life-equivalent, like a pebble that gets worn down as it rolls down the bed of a river. If we combine all of those sequences for everything that has suffered, is suffering or will suffer any changes, we can call that the history of the universe. A DeM with omniscience will perceive that history as something static. If we can imagine a DeM with that kind of perception, surely God, if a God exists, must have at least that extensive perception even if God may perceive other things that have no relationship to us or our universe.

However, that level of perception makes other powers irrelevant. Omnipotence, for instance, would be exhibited by making a change in the history of the universe. But if a DeM already perceives everything that represents a possible event in that history there is no point in the DeM changing something in such a way that it results in something that, to the DeM, already exists. It is like rotating a perfect sphere: no matter how you hold it, it looks the same. No matter what a DeM might do to the History of the Universe it always looks the same; so there is no point in doing it.

The effect that this has on religion is that if there is no point in a DeM (or God, if a God exists) doing anything to change the history of the Universe that it perceives, there is no point in our doing anything in particular to try to manipulate the DeM (or God) into doing anything. No acts of behavior like prayer or ritual is going to manipulate the DeM (or God) to do anything that will change the history of the Universe.

However, there are plenty of actions we take that can have an effect on us, some of which will affect the particular life-sequence that we perceive. The trick is to figure out what actions to take that will be the most effective.

The best way we know to do that is to seriously apply the methods of science to what choices we make, i.e., to invent a science of human behavior, which is to say create a model of human behavior that is self-sustaining and beneficial.

Universal Basis For Science and Religion

2008-01-02T10:39:00.000-04:00

I'm going to start a new blog around the concept of a Universal Basis. I'll probably drop some of the other blogs.

A Universal Basis For Science And Religion

The key is that the more difficult things about doing science, especially on the fundamental level, is that one has to "believe in" science as it is practiced in the present, while, at the same time, searching for some instance in which science as practiced is "wrong" or, at least, incomplete. You have to be prepared to "believe in" and "not believe in" science at the very same time.

This technique is not entirely unknown in religion. If one reads the literature of Zen Buddhism one keeps running into the idea that having the insight of "Satori" makes it unnecessary to "believe in" Buddhism as practiced, yet unless one "believes in" Buddhism one does not have the spiritual basis necessary to attain Satori because only Buddhism is consistent with Satori. It is reasonable to believe that that paradox is somehow necessary (but not sufficient) to the attainment of Satori.

The reason this seems to work is that science is not a description of the universe as it is, but is, instead, a description of a model of the universe that is self-consistent; i.e., that is consistent with the accepted logical (and preferably mathematical) description of all the experienced physical phenomena that we are aware of at a particular time and place in the history of the universe. We could not, for instance, recognize the physical phenomena that are described by quantum mechanics until we recognized that the darkening of photographic film by pitchblende was caused by a previously unrecognized form of radiation, and that phenomenon wasn't observable until we had created photographic film and mined pitchblende.

We can reasonably expect that there will be phenomena that are observed in the future that will require changes in the scientific model of the universe that we use today. We should also expect that the religious models that were used yesterday will not necessarily fit the phenomena we observe today.

This will be difficult for theologians because the tradition in religion is to follow the insights of some particular individual at a particular time and place. That individual will articulate those insights in terms of the common perceptions of the time and place (or, if he does not, they will be recorded in terms of those perceptions) and, in general, the religion that results will not have a convenient mechanism for adjusting those insights and perceptions to the changed circumstances of other times and places.

But there is no reason why religious models can't be adjusted the way scientific models are. We give great respect to Isaac Newton for his insights into classical mechanics, but we feel free to use the insights of Einstein and the quantum theorists in the areas where those modification of classical mechanics work better. There is no reason why we can't respect Jesus and Mohammed and Gautama and Lao Tzu, and their insights, and still find modifications of the systems of behavior that they inspired. The trick is to know how to do that in a way that works as well as the modifications of science we have made in the last few centuries.

On the other hand we do not discard the scientific models of the past simply because they don't explain everything. We use 19th century classical statics and dynamics as the basis for civil engineering, and we find that the 19th century model of the universe is good enough for constructing buildings and bridges and machinery. It seems reasonable to retain the existing religious models to the extent that they work, i.e., to apply to those models the same kind of criteria that we use for scientific models.

What we will find is that when we start to apply scientific criteria to religion, we have to look at certain aspects of science that have become so ideological that they are more like primitive religions than the sciences they pretend to be.

Science and Theology

2007-12-30T09:34:00.000-04:00

One of the more difficult things about doing science, especially on the fundamental level, is that one has to "believe in" science as it is practiced in the present, while, at the same time, searching for some instance in which science as practiced is "wrong" or, at least, incomplete. The reason one can do that at all is that science is not a description of the universe but is, instead, a description of a model of the universe that is self-consistent; i.e., that is consistent with the accepted logical (and preferably mathematical) description of all the experienced physical phenomena that we are aware of.

The intent is to make that model as close to experienced reality and as consistent with itself, as possible; but historical (i.e., no longer valid) versions of that model may well be useful for pracical purposes.

As an example, civil engineering is built on classical statics and dynamics. When it uses quantum effects, such as the straightness of laser beams, it uses them as tools whose properties are stated a priori and in classical terms. Classical mechanics is simply "good enough" for the purposes of civil engineering without being a description of how each particular atom and molecule contributes to the final result.

Any version of science is "good enough" if it is a model that is consistent with itself and with those prior scientific models that are fundamental and accepted, and which is also consistent with those experiences of reality that have not been adequately modeled. Because science is a model of reality rather than a description of it, it is entirely possible for an area of science to be "good enough for all practical purposes" and still not be a completely satisfactory explanation of experienced phenomena: electrical curcuit theory, for instance, is "good enough" for the purpose of building most of the electrical and electronic devices we use and still not explain the phenomenon of superconductivity or even ordinary conductivity.

There are places where models of differing sophistication intrude on one another. There are instances in classical thermodynamics where thermodynamic constants that can be measured by 19th century laboratory equipment can only be explained by recourse to quantum mechanical models. They remained mysterious until the quantum model was invented.

So we have to look at science as being composed of many levels of sophistication, some of which are "good enough" for practical purposes and other levels that may be more sophisticated and explain more phenomena, but may not be necessary for many purposes. On the other hand, a school of thought claiming to be a "science" but that does not explain a commonly observed phenomenon is not a science but an ideology that can be called a "pseudoscience". We will demonstrate this phenomenon later in the case of Spencerian Evolution.

Theology is normally an ideology. It is generally not a pseudoscience to the extent it does not claim to explain those physical phenomena that are the subject of common experience. Instead, it generally makes certain statements that are believed to originate (or be about) some kind of supernatural entity, and which are therefore a priori "true".

There is no problem if that "theological truth" is consistent with ordinary experienced reality or even the more sophisticated kinds of scientific reality. If that "truth" is inconsistent with common experience there is a conflict that may be difficult to resolve. In that case the conflict will usually be called a "mystery" that is inherently unexplainable by ordinary human beings. In other words it is accepted that ordinary human beings are too stupid to find a way to make theological truth consistent with ordinary experience or scientific truth.

If we look at the history of science we see the progressive development of models that constitute more and more sophisticated descriptions of experienced phenomena. The history of theology, on the other hand, shows no significant progress in the sophistication of thinking about God. Any god-based theology is locked into the model of god that is adopted by the founder of the religion using that theology, and there is seldom anyone with sufficient authority within that religion to make a significant change in the qualities of their god. What, if anything, happens is that a new religion, with a new model of god, replaces the old and then that religion freezes its ideas as of the date of its founding.

This succession of slightly different models of god, each proclaimed as an absolute truth by a religious founder or reformer, makes it hard to believe in any model of god. Science, on the other hand, when the contemporary content of science is recognized as a model, and where the normal activity of scientists is to make that model an even more precise description of the universe by changing it, gets more and more believable as it gets more sophisticated.

It is possible to create a theology that is as believeable as science because it meets the same criteria that science does. That theology can be considered a model of the universe as experienced by a being or beings whose qualities are different from ours.

Let us consider a "Deus Ex Machina", or DEM, that is Omniscient in that it knows everything that happens, has happened or will happen in our universe. In that case there are two possible circumstances that are of significance to us: that we have "free will" or we don't have "free will".

If we don't have "free will" then there is no point in doing or saying anything about the DeM (or, for that matter,the universe) because everything is predestined. We don't have to make any decisions because those decisions won't have any effect. That circumstance is of no theological interest because we will just believe what we are predestined to believe. Scientists will "discover" what they are predestined to discover, no matter what they think they are doing. That circumstance doesn't merit thinking about.

If we do have "free will" then we can use our cognitive abilities to propose a set of qualities for a DeM that is consistent with our experience. If one of those qualities is omniscience, then the DeM must be aware of all of the possible choices we might make, i.e., the repertoire of possibilities that we can choose from.

We can model the life we experience as a sequence of events in which each possible decision point is a transition between a single path in and a multiple path out. Each of those multiple paths leads to another decision point with its own repertoire of choices. We can consolidate this model by combining all those decision points that are experienced as identical so that the path up to the decsion point is the aggregation of all the past paths that result in that point, and the path away from that point includes all the possible results of a decision at that point. This aggregation, made for every decision point touched by the possible decisions, can be called the "lifeline" of the deciding individual. It can be represented by a series of matrices that represent the transformation of one decision point to the next.

We can consider the aggregation of all the lifelines of all the entities in the universe that have a "lifeline" in the sense that they occupy different states at various points in time (e.g., an entity posessing "life", a volcanic ejecta cooling down, a canyon produced by erosion, or anything whose qualities change over time). We can call this aggregated lifeline the history of the Universe.

If a DeM has omniscience it must at least have the history of the Universe as part of its experience. It may or may not have other experiences that do not relate to the Universe we experience, but those experiences are meaningless to us. One presumes that God has at least the qualities of that kind of DeM, whatever other qualities God might have.

Another quality considered appropriate for a God is omnipotence. If we consider the DeM that has omniscience, omnipotence can be defined as the ability to change the history of the universe from one state to another state. Since the history of the universe already includes all the possible states that can come into existance, there is no point in changing it. To the DeM any change would be like rotating a perfect sphere--whatever changed state that results in looks the same as the starting position.

So there is no point, for example, in asking the DeM to change one's circumstances, i.e., move one's awareness to a different lifeline. But what that DeM would do would make no change perceptible to us. If that personality already exists in that other lifeline then it would simply continue to experience itself as it was, memories and all, and the personality on the original lifeline that we now experience as ours would simply continue to experience itself as before. If one asks the DeM to transform oneself to a lifeline that the DeM had not already experienced, it would be impossible because the DeM already experienced all the possible states of the universe. For example, if you asked the DeM to allow you to live in the core of a sun, that state of the universe is simply inconsistent with the rules by which our observed universe operates.

So the DeM has no need for omnipotence, because any change that is consistent with the rules of the universe has already been experienced by the DeM, and any hypothetical change that would result in a state that is not cnsistent with the rules of the universe would not be made by a consistent DeM. We can say that even if we don't know what all of the rules governing the state of the universe are.

Since a god would at least have the qualities of the DeM, no matter what qualities it has that are irrelevant to us, there is no point in the god being omnipotent. It would simply be irrelevant.

At the same time it is irrelevant for us to ask the god to do anything because that action would merely change the history of the universe into itself. Thus it is irrelevant for us to perform actions or refrain from performing actions in such a way that the result will be that the god will perform or refrain from performing some action. Actions like prayer or the performance of ritual are irrelevant to our lifelines except for the effect that they have on us.

On the other hand, actions by us that provide a benefit or do an injury to ourselves, some other person, or aggregate of persons, or our species, can be analyzed by the methods of science to create a model of behavior that is desireable or undesireable. This topic is still under active consideration by biological and behavioral scientists. We can consider that in terms of whether it is more desireable to act in terms of our individual benefit (i.e., Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest") or the benefit of our species (i.e., Darwin's "Non-survival of the Unfit").

We will discuss that in this context in future blogs. In the meantime there is a version of the relevant argument in "Wholly Holistic Evolution, Mr. Darwin" [http://we.karleklund.net] or "What Now?" [http://whatnow.karleklund.net].

Merry Christmas

2007-12-11T09:27:00.000-04:00

Merry Christmas!

Usually a Christmas email isn't justified because nothing much exciting happens here in St. Vincent, and you can read about what does happen on my St. Vincent blog at [http://svgb.karleklund.net]. But this year is an exception.

On the morning of November 29th I was sitting watching the TV with a cup of coffee and I had a strange feeling. As it got stronger I saw the whole house was rocking and rolling and it kept doing that for about 30 seconds. I heard a small crash, which turned out to be a pile of books destined to be a donation to the local library. Sally and Veronica (our household helper) were in different places in the house and when they could let go of what they were holding on to, they rushed into the living room. We decided it was clearly an earthquake, but was it La Soufrier, our volcano?

I rushed to the computer and eventually found it was a 7.4 earthquake 18km below the sea between Martinique and Domenica, where some noticeable damage was done on both islands. The attached picture is the cathedral on Dominica. The earthquake was the strongest recorded since the 1700s, but the shocks weren't sharp and sudden so it didn't do a lot of damage. But it was interesting--on the east coast of the US we don't get very many serious earthquakes and I had never felt anything like that.

Oh, and our volcano is still quiet.

Otherwise, we did our usual doctor visits this summer and we continue to be in reasonable health for the old f#rts we are.

So have a Merry Christmas and we'll all hope for another Good Year.

With love,

Sally & Karl Eklund

December 7th, 1941

2007-12-07T12:36:00.000-04:00

The day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor with the intent of making the United States unable to defend it's colonies in the Pacific. The U. S. then declared war on Japan, Germany declared war on the U.S. and pretty much everyone was involved in killing one another for a while thereafter. We seem to have had one war or another going on ever since. Actually that war was merely a continuation of World War I, so we can consider that there's been a war somewhere or another for the last century. I, for one, think it is about time we stopped.

Testing

2007-11-15T17:32:00.000-04:00

I'm testing because I updated OS 10.4.10 to OS 10.4.11 and it seems to have illed Safari. Let's see if this blog shows up.

Back On Line

2007-10-23T10:17:00.000-04:00

We are back on line. The username of our account at Cable & Wireless was changed and we weren't told. Finally a technician who knew something came back from vacation and fixed things. More later.

More Nine-Eleven

2007-09-13T10:11:00.000-04:00

NIST agrees.

At a press briefing in New York City on April 5, the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) presented its analysis of how the World Trade Center (WTC) towers collapsed after two
aircraft were flown into the buildings by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001. The study is the most detailed
examination of a building failure ever conducted.
“Like most building collapses, these events were the result of a combination of factors,” said Shyam
Sunder, lead investigator for the agency’s building and fire safety investigation into the WTC disaster.
“While the buildings were able to withstand the initial impact of the aircraft, the resulting fires that spread
through the towers weakened support columns and floors that had fireproofing dislodged by the impacts.
This eventually led to collapse as the perimeter columns were pulled inward by the sagging floors and
buckled.”
The probable collapse sequences update and finalize hypotheses released by NIST last October. The
sequences are supported by extensive computer modeling and the evidence held by NIST, including
photographs and videos, recovered steel, eyewitness accounts and emergency communication records.
Additionally, this information was used to document a variety of factors affecting the performance of the
buildings, the efforts of emergency responders and the ability of occupants to escape prior to the collapses.
In turn, NIST has identified a number of future practices and technologies that potentially could have
enhanced building performance and life safety capabilities on 9-11 had they been available for
implementation.

Nine-Eleven

2007-09-13T09:49:00.000-04:00

MSNBC replayed some tape from the morning of 9/11/01 and I watched it for a while. I was not impressed by the idea that the collapse was brought about by conspirators who had planted explosives; nor was I impressed by the notion that it was caused by collisions with the airplanes. My conclusion was that it was brought down by the fires. I suspect that if a floor of the WTC was engulfed by fire from any cause the building would have collapsed. The authorities might have wanted to cover up that vulnerability as much as anything else.

Why would buildings have been built that were so vulnerable to contact with the air traffic, considering how heavy that is in the New York Metropolitan Area? That's where Prof. Petroski's book comes in. There are lots of "other" forces that cause engineers to push designs to the edge of failure, and sometimes beyond that edge--aesthetics, greed, convenience of construction, etc. And sometimes that leads to lots of casualties--in this case over a million Iraqis have died and more millions displaced by the war that was justified by the 9/11 disaster.

But we won't learn from such a disaster if we don't look at it closely and honestly, and we are not in the kind of historical period that makes that possible.

Post-Industrial Engineering

2007-09-10T01:18:00.000-04:00

Henry Petroski's book To Engineer Is Human raised an interesting question. One of the significant constraints on design in our contemporary world is cost. If you make something stronger (i.e., less failure-prone) than it needs to be, somebody else will design a thing that is cheaper to make and undersell you. In fact I had used that idea myself in an essay, the purpose of which I have forgotten: I said that if he wanted a microwave cavity that wasn't lossy a physicist would hog it out of a gold ingot, if he had one, whereas an engineer worries about 10 minutes of a worker's time.

That makes sense in our society in which money is the primary mark of social status. The protestant-industrial revolution has been characterized by upward mobility of the lower middle class by the acquisition of money; as opposed to the prior system of establishing status by being or serving a warlord. But the industrial age is over. Upward mobility stopped around 1950 because the sign of social status was the waste ( or unnecessary use) of resources, and there aren't enough resources to allow the women and people of color who live outside the industrialized world to waste resources at the same rate as bureaucrats in the developed world do. In fact the developed world is being characterized by downward mobility of lower-level bureaucrats who are becoming, in Toynbee's sense, an "internal proletariat".

The internal proletariat shows itself in the need to limit immigration from the undeveloped world, i.e., from the "external proletariat". That external proletariat is beginning to express hostility toward Western Civilization: as direct guerilla warfare among Islamic peoples, and as anti-colonialism among the Bolivarians of Latin America. According to Toynbee's scenario, Western Civilization will turn itself into a military dictatorship and run itself into the ground. Until that final stage we will experience constant guerilla war, since the guerillas do not have the infrastructure to "win" and Western Civilization is only trained to waste resources rather than use them to "win" and is too decadent to do anything creative.

The question is not how we save Western Civilization. It has served its purpose and needs to get out of the way with as little trauma as possible. The question is how we design the infrastructure of the post-industrial society.

One way has been described in http://utopia.karleklund.net. This was based on the statement by Norbert Weiner, that when computers and robots are fully developed no one would be allowed to work unless they could do something better than the robots and computers. That suggested to me a society with an elite "Working class" of people doing creative activities and a larger "Liesure class" of people who merely needed to keep themselves amused.

All people would have an equal right to be themselves and food, shelter and health services would be there for the taking, produced and distributed by robots and computers and other, less sophisticated, machines. Each person would have, as a matter of right, his or her proportion of the annual global production.

The Working class would consist of "Journeymen" who were able to work with little or no supervision and "Masters" who were elected by their peers on the basis of a masterwork and who could take on apprentices. The apprentices would become journeymen when their masters decided they were ready.

The Liesure class would consist of groups of people whose customs showed mutual compliance in localities; and individualists who gathered in "Bohemias". Bohemias would be locations where the ordinary residents might not be creative but were capable of tolerating creative people. These areas might resemble the Latin Quarter or The Village or Haight-Ashbury.

I proposed that the primary universal constraint on behavior would be an abhorrence of waste, possibly because it was identified with the elite of the late industrial period. Whatever else anyone believed it would be considered extremely bad taste (or "nekulturni") to waste. There would be a universal, emotional adherence to the motto that used to be in military mess-halls: "Take what you need but eat what you take".

That would provide the tension in the creative act that cost does in our money-based society. It would eliminate the needless duplication of goods we now see in developed societies: if there were two products with the same function, quality and use of resources, the better would be chosen (by peer review) for production. Status among design workers would be determined by whose designs remained in use.

Failure

2007-09-09T14:37:00.001-04:00

When we are in the US most of our time is spent seeing doctors, or waiting to see doctors, or having operations in hospitals or clinics or nice stuff like that. To amuse ourselves without spending too much money we spend Saturday going to Yard Sales. We buy a lot of books and send them down to the Caribbean in barrels along with stuff that's hard to get down there, because a used paperback book costs about what a laborer gets for a day's work. If we don't want to keep them we donate them to the public library.

Once in a while we run across a real gem. Yesterday I found a copy of To Engineer Is Human by Henry Petroski. It is subtitled "the role of failure in successful design" and his view of the history of engineering considers not only that failure is inevitable but that the thoughtful analysis of failure is a stimulus to the evolution of engineering design.

I sat down and, pretty much, read it through. I have to say that I enjoyed it more than any book that I have read in recent years.

Part of that is nostalgia, of course, I not only had, and used at MIT, a K&E LogLog Decitrig slide rule like the one he uses as an example, but I had a book of log tables from the Bureau of Standards for pushing some calculations a couple of decimal places. When I worked at Yale I bought for our project an early Marchant electronic calculator that was as big as a Monroe mechanical calculator, cost $1500 and had the same power as the ones you can now get in a dollar store. Petrosky uses the sliderule as an example of the historical limitations of technology.

But new technology brings in new limitations. While in graduate school I did part time technical writing on the Wright YJ67 jet engine. Evidently their engineers wrote so badly that the company shipped the raw information to the small firm I worked for and we wrote their reports. In one case I ran across a diagram which showed the temperature distribution in the combustion chamber With the temperatures stated to 4 decimal places. It may be that their engineers believed it, but nobody who actually tried to measure temperature in a combustion chamber would take more than two decimal places seriously. It was probably the result of a computer simulation and computers don't get to take measurements.

I also did a failure analysis of a fuel control for that engine. We got the job because our overhead was lower than anybody else. I taught myself what it was about, hired a college student for the summer, and got a commendation from the Air Force. We got it to perform the mission by saying that the pilot had to push a test button every few minutes.

Nobody was happier than I was when the Air Force scrapped that engine.

I also taught a course on nuclear safety for prospective engineers for the nuclear freighter Savannah where one student was transferred from graduate school in maryland and a couple of the others had GED certificates and 25 years at sea. The chairman of the department asked me not to go too heavy on safety because one of my class was a shop steward and they didn't want him to know too much. I did go heavier than I might have if he hadn't said that, but I was happy when the NS Savannah was decommissioned.

I also learned something about brittle fracture. When I was cleaning up toxic waste sites I had a client who had leaded gas on the groundwater under his gas station. He hadn't had leaded gas in those tanks for twenty years but it was downgradient of a landfill where the National Guard had reportedly dumped drums of leaded gas.

The State forced him to exhume those gasoline tanks and the state inspector found a leak by pounding on a rust spot with a sledge on an extremely cold winter day. This was two weeks after the tank had passed a standard leak test. But the daily cover on the landfill was excavation material from the "Big Dig" and I was the only one who wanted to look into that carefully. After all, if they found the excavated material was contaminated it would have added to the "Big Dig" deficit.

The state later took away my license as a site cleanup engineer. The expert witnesses against me at the hearing couldn't cite anything I had done contrary to regulations. but, as the Board's lawyer said, I hadn't been charging my clients enough. Since the Board was mostly my business competitors that was a terrible crime.

As an example, there was an oil spill at a church I had belonged to. Another engineer had estimated $70,000 to explore for contamination. I provided my services pro bono and worked with volunteers from the congregation. We did the job for $600.

The State Board took away my license on the spot, so I retired. My lawyer charged me more than my income for that year and never really understood what was going on.

That sort of thing should explain why I enjoyed the book. I had been trained as a nuclear physicist but I had done a fair amount of engineering work, at least partly because my father was a tool & diemaker. When I worked for the engineering firm anything that didn't fit precisely within one or another specialty was given to me to try. Since I didn't have any preconceived ideas I could sometimes figure out a cheap way to accomplish the task.

Even my Ph.D. thesis was less interesting for the physics it contained than the design of the instrument I did it with. People all over the world were interested in that.

But I'm not in that business any more as you can see from http://index.karleklund.net

But if you run across one of Professor Petroski's books, grab it. Even a non-engineer will find it interesting.

God and Free Will

2007-08-29T00:06:00.000-04:00

It is desirable to believe in "Free Will" if you want to use science, because if we don't have free will there is no point to doing experimentation. Free will expands the history of the universe in a transverse direction: at any decision point we will have an assortment of responses that are consequent to a particular stimulus, and each of those will act as a stimulus to the environment, producing an assortment of behavioral events that act as stimuli for the next opportunity to show free will. We only observe one trajectory in behavior space because we cannot perceive any events that happen in the future, and we can only observe one sequence that came from the past to the present. We know, however, that there are a large number of possible paths leading from the present into the future, and a large number of paths that might have arrived at the present but started from pasts that we don't remember as "our" past.

There is no reason why God should have the same limits of perception as an ordinary human being. There is no reason why God couldn't perceive all the possible futures that spring from a particular decision point, and all the possible pasts that might have led up to it. There is also no reason why God shouldn't be able to perceive that kind of mega-trajectory associated with every decision point. We can call those bundles of trajectories "The Meta-History Of The Universe". All that requires is for God to be omniscient.

Is God omnipotent? God already perceives every behavioral event that has happened, will happen, might have happened in the past or might happen in the future. There is no point in God changing the outcome of any particular event because that event already exists somewhere on the Meta-History of the Universe as God perceives it. So an omniscient God has no need for omnipotence because what we might ask God to do with that omnipotence has already been done, in God's perception.

Conversely, if we create a God in our imaginations who can be bribed or pursuaded to make some change in the Meta-History of the Universe, that God has a limited perception and is just an idol with clay feet. The reason that we still have Gods like that around is that Gods were invented in the Neolithic, and many of us have not progressed in our imagination since then.

Religion

2007-08-28T06:43:00.000-04:00

It is necessary to have a religion because to "tell the truth" we would have to describe the history of the universe every time we said anything. What we do is talk in terms of abstractions, and the particular way we create our abstractions implies a set of beliefs and values that implicitly define a religion. The most effective kind of religion is produced by the method we call "science" which tries to be consistent with our objective experiences, consistent with itself, and not parochial. A particularly useful technique is mathematics, because it is self-consistent and not parochial in itself, so it is merely necessary to find a mathematical structure that is consistent with some collection of objective observations. It is even better if the mathematical description of a particular set of objective observations is consistent with the mathematical description of other sets of objective observations that describe similar phenomena.

It has always to be remembered that observations that can be defined by a label containing a finite amount of information (say a description couched in a finite number of words) is an abstraction, an incomplete designation for the observed phenomenon that is "good enough for practical purposes" but isn't the complete designator that God might use. Those kinds of observations can be gathered into sets that are "the same for all practical purposes" even if they are unique in terms of their placement in the history of the universe as seen by God. That kind of editing out of details that may not be equally shared by the membership of the set allows us to describe the actions of members of a set of things that are "the same" that ignore their individuality.

Natural Ecologists

2007-08-26T15:08:00.000-04:00

If you are an egalitarian ("All persons are equal"), and a non-wastrel ("meet your physical needs without waste"), then you will be likely to be a believer in natural ecology. The trick will be to use surplus organic material that is naturally produced in natural ecosystems as a raw material in automatic factories that produce foodstuffs. There is no reason to believe that that can't be done because there was a long period in our evolutionary lifetime where we lived by gathering. All we need to do is gather that surplus that the earth produces that is surplus to reproducing an equilibrium ecosystem, which can be done using robots, and converting that into tasty and healthful foodstuffs. We developed farming as a way to allow us to increase our population, but that had unintended byproducts like stratification, war, religion, and the like. It also caused us to grow things that were easy to produce in quantity, like grains, to the detriment of soils; and to produce things like animal flesh, that were costly to produce and thus suitable for status symbols. If we don't have profit or stratification as a motive we can invent ways of creating food from the surplus of whatever grows.

GBS

2007-08-26T15:01:00.000-04:00

I started rereading a biography of Bernard Shaw. Interesting that the socialists of the1880s were much like the progressives of today. They lectured everyone else, including each other, but they didn't seem to look beyond whatever the immediate crisis is. And the last thing they would think of doing is to try to figure out why "now" happened the way it did, so they could see what was going to happen if nobody listened to them.

I find that slightly disappointing because it would be interesting to talk to someone who had put in some time thinking about the future. Especially a future that wasn't just the present in funny hats.

Wastrels

2007-08-24T08:25:00.000-04:00

One of the first by-products of an egalitarian infrastructure is the policy that one should not waste resources that are not surplus, "surplus" meaning that all the needs for survival are met. There is no particular reason not to use perishable resources for non-survival purposes so long as everyone has enough to survive and there are no unmet survival needs that could be produced as an alternative to those perishable resources.

"Waste" would be defined as a purpose (or lack of purpose) that causes the resource to be expended in a way that creates an unmet physical need somewhere on the globe. For example, creation of a dress uniform for an official or a "fashion" for a civilian when there is a person anywhere on the globe who is insufficiently clothed. Or taking food and not consuming it when there is a person anywhere on the globe who is insufficiently fed.

I say "physical" need, because there are symbolic wasteful actions that may satisfy neurotic "needs" in some individuals. The need to be in a superior stratum in a stratified infrastructure and demonstrate that by the use of resources for symbolic purposes is such a neurotic need. The fact that it is common in some varieties of social infrastructure does not make it less psychopathological.

In the past, and to a certain degree at present, a certain amount of waste was inevitable; but with modern methods of information transfer, perishable storage, and transportation, much less waste is inevitable. That being so, we have to decide whether is it proper for some people to waste by using resources for symbolic purposes while others have insufficient resources to survive, or at least insufficient resources to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Of course if one believes in inequality, then any amount of unequal distribution of resources is acceptable and may even be desirable. If one agrees that "All persons are equal" then an unequal distribution, for whatever reason, is unacceptable.

So "All persons are equal" and "Do not waste" are of equal importance as slogans.

If all persona are equal, there does not seem to be any reason for awarding some people with resources while denying them to others. Sufficient materials in a form suitable for direct personal consumption by everyone can be produced by automatic machinery so there is no reason to make consumption conditional on any particular activity such as "work". In fact, it is undesirable to have anyone "work" unless they can do something better than a robot or computer, because that would be inefficient, i.e., wasteful and nekulturni. Those who can do something better than a robot (e.g., be creative) will compete for the chance to do it for personal satisfaction.

This gets back to my Utopia, so I'll have to look at this carefully to see that I'm not just copying myself.

Progressives

2007-08-24T08:16:00.000-04:00

I've been surfing around the political blogosphere to considerable disappointment. There doesn't seem to be anybody with a long-term view. Maybe I should reinvent the fabians? But the idea that we (of the left) can agree on equality as a goal is something that I should think about--not on whether or not it is desireable, because that's just a matter of having our infrastructure match our need for species survival--but on how well the various kinds of leftists actually have that as a goal.

Sally

2007-08-22T09:18:00.000-04:00

Evidently her indisposition was more showy than serious. She's back out of the hospital and has taken her radioiodine thyroid scan. I suspect it was the combination of a rough colonoscopy and a strong laxative that resulted in bleeding in the colon. Cat scan said nothing serious but they didn't feed her for a week while she was off her thyroid medicine and that made her very weak. She hasn't gotten over that yet.

Democrats

2007-08-21T23:39:00.000-04:00

There was an "On Point" show on public radio the other day about the future of the Democratic Party. I had already noticed that it was a Farmer-Labor Party when I was a kid, pretty much through the depression and World War 2. But the flow of social evolution stopped around 1950 so that the bureaucratic establishment (corporate, government and academic) closed the door to upward mobility for women and people of color. Now they are closing it off for the lower levels of the bureaucracy because the status marker for the upper levels is the ability to waste resources, and there aren't enough resources to do that any more. The establishment are building walls around their ghettos (Israel and the US in particular) to keep out the "outside proletariat" (in Toynbee's sense) and the alienated "internal proletariat" are getting a sense that they have been left hanging out to dry.

The Republicans and "Centrist" Democrats are just trying to maintain their status under stress, scrabbling for those remaining resources they can waste. The "Liberal" Democrats are trying to adapt "New Deal" policies that are out-of-date to meet current problems. The "Progressive" Democrats sense that something is wrong, but they can't find anything to believe in among the available slogans that fits the current situation.

What the Progressives have to do is jump over the slogans that just serve to reelect politicians. Those slogans are too closely tied to the status quo. They need to believe in something that may sound impossible but feels comfortable. Like "All persons are equal".

In the current situation that isn't true anywhere. All the little political subdivisions have some quality that they use to divide society into strata. Some places it is appearance, or religious sect. In Western Civilization those exist but the primary division is the appearance of wealth.

If the Progressive Democrats take "All persons are equal" as their guiding principle the fact that we don't actually live that way isn't important. The important thing is that all progressives can agree on the goal even if they may differ on the method of achieving that goal.

My contribution is that "Wholly holistic evolution, Mr. Darwin" [http://we.karleklund.net] and "What Now?" [http://whatnow.karleklund.net] argue that the direction of human social evolution is precisely toward a future in which "All persons are equal". There is even a novel, "Utopia" [http://utopia.karleklund.net] in which that is officially (and almost actually) true. None of those books or essays plump for a particular method, so any progressive can create a hypothetical history that allows us to reach an egalitarian Utopia, and that can be different from the hypothetical history of any other progressive; and all progressives can feel a sense of unity because whatever the disagreements on method we all share the same goal: "All persons are equal"

I'll write some more about this from time to time, but this blog, and the books and essays mentioned, are enough to satisfy the needs of Progressives of all political creeds. Anyone who doesn't believe that "All persons are equal" except as the unfortunate description of a stratified society, simply isn't progressive. Anyone who does believe that "All persons are equal" will be willing to hear out, with respect, the argument of any other progressive. Eventually we will figure out just what kind of a global infrastructure will work; because we have the test that any infrastructure that maintains a stratified society is not progressive.

Send any comments to progressive [at] karleklund.net.

What's Up

2007-08-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

Sally's in the hospital right now, which makes things complicated, but we still intend to go back in October.

Still Alive

2007-06-27T23:16:00.000-04:00

I've been involved in other things for a while, but I haven't forgotten blogging. Don't give up on me.

Arrived

2007-05-11T01:53:00.000-04:00

Arrived safely. Got computer fixed "while "U" wait" at Apple Store, but I'll need to fix up a lot of stuff to get back to normal operation.

Recess

2007-05-08T17:56:00.000-04:00

We'll be up in the states for a couple of months or so, so this probably won't include too much news. Not that it ever does.

Photo by Chris Snow

2007-04-15T14:58:00.000-04:00

A photograph by Chris Snow, Sally's son, of Sally & Karl in front of one of Sally's quilts; taken during a visit in 2006. For more photos like this go to "CTSnow" on Flickr.

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/ctsnow/)

Merry Christmas

2006-12-22T07:01:00.000-04:00

At 5:30 AM, Friday the 22nd of December, 2006, I was sitting on our back balcony, sipping the coffee I had just made and listening to the cat crunch dry kibbles; while in the background a marimba or very mellow pan (steel drum) was playing from Caliaqua in the valley below. It is Christmas time, specifically Nine Mornings, the period before Christmas when there is entertainment from 4AM to 7AM. This tradition has been revived in recent years and gotten so popular that it has spread from Kingstown to other towns farther into the country. It was originally intended to be before working hours for slaves and indentured workers.

I am feeling contented, not only because I can sit on my back balcony wearing no more than shorts, but because I have no more obligations for a couple of days. We'll have people over on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so Sally will have to cook and I'll prepare vegetables and wash dishes, but that doesn't involve other people. Yesterday I was lucky: I only stood on line one and a half hours to get my car registration (I have spent as much as four!). And I satisfied myself that we are going to evolve into a Utopia.

Those of you who have been following my thoughts on evolution are aware that Spencer's version, "survival of the fittest", is simply wrong and that Darwin's original version, "non-survival of the unfit", is the version that explains things like the evolution of species, the plethora of variation in the Burgess Shale, and, in general, the evolution of complex entities and organs. The difference is that in Spencer's view any slight change has to justify itself by creating "the fittest", while in Darwin's view a change merely has to avoid being so harmful that it causes premature non-survival. Darwin's rule gives a lot more scope for variation that can develop into a complex organ.

I pushed this a little farther than I had before, when I noticed that for a species with "culture" (a collection of behaviors that are traditional among the breeding group) Darwin's rule favors global egalitarianism, ecological responsibility, altruism, cooperation and creativity. That was what I had been looking for in the first place (i.e., the 1970s) by trying to explain the crazy behavior we were doing. I put that argument on the start page of the book at [http://we.karleklund.net] and it means the rest of that long, complicated and difficult book merely has to explain why we are acting crazy. If we don't get in its way Evolution will lead us to a sane condition.

That is, obviously, a much easier task since the main point is on one page and the rest is, in effect, a footnote; and relieves me of the urgency I felt in getting someone to understand my argument. Now they just have to understand one page, and if they can't understand that they simply don't want to.

And, to all of you who have read this, a Merry Christmas and a Happy new year. Now I'm going to load my iPod up with Christmas music and wallow in it. Sally sends her greetings, too.

Karl Eklund
Villa, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

New Blog Entries

2006-11-27T09:27:00.000-04:00

I've added some new entries to The Social Evolution Blog (http://socevol.blogspot.com) or (http://socevol.karleklund.net) and the Tomorrow's God Blog (http://god21.blogspot.com)or (http://godblog.karleklund.net), some relating to a recent Science/Religion conference. There are also some new entries in the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Blog (http://svgblog.blogspot.com/) or (http://svgb.karleklund.net), mostly keyed to photographs in Flickr (http://pix.karleklund.net). As I said, I will be working on the SVG Book and the Evolution Book, but those are big jobs that need committment and I may not start them till after Christmas.

Back Again

2006-10-29T09:51:00.000-04:00

We are again resident at our house in Villa, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. I expect to be working on the SVG book [http://svg.karleklund.net] and the evolution book [http://we.karleklund.net]. Progress notes may well appear at the other blogs, which can be accessed from [http://index.karleklund.net]

If anything raises a question, feel free to write to:
karl@karleklund.net

Up North

2006-05-31T23:40:00.000-04:00

We are, as we usually are this time of year, in Massachusetts. There is usually a lot of work involved with getting our lives adjusted to the climate and social environment, including seeing doctors who are helping us cope with the inevitability of aging, so there isn't as much time for blogging. And I just got a new computer that I have to learn to use. So don't be surprised if nothing seems to be happening.

Just enjoy (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) the increased warmth.

A Glass Half Full

2006-04-02T21:40:00.000-04:00

A Glass Half Full
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

Felix Dennis a rich publisher who has a house on Mustique gave a reading at Government House. I kept reading the books I got by giving a contribution to the GGs charity, and took another look at Robert Graves. This resulted in:

Twenty-First Century

Fusilier Captain Graves escaped his namesake
Felix Dennis did so in his time
But was it death that made them take
to such unfashionable rhyme?

Shaw's first avoidance of fatality
Was private, not the public show
He made his life. Sam Spade's morality
needed the prod of death to let us know.

Gautama Buddha let himself get hungry.
Jesus of Nazareth let himself get hung.
Mozart felt death was like a buddy.
Steve Jobs said death made iPods sing.

So aren't we lucky to be jointly facing terror
from the millions that we've taught to hate
us; so that we can see, as in a shining mirror,
our naked souls before it is too late?

Karl Eklund

"Escape" from Robert Graves: Fairies and Fusiliers, 1918. "Life Support" from Felix Dennis: A Glass Half Full, 2002. Shaw's biographers suspect he had a bout of smallpox before coming to London. Dashiell Hammett started writing when he expected to die from tuberculosis. Mozart wrote that in a letter to his father. Steve Jobs implied that in a commencement address at Stanford University.

The prose version is at: http://we.karleklund.net

"Wholly holistic evolution, Mr. Darwin"

2006-03-31T00:02:00.000-04:00

Uploaded to http://we.karleklund.net

Folding Map

2006-02-28T15:10:00.000-04:00

27-015
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

This is a topographic map of St Vincent that folds up into a 6x9in untit like a roadmap. It used to be available in the bookstotes but no longer is. You can, however, get a copy at the planning office on Murray Rd. It was last revised in 1984, but the major roads haven't changed direction since then.

The planning office has a larger scale map but it comes rolled up and isn't as convenient in a car.

There are some free small maps available as tourist promotions but you'll find the one in "Ins & Outs" as good as most.

Sermon 12 /23 /05

2005-12-23T21:26:00.000-04:00

I wrote the stuff below and what it refers to a while back and I've changed my mind since then My current ideas are on
http://we.karleklund.net
and I've found a religion that will serve the transition period better than anything I could invent, Universism. You can find out about it by Googling "Universism" [note: NOT "Universalism"--that's something else entirely}

(correction dated 04 /07 /06)

.........................................

Sermon 12 /23 /05

The Book of the Church of Evolving Freedom is up on the web
(at http://free.karleklund.net ) and I don't intend to make any changes in it for a while. Doesn't mean it is perfect, far from it. But the changes and additions that need to be made are primarily mechanical, links from the summary pages to the body of the "Einstein's God" part. I'm not up to that right now. For one thing it has been so long since I read "Einstein's God" that I've forgotten a lot of what is in it. Stuff that seemed inspired when I wrote it seems less important now, or I've lost interest in that particular thread. But that's OK: it is there for people to find if they are interested. They haven't been interested these last 35 years, but things are tougher now and more people are alienated and dissatisfied. They won't get cured of that by thinking about my ideas, but at least they'll see, when they get around to it, that the world we are in isn't the only possible world. That will give them a focus for their alienation.

I'm going to write short pieces like this (that I'll call "Sermons") and put them up on one of the blogs. What blogs?

Tomorrow's God http://godblog.karleklund.net

Social Evolution http://socevol.karleklund.net

Karlek's Blog http://blog.karleklund.net

Karlek's Blog will be mostly about personal things, but you never know when something will occur to me. Tomorrow's God will mostly be about the religion of the Church of Evolving Freedom, and the Social Evolution blog will be mostly about the scientific aspects, but they are pretty intimately involved so a sermon might pop up anywhere.

I'll post this on all three.

There is another blog, about Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, but there shouldn't be too much interaction. That is at:

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Blog http://svgb.karleklund.net

Main SVG site http://svg.karleklund.net

If I don't write any more before then, Merry Christmas

Religion Book

2005-12-21T15:08:00.000-04:00

A final (at least for a while) version can be found here.

....................

That's true, but not what I meant by it originally.

I wrote the stuff above and what it refers to a while back and I've changed my mind since then My current ideas are on
http://we.karleklund.net
and I've found a religion that will serve the transition period better than anything I could invent, Universism. You can find out about it by Googling "Universism" [note: NOT "Universalism"--that's something else entirely}

S&K12 14 05

2005-12-14T10:39:00.000-04:00

S&K12 14 05
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

This is Sally and me in our front orchid garden on December 14, 2005; a warm, sunny day in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. We hope you will have (have had) a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We intend to.

Free Will Church

2005-11-26T20:18:00.000-04:00

I wrote the stuff below and what it refers to a while back and I've changed my mind since then My current ideas are on
http://we.karleklund.net
and I've found a religion that will serve the transition period better than anything I could invent, Universism. You can find out about it by Googling "Universism" [note: NOT "Universalism"--that's something else entirely}

.....................

I've decided that it will be useful to start a church, because churches are the kind of organization that can live through a decline and fall of one civilization, survive the interregnum, and remain functional in the successor civilization. That way I don't need to worry about the detail of the decline and the Dark Age in between. Except for practical matters, of course.

The manifesto is on http://church.karleklund.net

Comments on the church will be found on the "Tomorrow's God" blog http://god21.blogspot.com

Comments

2005-11-11T21:32:00.000-04:00

I've eliminated the comments because they were being used for spam. If you have any comments write to:

blog(AT)karleklund.net

St Vincent 1795 (Compiled)

2005-10-15T15:24:00.000-04:00

I put the St Vincent section of the Moreau de Jonnes memoir together and located it at:

http://1795.karleklund.net

Hope you enjoy it.

Karl

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

2005-10-15T15:20:00.000-04:00

We are going back down tomorrow. I'll write again if we get there safely and I get hooked up to the web in a timely fashion.

Best, Karl

Pig Story, with Goat Addendum

2005-10-03T15:26:00.000-04:00

I want to pass on a story, call it a folktale, about a pig.

If seems that the New Homesteader (i.e., a tree-hugging amateur farmer) had gotten this little piggy, and now she was a sow so something had to be done. After all, the purpose of sows is to make more little piggys, isn't it? So he called the Old Farmer he bought her from.

(They always do. It is in the unwritten part of the contract.....)

Old Farmer explained that people may do it any time, but farm animals do it when their bodies are ready, and that's called "coming in to season", and that it doesn't take if the time isn't right, and other swinley facts.

The New Homesteader absorbed all the advice and one morning, when she reemcd to be acting a little hyper. he called the Old Farmer. The Old Farmer says to bring her to the boar.

The New Homesteader put her in his wheelbarrow and trundled her down the road.

She took one look at the boar and ran away screaming "I'm not that kind of girl!" (In pig, of course, but the body-language made the translation easy.) Nothing left but to put her in the wheelbarrow and trundle her back home again.

Next morning there was squealing from the pigsty, and she waa making little dashes back and forth, so there was another call and back in the wheelbarrow again. This time she let the boar do a little sniffing. but every time he'd try to mount she'd skitter out from under. The New Homesteader worried if she didn't have some kind of sexual maladjustment.

"Naw" says the Old Farmer, chewing on a straw for emphasis, "You can think she's in season, and I can think she's in season. but that don't mean a damn to her. She'll know when she is, and when she is she'll stand for the boar. Don't worry about it."

But that's eary to say and hard to do. The new Homesteader worried as he trundled her home in the barrow. and he worried during the day. and he warricd when he went out to the sty at dusk to tale a last look. She was his only sow, after all.

And he worried first thing he got up in the morning, so as soon as he was dressed he went out to the pig-sty.

As he walked in the dawn chill he heard the birds twittering in the trees.

He stopped.

Twittering? Bird noises?

Where were the pig-noises? He broke into a run.

"G-D, Almighty" he ejaculated.

The pen was empty! What happened? Where could she be?

Pig-nappers? He dashed back and rousted out the family and they searched everywhere.

Back and forth and in and out and around the barn and no sow.

Then one of the kids yelled from the front yard.

There was the sow, calmly sitting in the wheelbarrow.

That was the story as I heard it, more or less. I thought it was cute and that l'd have to use it one day when 1 didn't have anything real to write about.

Then there was this fellow from Seekonk way who wantcd his doe bred to one of our bucks.

He brought her over and she looked to be in season, but when the buck sniffed her she like to leaped out of the window. I said I thought she might have been coming out of reason. and that we'd have to try her again in 18 days or so.

I walked him out to his car and was surprised when he put the goat in his trunk! Well, we have a van that they can stand around in and sometimes just traveling in that will put them off season (gives them a headache, maybe) so I wasn't encouraged by the goat being locked up in the trunk.

But I could understand that since he was alone he didn't want her jumping in his lap while he was driving. I told Sally and then forgot about it.

Little less than three weeks later we got a call and over they came again. She wouldn't stand. She was a little calmer, though, so I figured she was just coming in to season, so I asked if he could bring her back the next day. and it was Sunday, so he could.

Sunday morning he brought her into the barn, and I let the buck loose and she stood and was bred - all in lest than a minute.

We let them fool around for a little until they bred again.

When Peter started sniffing for the third time it was clear she had lost interest So I put Peter back in his stall.

I walked them back to his car. As we got there he said "Funny. Every other time I've come over I've had to drag her to the car and stuff her in the trunk. This morning the jumped in by herself."

Thus does life imitate art.

St. Vincent 1795

2005-08-18T21:54:00.000-04:00

I have known for several years that there was some writing about the Caribs on St. Vincent in 1795 in the memoire that Alexandre Moreau De Jonnes wrote in 1858 but the translation I got had nothing in it. Recently I got a 1920 translation by General Arby that does. I've put those 5 chapters on my St. Vincent blog at
http://svgb.karleklund.net

It is a very exciting story. Almost too exciting to believe, but it makes sense and De Jonnes turned into a very respected scientist in his mature age. At worst it is like George Washington at Valley Forge--if it has been touched up for the sake of making it more interesting it is no worse than any other history. I think every Vincentian kid, especially young Vincentian girls, should read it; which is why I spent a fair amount of money to buy the book and why I put it on the internet.

Read it and see if you don't want to spread the word.

Myricks

2005-08-16T23:00:00.000-04:00

1Myricks05
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

This is just to remind you that we are still in Massachusetts, the Myricks section of Berkley to be precise. You can look here if you want to see some old pictures.

We will be going back to Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in mid-October and staying there until mid-May.

The picture is the interior of our post-and-beam barn, circa early 1700s. The house is also post-and-beam from about the same period with a baloon frame addition on the back.

There are a couple of little stores and a gas station a mile down the road. The nearest supermarket is about 6 miles away. Myricks is an isolated corner of a small town, which is about as rural as you can get in Massachusetts.

Chicken Little

2005-08-16T09:39:00.000-04:00

A few years ago I wrote a year's worth of columns for a local newspaper. You can read some of them at rfd.karleklund.net. Here's one.

. . . .
I don't know why, but 1 get a lot of pleasure watching chickens wandering around scratching the dirt. Some of it must have been useful, I suppose: if they hadn't we'd probably have had more bugs than we did. But they won't touch potato bugs and they aren't that fond of squash bugs either. and one summer the chickens got to all of the early tomatoes before 1 did. So it must be at least partly aesthetic.

Ours were pretty, even if they were a mongrel crew. Our roosters are part Aracana, so aside from the dozen we got as chicks from the 4H exhibit at the county fair, and the banties we were given by someone who didn't like their habit of roosting in trees, the new generation shows traits of various breeds.

It may give them hybrid vigor, it certainly makes them more individual. But even I wouldn't call them bright, and they were certainly excitable. If you walk where they are they'll try to sidle away, but if they find themselves in a blind alley they'll give one hell of a ''scrawrk" and fling themselves into space as best they can. Which isn't all that graceful.

But one such incident did remind me of an old folktale that l'd like to share with you.
. . . .

A sparrow, seeing a motion in the sky that she took for a hawk, dropped the piece of bread she was carrying home to her babies. It fell to earth and dropped right on the head of Chicken Little: who was engaged in grubbing out lunch.

"Ouch" said Chicken Little, "something hit me on the head." She made a few more scratches.

"But there isn't anyone around." she continued to herself. "and l'm not under an oak tree. I remember that grandfather said that an acorn fell on his head, once, and he got all excited and ran to tell the King that the sky was falling. Boy! Did it ever take him a long time to live that one down!"

Her scratches grew absent-minded—gestures of habit, like when you pull at your beard when you are thinking. She continued her ruminatory soliloquy.

"But there are no oak trees around now. And nothing else, either!"

The sparrow had long since vanished. "This time the sky MUST be falling!"

She started running, crying: "The sky is falling. the sky is falling!"

She bumped into Gander-Lander. ''Gander-Lander. Gander-Lander, the sky is falling"

"Oh, my goodness." said Gander-Lander, "Oh, my goodness." He started to run around in a small circle saying "Oh, my goodness" over and over.

Chicken Little was taken aback. She appreciated that Gander-Lander was concerned, but this didn't seem to be solving the problem. She might be running and crying out, but she had a direction. So she left Gander-Lander to his circles and ran to Piggy-Wiggy.

"Piggy-Wiggy, Piggy-Wiggy, the sky is falling."

"Wurgm" said Piggy-Wiggy, opening one eye halfway.

"Don't you understand?" asked Chicken Little, anxiously.

Piggy-Wiggy opened both his eyes and put his snout in the trough. With his mouth impolitely full of swill he said. "I'm all right Jack, grunt you!" and turned his back.

Chicken Little was understandably both offended and disgusted. And getting a little desperate. She ran to the barn. "Horsey-Lorsey, Horsey-Lorsey" she screamed. "The sky is falling!"

"That is certainly a matter for serious concern." said Horsey-Lorsey, buttoning the vest of his threepiece harness. "And if I had the time 1 would certainly apply my extensive experience to helping you create an appropriate, sensitive but hard-hitting public awareness campaign. But right now I have an important business appointment in the South Forty and that will keep me very busy for a few days. Why don't we do lunch next week and run it up the flagpole and see who salutes." He turned back to the mirror and adjusted his collar.

Well, that kind of calm acceptance dampened Chicken Little's excitement a little, but she figured that she might as well make the date for lunch anyway. After all, Horsey-Lorsey was a solid citizen, wasn't he?.

But she still felt, as she watched Horsey-Lorsey amble off fo the fields, that it wasn't enough. Something should be done now. And then she thought of the police. Didn't they handle emergencies? So the ran to the police station.

She ran through the door shouting:"Fuzzy-Wuzzy, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, the sky is falling!"

"What was that you said?" Growled the burly desk sergeant, hall rising from his chair. (He hated hippies.)

"Oh. Sorry, officer. I would like to report that the sky is falling."

"Your name?"

"Chicken Little."

"Address?"

"What difference does that make?" said Chicken Little frustratedly.

"Just give me your address."

"Oh, all right. The Chicken Coop @ MacDonald's Farm."

"1 see. And you want to report that the sky is falling?"

"Yes, yes. What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm afraid that that is out of our jurisdiction. Have you seen the Board of Health?" And without waiting for an answer the nice policeman turned and began typing up a report of the incident.

Chicken Little went over to the Town Hall, mumbling to herself, but when she got there she found from the Clerk that the Board of Health only met on the third Thursday of every month, and today was the fourth Monday. It might not be possible to get a sky question on the warrant, it being the season for perk tests, but they'd try. Had she tried the Conservation Commission?

But Chicken Little had had enough. Chicken Little trudged back to the Coop, too exhausted even to mumble. It had been a trying day. She considered going to see the King, but what she had seen of the Governor on TV hadn't impressed her. [The name of the Governor of Massachusetts at the time was "King".] It would be the Town Clerk all over again. If that.

"Oh. well." she said to herself. "maybe I was just being a silly chicken anyway. Like Grandfather."

But that hadn't been a hawk that the sparrow had seen-it was a piece of the sky falling. The next day the rest of it fell and squashed everyone flat.

MORAL: listen to the message and not the messenger.

Porter

2005-08-16T09:29:00.000-04:00

Porter
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

When I was a kid and read about the Arabian Nights, I wondered about these people they called "porters". I knew about the porters who moved bags at train stations, but they had no trains.

In Kingstown (in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines) you don't move packages in Taxis, like you do in New York, because there are still a lot of places where it is easier to walk. If you have a lot of packages, you use a porter like this fellow.

What I'm Up To When I'm Not Here

2005-08-14T11:01:00.000-04:00

I have been working on the site at svg.karleklund.net by editing out a bunch of the pictures so it was small enough to put it on a site without ads. These pictures, and a bunch that were waiting to go somewhere, have been uploaded to pix.karleklund.net. I have been putting lables and tags on those and I'm starting to weed out the duplicates. The pictures that are still in the SVG book are being uploaded to the new server, slowly.

I have some texts that will eventually go, in full or as extracts, to the SVG Book. They are being sorted out and, if appropriate, published on the SVG Blog.

Between them that's going to take up a bit of time.

The only time I think of stuff like evolution or God or behavior is when somebody else writes something and I send them an email. Some of those will get stuck up here or on the Socevol Blog.

And then there is ordinary life, too.

Chatoyer, National Hero of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

2005-07-28T14:18:00.000-04:00

1BRUN19
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

For a very interesting analysis of Brunias and his history, read Chatoyer's Artist: Agostino Brunias and the depiction of St Vincent:
Lennox Honychurch [http://www.uwichill.edu.bb/bnccde/svg/conference/papers/honychurch.html]

You can get back to a number of copies of Brunias paintings, and the engravings made from the paintings, by clicking on the picture. There is an engraving after Brunias in the public library in Kingstown.

My Blogs

2005-07-21T07:10:00.000-04:00

I've set up more than one blog so I can put down thoughts on a number of topics. The one you are reading will be a good place to start because it will be a miscellany, and will nudge you if anything important is on one of the other blogs.

The SVG Blog will contain material that is specific to Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and material (other than pictures) that is intended to go into the SVG Book.

The Social Evolution Blog will contain material that is relevant to my theory of the evolution of human social behavior, especially material intended to go into the book Einstein's God and the Science of Zen.

Diaryland will contain material that may be of interest to those who know us personally if it is interest at all.

I hope this makes sense and that you enjoy any blog you visit.

Karl

Zuni Story

2005-07-20T10:38:00.000-04:00

Tony Hillerman, who writes mysteries based on cops in the Navaho tribal police, ends The Wailing Wind with a story from the Zuni--

Two young hunters were out and they saved a dragonfly stuck in mud. As is usual in these stories it offered them wishes. The first hunter said: I want to be the smartest man in the world. So be it, said the dragonfly, turning to the second hunter. I want to be smarter than the smartest man in the world, he said. So the dragonfly turned him into a woman.

That resolves the last problem in the novel.

Bronx Map

2005-07-19T23:37:00.000-04:00

Bronx Map
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

This is a map of a section in the northern part of The Bronx where Robert Klein, the comedian, grew up. It was printed in the New York Times this morning (07 /19 /05) in conjnction with an article about Klein's boyhood. What the Times didn't know is that I grew up just off the upper right corner of the map. We might well have gone to the same High School since it was walking distance from both our homes.

Cleaning Up Sites

2005-07-19T20:51:00.000-04:00

I put a copy of the index on the Ad-free ,mac site, and put links on all the sites that I could access that formerly had indecies on them. This is what the link says:

.
Message to the Reader: All Karl Eklund's sites are reachable through:

http://index.karleklund.net

I Forgot

2005-07-18T23:45:00.000-04:00

I noted that I relocated the index, but it didn'y occur to me that you might have forgotten its address. It is at:
http://index.karleklund.net

Sorry about that

New Site Index

2005-07-17T06:21:00.000-04:00

Actually the site index isn't exactly "new", but it is rewritten and some of the sites are in different places and it is in a different place. In particular it is on Apple's website, mac-dot-com, and it is in the "public" folder along with some other files that I wanted you to be able to read without ads. Some of the sites, that I don't intend to do much with, are still on servers that run a lot of ads.

I have been involved with that kind of housekeeping lately so I havent kept up with the blogging. I'll try to do better but sometimes it takes a while for ideas to solidify enough to articulate. That's the problem with a lot of blogs--it is so important for the bloggers to get their ideas up in words on the net that they just gush. That's OK too, but it doesn't offer much to chew on.

SVG Museum Exhibits

2005-06-14T18:15:00.000-04:00

I found some prints ca. 1995 of exhibits in the museum that was formerly located in the Botanical Garden just outside Kingstown, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. I wanted to put them on the internet because the artifacts aren't on display right now. If you go to the web page at http://pictags.karleklund.net and click on the tag "kirby" you'll see these pictuures. They and the artifacts on display at Fort Charlotte can be seen by clicking on the tag "museum".

The other tags will allow you to sort out from the 1200 or so images filed there the ones tagged with that word. The images have been uploaded from various collections on my computer files, so there are duplicates. I'll get to them and edit them out one of these days.

Karl

VillaBeach

2005-06-05T20:52:00.000-04:00

VillaBeach
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

I have been uploading pictures from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines onto Flickr (you can get there by clicking on this picture) and I'm now going to scan in some selected prints from 1995 to 1998 when I started to put hings on CD. What I intend to do is to use a minimum of pictures in the SVG book, and use a lot of references to http://pictags,karleklund.netwith specific tags to search on.

That will keep the SVG book to a reasonable size and still have a variety of pictures available.

Until I get everything worked out there will be some duplicates on Flickr, but that has a lot of capacity. There's over a thousand pictures of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on Flickr already.

Incidentally, this is a recent picture of Villa Beach You can see it is still not crowded except on weekend afternoons. The sand does move around, however, so the best place to go in is down near the gate to Sunset Shores.

Rainbow over Caliaqua

2005-06-02T23:54:00.000-04:00

06HSE01
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

I've uploaded a lot of photographs of St. Vincent onto the Flickr website that this picture comes from. I think you can see them by clicking on this picture and following the menu but, if not, go to
http://pix.karleklund.net

The pictures will provide a source for the revised St. Vincent book. The current version is at
http://svg.karleklund.net

Feel free to browse around. There are a lot of pictures, so use the "tags" to sort by subject

Snake

2005-05-27T11:40:00.000-04:00

Snake
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

(continued from Snakes and hoses)

One of the snakes (I can't tell gender) said to me "What do you mean by distrbing us in such a private moment?" Now actually it was an experiment to see if I would experience what Tiresias did, but instead I said "What do you mean by having sex in my back yard?". The snake pointed with its tail at the hoses and asked "Who was it who put up the erotic statuary?"

It had a point, I guess. In any case the other snake had vanished so we went our seperate ways.

Snakes and hoses

2005-05-27T11:34:00.000-04:00

Snakes and hoses
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

I went out to help water the orchids one day and there were two snakes having sex at the faucet. I ran back in and got the camera but they had been disturbed.

(continued)

Up North

2005-05-24T17:50:00.000-04:00

On May 18th we flew from St. Vincent to St. Lucia (a stone's throw away) with little hope of catching the next American Eagle plane to San Juan. We would not quite have made it if we had run through a transit lounge while someone moved our bags at the speed of light. But there was no transit lounge, and we had to recover our bags and take them through immigration and customs then outside the terminal to the American Eagle counter. There we were told that the plane had broken down in Canouan (a posh resort in the Grenadines) and we would go on that flight anyway. Later we were told that it wasn't going to be fixed before the afternoon flight, so we were booked on that flight and they bought us luch. Then we were told that the plane was fixed, and then not. By the time we actually left, we were on the afternoon flight that our agent had booked us on the previous October, but we had been shifted between planes 4 times and the other plane left about the same time we did. Everything else was fine and they boght us lunch, but there was something very Caribbean about it.

In any case we are back in Massachusetts (where it is cold and wet) have seen our grandkids and some of the Doctors and shopped in most of the stores like Building 19 and Ocean State for hyperbargains and we can settle down for a while. I'll try to catch up on the blogging.

Love to all, even American Eagle and Caribbean Star.

"City of Arches" by Vivian Child

2005-05-24T17:24:00.000-04:00

VvCh003
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

There are now a group of photographs on the net that I took in 2003 at the launching of Vivian Child's architectural memoire of Kingstown, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. It was held at the former Carnagie Library, now occupied by the Aliance Francais. You can click on the picture, or go to
http://pix. karleklund.net
and click on the tag "Vivian"

Vivian Child

2005-05-16T13:46:00.000-04:00

VivEb009
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

Dr. Vivian Child, a long-time resident of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, at the celebration of the publication of her book of african paintings. For more pictures go to the site at:
http://pix.karleklund.net and put "Vivian" in the "search" box.

That procedure will also bring up pictures of Ebika Kagbala's african fashions.

Oasis Hotel

2005-05-16T13:37:00.000-04:00

Oasis138
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

The Oasis Hotel in Argyle, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, is intended for groups on retreats, business meetings and small conferences. For more pictures see
http://www.flickr.com/photos/karlek/
and put "Oasis" in the "search" box.
For more information email
shirleypjones@vincysurf.com

Pirates Chest

2005-04-29T00:46:00.000-04:00

PirChst47
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

The remains of the set of Pirates of the Caribbean Part 2: Dead Man's Chest, at Walliabou Anchorage, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. For more pictures of this location go to http://pix.karleklund.net and put "Pirates" in the search box.