Saturday, November 29, 2008
What "legal" means
There seems to be a lot of confusion here in Victoria, and at city council, about what the word "legal" means.
It is the duty of the police to enforce the law, and others to conform to it. BUT:
The law consists of the Constitution, Charter of Rights, previous legal decisions (precedent), common law, Tort (civil) law, and - according to the Nuremberg tribunal - supervening international legal and moral norms as well. TOGETHER these constitute the law. (Albeit the last is contradicted by the Notwithstanding Clause of the Canadian Constitution, which clause could be invoked for anything at all including the mass murder of people with red hair, elimination of free speech, or a new holocaust - all these would be superficially "legally" in Canada if the Notwithstanding Clause were invoked.)
A statute or bylaw may declare night day and day night, but that doesn't make it so. Policework is not merely a game of "Simon Says" where we substitute "City Council" for "Simon." That game isn't legal in Canada. The latest whim of council isn't law unless it conforms to the Charter of Rights, Constitution, etc. Not for the police, nor anyone else. Neither is it enough to say that whatever the courts have not specifically ruled out in previous decisions is therefore legal should a brand-new bylaw declare it so. There's no principle in law that everything is legal "until it is specifically ruled against by a judge." (This is the equivalent of "let's just do it until we get caught" or "it's legal until we get caught." But, no it ain't.)
In summary: "I was just obeying orders" doesn't remove culpability from authorities, post-WWII, or according to Canadian law.
Where the police have every reason to suspect that law and bylaw might conflict, the legal course is instead to set up a test case, with the cooperation of those affected where possible (a "collusive action"); and to otherwise suspend any enforcement until the courts have ruled on that test case.
The police, who are in an increasingly difficult position, have been very ill-used by Council and by their own management as tools to break the laws. This taints the reputation and effectiveness of the police generally, diverts them from the duties they were trained for, and make any future cooperation between the homeless community and law enforcement officials extremely difficult - yet that cooperation must eventually come about, for everyone's sake. Nevermind what you see on the TV show CSI, police have always relied on the community to do the bulk of the work in discovering, reporting and providing the evidence to enforce the law. This will have to be true for the homeless community as well in the future, but nothing could create a larger obstacle to this than years of directed, systematic law-breaking by the people entrusted and paid to maintain the law.
The question is, why have the police decided to be such thorough (and culpable) codependents? It may be that both they and the City Council believe that intimidation and some degree of cruelty and lawlessness by the police will discourage homelessness here, or at least, discourage the homeless from moving to Victoria. Where law isn't sufficient, skirting the law or simply breaking it, is the next resource. Anyone can understand the temptation to grasp at simple solutions for growing, and frightening, problems, if not the contempt for the law. Extra homeless people in Victoria are an inconvenience for everyone including the homeless people already here, but...
Given the compulsory nature of most homelessness and, for that matter, the uniquely kind weather of Victoria within Canada and B.C. (although most homeless are not newcomers), this experiment in twisting the arms of the victims again and again is absolutely futile. Sooner or later, council must come to understand this, however distressing it may to them to give up on the dream of violently pushing away homelessness must be to the more comfortable. If this was going to happen, it would have happened - the police were freer in previous years to act illegally (and did) than they can possibly be in the years to come now that the scrutiny of the courts has been aroused.
I would not wish to be a police officer in Victoria, or nearly anywhere else in North America, today. I am grateful that many are willing to serve as peace officers. But I earnestly appeal, with emotion that cannot enter into this text, that the police, and in particular their management, look to their own interests, and their own future interests with regard to the questions pertaining to homelessness. The council has thoroughly betrayed those interests, and the police cannot act too quickly to ensure that their officers now strictly obey the whole of the law, and begin to rebuild the reputation that they must have to do their job (and to do it more easily and in less peril) within and without the homeless community.
I might humbly submit that in order to commence this new approach, the police should immediately cease some techniques they now employ to evade accountability: Primarily, stop using volunteers merely dressed as police at the front desk who don't actually know the law. This current practice allows citizens to believe they have made a report to the police by talking to the front desk, or that they have advice from authority, when neither is true. Moreover no record of any kind is made of their report unless the volunteer on their own sole authority decides to tell them how to make an actual report, in writing, on the correct form. This is a great way to keep crime stats down, but thoroughly mischievous, as well, and calculated to bring the police into disrepute. Everyone showing up at the desk can be given a number and one sentence description of their report (anonymous or not) which is reported and retained by the police for future reference. Similarly re phone reports, everyone phoning in has to be given a report number and the call be databased, even if with a one-sentence description, and even if the report was anonymous. Now, my experience has been that phone operators seem to be trained to do everything they can, including balding lying about what the law is, in order to avoid any report being recorded if at all possible. I don't doubt that the police are underfunded, but this isn't the way to deal with that. It might even be that actually recording all crime reports would result in more funding.
by Russell Johnston
http://confusioncomplete.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-legal-means.html
It is the duty of the police to enforce the law, and others to conform to it. BUT:
The law consists of the Constitution, Charter of Rights, previous legal decisions (precedent), common law, Tort (civil) law, and - according to the Nuremberg tribunal - supervening international legal and moral norms as well. TOGETHER these constitute the law. (Albeit the last is contradicted by the Notwithstanding Clause of the Canadian Constitution, which clause could be invoked for anything at all including the mass murder of people with red hair, elimination of free speech, or a new holocaust - all these would be superficially "legally" in Canada if the Notwithstanding Clause were invoked.)
A statute or bylaw may declare night day and day night, but that doesn't make it so. Policework is not merely a game of "Simon Says" where we substitute "City Council" for "Simon." That game isn't legal in Canada. The latest whim of council isn't law unless it conforms to the Charter of Rights, Constitution, etc. Not for the police, nor anyone else. Neither is it enough to say that whatever the courts have not specifically ruled out in previous decisions is therefore legal should a brand-new bylaw declare it so. There's no principle in law that everything is legal "until it is specifically ruled against by a judge." (This is the equivalent of "let's just do it until we get caught" or "it's legal until we get caught." But, no it ain't.)
In summary: "I was just obeying orders" doesn't remove culpability from authorities, post-WWII, or according to Canadian law.
Where the police have every reason to suspect that law and bylaw might conflict, the legal course is instead to set up a test case, with the cooperation of those affected where possible (a "collusive action"); and to otherwise suspend any enforcement until the courts have ruled on that test case.
The police, who are in an increasingly difficult position, have been very ill-used by Council and by their own management as tools to break the laws. This taints the reputation and effectiveness of the police generally, diverts them from the duties they were trained for, and make any future cooperation between the homeless community and law enforcement officials extremely difficult - yet that cooperation must eventually come about, for everyone's sake. Nevermind what you see on the TV show CSI, police have always relied on the community to do the bulk of the work in discovering, reporting and providing the evidence to enforce the law. This will have to be true for the homeless community as well in the future, but nothing could create a larger obstacle to this than years of directed, systematic law-breaking by the people entrusted and paid to maintain the law.
The question is, why have the police decided to be such thorough (and culpable) codependents? It may be that both they and the City Council believe that intimidation and some degree of cruelty and lawlessness by the police will discourage homelessness here, or at least, discourage the homeless from moving to Victoria. Where law isn't sufficient, skirting the law or simply breaking it, is the next resource. Anyone can understand the temptation to grasp at simple solutions for growing, and frightening, problems, if not the contempt for the law. Extra homeless people in Victoria are an inconvenience for everyone including the homeless people already here, but...
Given the compulsory nature of most homelessness and, for that matter, the uniquely kind weather of Victoria within Canada and B.C. (although most homeless are not newcomers), this experiment in twisting the arms of the victims again and again is absolutely futile. Sooner or later, council must come to understand this, however distressing it may to them to give up on the dream of violently pushing away homelessness must be to the more comfortable. If this was going to happen, it would have happened - the police were freer in previous years to act illegally (and did) than they can possibly be in the years to come now that the scrutiny of the courts has been aroused.
I would not wish to be a police officer in Victoria, or nearly anywhere else in North America, today. I am grateful that many are willing to serve as peace officers. But I earnestly appeal, with emotion that cannot enter into this text, that the police, and in particular their management, look to their own interests, and their own future interests with regard to the questions pertaining to homelessness. The council has thoroughly betrayed those interests, and the police cannot act too quickly to ensure that their officers now strictly obey the whole of the law, and begin to rebuild the reputation that they must have to do their job (and to do it more easily and in less peril) within and without the homeless community.
I might humbly submit that in order to commence this new approach, the police should immediately cease some techniques they now employ to evade accountability: Primarily, stop using volunteers merely dressed as police at the front desk who don't actually know the law. This current practice allows citizens to believe they have made a report to the police by talking to the front desk, or that they have advice from authority, when neither is true. Moreover no record of any kind is made of their report unless the volunteer on their own sole authority decides to tell them how to make an actual report, in writing, on the correct form. This is a great way to keep crime stats down, but thoroughly mischievous, as well, and calculated to bring the police into disrepute. Everyone showing up at the desk can be given a number and one sentence description of their report (anonymous or not) which is reported and retained by the police for future reference. Similarly re phone reports, everyone phoning in has to be given a report number and the call be databased, even if with a one-sentence description, and even if the report was anonymous. Now, my experience has been that phone operators seem to be trained to do everything they can, including balding lying about what the law is, in order to avoid any report being recorded if at all possible. I don't doubt that the police are underfunded, but this isn't the way to deal with that. It might even be that actually recording all crime reports would result in more funding.
by Russell Johnston
http://confusioncomplete.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-legal-means.html
The Swan of Avon Explained?
Is what follows too obvious to say, or has it been too obviously overlooked?
I've been looking at Sir Francis Bacon's writings on the beginning of Science, and the Royal Society - spurred on by a CBC radio "Ideas" program that I had to look up quotes for online next day, since I was listening in healthy, true darkness.
Related Google enquiries led to links to the question of whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare. I love such thoroughly eccentric explorations of history, true or false, credible or laughable, for the same reason that anyone who's read a huge pile of history books (and doesn't have their head stuck up their ass) ought to love 'em - they take me far from the well-worn facts of history I've read about, often literally hundreds of times, into genuinely new territory (whether my guide is inept or not.) That's refreshing if you love history but sometimes find it hard to obtain genuinely new grist for the mill.
In the process of encountering many delicious tidbits of otherwise hopelessly obscure history that's refreshingly new to me, it could be I've stumbled on an overlooked clue to the mystery of authorship, just maybe, maybe (if there is any mystery, of course.)
Should you want to know why Ben Jonson called Shakespeare "Sweet Swan of Avon", as Bertram Theobald did:
"Now one word about the 'Sweet Swan of Avon.' Has it ever struck anyone that if this phrase is to be taken at its face value, it is singularly inept as a simile? The verses of a poet are melodious,or should be."
http://www.sirbacon.org/bertrambj1623folio.htm
It may be instructive to look at a line very early on in Robert Green's "Groats-Worth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentance" (1592), incidentally our first published mention of Shakespeare, which line is retailed as if it were a common enough saying of the time:
The Swan sings melodiously before death, that in all his life vseth but a iarring sound.
http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/greene1.html
That is: "The Swan sings beautifully at death, who all his life used (issued) only a jarring sound."
In the context of that popular saying (as it seems from the context in Green's pamphet), Jonson's calling Shakespeare "a sweet swan of Avon" has new meaning. It's quite a funny line (and still packs a punch today) if the the rude Shakespeare from Avon were not much of a poet, but the Shakespeare about to become part of history with the posthumous publication of the Folio, was a very fine poet indeed.
But note that how melodious a swan is depends very much on the species of the swan.
Which leads us to another explanation: that Green's contemporary version of the saying isn't relevant, but the Phaedo is, where Plato has Socrates say that swans "having sung all their life long, do then sing more, and more sweetly than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are about to go away to Apollo, whose ministers they are." Or even Shakespeare himself, who in Othello has Emilia say "I will play the swan, and die in music."
If so, Jonson only meant to say that Folio was the Bard's beautiful final song, as it was.
Or, we could give the final word to Wikipedia, "Swan Song":
The phrase "swan song" is a reference to an ancient belief that the Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) is completely mute during its lifetime until the moment just before it dies, when it sings one beautiful song.
Cygnus olor was originally native to the British Isles, and that restores the Baconian jest to Jonson's words.
Jonson and Green were both playwrights and contemporaries in London and might be supposed to have used the allusion similarly, or likely so. On the other hand, Johnson was self-educated but would have known Plato. Still Green went to Cambridge and Oxford and could hardly have escaped knowledge of the Phaedo, himself. We report, you decide.
I've been looking at Sir Francis Bacon's writings on the beginning of Science, and the Royal Society - spurred on by a CBC radio "Ideas" program that I had to look up quotes for online next day, since I was listening in healthy, true darkness.
Related Google enquiries led to links to the question of whether Bacon wrote Shakespeare. I love such thoroughly eccentric explorations of history, true or false, credible or laughable, for the same reason that anyone who's read a huge pile of history books (and doesn't have their head stuck up their ass) ought to love 'em - they take me far from the well-worn facts of history I've read about, often literally hundreds of times, into genuinely new territory (whether my guide is inept or not.) That's refreshing if you love history but sometimes find it hard to obtain genuinely new grist for the mill.
In the process of encountering many delicious tidbits of otherwise hopelessly obscure history that's refreshingly new to me, it could be I've stumbled on an overlooked clue to the mystery of authorship, just maybe, maybe (if there is any mystery, of course.)
Should you want to know why Ben Jonson called Shakespeare "Sweet Swan of Avon", as Bertram Theobald did:
"Now one word about the 'Sweet Swan of Avon.' Has it ever struck anyone that if this phrase is to be taken at its face value, it is singularly inept as a simile? The verses of a poet are melodious,or should be."
http://www.sirbacon.org/bertrambj1623folio.htm
It may be instructive to look at a line very early on in Robert Green's "Groats-Worth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentance" (1592), incidentally our first published mention of Shakespeare, which line is retailed as if it were a common enough saying of the time:
The Swan sings melodiously before death, that in all his life vseth but a iarring sound.
http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/greene1.html
That is: "The Swan sings beautifully at death, who all his life used (issued) only a jarring sound."
In the context of that popular saying (as it seems from the context in Green's pamphet), Jonson's calling Shakespeare "a sweet swan of Avon" has new meaning. It's quite a funny line (and still packs a punch today) if the the rude Shakespeare from Avon were not much of a poet, but the Shakespeare about to become part of history with the posthumous publication of the Folio, was a very fine poet indeed.
But note that how melodious a swan is depends very much on the species of the swan.
Which leads us to another explanation: that Green's contemporary version of the saying isn't relevant, but the Phaedo is, where Plato has Socrates say that swans "having sung all their life long, do then sing more, and more sweetly than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are about to go away to Apollo, whose ministers they are." Or even Shakespeare himself, who in Othello has Emilia say "I will play the swan, and die in music."
If so, Jonson only meant to say that Folio was the Bard's beautiful final song, as it was.
Or, we could give the final word to Wikipedia, "Swan Song":
The phrase "swan song" is a reference to an ancient belief that the Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) is completely mute during its lifetime until the moment just before it dies, when it sings one beautiful song.
Cygnus olor was originally native to the British Isles, and that restores the Baconian jest to Jonson's words.
Jonson and Green were both playwrights and contemporaries in London and might be supposed to have used the allusion similarly, or likely so. On the other hand, Johnson was self-educated but would have known Plato. Still Green went to Cambridge and Oxford and could hardly have escaped knowledge of the Phaedo, himself. We report, you decide.
Monday, November 24, 2008
How we got here - according to the Governor of the Bank of Canada
Wonder why we have a depression or recession thanks to the subprime lending crisis? Here's an insider's view:
Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney interviewed by Carrie Gracie
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/the_interview.shtml
Last Updated: Saturday, 22 November 2008, 23:32 GMT
Excerpts:
"A: The fear had become self-fulfilling."
....
"Q: What exactly, in your view, went wrong? These banks just borrowed too much, was it?
A: "They borrowed too much: they did two things, they borrowed too much, they had too much debt, relative to their amount of capital without question, but they felt they could do that because they felt they weren't taking any risk. And they short-circuited some of the very basic aspects of banking. Which is that, banking is about, in some respects it's about relationships, you should know your customer, you should know the business or person you're lending to, um, and you should, ah, do analysis in terms of their ability to repay. And what became, they did two elements of shorthand for that, instead of having that type of relationship credit-based, you know, hard-nosed the [garbled] advisor type of banking, what they did was, they relied on other people to make judgements, these were the famous credit agencies that were rating them at triple A or, they felt that they were taking on a loan, but it only mattered - they weren't going to hold onto the loan, it only mattered how quickly they could sell it to somebody else. In the terminology, they had 'warehouse risk'. So as long as they could get rid of the hot potato, quickly, it didn't matter. Well, you know, the music stopped eventually, they still had it, and because they had it in such size, it's been a very painful process to work that out.
....
Q: And why wasn't that spotted...
A: We had some faith in this as well...
[A: The mistake that was made was that when the subprime market was small, you had to be a good risk to get in but as they expanded the likelyhood of default increased] "But people were seduced, or only remembered the old assumption, they didn't realize that the expansion of this [subprime lending market from 2% of US lending to 15%] would change the equation."
Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney interviewed by Carrie Gracie
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/the_interview.shtml
Last Updated: Saturday, 22 November 2008, 23:32 GMT
Excerpts:
"A: The fear had become self-fulfilling."
....
"Q: What exactly, in your view, went wrong? These banks just borrowed too much, was it?
A: "They borrowed too much: they did two things, they borrowed too much, they had too much debt, relative to their amount of capital without question, but they felt they could do that because they felt they weren't taking any risk. And they short-circuited some of the very basic aspects of banking. Which is that, banking is about, in some respects it's about relationships, you should know your customer, you should know the business or person you're lending to, um, and you should, ah, do analysis in terms of their ability to repay. And what became, they did two elements of shorthand for that, instead of having that type of relationship credit-based, you know, hard-nosed the [garbled] advisor type of banking, what they did was, they relied on other people to make judgements, these were the famous credit agencies that were rating them at triple A or, they felt that they were taking on a loan, but it only mattered - they weren't going to hold onto the loan, it only mattered how quickly they could sell it to somebody else. In the terminology, they had 'warehouse risk'. So as long as they could get rid of the hot potato, quickly, it didn't matter. Well, you know, the music stopped eventually, they still had it, and because they had it in such size, it's been a very painful process to work that out.
....
Q: And why wasn't that spotted...
A: We had some faith in this as well...
[A: The mistake that was made was that when the subprime market was small, you had to be a good risk to get in but as they expanded the likelyhood of default increased] "But people were seduced, or only remembered the old assumption, they didn't realize that the expansion of this [subprime lending market from 2% of US lending to 15%] would change the equation."
Thursday, October 30, 2008
The End of Night: Why We Need Darkness
Go National Geographic!
I've been (quite futilely) trying online to get people with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome to consider turning off the light switch a bit more. (Ok a lot.) You might suppose that desperately ill, suffering people would be eager to try a fairly easy, natural way that someone else swears has worked wonders for them. If so, you couldn't possibly be more wrong! This is my second try, I got absolutely no-where two years ago - so I resolved to be much more forceful and jump straight down the throat of anyone who wanted to merely gainsay the research, but supplied no bibliography - just their prejudices. There have been very few takers willing to reach up to that switch and turn it off more often! But the good news is, there have been a couple. As Bruyner (Lance Armstrong's team manager) says in his book, if you want the prize, you have to be willing to bend a few fenders (he is notorious for his driving as he follows Lance on the tour along narrow mountain roads.)
Wholly by coincidence, at the local newsstand I see that the new November National Geographic has emblazoned on its cover: “The End of Night: Why We Need Darkness" which includes discussion of health effects for humans, and so many other animals. I've included below the relevant quotes:
Light Pollution
Our Vanishing Night
Most city skies have become virtually empty of stars.
Published: November 2008
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.
For most of human history, the phrase "light pollution" would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth's most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been as likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow.
....
Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet, a process being studied by researchers such as Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, co-founders of the Los Angeles-based Urban Wildlands Group. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being "captured" by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop. Migrating at night, birds are apt to collide with brightly lit tall buildings; immature birds on their first journey suffer disproportionately.
....
Frogs and toads living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses.
....
Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need an undiminished view of the night sky for our work, but like most other creatures we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives—one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.
For the past century or so, we've been performing an open-ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body's sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a biological toll. At least one new study has suggested a direct correlation between higher rates of breast cancer in women and the nighttime brightness of their neighborhoods.
In the end, humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs in a pond near a brightly lit highway. Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural patrimony—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/light-pollution/klinkenborg-text/
I've been (quite futilely) trying online to get people with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome to consider turning off the light switch a bit more. (Ok a lot.) You might suppose that desperately ill, suffering people would be eager to try a fairly easy, natural way that someone else swears has worked wonders for them. If so, you couldn't possibly be more wrong! This is my second try, I got absolutely no-where two years ago - so I resolved to be much more forceful and jump straight down the throat of anyone who wanted to merely gainsay the research, but supplied no bibliography - just their prejudices. There have been very few takers willing to reach up to that switch and turn it off more often! But the good news is, there have been a couple. As Bruyner (Lance Armstrong's team manager) says in his book, if you want the prize, you have to be willing to bend a few fenders (he is notorious for his driving as he follows Lance on the tour along narrow mountain roads.)
Wholly by coincidence, at the local newsstand I see that the new November National Geographic has emblazoned on its cover: “The End of Night: Why We Need Darkness" which includes discussion of health effects for humans, and so many other animals. I've included below the relevant quotes:
Light Pollution
Our Vanishing Night
Most city skies have become virtually empty of stars.
Published: November 2008
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.
For most of human history, the phrase "light pollution" would have made no sense. Imagine walking toward London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth's most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, making do, as they always had, with candles and rushlights and torches and lanterns. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been as likely to smell London as to see its dim collective glow.
....
Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet, a process being studied by researchers such as Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, co-founders of the Los Angeles-based Urban Wildlands Group. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being "captured" by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop. Migrating at night, birds are apt to collide with brightly lit tall buildings; immature birds on their first journey suffer disproportionately.
....
Frogs and toads living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses.
....
Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need an undiminished view of the night sky for our work, but like most other creatures we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself. The regular oscillation of waking and sleep in our lives—one of our circadian rhythms—is nothing less than a biological expression of the regular oscillation of light on Earth. So fundamental are these rhythms to our being that altering them is like altering gravity.
For the past century or so, we've been performing an open-ended experiment on ourselves, extending the day, shortening the night, and short-circuiting the human body's sensitive response to light. The consequences of our bright new world are more readily perceptible in less adaptable creatures living in the peripheral glow of our prosperity. But for humans, too, light pollution may take a biological toll. At least one new study has suggested a direct correlation between higher rates of breast cancer in women and the nighttime brightness of their neighborhoods.
In the end, humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs in a pond near a brightly lit highway. Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural patrimony—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/light-pollution/klinkenborg-text/
False Left-brain Right-brain Test
"Left Brain v Right Brain Test"
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0%2C023739%2C22556678-23272%2C00.html
Someone else pointed out to me that if you put your attention on the shadow of the foot she turns anticlockwise. This attention to the shadow unravels the mystery it seems to me, and shows the test false:
The shadow of the lifted foot is, since it's only visible in part of its arc, is unambiguously going anti-clockwise so the dancer is too - only if your brain is so selective that it never really sees or takes in that shadow can anyone interpret the movement as clockwise.
Therefore, I think this is a decent test of Alzheimer's (sorry bro), or maybe typical male laser-like focus on naked female bodies. (Male brains during orgasm have intense activity in a small area unlike female for example.)
IMHO, a well-functioning brain will unconsciously take into account the foot-shadow and can then only give one interpretation. But we know from other studies that male brains don't function that well well viewing naked nubile females.
Today's excitement: trying to figure out today whether I'm smelling dead neighbor out in the hallway (wouldn't be the first time in the last month or so.)
Interesting new study shows genetic illnesses aren't caused by new mutations but the opposite - very old genes going back to single-cell life. If that holds up, this tells me these illnesses are 99% environmental, triggered by our dazzlingly unnatural modern lives. Light being suspect number one for me, but not the only suspect.
Genetic-based Human Diseases Are An Ancient Evolutionary Legacy, Research Suggests
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081016124043.htm
Russ
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0%2C023739%2C22556678-23272%2C00.html
Someone else pointed out to me that if you put your attention on the shadow of the foot she turns anticlockwise. This attention to the shadow unravels the mystery it seems to me, and shows the test false:
The shadow of the lifted foot is, since it's only visible in part of its arc, is unambiguously going anti-clockwise so the dancer is too - only if your brain is so selective that it never really sees or takes in that shadow can anyone interpret the movement as clockwise.
Therefore, I think this is a decent test of Alzheimer's (sorry bro), or maybe typical male laser-like focus on naked female bodies. (Male brains during orgasm have intense activity in a small area unlike female for example.)
IMHO, a well-functioning brain will unconsciously take into account the foot-shadow and can then only give one interpretation. But we know from other studies that male brains don't function that well well viewing naked nubile females.
Today's excitement: trying to figure out today whether I'm smelling dead neighbor out in the hallway (wouldn't be the first time in the last month or so.)
Interesting new study shows genetic illnesses aren't caused by new mutations but the opposite - very old genes going back to single-cell life. If that holds up, this tells me these illnesses are 99% environmental, triggered by our dazzlingly unnatural modern lives. Light being suspect number one for me, but not the only suspect.
Genetic-based Human Diseases Are An Ancient Evolutionary Legacy, Research Suggests
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081016124043.htm
Russ
Saturday, October 25, 2008
So many String Theories, so Little Time
Why 10 to the 500th power is a small number.
NOTE - what follows is a very restricted argument about one aspect of one point made versus String Theory, the size of the possibilities it admits: 10 to the 500th power. I'm not competent to wander from that restricted topic here; although I include references to statements from those who are. My point may be so minor that everyone in effect assumes it, never bothering to state it, but the frequency and vigor with which the number 10500 pops up appears to belie this.
Suppose you are a prosecuting attorney. You believe you have the criminal. Unfortunately you need evidence, and so far the admissible evidence, including a blood type only restricts the perpetrator to one of 10 to the 500th power DNA combinations, isn't anything like sufficient. 10 to the 500th people is obviously greater than the earth's population, for starts. Even if only a few hundred million people are actually walking around with the right blood type, it would seem that you haven't made much progress on your case. If you need to go to court tomorrow, of course you ought to dismiss the case.
But let's say you can count on more than a year before this case shows up on the calendar. That's lots of time to get new evidence, and if even a little DNA shows up, then that will narrow the possibilities instantly, and at least logarithmically. There are so many DNA combinations that almost any substantive DNA result will be more unlikely than "merely" 10 to the 500th power. So, sure, right now, your evidence is consistent with too many possibilities. But one DNA discovery will blow nearly all, or all, of those possibilities away. Additionally, suppose you find 10 pieces of more ordinary evidence that are compatible with only one in a thousand of the suspects that haven't yet been ruled out by blood type. Barring codependent variables, that's 10,000 of your 500 zeros gone into the ether... in other words, this sort of evidence will eliminate possibilities logarithmically, also. In other words, for investigators contemplating possibilities, 10 to the 500th just isn't as large a number as it is for, say, the average price-sensitive shopper.
Just then your assistant says, "Hey, our LHC - the Large Heuristic Collator is supposed to start up this year! It data mines way more than our current databases. Just one or two discoveries there, could knock out nearly all of those other supposed suspects - or all of them, if we've got the wrong guy." Now things don't look so hopeless.
The Large Hadron Collider might do something similar to, or for, String Theorists; knocking out all but one of their models, or all of their models. According to Woit, just one unexpected new particle within the energy range of the LHC and String Theorists will be mighty short of zeros in that exponent, very quickly, since none of their possible theories will be compatible with such a particle. Still, it's not logically impossible (actually some sever critics say the theory is already inconsistent, I believe) that other LHC results, will narrow the window and do so in a way that remains consistent with M-theory and 10 to the 500th will be history, replaced by 1000, 100, or 1 (or zero). Woit demurs, at least in part, saying that in the case of the search for superpartners that they've already hedged their bets with the anthropic principle, and have an explanation at hand for every result.
Woit's claim of hedging brings up the real worry, it seems to me: which is whether 10 to the 500th in fact represents the last kludge, or the last epicycle. Is 10 to the 500th in truth just the tiniest tip of the iceberg of what malleable multi-dimensional math can be patched up to provide (pardon the aglomeration of alliteration, there), once string theorists are more motivated to expand their horizons?
If the latter, then what string theorists have been developing is "merely" a language in which some future theory could be expressed. Woit would then be correct to say that it's no more a theory than calculus, by itself, is a physical theory. Now, such research is not necessarily useless, by any means (although its application might turn out to be far removed from particle physics.) Developing a language in advance of need is, however, surely no reason to crimp anybody else's funding, much less everybody else's funding - particularly anybody trying to develop an actual theory, you know, with predictions and stuff. If Woit is right about the irrelevance of the LHC for string theorists (so long as the standard theory isn't equally embarrassed, I take it), then given the expense involved in creating collisions that are orders of power more energetic, perhaps a moratorium on spending in "language development" for at least a few decades is in order.
From my uninformed viewpoint, string theory might still be a winner. Someone knowing calculus before Liebnitz or Newton might have a hunch that it could describe planetary orbits and reasonably start groping around for a relationship or constant to plug in that might pop out some elliptical orbits. This may even be roughly what Newton and Hooke did, in fact. (According to Hooke) when a particular possibility for the attraction between masses (inverse square of distance) was mentioned to Newton by Hooke (who may have already proved the consistency of an inverse square law with circular orbits), Newton had in hand the mathematical language to prove that that specific relationship fit the elliptical evidence Kepler and Tycho had previously provided. Newton also claimed at the time that he had already previously proved this result for ellipses and an inverse square law: but his papers did not contain such a work or any notes concerning it, whereas a discussion between Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley about whether the inverse square law would produce elliptical orbits took place in 1684, two years before Newton published the Principia. The interesting possibility is that, whether or not he had anticipated Hooke, Newton's preeminence today may be a direct result of his spending considerable time researching the language with which future theories might be expressed, rather than trying to charge ahead to next discovery with the mathematical tools already developed, or pressing ahead with experiments not much different than those already published. If string theorists have done the same, that may not be all bad. Given the cost of each new generation of cyclotron, it may even be inevitable. During the nineteen twenties, Russian filmakers had no film. Year after year, they could only sit around and discuss what future films might be like, and the techniques they could employ - in other words, all that they could do was to invent the next language of film. As "Battleship Potemkin" showed, they succeeded wonderfully in this, and turned out not to be "useless eaters" [if the reader will pardon that Nazi-era phrase] after all.
Other places to peruse re this topic:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/08/lee-smolins-trouble-with-physics.html
'Theory of everything' tying researchers up in knots
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/14/MNGRMBOURE1.DTL
Woit's blog:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/
NOTE - what follows is a very restricted argument about one aspect of one point made versus String Theory, the size of the possibilities it admits: 10 to the 500th power. I'm not competent to wander from that restricted topic here; although I include references to statements from those who are. My point may be so minor that everyone in effect assumes it, never bothering to state it, but the frequency and vigor with which the number 10500 pops up appears to belie this.
Suppose you are a prosecuting attorney. You believe you have the criminal. Unfortunately you need evidence, and so far the admissible evidence, including a blood type only restricts the perpetrator to one of 10 to the 500th power DNA combinations, isn't anything like sufficient. 10 to the 500th people is obviously greater than the earth's population, for starts. Even if only a few hundred million people are actually walking around with the right blood type, it would seem that you haven't made much progress on your case. If you need to go to court tomorrow, of course you ought to dismiss the case.
But let's say you can count on more than a year before this case shows up on the calendar. That's lots of time to get new evidence, and if even a little DNA shows up, then that will narrow the possibilities instantly, and at least logarithmically. There are so many DNA combinations that almost any substantive DNA result will be more unlikely than "merely" 10 to the 500th power. So, sure, right now, your evidence is consistent with too many possibilities. But one DNA discovery will blow nearly all, or all, of those possibilities away. Additionally, suppose you find 10 pieces of more ordinary evidence that are compatible with only one in a thousand of the suspects that haven't yet been ruled out by blood type. Barring codependent variables, that's 10,000 of your 500 zeros gone into the ether... in other words, this sort of evidence will eliminate possibilities logarithmically, also. In other words, for investigators contemplating possibilities, 10 to the 500th just isn't as large a number as it is for, say, the average price-sensitive shopper.
Just then your assistant says, "Hey, our LHC - the Large Heuristic Collator is supposed to start up this year! It data mines way more than our current databases. Just one or two discoveries there, could knock out nearly all of those other supposed suspects - or all of them, if we've got the wrong guy." Now things don't look so hopeless.
The Large Hadron Collider might do something similar to, or for, String Theorists; knocking out all but one of their models, or all of their models. According to Woit, just one unexpected new particle within the energy range of the LHC and String Theorists will be mighty short of zeros in that exponent, very quickly, since none of their possible theories will be compatible with such a particle. Still, it's not logically impossible (actually some sever critics say the theory is already inconsistent, I believe) that other LHC results, will narrow the window and do so in a way that remains consistent with M-theory and 10 to the 500th will be history, replaced by 1000, 100, or 1 (or zero). Woit demurs, at least in part, saying that in the case of the search for superpartners that they've already hedged their bets with the anthropic principle, and have an explanation at hand for every result.
Woit's claim of hedging brings up the real worry, it seems to me: which is whether 10 to the 500th in fact represents the last kludge, or the last epicycle. Is 10 to the 500th in truth just the tiniest tip of the iceberg of what malleable multi-dimensional math can be patched up to provide (pardon the aglomeration of alliteration, there), once string theorists are more motivated to expand their horizons?
If the latter, then what string theorists have been developing is "merely" a language in which some future theory could be expressed. Woit would then be correct to say that it's no more a theory than calculus, by itself, is a physical theory. Now, such research is not necessarily useless, by any means (although its application might turn out to be far removed from particle physics.) Developing a language in advance of need is, however, surely no reason to crimp anybody else's funding, much less everybody else's funding - particularly anybody trying to develop an actual theory, you know, with predictions and stuff. If Woit is right about the irrelevance of the LHC for string theorists (so long as the standard theory isn't equally embarrassed, I take it), then given the expense involved in creating collisions that are orders of power more energetic, perhaps a moratorium on spending in "language development" for at least a few decades is in order.
From my uninformed viewpoint, string theory might still be a winner. Someone knowing calculus before Liebnitz or Newton might have a hunch that it could describe planetary orbits and reasonably start groping around for a relationship or constant to plug in that might pop out some elliptical orbits. This may even be roughly what Newton and Hooke did, in fact. (According to Hooke) when a particular possibility for the attraction between masses (inverse square of distance) was mentioned to Newton by Hooke (who may have already proved the consistency of an inverse square law with circular orbits), Newton had in hand the mathematical language to prove that that specific relationship fit the elliptical evidence Kepler and Tycho had previously provided. Newton also claimed at the time that he had already previously proved this result for ellipses and an inverse square law: but his papers did not contain such a work or any notes concerning it, whereas a discussion between Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley about whether the inverse square law would produce elliptical orbits took place in 1684, two years before Newton published the Principia. The interesting possibility is that, whether or not he had anticipated Hooke, Newton's preeminence today may be a direct result of his spending considerable time researching the language with which future theories might be expressed, rather than trying to charge ahead to next discovery with the mathematical tools already developed, or pressing ahead with experiments not much different than those already published. If string theorists have done the same, that may not be all bad. Given the cost of each new generation of cyclotron, it may even be inevitable. During the nineteen twenties, Russian filmakers had no film. Year after year, they could only sit around and discuss what future films might be like, and the techniques they could employ - in other words, all that they could do was to invent the next language of film. As "Battleship Potemkin" showed, they succeeded wonderfully in this, and turned out not to be "useless eaters" [if the reader will pardon that Nazi-era phrase] after all.
Other places to peruse re this topic:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2006/08/lee-smolins-trouble-with-physics.html
'Theory of everything' tying researchers up in knots
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/14/MNGRMBOURE1.DTL
Woit's blog:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Mold. I've been nailed by mold.
A word to the wise, from the unwise!
I've suffered from a year of terrible health - and in particular terrible sleep - since moving into my present apartment. Turns out the place was flooded and the previous resident probably turfed out for that reason.
I should have known before I moved in. The rug was wrinkled (and still is) as if it was just a bit too big for the floor. Sure sign of a flood, but I'm from semiarid country originally and I wasn't familiar with such things. Plus a specifically asked about the musty smell and the (non-profit!) landlord insisted that that was just the rug cleaner. It wasn't. The rug is very old, but it wasn't removed, much less a proper remediation done. I even asked about whether formaldehyde might be causing my symptoms, but the building manager denied that and kept firmly clammed up. There was no problem and they weren't going to do anything. A letter from my doctor asking them to move me left them utterly cold. No way no way no how were they going to do anything - including mention that they knew perfectly well what the real problem was, and it's impossible to believe they didn't know. Why do non-profits uniformly, given enough time, become somewhat more evil than other sorts of institutions (look up the history of HIV and the Red Cross, or that of any communist state) - "because they can", that's why. (Clinton's reason.) That is to say, there's no mechanism for removing nasty non-profits, no equivalent of bankruptcy (moral bankruptcy laws for non-profits, anyone?)
As for my being naive: because I'm more used to living in near-desert conditions, I had no idea how many steps needed to be taken to keep humidity low in a rain-forest-like climate. I like to soak beans overnight and then boil them for hours, to reduce the lectins, for example. But it never occurred to me to put the smoke-hood fan on, then. Hey, nothing was on fire.
The result of a little extra humidity triggering a huge preexisting mold condition? Horrible sinusitis causing asthma causing apnea causing a whole lot of seizures and boatloads muscle pain. Large doses of creatine controlled the seizures, but I still wasn't sleeping more than an hour at a time, with many hours awake in between, most nights. (Plus the productive cough, watery eyes, headaches, etc that mold typically produces.)
The good news is that mold isn't that scary - it triggers one's immune system (an allergic effect) and therefore the sinusitis etc; but there are no literally toxic effects. Keep the humidity way down so that mold growth is all but stopped and you may be okay in the same place. (If it's caused by condensation in the outside walls that's beyond your control and you can only move or remodel however.)
So here's hoping a new chapter of life begins... soon, I'm sure hoping...
Some good mold links:
http://www.epa.gov/mold/moldguide.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold_growth,_assessment,_and_remediation
http://www.mouldfacts.ca/blog/2007/04/mold-symptoms.html
I've suffered from a year of terrible health - and in particular terrible sleep - since moving into my present apartment. Turns out the place was flooded and the previous resident probably turfed out for that reason.
I should have known before I moved in. The rug was wrinkled (and still is) as if it was just a bit too big for the floor. Sure sign of a flood, but I'm from semiarid country originally and I wasn't familiar with such things. Plus a specifically asked about the musty smell and the (non-profit!) landlord insisted that that was just the rug cleaner. It wasn't. The rug is very old, but it wasn't removed, much less a proper remediation done. I even asked about whether formaldehyde might be causing my symptoms, but the building manager denied that and kept firmly clammed up. There was no problem and they weren't going to do anything. A letter from my doctor asking them to move me left them utterly cold. No way no way no how were they going to do anything - including mention that they knew perfectly well what the real problem was, and it's impossible to believe they didn't know. Why do non-profits uniformly, given enough time, become somewhat more evil than other sorts of institutions (look up the history of HIV and the Red Cross, or that of any communist state) - "because they can", that's why. (Clinton's reason.) That is to say, there's no mechanism for removing nasty non-profits, no equivalent of bankruptcy (moral bankruptcy laws for non-profits, anyone?)
As for my being naive: because I'm more used to living in near-desert conditions, I had no idea how many steps needed to be taken to keep humidity low in a rain-forest-like climate. I like to soak beans overnight and then boil them for hours, to reduce the lectins, for example. But it never occurred to me to put the smoke-hood fan on, then. Hey, nothing was on fire.
The result of a little extra humidity triggering a huge preexisting mold condition? Horrible sinusitis causing asthma causing apnea causing a whole lot of seizures and boatloads muscle pain. Large doses of creatine controlled the seizures, but I still wasn't sleeping more than an hour at a time, with many hours awake in between, most nights. (Plus the productive cough, watery eyes, headaches, etc that mold typically produces.)
The good news is that mold isn't that scary - it triggers one's immune system (an allergic effect) and therefore the sinusitis etc; but there are no literally toxic effects. Keep the humidity way down so that mold growth is all but stopped and you may be okay in the same place. (If it's caused by condensation in the outside walls that's beyond your control and you can only move or remodel however.)
So here's hoping a new chapter of life begins... soon, I'm sure hoping...
Some good mold links:
http://www.epa.gov/mold/moldguide.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold_growth,_assessment,_and_remediation
http://www.mouldfacts.ca/blog/2007/04/mold-symptoms.html
Friday, September 19, 2008
Graft and War, the Eternal Couple
"The 101st had seldom been in a rest area. What the men saw there made them wonder how any supplies ever reached the front line. Twice in Haguenau they had received a beer ration of three bottles each. The cigarettes they got were Chelseas or Raleighs, much despised. No soap, an occasional package of gum, once some toothpaste - except for C and K rations and ammunition, that was all that reached the front lines. Being near a supply depot in the rear, the men learned why. The port battalions unloading the ships coming from America got their cut, the railroad battalions helped themselves to Milky Way candy bars and cases of Schlitz beer, chalking it up to "breakage," the truck drivers took the cartons of Lucky Strikes (by far the favorite brand), and by the time division quartermaster and regimental and battalion S-4 skimmed off the best of what was left, the riflemen on the front line were fortunate to get C rations and Raleigh cigarettes."
p321 Band of Brothers; E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest
by Stephen Ambrose
p321 Band of Brothers; E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest
by Stephen Ambrose
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Dynamic Story Sorting
Seems there's nothing that can't be patented these days including "page up"... but just in case somebody later on tries to make this minor suggestion their own private property (like so many other things)...
(email to news organization/publisher Sept 4, 2008)
"I didn't remember this queue notice or I wouldn't have asked re the delay in publishing my recent articles. The delay does mean that I will tend to publish somewhat time-sensitive articles (ie anything based on recent studies) elsewhere, however.
But I do have a suggestion - I apologize, since it's a bit rude to suggest work others might do, particularly programming, still...
Someday, maybe go to a dynamic two-tier system, as is found on other news sites, where people can click for more articles from a given day, and make it so that articles are tracked so that the most popular "hidden" articles are swapped with less-clicked articles on the front page, as the day goes on and stats accumulate. Come to think of it, for all I know, this last might be a patentable suggestion. I'll publish it on my blog.
Thanks for listening to what might be an impertinence....
(email to news organization/publisher Sept 4, 2008)
"I didn't remember this queue notice or I wouldn't have asked re the delay in publishing my recent articles. The delay does mean that I will tend to publish somewhat time-sensitive articles (ie anything based on recent studies) elsewhere, however.
But I do have a suggestion - I apologize, since it's a bit rude to suggest work others might do, particularly programming, still...
Someday, maybe go to a dynamic two-tier system, as is found on other news sites, where people can click for more articles from a given day, and make it so that articles are tracked so that the most popular "hidden" articles are swapped with less-clicked articles on the front page, as the day goes on and stats accumulate. Come to think of it, for all I know, this last might be a patentable suggestion. I'll publish it on my blog.
Thanks for listening to what might be an impertinence....
