Flowers for Your Rose Garden

C3001-104 Thanksgiving: Lister Bag Tea

    The isoprenes hung heavily in the air around the pine tree boughs like mean gossip in a small, Southern town.  I could see the haze extending to the far horizon, in staggered slices of landscape, each one just a bit lighter than the one in front of it, cascading into pale indistinction.  The cicadas filled the valley with their strident, insistent sirens.  Who, I wondered, could think of reproduction in such oppressive heat and humidity; who could find allure in the sticky embrace of such a sweltering sycophant?
    We marched in route step through the forest along a well-worn path that had seen generations of footsteps in the khaki-colored soil: the pale color of cowardice, stubbled with stubborn chert here and there to twist ankles.  I learned in time to kick those stones off the path without breaking my stride.
    At first, the man in front of me had a slender, dark line of perspiration on the back of his shirt.  But as we marched those endless miles through the heat, his shirt eventually turned into a uniform flowing with sweat.  The man dripped with each step like a metronome.  Those droplets were eagerly swallowed by the dusty-dry soil.
    After what seemed like hours of marching, we came to an expansive, open area that looked much like  a picnic area in a state forest.  Then I noticed them.  There were two of them and they were hanging from a tree like bloated carcases in a slaughter house.  In some respects, they looked just like duffel bags except they were much fatter.  I had never seen anything like them before.
    I asked what they were and I was told that they were Lister Bags (cf. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Lister+bag ) filled with iced tea.  Somehow the thought of cold tea revolted me.  Who could drink such a thing?  But I was told that it was actually “pretty good.”
    Later, after I stood in line with the others, I got a canteen cup of that unsweetened tea.  I sipped tentatively and tasted the strangeness of the polymers from the rubber lining of the Lister Bag.  But the drink was cool and refreshing.  It was a welcomed guest on that hot and humid day.
    And now, years and years later, I found a bottled unsweetened tea for sale in my local grocery store.  I brought one bottle home and sat on the couch sipping the tea.  It was Lister Bag tea all over again.  My wife could not understand the Christmas-morning joy I found in that glass of tea.
    I am thankful for that hot and humid day, filled with isoprenes and cicadas, and khaki-colored soil.  But I am especially grateful for that canvass bag of iced tea with its generous gift of refreshment.

B4022-4 Moron Economics: Galbraithian Nonsense

    A colleague of mine used to patronize the people who assembled machine tools in a large machine tool manufacturing facility.  The colleague was an electronic technician who was responsible for debugging and testing the machine tool electrical controls.  Frequently, the assemblers asked him how the control “knew” where to move, say, the table or the slide of the machine tool.  An adequate explanation would have taken more time than it was worth.  So, the technician simply told them that “it was all magic.”  They never accepted that explanation and they always wanted him to explain things further.  “Well,” he say, “it’s like putting your tooth under the pillow at night and finding a quarter there instead in the morning.  It’s a Tooth Fairy sort of thing.  And it’s all magic.”
    Much of what passes for economics today is that Tooth Fairy sort of thing.  Your car won’t start?  Try pushing it off a fifty-foot cliff unto the jagged rocks below.  It didn’t start?  Okay, try pushing it off the 100-foot cliff nearby.  What?  It still didn’t start?  We need a 200-foot cliff, folks.  The “stimulus package” wasn’t big enough.
    I’m sure that there is a Miss Romer somewhere dug into her stuffy Keynesian burrow who is wondering why the United States’ stimulus plan didn’t work.  Somewhere, a Mister Summers is scratching his head over the same issue.  “If only we had spent more!”
    Now, a fool comes out of Texas with an absurd reprise of France’s 35-hour workweek (1998-2008).  Remember that?  Let’s reduce the workweek hours and spread the jobs around.  Today this Texan fool says let all of those older folks retire who want to retire, and let the younger unemployed take their jobs.  It’s a win-win for everybody.  Well, except if you work the mathematics:  The person now working pays a portion of his salary into Social Security and Medicare “trust funds.”  That person retires and begins to draw down those “trust funds.”  The younger person begins his new job and starts paying the same fees to the “trust funds” as the older person did.  No matter who works the same fund amount is contributed.  But in this case, an additional person is drawing funds out of the “trust funds.”  Can’t bankrupt the Social Security and Medicare “trust funds” fast enough?  Try getting more people to draw out of the system.
    Tooth Fairy economics.  Put your tooth under the pillow and tomorrow there will be a coin there.  It’s all magic.

B8005-5 Arguments: Clarification of Opinions

THE CLARIFICATION OF OPINIONS: We could say that some arguments serve to establish particular opinions in others where no such opinions existed previously. To “win” an argument, thus, is to form or affect a new opinion in another person.

TRIVIALITY: But let us understand, first, that all arguments that seek to change opinions are, by their very nature, trivial. While it is true that the arguments themselves may seem very important to the persons arguing the particular cases, in any reasonable scheme of things it makes very little difference whether I believe, say, that the moon is either made of Green Cheese or if it is made of Compressed Twinkies. In either case my opinion - along with one American dollar - will get me a coffee at McDonalds, and very little else; i.e., my opinions, like the arguments themselves, are ipso facto trivial.

THE NATURE OF OPINIONS: Since opinions are philosophically identical with contradictions, there can be no “correct” opinions. Instead, there is nothing out there but a bewildering array of competing opinions, each of which is valid for his owner, but not necessarily for others. Listening to others bray about their opinions is very similar to flipping through a catalogue of highway signs: each sign wags its scolding finger in your face without any practical effect. At the end of the day, the catalogue - and your interlocutors’ opinions - can be tossed into the trash can.

THE FUTILITY OF ARGUING AGAINST OPINIONS: In any really objective sense of the word, it’s a hopeless task to badger another person with relentless ferocity in order to change his opinion. Far better, one should allow the other to steep in his delusions until he, himself, comes to the conclusion that his opinion is unwarranted by existing conditions or facts. Don’t change the opinions of others; let the conditions change the opinions:

EDUCATION: We often hear an array of arguments about spending additional sums on education. Almost always such arguments take the form of what will happen to "our children" if we fail to spend less than x-dollars per pupil. It is a fruitless task to counter such arguments with economic specificity. Rather, it is always a more effective approach to give the education leeches precisely what they ask for in the hope that eventually they will build such a large edifice that the salaries, operating and maintenance costs will simply overwhelm the system. Currently, many state governments are operating with budgets severely in deficit because of past excesses in granting every silly educational demand that was placed upon the state legislature. For years conservatives have argued for some kind of restraint, and they have made those arguments to no avail - until now. Once the critical mass has been reached with extravagant spending (as it is today), further arguments are no longer necessary because everyone from the smallest child to the oldest man can see that the budgets are not sustainable under any taxing scheme. The educational establishment is ready to become undone by its past "successes."

KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS: At the present time we are participating in an economic experiment. Some, like the Captain Ja-Boom Tisch's (i.e., Obama's) administration, have argued for stimulus spending to give a Keynesian boost to the economy. Huge sums of money had been spent in the attempt to prove that Keynesianism actually does something. To date, however, the results are exceedingly unsatisfactory. The amount of money that's been spent is slowly crushing the private sector, and less charitably, is destroying the United States of America. Yet the persons responsible for continuing to support these silly Keynesian ideas are not dissuaded by the results that we are now seeing. Instead they firmly believe that we need to spend more to make this work. Or as one wag put it so well, "If you failed to fly after you jumped off a 10-foot step ladder, perhaps you could try jumping off of the roof of your house." There will come a point, obviously, when it is no longer feasible to pretend that additional deficit spending will stimulate the economy. The problem, however, is that the United States may no longer exist when these economic morons finally come to their senses.

KILLING ME SOFTLY WITH HIS WORDS: Second, all arguments that seek to change opinions are never attempts to discover objective truth itself, but instead, are always attempts to squeeze some gritty exudate through the grille surrounding the opponent’s head. The end of such argumentation is to smother the opponent in a virtual helmet of irrefutable logic, from which he cannot see or breathe or even speak. All in all, the argument seeks to conclude with one party silent and unable to speak.

B8005-4 Arguments: Assumptions

“Arguments follow from assumptions, and assumptions follow from beliefs, and very rarely - perhaps never - do beliefs reflect an agenda determined entirely by facts” (David Berlinski. The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions. New York: Crown Forum, 2008, pp. 103-104).

ARGUMENTS FOLLOW FROM ASSUMPTIONS: Of course, this is an incorrect statement. Arguments follow from disagreements, where one of the parties refuses to accept certain assumptions made by the other party of the disagreement. What the two parties argue about, basically, are the assumptions themselves. Did Wittgenstein not say that arguments cease once adequate definitions are made? It would seem, then, that the first requirement of any disagreement would be to clarify the meaning of the assumptions being used.

ASSUMPTIONS FOLLOW FROM BELIEFS: Again, this is an incorrect statement. Assumptions may follow from beliefs. But more often, assumptions are applications of current opinion to contemporary arguments. That is to say, sometimes assumptions are nothing more than clichés stated by one of the parties without regard to reasoned thought or to an opinion formed from examined beliefs. For example, people often say "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Such a statement more often reflects the extent to which propaganda has been effective in the lives of the public than it does from a conclusion drawn from proper examination.

BELIEFS ARE NOT FACTUALLY SUPPORTED: While I tend to agree with this statement at some overall level of understanding, I also assert that facts themselves are trivial. A true fact does not support a belief. Rather, it makes a tautological statement about the world. But in a very general way, the things that people assert tend never to be based on examined facts. It might be more correct to say that people express their beliefs on the basis of selected facts, or on particular facts culled from a vast assortment of available facts. In other words, beliefs are often based on peculiar and nuanced selections of facts.

CONTRIVED REASONING: In spite of the difficulties that Berlinski has laid out here, I think he is particularly correct about modern science in its pretense that its positions and conclusions are based on "facts" alone; and, in contradistinction to religious belief, that scientific assertions are always based on evidence rather than on beliefs. Almost always, science has no genuine evidentiary basis. Instead, it possesses something that I will call a contrived reason that supports a particular notion.

B5006-1 Reasoning: Scientific Facts

Scientific Facts: It may be pure speculation on my part to suppose that progress in science, generally, is hampered by the psychology of remembered “facts.” In particular, a rigidly held belief in some particular aspect of science, e.g., Darwinian evolution, may prevent a scientist from looking at his scientific inquiries with the necessary objectivity to determine the actual truth. His elaborately constructed world view may not be capable of the requisite deconstruction needed to accommodate a newer, more descriptive, conceptualization of science. Even when confronted with the overwhelming statistical logic of a William Dembski, for example, or the compelling biochemical evidence compiled by a Michael Behe, the dyed-in-the-wool Darwinian, such as Richard Dawkins, cannot admit that his concept of evolution is fatally - and ineluctably - flawed: “Dawkins...asserts that ‘biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.’ He refers to living beings as ‘designoid’ objects. ‘Designoid objects look designed,’ Dawkins contends, ‘so much so that some people - probably, alas, most people - think they are designed. These people are wrong.’ ” (Dan Peterson. “The Little Engine That Could Undo Darwinism,” The American Spectator, June 2005, p. 37.) It is difficult for me personally to imagine a more arrogant statement than Dawkins’s statement that “these people are wrong.” On what objective basis can he make such a statement? That he believes in materialism with such blind and obstinate conviction that absolutely no non-materialistic explanation has even the possibility of being true? Good Heavens! Where does this person get off?

B4023-5 Education: The Virtual University

The Virtual University:  Today, boys and girls, let’s do a little thought experiment.  Imagine for a moment that a young woman - let’s call her Rachel - gets into her automobile and drives ten miles to a “commuter” university.  The school has few on-campus dormitory residents; most drive from elsewhere to attend a day’s classes.  Rachel parks her car in a large parking lot, slips on her backpack of books and laptop computer, and begins the half-mile  (about 800 meters) trek to her classroom building.  Notice, if you will, the absurdity of locating a parking lot that far away from the building.  Many would ask, “Whatever were those architects thinking?”

 
    Rachel enters a large lecture hall and takes a seat along with several hundred other students.  The lecture hall is shaped like an amphitheater, and the lecturer is seen by Rachel as a very tiny dot way down there at the bottom of the room.  The lecturer is nearly invisible.  And if it weren’t for the projected image of the lecturer on the adjacent wall, Rachel would hardly be able to see the person.  Moreover, the voice of the lecturer must be amplified to be heard by others at the higher end of the lecture hall.
 

    When the lecture begins, Rachel notices that many of the students around her are chatting with one another about things that have nothing to do with the content of the lecture.  Their gossip is a major distraction to her.  The lecturer, too, is a chirrupy little bird who can hardly be understood.  Rachel strains to hear and comprehend the lecture.  All in all, it is a very frustrating experience for Rachel.
 

    After the lecture, Rachel retraces her half-mile walk back to the parking lot.  It is now raining and Rachel is getting soaked.  She utters soft blasphemies with each step, generally aimed at the deranged miscreants who laid out the parking lots, but audible to anyone else who might be listening.  She gets into her car and drives ten miles back to her home.  She is absolutely furious.
 

    Well, what’s wrong with this picture?  In a word: everything.

    It may have been useful to arrange a lecture hall like Rachel’s back in the nineteenth-century.  But surely the internet-connected twenty-first-century has no need for brick-n-mortar lecture halls and all the attendant paraphernalia necessary to sustain that obsolete model of education.  Today, a well-produced lecture could be recorded in a sound studio, edited and packaged in an attractive video.  Such a video could be viewed from the comfort of the student’s home via the internet, at any time she so chose to view the video (and as often as she chose to view the video again), without the attendant driving time and mileage, or distractions of gossiping fellow students.  Since the amphitheater lecture does not provide for any interaction between the lecturer and the students, why is it necessary to travel to a specific location to hear the lecture?  And why is it necessary to burden the student with the fixed costs of support personnel when technology exists to present an exactly similar video lecture without all those lawn-mowing, parking lot-plowing, food-service folks?
 

    Am I suggesting that internet videos replace all university lectures?  Hardly.  Many university-level courses are not conducive to video broadcasting.  Laboratory courses in the sciences, for example, require brick-n-mortar facilities.  But the same is not true of many other areas of study.
 

    Nonetheless, I await your “Yeah-Buts.”

A Rose for Your Rose Garden

Happy Independence Day!

B4023-4 Education: Field's Law (2)

Education: Field’s Law (2):  A university campus expands in a concentric manner.  Additional buildings are added, along with their supporting infrastructure (parking lots, sidewalks, etc.), beyond the “core” or original campus.  Many universities have an identifiable older building that was the first classroom building on the campus.  Usually, that building has an architectural distinction that might be called “Venerable, Ivy-Covered Brickwork.”  The newer buildings almost always fail to replicate the look of the original building.

 
    As the university campus expands, important things happen to that older building.  If the older building is WWII vintage or older, it probably had a stand-alone boiler house, with coal-fired boilers used at one time in its history.  Later, those coal-fired boilers were retrofitted with natural gas-fired burners, and the building was heated for a number of years using that technology.  But as the university expands, a central heating plant is constructed to supply steam to various buildings on the campus.  In time, that stand-alone boiler house, next to the Oldest Classroom Building, is torn down because “it is no longer needed.”  It is at that point that Part Two of Field’s Law kicks in.

    Field’s Law, as you might remember, states that the longer the steam lines, the higher the fixed costs.  As the university campus expands - and becomes less dense - whole armies of support staff are needed to keep the place tidy and in good repair.  And while a campus might expand arithmetically, the fixed costs expand logarithmically.  This is true of every concentric expansion: the bigger the “footprint,” the higher the fixed costs.”
 

    Fast food restaurants, on the other hand, expand by incremental expansion.  New restaurants are built in new locations that have no organic connection to older buildings (other than corporate advertizing and corporate “ware” - cups, packaging, etc. - that give a consistent look to each franchise).  In times of economic distress, corporate-owned restaurants can be closed on the basis of profitability alone.  The least profitable locations can be closed, and the corporate enterprise as a whole is strengthened by doing so.
 

    The same is not true with concentric expansion.  It is not a simple matter to shutter university campus buildings.  Because of the interconnected utilities, it is often impossible.  Even thought it might be desirable to shut down the central heating plant because of the enormous costs of operating such a facility, usually there are no “back-up” heating systems (boilers, etc.) for all those separate buildings.  Field’s Law states that “the longer the steam lines, the higher the fixed costs.”  But it also states that you cannot get back home again if those steam lines are too long.  The university is stuck with running everything - with those high fixed costs - or shutting down the entire campus.
 

    And they thought they were making a wise move when they bulldozed the boiler house next to that ivy-covered classroom building.  Instead, they may have taken their first steps to the “Point of No Return.”

B5005-1 Reasoning: The Phlogiston Theory

THE PHLOGISTON THEORY: If one places a great deal of faith in science’s purported aim of “explaining” nature, then one is left with the task of defending those explanations of the past which explained a great many things and yet were subsequently found to be spurious. The Phlogiston Theory, for example, failed to explain, in a satisfactory manner, a great deal of diverse phenomenon which today is subsumed under the heading of oxidation reactions. Even though the theory had the initial advantage of appearing to explain things by that all-inclusive essence of phlogiston, the prominent short-coming of the theory was, specifically, its failure to really explain anything.

Now, if science has as one of its aims that of explaining things, then this phlogiston theory must be reduced to the realm of non-science. If this can happen to the theory of phlogistons then all theories are vulnerable to a similar fate. In other words, all of science is suspect. And you may safely assert that this is certainly the case. In fact, you may assert that it must always be the case in science: science is an epistemological effort which cannot stand on settled “truth”. Instead, it is an endless search for more accurate, more precise “truth”.

But, where does this leave the scientist? Isn’t he then in a position where everything he believes to be true must be doubted per se? That is, is science reduced to a series of “I think this is so, but I don’t know” propositions? If it is, then how does one make any theory truly credible? What makes a good theory sound if it is always subject to doubt? Isn’t the test one of what can be done with the theory, rather than what cannot be done? Remember: what cannot be done is believing in the theory with complete certainty. Spurious theories fail, not because they fail to explain satisfactorily, but because they have little use in the practical application of science - what can be done with a theory is the crux of the test, not what area can be effectively enveloped with intelligible explanations.

The phlogiston theory, then, fell into disrepute, not because it failed to explain things, but rather because it did not adequately describe things. This adequacy of description is not to be confused with accuracy of description, for, the oxidation/reduction theory which effectively replaced the phlogiston theory is itself subject to correction and amplification: as of the present date the theory is adequate for our purposes, even though it might not fit all cases with some standard measure of accuracy. What made the phlogiston theory so nebulous was an “essence” which was supposed to leave a reaction when, say, a candle was burned or an “essence” which arrived to account for the gain in weight of a burned (oxidized) substance. This dealing with what is now seen as oxygen moving into a gaseous end product (which explains loss of weight in a burning candle) or into a solid end product (which explains the gain in weight in metal oxides - dealing with this “essence” in such an imprecise manner - lead to apparent contradictions: candles lost weight when burned and metals gained weight when burned; the “same” thing certainly could not account for both reactions, so men thought.

As long as men thought in terms of “essences” and phlogistic elements moving into or out of reactions, the area of concentration remained too broad for any practical application. How does one harness an essence? What, for that matter, is the “essence?” It was in answering these questions about essences that the essences were identified as oxygen or oxidation reactants and which, then, limited the context of experimental materials to more amenable procedures. With “essences,” alone, the context, being too broad, would not allow an experimenter to manipulate any of the variables, since the variables always remained indeterminate. Once such things as oxygen or oxidation reactions were recognized, the each reactant could be varied.