A Civilization Built on Sand

         The familiar metaphor that one should place the foundation of a house upon a rock rather than sand is usually used in reference to religions but it also applies to modern technology.  The, so called, civilized world of man began with the use of stone tools, weapons and building  materials, advanced with the addition of bronze implements and weapons, took another step into the age of iron and steel, and with the help of mortar and concrete, has brought us to our present state of solid roads and structures all carefully placed on solid foundations. Unfortunately we found a secondary use for sand that may be making our modern civilized world fragile in spite of it's apparent solidity.. 
     Silica, (sand), is the second most common element on Earth and we have used it as an abrasive, have turned it into glass, and combine it with many other elements to our advantage. Very recently we discovered another use for silica. By turning it into tiny chips we can use sand to store and process information, allowing us to create thinking self directed machines. The stuff we let our children play in and walk on next to ocean waves now has a memory, lands airplanes, directs factory robots, guides bombs, directs the flow of electricity to our factories, monitors our water distribution systems, provides vendors and wholesalers the tools that keep track of sales and inventory, is integral to Wall Street and every other world stock exchange and is central to our communications and navigation. We have replaced direct control of nearly every essential operation of our complex civilization with chips of sand and become dependent on their reliability. We have created a fragile interface between ourselves and the systems that sustain us. In just a few decades we have replaced a civilization built on rock and steel with human hands on the levers of control to a civilization built on sand susceptible to gamma ray bursts and computer virus.
     When sand shifts under the foundation of a building the building sinks and the foundation cracks but, with the exception of an earth quake, a sinking building seldom effects a neighboring building. Our new silica chip civilization however is networked into interlocking operations communicating with individuals and each other and a crack in one foundation quickly spreads. Some of this is accidental as was the case of the great power grid failure in 2002 and some is intentional as in the case of the Iranian nuclear development center computer crash in 2010. The most dangerous of these was the Iranian incident. Even though shielded and isolated from the Internet the security of the computer systems running the uranium enrichment program crashed when a powerful virus designed to interrupt program directives for complex machine operations was introduced internally by the insertion of a simple thumb drive. What makes this incident noteworthy is that the destructive virus escaped the secure facility and has since infected thousands of critical operations in many sectors.
     The implications of these incidents and many others should make it clear that our advanced technologically based civilization, dependent on traces for electron movements etched in silica chips and continuous communications, has moved the foundation of human survival onto soft ground.
Ironically, it may be the inherent uncertainty of the quantum world that moves us back to a rock solid foundation as quantum computing makes intrusions and errors nearly impossible.

Militant Evangelism

       To be an evangelical one needs to have been made privy to a truth, a truth that is self evident and beyond question. These absolute truths can be religious revelations, ideological constructs,  narcissistic impositions, or simply an elaborate falsehood designed to seduce large numbers of people to a cause. Nearly all evangelical efforts are based on an emotional appeal and are made directly
to individuals from the pulpit, in a conversation or on social media by tapping into latent paranoia or hatreds, or by promising a reward.
      Evangelical causes vary from the acceptance of Gods or Prophets, methods of worship or ritual, the proper relationship of a subject to a pharaoh, king or dictator, the economics of nation states, the state verses individual freedoms, correct moral behavior and many more. All start by drawing a line in the sand separating a cause from those who either reject the evangelical beliefs or who have not yet been informed and recruited.
      Evangelism can be Passive; as exemplified by the Gideon's placing Bibles in every hotel and motel room, Direct; as exemplified by Mormon youth knocking on doors and leaving pamphlets, or Confrontational; as exemplified by the Crusades, and now by ISIL. There are sixty thousand evangelical Christians in the United States and over thirty thousand militant Muslim extremist now engaged in an effort to convert the world to their absolute truths their capsulized perspectives and their narrow views.
      Militant evangelism takes place at small and large scales. The bombing of abortion clinics and murder of abortion workers is extreme evangelism using elimination and intimidation to change society to fit within their circle of beliefs. The Crusades, using the recovery of holy relics as an excuse, eliminated an entire civilization of "non believers".  Shiites kill Sunnies over minor differences as have Catholics and Protestants. I personally have been attacked by a frustrated Baptist evangelist with a machete when I refused his gift of eternal life and his demand that I commit to his beliefs. Militant evangelism recruits and controls a following by promoting paranoia and hate using emotionally charged words and measured interpretations of ancient "holy" writings and by limiting information and narrowly focusing educational curricula.
      Evangelistic movements solicit funding by appealing to basic tribal emotions, once of value in a pre-civilized world but now a dangerous vestige of evolution out of sync with nation states and a global economy. There are many potential donors and recruits among those who feel displaced by technology and society and these individuals are easy prey. A cause that reinforces their paranoia and justifies their hate,and simplifies the complex modern world of science and technology by substituting the word of god or ancient prophets empowers them and has great appeal. Give them a gun to make them feel even more powerful and surround them other like minded recruits and you have an army. Use funding from evangelistic groups to select and support political candidates with extreme views and render rational deliberative government bodies impotent.
      Even if one of these extreme militant evangelistic movements were to succeed, it would soon splinter and the new norm established would be confronted by another extreme cause. Those who hope to save us from ourselves may be the most dangerous among us.

Some Amazing Things About Language

    While having a cup of coffee at Starbucks recently a young man next to me carefully marked his place in the book he was reading and commented that the written word was amazing and that it had saved him. Trying to be kind, but at the same time avoid what was probably going to be a self indulgent disclosure of some tragic event in his life, I responded with a noncommittal,
    "That's good, I'm happy for you."
   Unfortunately he was not put off, and as he told me about his past drug addiction and jail time he pushed the book he had been reading closer and I could see it was a Bible. He finished his story by commenting again on the amazing power of the written word and waited for me to open the door for his chance to save my soul.
     Now, I respect others perspectives and religious beliefs, but having been subjected to hundreds of pitches to join everything from multi-level marketing efforts promising quick riches, to evangelical recruitments promising eternal life, I have become dubious about conversations like the one the young man was trying to initiate. The amazing power of the word he was talking about was the word of God, but the actual words he was referring to were the result of writings by many individuals spread over six hundred years and translated from Greek and Aramaic into hundreds of other languages over nearly two thousand years and the words that were now setting on a small table next to me at Starbucks.
     The young man obviously found the book amazing because, for him, it was a kind of magical code for behavior and salvation, I found the book amazing because it exemplified the human trick of coding meaningful speech sounds into visual symbols that no longer drifted away in the wind but lasted through time for future humans to scan with their eyes and re-translate into meaningful sounds. To me the miracle of the book he was pushing at me was not God talking to people but the ability of humans to speak to other humans in the future, an amazing quality of all books.
     As I pondered the many amazing things about communications between plants, animals and humans I remained silent and the young man, fearing he had lost the opportunity to fulfill his obligation to save my soul, repeated his opening statement loudly hoping to interrupt my reverie. This time his loud and insistent announcement that, ' the word was an amazing thing', got the attention of many others enjoying coffee and a quiet conversation. He was now holding up the Bible and I was suddenly on center stage at Starbucks being threatened with a Holy book by a militant evangelist.
      "Admit it," he repeated. "The word of God is amazing."
Without thinking I responded in an equally loud voice.
     "What's amazing is that we can exchange complex ideas by vibrating the air between us"
There was a smattering of applause and laughter from other customers and the young man pulled his book back, opened it to his marked place as if looking for the ultimate proof needed to force his religion on me, and went silent. Soon after he closed his magical book without having turned a page and left the coffee shop without vibrating any air between us.
      Other than the few who have attacked me with weapons when I resisted their attempts to save my soul, I hold no ill feelings toward those who feel compelled to bring everyone into their circle of beliefs and thank the young man at Starbucks for prompting me to examine language and communications from a new perspective. Nearly all living things communicate in some way or another and some leave traces, visual and scent, to be read by others in the future but only humans leave complex ideas and thoughts in electronic and graphic forms for other humans to open and read in the future. This nifty trick makes civilization possible and indeed amazing. A month from now I can return and read what I have just written and will be listening to my own voice from the past. "Amazing". I can also go to the library, walk between the racks and touch thousands of books waiting to be opened releasing the voices, ideas and wisdom of authors long dead. "Amazing".             

The Me/We equation

     Humans are social animals. They live in groups and depend upon one another for protection and physical and emotional support. Alone we aren't much of a match for Nature but as cooperative collections of individuals humans rule the planet. Human success is due in large part to their language capacity which allows them to share complex ideas and imagine things no one has experienced. The complexity of their language also absorbs natural orders of things hidden in Nature and allows the naming of reoccurring events increasing their predictive powers and expanding their scope of awareness. Beyond their articulate tongue, humans possess an opposable thumb and walk upright with hands free to use the tools their language and their inventiveness leads them to fashion. Humans name each other, and the tribes to which they belong, and as with all social animals they differentiate between their personal needs and the needs of the pack. Like all social animals living in mutually supportive groups they also establish relationships, position and rules, and establish a relative balance between their personal needs and the needs of the tribe. This balance between the individual and the group is the "Me/We" equation.
     The "Me/We" equation is weighted and balanced by circumstance but is perpetuated and observed as a matter of perception and is sustained by the acquiescence of the individuals within the group. Nearly all ancient societies were weighted heavily in favor of the "We" side of the equation. Individuals thought of themselves as subservient to the ordered society around them and were sustained by myth and sometimes tyrannical rule, and marched in step without complaint. Order was imposed and maintained partly by fear of punishment but also by the feeling of security afforded by being a part of a greater and protective whole. The Roman Empire was expanded by force but persisted by being all inclusive and making certain all of it's citizens benefited by being under Roman rule. The "We" perception was weighted heavily against the "Me" for most of human history and has provided the glue that allowed empires to persist for centuries.
     A few thousand years ago, however, a "Me" message began to take hold that, for good or ill, has tilted the equation toward "Me" as being equally or more important than "We" and we have been struggling with this shifting balance ever since. One can establish numerical values and assign them to the "Me/We" equation for periods of recent history and to Kingdoms and Nation states. 8Me=2We, (or the State is four times as important as the individual), might describe communism under Stalin for example, but I will leave that fruitless task to others and use the concept of a "Me/We" equation only as critical thinking tool that can be used to shed light on many of our current organizations and political views and to point out that religion has added an additional variable to the equation, "The Other Me" or "OMe".
     The "Other Me" is the concept that beyond ones perception of their responsibility to their tribe, and themselves is another "Me" called their soul that is responsible not to their tribe, (unless the leader or Emperor is a god},  but to an all seeing God that will save all "OMe" believers from death and reward or punish them according to how well they have obeyed the precepts of their religion. We now have a "Me/We" equation that looks like this "OMe = Me + We".  To balance this equation the "OMe" must always outweigh the sum of ones allegiance to both self and tribe.
     One can apply the equation to one's self for a self evaluation, to another persons perception of their status with regard to the strength of their allegiances, to an organization, a political party, a terrorist group or a nation state, not as a clear measure of the truth but as an illuminating exercise in critical thinking.
    
    
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Protesting, Obstructing, and Stalking; There is a difference

 

  There are many social issues that divide people along ideological lines; labor vs. management, industry vs. environmentalists, resource consumption vs. conservation. Confrontations between opposing opinions and purposes take many forms. Approached logically, in person, in legislative bodies, or in courts of law, compromises can sometimes be reached, but logical debate requires an unemotional exchange of information which isn't always possible. Confrontations over social issues can take the form of peaceful protests, obstruction, intimidation, stalking and violence.
Laws do not effectively differentiate between various forms of ideological conflicts in a free societies for fear of trampling on a citizens right to free speech, but in more despotic forms of government protests are dealt with swiftly and sometimes with deadly force.
   Free speech is an essential element of our democracy and guaranteed by our constitution but there are limits. Slander is not allowed. Creating panic without due cause is not allowed. Likewise certain activities used as a means to voice an objection or opinion are not allowed. One cannot jamb up a revolving door to a department store because they sell perfume tested on animals, or drop stink bombs onto a construction site because homes are being displaced.
   But striking workers can recruit surrogates to parade up and down sidewalks with ready made signs protesting low wages or safety issues, war protestors can infiltrate funerals for fallen soldiers, religious protestors can interfere in gay right activities or block access to abortion clinics and neo Nazis can parade with anti-Semite signs and banners and, as long as these activities are infrequent and of short duration they are tolerated.
    But there is one ongoing protest that has lasted for decades and is an every day occurrence carried out by the same few individuals who claim their right to free speech excludes restriction because their message is from God, and they are therefore free to continually harass, intimidate, threaten and sometimes harm or even kill with impunity. Their message is an emotional distortion of the reality they protest against and they justify their actions through assumed religious truths and pseudo science. Clergy, politicians and lawmakers cower and try to avoid their virulent activities because this small group has succeeded in drawing the line between what they believe and any modified or alternate view so narrowly that any non committal or reasonable stance identifies the moderate as outside the community of a true believer and therefore a non Christian.
   These same militant few are often treated with kid gloves by police and  prosecutors because they revel in any attempt to control their activities as a chance to proclaim themselves and their obstructionist cause as being the victim of state interference in religion. Any other continuing protest activity lasting decades and involving stalking, personal threats, invasions of privacy, bombings and killings by a small group of militant evangelists would have labeled them terrorists and been dealt with swiftly, but these few radicals have intimidated our leaders and infiltrated government agencies, not to serve the people but to serve  a single obstructionist cause. They succeed because their voices are loud and threatening, not because they understand or are compassionate. They persist because they have used their single issue to divide our society into believers and non believers and because of this created a state of avoidance. Ignore them and they will never go away. They have even corrupted our language. Before their decades long campaign of intimidation the word 'choice' had a good connotation. It was at the core of our democracy and morality. Now the word has been turned into a single evil option that cannot be used without their agenda ringing in our ears.
     I would urge every one partially seduced by their rhetoric to go unannounced to one of their protests and pretend you are violating their barrier, or just stand aside and observe. These people are infiltrating your government and slowly usurping your rights, not just as it pertains to their cause but many more. The intensity of one's beliefs does not make them any more or less true and this type of militant evangelism is potentially as dangerous as any radical religion.
    I would ask those that enforce the law to apply it equally to these obstructionists. A thirty year reign of intimidation and stalking is not a peaceful protest. I would urge the rational clergy to disclaim these religious intimidators and allow others with different beliefs to exist in peace. If you ignore them you condone their approach and will eventually draw their militancy into your churches. We have had enough religious wars and the deeper you draw the line in the sand between those who pray and those who don't, the less likely anyone seeking the refuge you offer from reality will cross the line.
  


 

Between The Past and The Future

     We treat time as the fourth dimension and divide it into three categories; (Past, Present, and Future) and then cut it into many pieces we call durations;  Attoseconds, Seconds, Days, Hours, Light Years, (and many more), and use these as units of comparison to measure movement, to order events, to control our technology and much of our lives. We treat time as a real thing, something we can save, use, and spend. In a practical sense, with our awareness focused on ourselves in everyday activities, this perspective makes sense, but our scientific investigations have created a very different view of time, one that goes well beyond the cyclical events of our planet spinning on it's axis as it circles the sun.
     Our tools of discovery have become ever more sophisticated and as we look deeper into space and deeper into the structure of matter, time takes on new dimensions. Our macro discoveries have forced us to expand our durational units to cover periods many times larger than our practical units and our micro discoveries have forced us to chop our practical units of time into bits so small we need negative exponents to represent them. We have also discovered that time is not a universal constant but a variable and find this so disconcerting that we cling to old perspectives in many of the formulae we use to describe our new findings. The past now extends back beyond human history, more than 13 billion years to the beginning of the universe, and the forecast future extends forward in equally incomprehensible measure.
    But what of the present? Is it also a variable? Is our "Now" different from "Now" in other places, and how wide is the present? How much time exists between the past and the future? As I type, I tap every key in the present but the last letter I typed is now in the past and the letter I am about to type is in the future. Is the present wide enough to encompass my entire typing session? Is it wider, or could it be much narrower? Our awareness is a survival adaptation of sensory organs and synaptic functions that allow us to sense conditions and activities around us and use our bodies, to react appropriately. Reflexes are built in for nearly instant reactions and instincts are genetically hard wired for reactions to more complex situations, but life has also developed the synaptic survival trick of recording events from past events and carrying these recordings into new present situations for use as needed. Living forms record bits of the past that are significant in a genetic library written in an amino acid alphabet of A, C, G,T, and an even more complex analog library written in electro chemical synaptic connections. The analog library collects data through sensory organs and when the brain is in a collection mode we perceive the activity as the present and when the brain is in a retrieval mode we perceive the activity as the past. We sense only a small part of the reality around us because of the limitations of our sensory organs just as we perceive time within the limits of our own synaptic functions. Our pace of awareness determines our perception of time including both the duration of the present and the division between the present and the past. But we have significantly augmented our sensory capabilities with technology and have used our technologically augmented synaptic capabilities to store more of the past and to explore more of the reality around us. We now know that the universe is exponentially more diverse and complex than we thought and are re-evaluating our concepts and perspectives to accommodate our growing augmented synaptic library. But some old perspectives are difficult to abandon, especially our concept of time as a real thing, a fourth dimension.
     Leading us to our new perspectives has been a series of experiments and discoveries. When light is shined on a metal the metal emits electrons and we discovered that the intensity of light doesn't affect the results, but when we altered the wavelength and the frequency of light we concluded that when the wavelength of light is increased the frequency decreases and vice versa. When one increases the other decreases an equal amount leading us to a constant. When wavelength and frequency are multiplied together we discovered a constant of: (3.0 x 10 to the 8th power meters per second). (this constant also happens to be the speed of light in a vacuum). We also discovered that an atom energized by light accepts the energy and subsequently gives it back in packaged amounts, which led us to postulate discrete electron orbital energy levels and eventually relativity, the uncertainty principle, plank limits, quantum theory and a theory joining all the basic forces of nature, (except gravity).
     We have gone far beyond our survival adaptive uses of our senses, reflexes, instincts, and synaptic capacity and ventured into the basic secrets of our surroundings, exploring with extreme tools a universe of controlled chaos ruled by probability and as we search for its largest patterns in outer space we also search for its smallest units in inner space. After combining the gravitational constant, (G), the relativity constant, (c), and the quantum constant, (h) Max Plank arrived at a constant unit of length, the smallest of which, (one plank length) is the smallest distance a photon of light can travel across at the speed of light in a vacuum. Anything smaller and the unit becomes dimensionless and our wavelength/frequency constant becomes an infinity that swallows the photon. Likewise a plank unit of time, (5.4 x 10 to the negative 44th power- seconds) is the smallest unit of time possible before physical laws fail and this limit is thought to have implications for quantum gravity, (yet to be reconciled with other forces) and has led to string theory, quantum loop theory and other extreme scientific reachings.
     Without capital letter credentials behind my name I am free to think outside the box risking only amusement by those with a deeper understanding. I am forced to think outside the box because my lack of fluency in the language of mathematics, (spoken inside the box), does not allow me access. Free of any fear of being embarrassed or discredited by any peers, I offer the following.

   (1) Matter motion and change don't require time any more than light requires a medium in which to travel. Changing relative positions conditions, temperatures or states, (be they the spin of a galaxy, the orbit of an electron, the death of a star or the joining of atoms to become molecules), require space and energy but not time. Time is an illusion created by an observer witnessing a record of motion and change that is recorded and carried into successive movements in quantum pulses which occur much to quickly to be observed.
     (3) The Universe exists only as a succession of plank units. A strobe lighted reality with a flicker rate far above our ability to observe.
    (4) Quantum uncertainty and action at a distance are the result of distortions as a jump to the next plank unit is made.
    (5) Information is passed from successive plank units to the next in unique arrangements of discrete packets describing energy, matter, congregations of matter, relative positions and relative motion  Slight transposition errors occasionally cause information to fragment and recombine in a hierarchy of evolving complexity that describes the motions and combinations of energy and matter that has evolved into the reality we now perceive.
   
    Our persistent use of the term (t), (time), in descriptive formulae we use to guide our experiments and discovery efforts may be misleading, even when it is not explicit, (as in the speed of light) (d/t). Replacing (t) with comparatives complicate our formulae but may lead us closer to not only reconciling gravity with t,he weak and strong forces, but also in reconciling Newtonian physics with Relativity and Quantum effects.

I will let someone else do the math.
    


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Describing Gravity

      from the time when pre- humans were still being bruised from falling out of trees we have been acutely aware of the force that tugs on us from below. Probably regarded as a spirit that pulled everything down to a lowest level it, along with other natural spirits living on mountains and in the clouds, was described by its effects. The gravitational spirit pulled rain from the clouds and pulled rocks and mud from the sides of mountains in an attempt to bring them down from a presumptive position of elevated self importance.  Mayan myths include an anti gravity below the Earth's surface where other people walked upside down and where the sun went when it set and, during the upright people's darkness, lighted the world below. Many other ancient myths describe gravity and it's effects in ways we may find naïve but linger on in our own experiences as a strange but familiar force.
     Modern science allows us to measure and describe gravitational effects in more detail but does not explain it. Newton, on a sabbatical from his studies at Oxford to escape the plague, developed a formalized description of gravity, a new mathematical concept, (the calculus), to calculate it's effects. He also solidified the concept of mass as a measure of the amount and density of material needed to produce a gravitational field of a certain strength. This mass/gravity equivalency is still at the core of the physical sciences, orbital calculations and cosmology even after being called into question by Einstein and the recent discovery of gravity without any apparent causal mass, (dark matter).
     The Mayans had the upside down people on the other side of a thin flat plane but were getting close to the truth. The persistent and unavoidable observations of a curved horizon hinted at a sphere and the Greeks, using shadow lengths taken at different latitudes, were able to calculate the size of the ball implied by the curved horizon. But persistent popular common sense opinions clung to a flat earth image with an edge which you could fall off if you sailed too far. Until astronomy advanced, and adventurers sailed beyond the horizon and returned did the full realization that we were stuck to a giant ball by a mysterious force called gravity become widespread and accepted.
     Newton's new math established the mass of the earth and it's gravitational field as a measure of acceleration as objects are pulled to earth from a height, and used this 32 feet per second/per second standard as a yardstick for measuring other massive objects in space by observing their orbits, but we still don't have an explanation, we only have a description and sometimes the description results in some very strange concepts.
     Newton's math describes why we can accelerate a satellite to 18,000 miles per hour and have it continually fall around the Earth instead of directly to the ground. It also allows us to calculate a speed, 25,000 miles per hour needed for the accumulated potential energy of a space probe's acceleration to exceed gravities potential to pull it back and escape into space beyond the Earths influence.
Strangely, Newton's math also describes a point of zero gravity at the center of the Earth and, if the world could be hollowed out, leaving only a thick crust, the surface people would still feel the effects of, (a reduced gravity), but people inside the hollow Earth would always be weightless, even when near the inside of the crust.
     With the advent of quantum theory gravity's description gets even more strange and as we smash the basic particles of matter together looking for clues inside cloud chambers we still don't have an explanation, only a more complicated and confusing description. Is the proton the source of gravity? It has mass but so do other sub atomic particles. Is gravity a by product of the strong force? Is it created by the gluons buzzing around and holding the quarks together inside the proton, and what about the Higgs particle. We are surrounded by and made up of mostly empty space. Empty space inside atoms and their constituents and between stars and galaxies, but gravity from dark matter and luminous matter continues to tug on itself at a distance and continues to shape the Universe and control how things move within it.
     We can describe gravity but still have no idea what it is. Maybe it is a spirit like our ancestors thought.