Mondovino

Saw a good movie yesterday, and just this once it's not a cheesy 50's rubber monster movie. Mondovino is a documentary about wine and the impact of globalization. It's not your usual film about wine, full of pathetic rich boomers prattling on about how they simply adore everything about Tuscany. You do encounter a few of 'em, but they come off looking like complete idiots and pretentious fools, as they should. A lot of global wine industry superstars come off looking that way. When you see negative comments about the film, it seems that much of the time they're from people offended by the unflattering portrayals of their personal prophets. It's true the movie doesn't pretend to be objective. It has a clear anti-globalist agenda, and wears its heart on its sleeve. While it's ostensibly about wine, it's really a critique of wider trends in the global economy, including the creeping homogenization and dumbing-down of consumer preferences (and therefore products) across the board. I tend to agree with this critique, although I do have to note in passing that in any other industry, if the product is basically unusable for the first 25 years after it's produced, it would be considered a serious defect, not a mark of quality.

One little quarrel is that the film does tend to romanticize the lives of small wine producers in France and Italy, so anyone who's inclined to see that as a sort of ideal existence will have this attitude reinforced.

I don't mean to go off on another round of boomer-bashing, but many of the "bad guys" in the film just happen to be affluent 50-something Americans. There's something really repulsive about rich middle-aged guys who describe themselves as revolutionaries, spouting canned references to Ralph Nader and Watergate-era journalism. Yeah, buddy, after all these years you're still a rebellious outsider exactly how? Riiiight. Also, I never want to hear the phrase "our generation" ever again. Woodstock is ancient history. Ancient, silly history.

I suppose if you aren't familiar with any history (or mythology) other than your own, everything will seem like a fresh, new discovery. You can waft about the vineyards of the Mediterranean region, flaunting your money, drinking a great deal, and generally living the life of an artistic, cultured dilettante. You can go about thinking you've stumbled on a heretofore-undiscovered idyllic rural utopia that exists apart from the "modern world". You can babble on about how the light is somehow different than anywhere else on earth. You can fill entire books about how it's all so incredibly profound, which primarily means that life moves slower, and the food's pretty good. You can do all of these things, and genuinely think you're the first "generation" to ever encounter such wonders. It helps not to be aware that rich people from northern Europe have been making this same pilgrimage for centuries now. They were idiots too, but a few of them actually knew how to paint. Oh, and then there's the people who actually live there, all of whom do, in fact, live in the modern world. Some even have cell phones. How shocking!

It strikes me that the same people who swoon over rural life in Tuscany or Provence would probably cross the street to avoid meeting farmers in their home countries. Someone who'd be considered merely "rustic" overseas becomes a hopeless ingorant redneck here at home. Small towns where everyone knows everyone else's business and everyone goes to church are picturesque just so long as they're beyond our borders, otherwise they're creepy and full of hidden evil. Deeply religious and superstitious rural Italians who go on and on about the "evil eye" are charming, but when rural people here are similarly religious and superstitious, it evokes a visceral horror among the sophisticated set. Mediterranean poverty's explained away as people simply "living just as they did centuries ago", but the same thing in Appalachia marks people as poor white trash. When was the last time you saw someone heap praise on Nebraska as a utopian land of simple folk who live in joyous, perfect harmony with the seasons?

And certainly nobody ever asks the Tuscans how they feel about their region being progressively carved up for foreigners' hobby farms and turned into a sort of agrarian theme park. Welcome to Tuscanyland, the Yuppiest Place on Earth!

But enough about that. One other distinguishing characteristic of Mondovino's baddies is that nearly all of them wear polo shirts, and the good guys don't. It's like how you can always tell the bad guy in an old western because he's wearing a black hat. Before now, I really didn't think French men ever willingly wore polo shirts, but a few of them do, the same men whose French is peppered with English terms like "marketing" and "product strategy". Yikes! This is one area where the wine world has a lot in common with the computer industry. The bad guys always wear polo shirts, preferably with corporate logos on them. It's the true IT mark of the beast, the real world equivalent to "pointy hair". However, the issue's muddied a bit by the fact that geeks who don't know how to shop for themselves also wear polo shirts, or any other corporate schwag they can get for free. Give 'em corporate logo kilts instead, and they'll wear those to work.

The good guys, on the other hand, have dogs. Some of the bad guys have dogs, too, but they seem listless and unhappy compared to the good guys' happy and charismatic dogs. Dogs get a lot of screen time. I imagine they're intended to be "telling details" about the lives of the people being depicted, but it also seems pretty clear that the filmmakers just really like dogs a lot, too. Even the world's surliest French bulldog.

So anyway, all ranting aside, I highly recommend the movie. Netflix carries it, but your local chain video store probably won't. If you're like me, and you like wine but find "wine people" appalling, I think you'll enjoy it.

SuperHyperRedux

Some followup notes about my recent math-heavy Hercules vs. Hydra post. If you didn't find that one very interesting, this one will definitely bore you to tears.

• Here's a link I ought to have included, giving an explanation of Goodstein Sequences, the basic idea behind the Hydra problem.
  
• A point I don't think I made sufficiently clear in that post is that, while the basic notion of using hierarchies of functions to define ordinals is widely shared, the higher up you go the less agreement there is on what hierarchies ought to look like. There's no one natural or universally accepted representation, at least not one that's been identified to date. Veblen's phi hierarchy, introduced back in 1908, seems to have attracted general use anymore, but there's no reason you couldn't ignore it entirely and define your own equally valid representation if it suits your needs better. This recent paper discusses a number of concerns, including the ongoing problem of "proper" ordinal notation. As you can see in that paper, the state of the art as of ten years ago was well beyond anything I mentioned in that previous post. I'll try to fill that gap if I ever get a better handle on the material. Right now it's Greek to me. One interesting tidbit is that some recent notational innovations go beyond the existing trick of using 'big' ordinals (w1/Omega/aleph-1 and larger) to help describe "normal", countable ordinals (generally beyond Gamma_0), which makes some mathematicians uneasy, or at least they find the practice unsatisfying. I think the justification has something to do with the big ordinals merely being indexes into the hierarchy of functions, and not being part of the functions themselves. I think. Regardless, the state of the art moves beyond alephs into the land of large cardinals, up to at least supercompact cardinals. Which is pretty damn big, if you ask me.
  
• I'd intended to spend some time pondering the relationship (if any) between ordinals and hyperreal numbers in that post, and just didn't get to it. It's not a topic I've seen a lot of discussion about, although here's a somewhat recent Usenet thread discussing the idea. I think for the most part it just doesn't come up in the course of normal mathematical work. If you're using hyperreals, you don't really need or care about ordinals, and vice versa, so positing any relationship between the two would just be unnecessary.
  
  To me, things would seem generally nicer and tidier if you could regard the countable ordinals as a subset of the hyperreals, for example. Or more precisely, as a subset of the hypernaturals, themselves a subset of the hyperreals. Identifying the sequence (1,2,3,...,n,...) with the ordinal omega (denoted here by 'w') doesn't seem like that big of a stretch. Venturing off to one side for a moment, the surreal numbers are intended to be all-encompassing, and it's been stated that the surreals include the class of all ordinals, plus the set of hyperreals, with the surreal number (1,2,3,...|) being explicitly identified as 'w'. Surreals and hyperreals are similar enough that it seems logical (to me) to identify the surreal 'w' with the hypernatural (1,2,3...n...), and call it 'w' as well. Further, you could identify the sequence f(n) = (a_1,a_2,a_3,...) as f(w), so that n+1 = (2,3,4,...) = w+1, n^2 = (1,4,9,16,25...) = w^2, n^^n = epsilon_0, and so forth.
  
  So you could do this, but let's take a step back and merely argue that ordinals and hypernaturals look pretty similar in a lot of ways, so that there may be interesting ideas to carry back and forth between them. This is because they aren't exactly the same, and you run into a few rough edges if you try to fit them together.
  
  Recall that arithmetic works differently on hyperreals than it does on ordinals, and then there's a third arithmetic for cardinal numbers. And further, IIRC arithmetic on surreals isn't quite the same as arithmetic on hyperreals, either. One could take the position that these are merely three different views of the same object, expressing various properties that happen to coincide and give the same answers so long as we limit ourselves to finite numbers. Because of this difference, there are several kinds of hyperreal that aren't also ordinals. Obviously infinitesimals are out (no 1/w), as are any non-"integers" (no w+pi). 2^w and w!, in hyperreal terms, both define "integers" that aren't also ordinals, since in ordinal terms both expressions are equal to 'w'. No such thing as a negative ordinal, either. And infinite numbers less than 'w' are right out, like w-1. Meanwhile, the ordinals stretch far, far past w1, the first uncountable ordinal, which appears to be the upper bound on the usual realm of hyperreals, which is why I'm limiting the discussion to countable ordinals.
  
  A correspondence like this does let you ask some (possibly) interesting questions, like what hyperreal sequence, in other words what function from N to N, would correspond to Gamma_0, or various other 'large' ordinals. And going the other way, one of the common objects of study in the area of function hierarchies is the so-called "slow growing hierarchy", where G_0(n) = n+1, G_m+1(n) = G_m(n)+1. Clearly, if you can increment by less than 1, you can get a hierarchy that increases much more slowly, even infinitesimally if you like, say G_0(n) = n + 1/n, G_m+1(n) = G_m(n)+ 1/G_m(n), so that I suppose you'd eventually get w+1/w, w^w+(1/w^w), Gamma_0+(1/Gamma_0), etc., unless perhaps that hierarchy converges to a limit somewhere. Either way, I don't know how useful it would really be.
  
  Also, it's possible everything I just said is complete nonsense.
  
• On a different note, I've finally managed to piece together part of the puzzle about "supernatural numbers", for which I'd come across several apparently incompatible definitions. The PlanetMath definition just referenced doesn't mention this, but the same product-of-primes thing is used for Godel numbering. So it becomes clear that these are the same supernatural numbers that Hofstadter talks about, but doesn't properly explain or give references for, in Godel, Escher, Bach. GEB goes on to mention infinitely large supernatural numbers as an example of nonstandard arithmetic or number theory. Again, the book doesn't explain what's meant by "nonstandard", but thanks to the magic of the Internet it's possible to find out. The axioms of Peano arithmetic were intended to give a succinct, complete, and unique definition of the natural numbers, but Lowenheim-Skolem theorem demonstrates that the axioms do not, and cannot, uniquely define the natural numbers, and it's possible in principle to create sets of objects, of any cardinality you like, that fulfill precisely the same axioms. And you can't get to a unique definition by adding more axioms, or using a different set of axioms. It's just an unavoidable fact of life. Instead of freaking out or getting depressed by this result, the math world simply decided to call the desired model "standard" and all the others "nonstandard", and study all of them. The supernaturals are just one nonstandard model, one which includes the naturals as a subset. The word "nonstandard" as it appeared later in connection with hyperreals is an analogy: Nonstandard analysis is to regular analysis as nonstandard number theory is to regular number theory. Both add additional "useful" numbers to the usual set, supernaturals being "useful" because, as infinite products of primes, by definition they fall under the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, so you can do all the usual number-theoretical stuff with them, I guess. Maybe some of them are even prime themselves. That's a weird idea.
  
  If we're going to assume the supernaturals fit into the hyperreals (which may or may not be justifiable, see the previous discussion), I think they'd all fit within the range starting at 2^w and less than w^w, which would mean there'd be no overlap between them and the ordinals. Although again, this is just a guess.
  

Concrete Cabin Fever

Ok, so I'm sick for a few days, and now it's a three day weekend. It'd be nice to get out of the house (or ultra-mod concrete pod in the sky, in my case), but it seems like we're on day Gamma_0 of a nasty cold+windy snap, so going outside is just unreasonable. It's beautiful outside, barely a cloud in the sky, and you'll need a spacesuit if you want to go out in it.

I popped outside to get some groceries a few hours ago, and I'm still thawing out. So I think I'll do a bit of aimless blogging, instead of trying that again anytime soon.

In honor of our Arctic-ish weather, today's cute animal is an Atlantic Puffin, chomping on some tasty fish. Fish has always seemed especially tasty in cold weather (to me, anyway). I'm not sure why that would be. It's probably just my opinion, not a product of evolutionary biology, since the colder it is, the more dangerous it is to go fishing, and anybody who instinctively craved fish in midwinter would be rapidly removed from the gene pool. It stands to reason, anyway.

When I was at the grocery store earlier, I picked up a chocolate bar with a photo of puffins on the wrapper, put out by the "Endangered Species Chocolate Co.". Yes, it was yet another one of those feel-good upscale "liberal" products, where what you're really buying is a temporary warm fuzzy feeling that your money's going to a good cause. And yes, it's organic chocolate, with organic sugar added. And no, it's not actually very good chocolate, but that's not really the point, is it? If you criticize the product, you must be some kind of diabolical Cheney clone who's against puffins. Not just puffins, but baby puffins. And the Baby Puffin Bar is just one product in a line of candy bars featuring a variety of charismatic megafauna. Never mind that actual puffin chicks look nothing like what's on the label. What's more, although the company's based right here in Oregon, they don't seem to be aware that puffins live along the Pacific coast as well as the Atlantic. And even the Atlantic ones are not actually endangered.

But all is not lost for local fans of actual quality chocolate. Now that Valentine's Day is over, I can mention a couple of local favorites without endangering my supply. My current favorite is Sahagun Chocolates, a tiny hole-in-the-wall storefront on NW 16th just north of Burnside downtown. The main website is more gloss than info, but the owner also has a blog here. This chocolate is amazing, wonderful stuff, but don't just take my word for it. Here's another rave about it.

Another big favorite of mine is Arioso Chocolates. They don't have a year-round store, but in warmer months they're available at local farmers' markets. Mmmm.... chocolate....

Common Cold Edition

I'm sitting here at home with a nasty head cold. So I've got nothing better to do than crack open a cold one at 7:30 am (hey, it's helping! honest!) and braindump a few random thoughts.

• Now that Whittington guy's gone and had himself a heart attack, which is really inconsiderate of him, since the WH press people had just decided to start treating the whole episode as a big hearty joke, so to speak. They must be kicking themselves right now, wishing Cheney had just stuck with Plan A: finish the guy off, dump him in an unmarked shallow grave, and have the government cover the whole thing up. Unfortunately there were witnesses, and Cheney's gun was way too puny to contemplate taking them out as well.
  
• On a cheerier note, the Olympics are on. Sooner or later I'm going to post about why I love the Olympics, but right now I'm in a viral-induced haze. I'm up to random thoughts and tidbits, but don't ask me to bust out multiple paragraphs on the same topic. Also, my DVR is full of curling, and it beckons to me. It calls me to come and watch the gentle art of the sliding rock and the pushbroom. And like I said, I've got nothing better to do right now. One thing though: During the opening ceremony (which was the usual parade of "one damn thing after another", but even more disjointed than most), when the Italian team marched in I noticed someone holding up a sign that said something like "Saluc Ladins". Which doesn't look Italian, exactly. Google indicates this person is a native Ladin speaker, one of a number of small linguistic minorities that cluster in the Alps in Italy and nearby countries, such as Romansch in Switzerland, and Friulian in more northeasterly parts of Italy. It's kind of fun looking at pages in Ladin, since it's obviously a romance language like Italian, Spanish and French, but it's also obviously not any of those. Still, it's kind of fascinating to look at text in a language you've never seen before and be able to make out a word or two. Not everybody's happy, though. Here's a post in an Italian skiing forum where some people seemed to think the whole incident was quite embarrassing.
  
• Word on the street is that dual-core x86 iBooks may be on the way. Woohoo!
  
• And the latest shenanigans in the SCO vs. Universe case. Now SCO's trying to get even more delay in their case against IBM, filing to take a bunch of depositions against third parties (Intel, Oracle, Open Group) at the very last minute. Needless to say, IBM is Not Happy About This. IBM's also making a new attempt to get most of SCO's claims about "misused material" thrown out. The filings are worth reading even if you haven't been following the case. If the filings in this case are any indication, it seems that if you can speak and write English in a clear and logical way, these days you're destined for law school. And if you can't, you're doomed to a life of journalism.
  

Cheney as Raskolnikov (& friends!)

No doubt you've already heard about Dick Cheney's little hunting "mishap", and every wannabe comedian out there is pretty much obligated to take a cheap shot or two (so to speak) at his expense. And yes, it is pretty funny. For those of us who already had the guy pegged as a creepy, amoral sociopath with homicidal tendencies, it's also not very surprising. The guy just doesn't seem to attach any value to human life, even that of his closest friends. So even if it was really an accident, I don't see Cheney losing any sleep over it.

And what if it wasn't really an accident? One constant theme throughout Cheney's career is that he thinks he's above the law, and deserves to be treated differently than members of the toiling classes. He didn't go to Vietnam because he had "other priorities". He didn't unload his Haliburton stock when he became VP, because he didn't want to, and nobody was willing to try to force him to. And then there's the whole bit with lying about WMDs. Let's not forget that part. His attitude is always: Do as you please, as brazenly as possible, and challenge anyone to try to lift a finger about it. You have to admit it's worked great for him so far. He's got no reason to think there's any limit whatsoever on what he can get away with.

And on top of everything else, he didn't have a license to hunt quail, it turns out. From the linked article:

Cheney has a Texas non-resident hunting license, but he failed to get a $7 stamp that's required to hunt game birds, the vice president's office said in a statement Monday night. He has since sent a check to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to buy the stamp, the statement said.

Another article about that pesky $7 stamp business he felt only the "little people" needed to get.

Now he's gone and shot someone, and everyone from the White House to the media to the victim himself are all rushing to say it was a regrettable but unavoidable accident. So maybe it was, and maybe it wasn't. We'll never know for sure, because they'd all close ranks and behave exactly the same way regardless of what actually happened, just because he's important and powerful and therefore deserves infinite deference and benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he just decided he wanted to shoot someone, for some reason, and so he did, because he knew for sure he was totally immune to consequences of any kind. I certainly can't believe he has moral or ethical objections to shooting people, or to anything else for that matter.

He reminds me of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who killed a couple of people because he decided they were bad and deserved to die. He, too, thought he was a law unto himself, an Übermensch outside society, entitled to kill with impunity as he saw fit. But then his conscience started to bother him, and in the end he got eight years in Siberia. This is where he and Cheney part company: Dostoyevsky (an extremely conservative and religious man, btw) hoped to demonstrate that everyone is ultimately subject to the same immutable laws and consequences. All I think he really demonstrated is that you can't get away with murder if you're an impoverished student, no matter how intellectual you are. If you're a czar, or a vice president, the rules really are different. If your czar/VP (the terms are increasingly interchangeable these days) happens to be somone like Cheney, a man who was born without a conscience, bloodshed of some kind is inevitable, and nobody will do anything about it. Nobody will even think less of him for it. After a couple of 24 hour news cycles, they won't even remember the episode ever happened, so if Dick says it didn't, they'll take his word for it.

I realize I occasionally rant about the misuse of historical analogies, but let me introduce a couple that I think are edifying. Inexact analogies, of course, but I think useful in understanding the icky Cheney mindset.

First there's the Leopold & Loeb case from way back in 1924, where a pair of rich teenagers decided to kill someone as an intellectual "experiment in sensation". They didn't get away with it, but this was back in the era when the media actually investigated things. Well, ok, it was also the era when they luridly exploited grisly crimes, too, but now and then there's an upside to that. Also, there's a big gulf between being the teenaged son of the VP of Sears, and being the VP of the whole country.

Or we can go a lot further back, all the way back to the Roman Empire. Not the end of the empire that conservatives obsess about, but its beginning, which marked the end of the centuries-old Roman Republic. An excellent popular account of that turbulent era is the recent book Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. The lesson, in short, is that if you're ruled by men of unlimited ambition, who ignore with impunity any law or tradition that doesn't suit them, no republic can survive for long. I'm not going to compare Cheney with Julius Caesar (or Napoleon for that matter), since he (like most conservatives) would probably see that as a great compliment. Maybe he's more of a Sulla. Not in the details, perhaps, but in the larger sense, as someone who was the first to really knock the republic off its axis and make its basic institutions look vulnerable, laying the groundwork for another equally ruthless person later on down the road. President Roy Moore, anyone?

Yay. I can hardly wait.

Meanwhile, on Mars...

The twin Mars rovers are still at it. The Spirit rover's just arrived at a weird area dubbed "Home Plate", which looks very different from the usual (and rather boring, to my untrained eyes) Gusev Crater terrain. Sounds like nobody yet has a clear idea of what caused all these layered rocks, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, here's the latest Mars Express image release, showing some funky tectonic pits and other features. Unlike their NASA counterparts, ESA researchers don't release a lot of images to the public, so any image release is a moderate-to-big occasion. ESA's still new at the whole PR game, I guess.

Meanwhile, on Earth, researchers studying a Martian meteorite have again put forth the idea there might once have been microscopic life on Mars. Something to do with veins of carbon-rich material in the meteorite. At least one of the team members was involved with the famous and still-disputed 1996 report about a different Martian meteorite. Another team member once headed the ill-fated Beagle2 project. So I don't know what to think about this. I don't really like the idea that the whole rationale for exploring Mars stands or falls solely on whether the planet ever had any microbes. People are always claiming another crucial piece of evidence for a discovery that, it's intimated, is just around the corner. And 20 years from now it'll probably still be just around the corner, and people will still be finding "crucial" bits of evidence. Do that long enough, and Congress (and the public) will start to think they're just funding a big con game. I mean, keep it on the list of things you'd like to investigate, but reserve the top couple of spots on the list for things you know actually exist, like, say, the solar system's biggest volcanoes, for example. The public loves volcanoes. Look at all the traffic the Mt. St. Helens webcam gets.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on Earth, fresh off getting fired from NASA, that slimeball George Deutsch is whining about how he's the real victim of the Big Bang Memo debacle:

"What you do have is hearsay coming from a handful of people who have clear partisan ties and they are really coming after me as a Bush appointee," he told radio station WTAW.

"I was an easy target. I was low-hanging fruit."

Un-freaking-believable, but not at all surprising. If you needed any more evidence that the guy's a total partisan apparatchik, here it is. It all boils down to partisan politics for him. In his mind, he was martyred by the hordes of commie Bush-haters, purely because of his unlimited devotion to the Glorious Leader. The notion that global warming or the Big Bang might be objectively true has never occurred to him, not even once. In today's conservative mind, it seems, there are no objective truths, just political wedge issues, just ways to scare up contributions or pander to the base. And I doubt he's the only party hack warming a cubicle at NASA HQ. In the event they ever do find unequivocal evidence of life on Mars, or anywhere else, we'll probably never hear a single word about it, since life on other planets isn't mentioned in the Bible.

Sadly, all this public wallowing in self-pity will likely turn out to be a fabulous career move for Deutschie. There's an unlimited market out there for conservative/fundie types who spin the "liberal persecution" angle and generally wallow in self-pity day after day, week after week, year after year. By now, he's probably got a seven-figure job offer from every think tank in DC. He's set for life. He'll never have to spend another minute outside the Beltway ever again, unless maybe Fox News makes him their new science editor (with extra emphasis on editor). That would be an important job in the Fox universe, since it mostly involves offering constant uninformed speculation about a variety of lurid missing-white-female-of-reproductive-age crime stories. He's already got experience at this, believe it or not, and for all we know he still thinks the Laci Peterson case was the doing of a shadowy Satanic cult.

There's an easy way NASA could've avoided this whole debacle. All they needed to do was pull Deutschie aside and tell him the President himself had given him an important, and very secret, mission. His new job: Go out and search for the edge of the flat earth, and contact HQ immediately the moment it's located. That would've kept the guy quietly occupied for the next few years. Instead, now they've gone and made him a fundie superstar.

In cheerier news, a researcher for Mars, Inc., has presented new evidence that chocolate can help prevent cancer and heart disease. As if really we needed another excuse. Seems the good Dr. Hollenberg is presenting the results at a scientific gathering known as the Cocoa Symposium. Now I know for an absolute fact that I'm wasting my life, and I picked the wrong career. Here I am, grinding out C++ code, when I could be studying chocolate instead. Of course, the symposium's put on by the National Academy of Sciences, a federally-funded institution, so it's anybody's guess what the results will look like once they've run the Deutschie-clone gauntlet. After all, chocolate tastes good and is therefore extremely sinful. I suppose these days all federally-funded researchers will be forced to say faith healing is the only real cure for any disease or ailment. Performed by a famous TV evangelist in front of a live studio audience, if at all possible.

Glorious Victory, Or Not

So... That sleazy political commisar George Deutsch is out of a job at NASA. And on the same day, it turns out that the BLM isn't going to censor OSU's forest research after all, at least for the time being.

So I should be happy, right? Ahh, if only that were so.

I'm distressed by a trend I've noticed recently. The Oregonian, our local fishwrapper, editorialized about the OSU controversy recently, and while they argued against the attempt to censor the study, they also felt the need to tell us they personally doubted the study's conclusions. This sentiment was echoed in today's paper by various members of the Oregon and Washington congressional delegations. The Oregonian also recently offered the bland boilerplate US newspaper editorial about those notorious cartoons, defending the Danish newspaper while explaining that the cartoons themselves are oh, so very terrible. And not letting the public see 'em so they can decide for themselves, of course. That's a given.

It seems that if you stand up in defense of the principle of free expression, you're always, always supposed to turn around and offer a pious, ritualized condemnation of whatever touched off the controversy. This, I suppose, is to demonstrate that you're taking a moderate, sensible, responsible position. It was Voltaire, I think, who originated the old cliche about disagreeing with what someone says, but defending their right to say it. Which is all fine and good, so far as it goes. But defending someone's right to speak doesn't obligate you to offer any opinion whatsoever about what they said. At some point, all you're doing is showing off your own pristine ethical bona-fides. It does the target of the criticism no good whatsoever, and quite possibly a lot of harm. The target ends up with lots of vocal "defenders" but no actual allies, and these so-called defenders will go out of their way to bash the target for any petty reason they can find, just to prove they're acting purely on noble high-minded principles and aren't actually siding with anyone.

If you're a scientist whose study's just been bashed by a major regional newspaper and much of the local congressional delegation -- all of whom are confirmed non-scientists -- your careeer's bound to suffer in the future. It's not fair, but that's how it is. Furthermore, the controversy's absolutely going to have a chilling effect on any future research in the area, whether by you or by anyone else. How is it that the mainstream media folks keep celebrating one "victory" for free expression after another, and yet in practice the boundaries of what it's permissible to say keep shrinking? It doesn't seem to bother them one bit, so long as their own hands remain absolutely clean.

It feels odd to be lecturing the media about how to defend the First Amendment, but they don't seem to have much of a clue about what's at stake anymore. If everyone tut-tuts about how a certain idea ought to be off limits (while remaining legal, technically), the result is an informal ban. The effect is the same, in the end. Avoiding offering any opinion either way about a scientific study would've been the easiest thing in the world to do. They could've offered a platitude about respecting the scientific community's ability to figure things out themselves. But no. Condemning the content of speech they're busy defending is pretty much habitual at this point. And by offering uninformed opinions about someone's research, they're buying into precisely the same notion so beloved by GWB & Co, namely that there are no objective, testable truths, only political opinions. And "God" help you if you have the wrong ones.

The way to defend free expression, is to defend it, period. Don't try to split hairs or finesse the issue, don't wring your hands about it, don't look for gray areas to hide in. Don't bash anyone for going out on a limb and causing controversy; they're taking much more of a personal risk than you are. Don't concede any rhetorical points whatsoever to the would-be censors. Period. Otherwise you're fighting a rear-guard action, and constantly losing ground. You may be retreating honorably, but you're still retreating. That's just wrong. When it comes to free speech, never give an inch. Never.


I don't have as much to say about the departure of that Deutsch kid. Only that (per DC tradition) the official reason given for his departure was entirely untrue, and as usual nobody batted an eye. The real reason he's out is that he was an embarrassment and a political liability. But for some reason it's not OK to say that. It's not even OK to explicitly disavow his idiotic blather about the Big Bang and give that as the reason he's gone. I mean, that wouldn't be precisely true either; I imagine his feelings about the Big Bang mesh up precisely with GWB's opinion on the subject, and he had every reason to think he was just doing the president's bidding, in his own clumsy and inapt way. But people would've bought it. Instead we get this technicality about him allegedly lying on his resume and not having a college degree after all. Since Deutch apparently quit Texas A&M for the purpose of working in the Bush-Cheney campaign war room, they had to have known about his lack of a degree before now. And it didn't bother them one bit until the blogoverse dug it up and spread it far and wide. But the resume thing gave them a non-controversial reason to ditch the guy, and once they had their political cover, he was outta there, with the whole thing framed up as a non-political, purely HR matter.

I guess this is just how the game is played. Spokesperson gives a bland and obviously false reason for whatever just happened. It's an obvious lie and everybody knows it, but no matter. Instead of being insulted, the press happily plays along, uncritically buying whatever's being offered, and relaying the lies to the public with no analysis of any kind. Everyone goes home happy, even though not a single true word was spoken, and thus the media once again helped someone in power deceive the public. You'd think they'd be a bit more skeptical after their recent role in helping the administration lie to a mass audience about Saddam and WMDs. But that doesn't seem to have happened so far, and I'm starting to doubt it ever will.

Hercules vs. Hydra

While we're on the topic of Greek mythology, which we still sort of are due to the recent post about Echidnas, I recently came across a fun bit of math known as the "Battle of Hercules and the Hydra". As the ancient myth goes, one of the 12 labors of Hercules was to go kill the Hydra, a nasty creature with lots and lots of heads. When you'd cut its heads off, the Hydra would just grow more of them. It's one of the better-known Hercules stories; snakes and snake-like creatures look good in art, and they're easy to draw, so the battle's been a popular topic for artists over the centuries. Here's John Singer Sargent's take on it. Here's a version by Francisco de Zurbarán a Spanish painter of the 1630s. And one by the Italian Renaissance artist Antonio del Pollaiuolo. And that's not even the tip of the iceberg.

But the big reason I think the story's so well known is that we've all been in situations like that at some time. Well, not precisely like that, but situations where the problem seems to keep piling up and getting worse despite, or possibly because of, one's best efforts to solve it. It turns out that the situation is less hopeless than you might think, at least in theory. It turns out that Hercules always wins eventually, by simply standing there lopping off Hydra heads, if he just sticks to it long enough, and doesn't get discouraged by the rapidly mounting number of heads early on. Hercules didn't actually need that torch-wielding assistant, after all.

This paper quotes the exact mathematical definition for the Hercules vs. Hydra game:

At stage n (n a positive integer), Hercules chops one head h of the hydra H. If the predecessor of h is the root, nothing happens. Otherwise let h1 and h2 be respectively the father and the grandfather of h. The hydra sprouts n copies of the principal subtree determined by h1 without the head h from the node h2 (the the roots of the new copies are immediate successors of the node h2). Hercules wins the battle if he reduces in a finite number of attacks the hydra to its root.

Another paper mentioning the problem can be found here.

In short, most of the time you end up with more heads than before, but not always, and that's apparently enough to guarantee that Hercules will win in the end. But it'll take him a good while, but hey, he's a demigod and all, he's got the time. You'll notice that the problem as formulated isn't precisely the same as the mythological account. If anything, it's even more of a challenge, since each lopped head is replaced with two new ones. The reason for the difference is that the problem was formulated not to resolve a hair-splitting dispute over an ancient myth, but to express certain ideas in the mathematical discipline of proof theory. Namely, the battle is a "natural" example of a theorem which is true but not provable within the normal realm of addition, multiplication, and exponentiation (known in the trade as "Peano Arithmetic"), therefore requiring the use of stronger axioms. If I understand the explanation properly, anyway. The whole discipline is highly esoteric, and discussions aimed at anyone below grad student level are few and far between. And even then it seems to be assumed you've got a faculty advisor holding your hand and guiding you through the material.

It's reasonable to wonder why I'm bothering to poke around in all this mysterious abstract stuff. Well, it turns out that proof theorists are among the very few people on the planet who have a genuine need for really large infinite ordinal numbers, which is a subject I find weirdly fascinating. I'm not even going to try to explain what these numbers are used for, since I'm sure I'd bungle the attempt. For the time being, we're just interested in the numbers themselves, not so much what they're used for. Think of it as a grownup version of the playground "who can count the highest?" game.

First a quick note on notation: When you see a 'w', it's really supposed to be a lower-case 'omega', which looks sort of like a curly 'w', and which represents the first infinite ordinal. The plain vanilla one that I imagine is what everyone has in mind when they say "infinity", which is followed directly by w+1, the legendary "infinity plus one" you knew existed back on the playground in third grade, before your math teacher told you otherwise. Following typical comp-sci notation, w*2 is omega times two, and w^w is omega to the omegath power. When you see an underscore, it indicates something's a subscript. And when Greek letters are named, the naming's sort of case sensitive: "epsilon_0" indicates a lower-case epsilon with a subscripted zero, while "Gamma_0" indicates an upper-case gamma, for example.

Most discussions of ordinal numbers tail off after you get to epsilon_0, like the Wikipedia article referenced above. If you're lucky, you'll get a brief mention that there are additional epsilon numbers -- epsilon_1, epsilon_2, epsilon_w, epsilon_epsilon_0, and so forth, just to reinforce that the process goes on forever. Recall that epsilon_0 is defined as w^w^w^w... , and it's the point where you can't get any further with just finite ordinals, 'w', "+', '*' and '^'. Your system's run out of steam, and adding another w to the already-infinite stack of w's doesn't change anything. Epsilon_0 = w^epsilon_0. We've reached what's known as a fixed point. You'd think this would be a bad thing, but far from it. They're solid gold. The ordinals, even just the countable ordinals, are an unimaginably vast collection, and fixed points of various functions are among the rare guideposts in the territory. So instead of bailing out, we just introduce the new symbol epsilon_0, and we can take its successor ( epsilon_0+1) and otherwise multiply, divide, and exponentiate to our hearts' content, until we reach a new fixed point, namely epsilon_1. And so on, until the inevitable, infinitely nested epsilon_epsilon_epsilon... , also known as the first "critical epsilon number", and as phi_2(0). What you're looking at there is an example from the hierarchy of Veblen functions, which basically take the fixed point thing and abstract it up another level. Each phi function enumerates the fixed points of the previous phi function. You can start out a Veblen-style function hierarchy with whatever function you like, but classically you start out with phi_0(n) = n, i.e. 0,1,2,3...w,w+1...w^2...w^w., etc. And phi_1(n) enumerates the fixed points of phi_0(n): epsilon_1, epsilon_2, epsilon_3, and so forth, on and on and finally we hit that infinite stack of epsilons mentioned earlier. the first fixed point of phi_1(n), giving us phi_2(0). And then we've got phi_3, phi_4, phi_w, phi_(w^w), and so on.

This may be a good point to pause a moment and try to imagine, for example, the size of the gap between phi_42(666) and phi_42(667). That's 41 levels of nested fixed points, which themselves are an incredibly-widely-spaced set of little corks bobbing in a vast sea of 'normal' ordinals. Ok, maybe it's better not to try to imagine that. Perhaps the only reasonable thing to do at this point is forget that we're talking about infinity at all, and just think of it as an exercise in abstract symbol manipulation, with levels upon countless levels of nested recursion. Which is still fun to think about, at least for a computer geek like myself. We certainly aren't going to resolve the question of whether these rarefied numbers we're talking about here are "real" or not. It's not that I'm against philosophical debates, per se. It's just that I usually have very little to add. If I was forced to pick a position, I'd incline toward a sort of Platonist notion that infinitely large and small numbers are somehow reflective of an underlying reality independent of human observers. Real, but perhaps not truly graspable by anybody with a mere few pounds of grey matter to work with. But that's just a personal hunch, and I can't imagine how you'd go about testing it.

In any case, the phi_n hierarchy itself runs out of steam eventually, and its limit is the ordinal Gamma_0. Gamma_0 is a milestone in that it's the first "impredicative" ordinal. I don't really understand the implications of this very well, but I gather that at least some schools of thought hold it's something to be avoided if possible. Or at least not overly enjoyed.

Beyond Gamma_0, the landscape is less clear (to me, anyway). Well, for starters you have Gamma_0+1, I guess, and then you repeat the whole process that got you to Gamma_0 until you run out of steam again, at which point you're at Gamma_1, Gamma_2, and so forth. The subject of proper ordinal notation for "large" ordinals seems to be the subject of ongoing research and debate. A Google search on the term "ordinal notation" will bring up lots and lots of hits. Here's one somewhat comprehensible treatment of the subject. Here's a decent article titled "Transfinite Ordinals and their Notations: For the Uninitiated". [Note: Like a lot of academic papers, it's on the net in PostScript (not PDF) format, which is sort of inconvenient for most people. One way to go is save it to a file, and run it through a PS to PDF converter, like this one.]

The referenced article describes Bachmann's theta notation, which is a more powerful extension of what we've looked at so far. Theta_0(0) = 1, Theta_1(0) = epsilon_0, Theta_2(0) = phi_2(0), Theta_Omega(0) = Gamma_0, and that's just the beginning. Note the capital 'O' in Omega there. This is not a reference to the familiar 'w', the first infinite ordinal, but rather the first uncountable ordinal, a.k.a. the cardinal number Aleph_1. Note: I'd originally had a comment here saying that all depended on what you thought of the Continuum Hypothesis, but that was a momentary bit of boneheadedness on my part. Ordinals actually don't have anything to do with CH, as far as I can tell. In any case, cardinal numbers aren't important to the present topic anyway. The important, and weird, thing here is that Omega (also alternately known as w1/omega_1) is much larger than the countable, recursive ordinals we're talking about right now, but it, and even larger ordinals, are necessary as indexes into the massive Theta hierarchy. We're no longer defining numbers as combinations of smaller, simpler numbers; no, at this point to describe a given number we need to assume the existence of a vastly larger number, and use that number to help us describe the number we really care about. Some people are ok with this, others get the philosophical heebie-jeebies.

Since not everyone is comfortable with monkeying around in the higher number classes just to come up with names for plain old countable, recursive ordinals, there are a number of other approaches one can use. The simplest is just to extend the classical phi hierarchy and create ternary, or even n-place Veblen functions. The notation usually gets modified a little, dropping the function notation and subscripts and such, so it looks like you're naming a number, not a function, i.e. instead of something like phi_1(0,0) we just have phi100 -- which just happens to be yet another name for our friend Gamma_0. It might help to think of the levels of nesting as the ordinal equivalent of decimal places, except that each 'place' can be as big as we like: phi110 (= Gamma_1), phi[w]00, phi[epsilon_0]00, etc., where the square brackets are just something I'm adding for clarity since I've been trying to avoid using actual greek letters. Anything in square brackets is really a single "digit". You don't often see phi extended past 3 places, but apparently it can be done if you're so inclined. I suppose the next logical step would be to give a count of the number of places, assuming zeros for trailing "digits". This is kind of the equivalent of scientific notation, so let's say phi100 = phi1^3 (in a trivial case), with phi6^4 = phi6000, phi6.6^4 = phi6600, phi1^10, phi1^100, ad infinitum. I don't know enough about the n-place Veblen thing to be able to say if there's a limit to this madness. Can one have a non-finite number of places? Is there such a beast as phi1^w? phi1^[phi100]? phi1^[phi1^[phi1...]]]? I really don't know.

There are also more complicated notations out there: Something called "Klammersymbolen", which translates simply to "bracket symbols", for one. I don't really understand how they work, but the notation is quite complex: There's an upper and lower row, each of which specifies a sequence of ordinals, with the whole assembly surrounded with large round brackets. There's a further extension of the idea called "ordinal systems". Concrete examples of either are hard to come by, so I don't know what the equivalent Klammer notation would be for, say, phi[epsilon_0]^[10^100].

Continuing on, we run into a few semi-important ordinals: The Ackermann ordinal (Theta_Omega^2(0)), and the small (Theta_Omega^w(0)) and large (Theta_Omega^Omega(0)) Veblen ordinals. The literature varies on the exact notation for all three, and it's unclear which but either the Ackermann or the small Veblen is the limit of finite n-place Veblen notation, in other words one of the two is equal to phi1^w, but I'm not sure which one. Which does indicate that the bigger-cardinal notation is way more extensible than the idea of simply adding more places to your phi notation, all philosophical objections aside.

The next really important landmark out there is an entity known as the Howard (or Bachmann-Howard) Ordinal, not to be confused with "Bachmann Turner Overdrive", of course. A lot of the discussion I've seen treats this number like some sort of Holy Grail, without explaining why. So I know they think it's very important, for some reason, I can say that much. In the Theta notation, it's Theta_(Omega^Omega^Omega...)(0), or Theta_epsilon_(Omega+1)(0). Which really tells me nothing useful, and leaves me scratching my head, I have to say.

As an example of how the notation can trip you up, this post used to assert that the Bachmann-Howard ordinal was Theta_(Omega_Omega_Omega...)(0) rather than the correct Theta_(Omega^Omega^Omega...)(0). That may seem like a trivial difference, but the former is vastly larger, and gets us into the thrilling world of large cardinals, specifically (I think) the first inaccessible cardinal (also known as "Aleph_Aleph_Aleph...").
If we're going to take the step into large cardinal land, we can go on iterating the Theta hierarchy as long as we need to, letting the big cardinal do all the heavy lifting. Alternately, Setzer's "ordinal systems" approach is supposed to get you well beyond the Howard ordinal without ever referring to any number larger than itself. If I had examples of this, I'd show them, but I don't. I understand that the ordinal systems notation is an extension of the already-complex Klammersymbolen, so if there are any examples out there, there probably aren't any concise examples out there.

And far beyond that we have the Church-Kleene ordinal, often denoted by w1CK. This is the first non-recursive, or non-computable, ordinal, the absolute limit of what it's possible to do recursively. Think of a rough analogy with the Busy Beaver functions discussed a few days back (although BB(x) is merely an example of a noncomputable funtion, not the actual upper bound on recursive functions). Any scheme you come up with for counting really, really high is guaranteed to run out of steam before you get to w1CK. It's kind of like the lightspeed of counting. The higher you go, the harder it gets to go even higher, and you'll still never get to w1CK by counting, no matter how hard you try, no matter what clever tricks you devise. Which is not to say we're out of ordinals. Oh, no, far from it. It seems that w1CK is just the first of something called "admissible ordinals", so that there's also a w2CK, w3CK, and so on. The fundamental thing here is that while you can count countable ordinals as long as you like, the set as a whole is uncountable. Unlike the (also uncountable) real numbers, which are uncountable due to their overwhelming density everywhere on the number line, ordinals stick the uncountability out on one end. The reals you can't count anywhere, but ordinals you can count, and count, and count, and it'll just never be enough. Not only can you not count to Omega (the next higher cardinal), you can't even count to a lesser milestone on the way there (w1CK). And then there's still an unimaginably huge sea of ordinals separating w1CK and Omega.

Even then, the ordinal Omega (or omega_1) (a.k.a Aleph_1) still lies off in the distance, far, far away, and then there's omega_2, omega_3, omega_omega, stack_of_omegas, and on, and on, and on.

All of which really makes me want a beer. And I see -- in a remarkable coincidence -- it's right about time for happy hour. So I think I'll stop right here for the time being.

Updated: Two subsequent posts of mine sort of elaborate on the material here. So if you liked this one, you'll love SuperHyperRedux and No Name. To teh Megist(r)on is also somewhat related.

Echidnas in the News

It's always nice when echidnas make the front page of the daily newspaper. Even if the AP story everyone's running describes 'em as "primitive", and other accounts call them "bizarre". That's not a very nice way to talk about an animal that, of its own free will, deigned to permit researchers pick it up. It didn't have to, you know. I do think the whole "Lost World" thing is a bit overstated and romanticized. The actual new species are all birds, frogs, and so on. Everything bigger than a bird was already known to science, but just rare and poorly understood. Calling the place the "Lost World" is just hanging out a welcome sign for the inevitable ravaging hordes of well-heeled ecotourists. The echidnas won't be so friendly the umpteenth time someone spills their soy chai latte on 'em.

Meanwhile, down Australia way, echidnas can be a significant road hazard. Here, a small local newspaper congratulates a motorist who managed not to hit one. And thanks to the magic of the Internet, the whole world knows about it.

Also in Australia, a new anti-litter campaign features a computer-generated Echidna, who's sick and tired of people messing up his habitat. Ok, I guess that might work, if you're going for the cute angle, but I still like Tim Cahill's proposal to enlist Rodan as the ultimate anti-litter spokesmonster.

Echidnas make popular mascots, it seems. Back in 2000, one of the trio of Olympic mascots was an echidna named Millie. Which is great unless you think the whole idea of Olympic mascots is stupid, like the author of this amusing article. Be sure not to miss the gallery of mascots from Olympics past.

Here's a weird, recently-discovered fossil creature from China that's giving paleontologists fits. The front half looks like a shrew, and the back half looks like a monotreme.

And while we're talking half-n-half creatures, there's the Echidna of ancient Greece, half woman, half snake. In this article, a writer for the local paper in Bangalore, India, marvels at the weird creatures of Greek mythology.

And since no post of mine would be complete without at least a little politics, here's a recent Usenet post to alt.politics.republicans about that current "Lost World" news story, into which some random fundie inserts "editorial" comments bashing evolution and making a variety of cheesy know-nothing wisecracks. He's just read the press release, and already he knows infinitely more about the whole subject than those gol-durned commie pinko liberal scientists. It's just amazing how that works.

Jesus Loves Clearcuts

You probably haven't been following the current brouhaha at Oregon State University's "Forestry" department, so a brief bit of history is probably in order. Back in 2002, Southern Oregon experienced a huge forest fire, which became known as the Biscuit Fire. This obviously resulted in a lot of dead trees, and even before the fires were out the timber industry started lobbying for what it calls "salvage logging". The idea being that the dead trees will go to waste unless they're "salvaged", meaning hauled out and turned into subdivisions. And almost as quickly, OSU started churning out reams of third-rate academic blather to justify the "salvage" (talk about a loaded word). It's useful to understand that the "Forestry" department is in large part industry-funded.

Unfortunately, one of these studies discovered that clearcutting isn't actually an improvement over just leaving the forest alone after a fire. The study was of sufficient quality that the prestigious journal Science accepted it for publication. It's really hard to get published in Science, and you'd think OSU would've seen it as a big honor, but no. Instead, a cabal of pro-industry professors tried to suppress the paper, because it doesn't say what the industry pays the department to say. The journal didn't buy that argument, unsurprisingly. Even that rejection didn't cause the leader of the cabal (and primary author of the third-rate blather referenced above) didn't give up his jihad against the paper. Oh, no. I wouldn't bother blogging about the controversy if it ended with the paper being published. No, instead somebody (technically yet to be determined) went and called in the big guns. And by "big guns" I mean our Glorious Leader, whose minions at the BLM have now cut off all funding for the university's forest research programs.

The message is very clear: Tell George what he wants to hear, or starve.

Let me reiterate that I'm not against logging, per se. Historically it's been this state's only reliable source of family-wage union jobs, which isn't something one should just ignore. But when the only way to justify it is by censoring the facts and replacing them with bogus, politically-motivated junk science, anyone with a brain and a shred of ethics ought to reject the attempt out of hand.

As it turns out the very same John Sessions who's trying to censor academic work in this country is also a big advocate of large-scale logging in third world countries. For example, here are proceedings (which he co-edited) from a conference about logging the Himalayas [PDF]. Seems he's got a bit of a consulting business on the side, and has brought his expertise in "forest engineering" (another loaded term) to bear in such places as Bhutan, Costa Rica, Brazil, Colombia, and Malaysia. Of course, all this work in ultra-low-wage countries with no effective environmental laws will no doubt result in a loss of domestic logging jobs. I'm morbidly curious how they'll argue this is all the tree-huggers' fault, because you know that's how they'll spin it if they need to.

BTW, here's another amusing article about the Big Bang debacle. And the blogoverse has already dug up some of George Deutsch's greatest hits from back at Texas A&M journalism school, including an editorial where he insists the Laci Peterson homicide was the work of a "satanic cult". And now he's writing NASA press releases. Yes, Deutschie's doing a heck of a job. At this rate, by this time next year he'll be a federal judge, and those of us who've criticized him will be off standing on boxes at Abu Ghraib. Not bad for someone who, contrary to earlier news reports, didn't even graduate from college. And now he's correcting the work of world-respected scientists, on God's behalf. It's like a story by Horatio Alger's evil twin, or something. Is this a great country, or what?

The Raptures (Ours & Theirs)

I felt like being depressed, for some reason, and so I did a news search on "rapture". It's surprising how many of the hits aren't religious stories. I won't spend a lot of time on those, although I have to say in passing that using the word "rapture" in connection with birdwatching or mountain climbing is even less comprehensible to me than the usual religious meaning of the word.

So here's what we've got today:

• A rather bitter column about the country going to hell in a handbasket, titled "From republic to tyranny". Widespread belief in the imminent rapture is just one of the many ills that face us. The author describes the book of Revelation as a rogue text largely incompatible with the gospel, which is about as apt a description as I've seen. I'm a confirmed nonbeliever, but it's obvious even to me that the parts just don't mesh up. You can base your religion on one or the other, but not both, and our fundies have decided they prefer the book that reads like the violent, incoherent ramblings of an insane person. Somebody give that John guy some thorazine, stat!
  
• Well, ok, not all fundies are identical. They've got lots of petty little theological divides and fissures, and the precise nature and timing of the Rapture is one of them. Not everyone believes it's right around the corner. Or more precisely, some belive it's impossible to know whether it's right around the corner. This article surveys the wide range of beliefs occurring just in the Yucca Valley, CA area. Read, and be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
  
• That Jesus guy isn't the only one who's due back any minute now. The Mahdi will also return Real Soon Now, and Iran's new president is working tirelessly, making all those pesky last-minute preparations. See the article "Waiting for the rapture in Iran".
  
• And the National Review, of all people, has an overview of Islamic end times beliefs, titled "Sound familiar?".
  
• In one of the better Freudian slips I've seen in a long time, this page refers to our upcoming, hyper-expensive F-22 Raptor fighter jet as the "F22 Rapture".
  
• I've saved the true sign of the apocalypse for last. Seems that the band Blondie (remember them?) is reworking their song "Rapture" for re-release. Gaaaaahhhh!!!!!
  

Big Bang Memo

So now GWB and Co. are making NASA the latest target of their holy war against facts. It's not at all surprising that they're trying to suppress the evidence about global warming. It's pretty typical for industries to try to hush up anything that would cost them money. I probably ought to be more outraged about that than I am, but it's the sort of thing you come to expect from the Bushies. And the effort to mold all NASA PR to support George's goofy Apollo Jr. plan isn't that outrageous either; all bureaucracies do that in some form or other, and experienced scientists generally understand the importance of sucking up to whoever's writing the checks. That's just a fact of life.

But it's no longer just a matter of being business-friendly or playing the bureaucracy game. Now the fundies in the administration are trying to suppress any mention of the Big Bang as a proven fact, since creationism is official government policy these days.

From the NYT story:

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."

More coverage at Bad Astronomy, The Inquirer and Slashdot.

In a not-entirely-unrelated note, Feb. 17th marks the 406th anniversary of the day the astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by Church authorities. Among other things, he argued that the earth orbits the sun, contradicting certain passages in the bible -- that is, if you take them absolutely literally.

We aren't yet at the point where our present-day fundies can have people arbitrarily killed for disagreeing with them, but I don't think this is due to a lack of desire on their part. Our fundies think the same way as their medieval predecessors, and they certainly didn't mind a bit of bloodshed now and then.

The blue-n-green blob above is a map of the cosmic microwave background (faint echoes of the Big Bang) made by NASA's WMAP spacecraft. WMAP was proposed and developed during the Clinton administration. You have to wonder if it would've even made it off the drawing board in this day and age?

Religion vs. science is an area where there really is a difference between Christian fundies and their Islamic brethren. Where our wingnuts flatly deny the validity of any facts that contradict what they think their holy book says, the Islamic tendency is to argue and try to demonstrate that science and the Koranic account of creation are in perfect accord. I have to say is a point in their favor, just this once. If the two strains of thought were reversed, and scientists in the Middle East were the ones under attack, we in the West would just add it to our existing stereotypes, and chalk it up as more evidence of ignorance and backwardness on their part. Instead, it's a sign of ignorance and backwardness on our part, and one we ought to be deeply ashamed of.

I'm a Natural

After putting the previous post together, I came across a great article arguing that humanity generally divides into two camps: Naturals, "people who consider material evidence paramount", and Unnaturals, a.k.a. "those who think inspiration and intuition and all the internal imagery of their minds define their external reality; that what they wish to be so will be so if only they can articulate it and select and distort evidence for the purposes of persuasion". Like our nation's Glorious Leader, for example. When unnaturals run the show, things can get difficult for the natural world, like this recent Charles Darwin exhibit put on by the Natural History museum in NYC. When naturals run the show, the worst that unnaturals have to put up with is the occasional mean hillbilly joke.

Now, it wouldn't be accurate to say that the natural vs. unnatural, rational vs. antirational divide is precisely the liberal vs. conservative divide. At least in this part of the world, it's very common for liberal-minded people to adopt (or at least affect) a sort of hip pseudo-Eastern or pseudo-pagan belief system. I don't know if this is a holdover from the 60's, or a reaction against Christian fundamentalism, or what, exactly, but it's very common. Certainly more common than people openly "admitting" to being secular rationalists. I'm not equating the religious mindsets, since they are very different. The Buddha-by-way-of-John-Lennon thing may be an improvement over the stuff spewed by Pat Robertson & co., in the sense that it's mostly harmless, but that doesn't make it any more real. And New Age people do seem to give fundies the willies. Another example.

Infinite self-absorption and New Age solipsism certainly have fewer directly negative effects than the fundies' obsession with war and the imminent, ultra-gory end of the world. I think it does foster a mindset where being liberal and "enlightened" no longer requires an element of compassion towards other people. The key to being a good person is drinking soy lattes and attending upscale yoga classes, not doing icky stuff like helping poor people, or even thinking about poor people. After all, if people somehow create their own reality, poverty is entirely the fault of the poor, and the only solution is for them to realize it's all in their imagination. I'm not exaggerating. I've seen this precise argument presented repeatedly. And owls really are more important than loggers. I won't go off on a full owl vs. logger rant today, but it's worth noting that at one time in this state, timber jobs once were considered good, honest work, paying family wages, with strong unions that looked out for their members. And then, nearly in the blink of an eye, certain parts of society started seeing timber workers as objects of utter scorn and hatred, people whose basic needs could be comfortably disregarded with nary a thought. For doing exactly the same thing they'd been doing for a hundred years. You can imagine how bewildering and upsetting that must have been. The party of FDR and Harry Truman would've never pulled a stunt like that. I guess I'd call that a clear negative effect, although I'm not sure it can be entirely blamed on religious beliefs.

Where fundie unnaturals reject science and scientific thinking, new-agey unnaturals try to appropriate it for their own ends. Over the years we've gotten pop-philosophy interpretations of relativity, quantum mechanics, Godel's incompleteness theorems, chaos theory, and probably others that aren't occurring to me at the moment. The common thread is that people try to shape a scientific or mathematical notion about a very specific subject into a general philosophy of life, and the resulting philosophy goes something like "you can't know everything" or "it's all relative, dude", basically an antirational, anti-intellectual viewpoint. I expect the originators of each theory would find the whole thing rather appalling. Unless you're a physicist, you aren't likely to encounter relativistic or quantum mechanical effects on an everyday basis. The classical, deeply unfashionable, mechanistic physics of Isaac Newton explains the everyday world rather well, which may be why that theory was developed so much earlier. And as this Slate article notes, even most mathematicians don't need to know or care about Godel on a daily basis.

I really don't see how this is different from the misreading of Darwin in the 19th century, when Herbert Spencer (not Darwin) coined the term "survival of the fittest", when applying a purely biological idea to advocate a fairly vicious form of laissez-faire economics and social policies. Or the naive and almost touching faith displayed by allegedly-rational Libertarians, when they explain that global warming is impossible because the Invisible Hand is benevolent and wouldn't permit such things to happen to us. Or fundies arguing that the reason we can't predict the weather, or earthquakes, or volcanic eruptions, with total accuracy is that they're manifestations of divine wrath, and attempts to understand them in scientific terms are pure heresy. I've actually seen this argument too.

I think my occasional math geekiness (which Gentle Reader(s) may have noticed in previous posts) is partly because "infinity" is an inherently compelling topic (well, to me, anyway), and one that it's possible to consider and discuss in a rational, entirely non-mystical way. Sort of like how astrophysics means you can talk about the beginning of the universe without arguing over theology. I suppose it's nice that neither the fundies nor the crystal-gazers have really seized on math so far, although that might be an entertaining spectacle. Really, there are quite a few things out there that would make the fundies angry if only they were a little better educated. And lots of things the New Age types would surely think were really deep and meaningful, if they'd ever heard of 'em. Maybe in a future post I'll try coming up with a list, or the start of a list, anyway. That should be entertaining.

Viva la Evolution!

February 12th will be Charles Darwin's 197th birthday. Which is something worth celebrating, given the rising tide of thuggish, medieval ignorance spreading in this country and around the world. I think it'd be tiresome and a bit shrill to devote yet another post to bashing fundies just now, so instead -- in honor of Mr. Darwin -- here are a few more pictures of cute fuzzy primates. [As usual, each image links to its original source, where you'll typically find more info, and more & larger images.]

The first pic is of a pair of Pygmy Marmosets. Second is a Cottton-top Tamarin, a threatened species from Colombia. Third is an Emperor Tamarin, followed by a baby Gray Gentle Lemur. And finally we have Charles Darwin himself. Note the family resemblance.

It's impossible for any normal person not to go "Awwwww..." when looking at these pictures -- well, possibly except for the last one. People who get outraged by the idea that we're related to these lil' guys are just contemptible. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is.

Heyy, MORE Blasphemy....

Seems that blasphemy is everywhere, once you start to look for it:

• In Denmark, it's apparently blasphemous to sell flip-flop sandals with pictures of Jesus and Mary on 'em. I can only imagine what would be going on if they'd put those Mohammed cartoons on shoes.
  
• Actually that's happened already, sort of, and Nike was the "guilty" party. One of the newer perils of being a profitable evil global monolith: If your product has any squiggly lines on it, you have to be absolutely sure they don't inadvertently spell anything in Arabic script. Of course, it's easy for Nike to get off the hook by blaming the whole thing on those prejudiced little Chinese 6 year olds who make all of their shoes.
  
• Meanwhile, AOL's new marketing slogan "I AM" is unforgivable blasphemy, according to certain psychotic Christian fundies. And they run our government, so you know what they're saying must be true. Or at least you'd better pretend it's true, if you know what's good for you.
  
• It turns out that Kanye West is a blasphemous infidel, as well, according to at least one fundie blogger. At one point he says "Good thing you're not God...and good thing I'm not God either (I'd be doing some major "zapping")". Which I think is a very revealing comment.
  
• In a bit of musical blasphemy, a couple of well-known Sunday school tunes have been given blasphemous new lyrics, singing the praises of Cthulhu. As for blasphemy against Cthulhu, I haven't really found anything worth posting, which is a bit surprising. Perhaps those who speak ill of Cthulhu are rapidly, ah, removed from the universe, along with everything they've ever posted on the net. That's one theory, anyway.
  
• Putting the Hindu god Ganesh on a beer label isn't just blasphemy, it's a hate crime, according to one offendee. So he's suing the Lost Coast brewery for a billion dollars. Indica is a great beer, and anybody who wants to get between me and my beer is the Enemy. As for food pairings, let me suggest sacred cow as a perfect accompaniment. Add some bacon on top, and you're up to 3 offended religions for the price of one. Eat it on Friday (rather than fish) and you might offend a few elderly Catholics as well. Mmmm.... Bacon....
  
• But if you're Catholic, maybe you're too busy being angry about a recent South Park episode. Yes, South Park is blasphemous too. Who knew?
  
• Of course, if you're a proper bible thumpin' fundie, you know that all Catholics are blasphemers, because of the whole Virgin Mary thing.
  
• And if you're a proper Koran thumpin' Wahhabi, you know that all Shias are blasphemers.
  
• Also, writing a comedic book about Jesus is criminal blasphemy in Greece, even now, in the 21st century.
  
• The UN, or at least its terminally silly "Human Rights Commission", thinks it'd be nice if we had a global ban on offending anybody's religion. The UN's also been in favor of world peace for the last 60 years, and look how that's turned out.
  
• Here's a negative review of John Travolta's film Battlefield Earth, which is based on the holy writ of L. Ron Whatsisname. Clearly this is an offense against the holy name of Xenu, and John and Tom are going to come looking for you.
  
• Believe it or not, even our Glorious Leader is a blasphemer. Seems that when he was in Japan, Dubya bowed at a Shinto shrine. Someone really ought to explain to the fundies that George only did it because he thought the shrine was the one where the war criminals are buried, and the bow was done strictly out of professional courtesy. That ought to make them very happy.
  

Equal Opportunity Offender

Surprising how little coverage the Danish cartoon crisis is getting in the US media. Part of it, I'm sure, is that US media people are clueless fools who can't find Denmark on a map, don't know anything about the place, and assume their readers don't want to read about the rest of the world anyway. But they all have AP news feeds, so they can't pretend to be completely unaware of what's going on. I imagine they're just deathly afraid of ever offending anyone. Call it political correctness if you like, although that's become an ideologically loaded term. I gather part of the original motivation for the cartoons was to comment on self-censorship in the Western media. I guess we really shouldn't be that surprised that our domestic media is timid and spineless, or that lots of other Western countries have a freer press than we do these days. I'm not saying they need to reprint the cartoons, just that it would be a good opportunity to editorialize in favor of freedom of expression, assuming they're still in favor of that. Or if even that is just too controversial, they could at least give it a couple of column inches on an inside page.

In an more unfortunate development, the story is getting a bit of buzz in the conservative blogosphere. Another example. And another. Yet another. I don't think it's exactly helpful to be pro-cartoon solely because you don't like Muslims. I've never found conservatives to be reliable defenders of free expression. Sure, they're in favor of it when they're the ones doing the offending, but say anything unflattering about their infallible King George, or their holy crusade in Iraq, or make fun of their religion, and they're all for having you hauled off to Abu Ghraib and hooked up to the electrodes. An additional ugly bit is that they're all acting shocked and amazed that anyone in Europe believes in free speech. They've all got to get in vicious little digs at France, even though a French newspaper had the guts to print something that no US paper (that I'm aware of) would touch. I guess the thinking is that anyone who failed to jump on the crazy train for war in Iraq must be against freedom of any kind. And then they're copping the same smug "I told you so" attitude as they did during the recent rioting in Paris. Like somehow they were proved right about something. About what, exactly? It's not entirely clear. Probably something about how this proves that our Glorious Leader is right to wage holy war against the unbelievers, or something.

For the sake of being "fair and balanced", here's an angry rant by someone who was offended by the cartoons. And here's an archive of many additional blasphemous images. And another blog about the controversy, this one taking more of a free speech angle, which is refreshing.

It's very simple, really. The right to free expression must include the right to "offensive" expression, with no exemptions made for anyone's personal sacred cow. There's no such thing as a right to never be offended by anything. And we certainly shouldn't start carving out exceptions to our basic rights in the name of religion, anybody's religion. All religions are irrational, stupid, and false, and buying into one of them shouldn't grant someone more legal rights than someone who chooses not to partake. Our own fundies claim they're being oppressed whenever they're legally prevented from imposing their beliefs on the public at large, whether it's creationism, mandatory school prayer, government-sponsored nativity scenes, or what have you. They want absolute "freedom of religion" for themselves, and none for anyone else, and certainly no freedom from religion for anybody at all. How this is appreciably different from what those nasty evildoers want is something they've never adequately explained. Perhaps it's because our country's fundies have got the One True Religion, while the fundies beyond our borders all believe in satanic false idols. But then, those fundies say the same thing about us. So who are we to believe? Maybe they're both right about each other, and wrong about themselves.

Mmm.... Cheeeeese.....

[I could talk about politics again and try to become a respected world-famous blogger, but I make a point of trying to spend as little time as possible being angry or depressed. So how about let's just agree that George W. and his minions are pure evil incarnate, and talk about something fun instead?]

The Super Bowl's coming up, which I couldn't care less about. I understand Seattle's involved somehow, which surprises me. Maybe if they'd put the players on ice skates, give them sticks, and make the ball sort of, well, puck-shaped, then I'd start caring about football. The only positive thing about football that I can think of off the top of my head is that it's an excuse to eat lots of cheese. Ok, and there's the beer, too, let's not forget the beer. But the whole experience would be so much improved if you didn't have all that TV nonsense to distract from the cheese and beer. Also, if you're going to have some cheese, it may as well be good cheese. Life is short. Why waste a single moment of it eating Velveeta?

A few selected news articles about cheese, some more fussy and pretentious than others:

• The ABCs of Wine and Cheese. I actually think beer goes better with most kinds of cheese. But no rant about beer vs. wine today.
  
• Making Fine Cheese a Respected Art. There aren't a lot of countries where you'd see a headline like that, or where within the article someone would remark that many people are afraid of cheese. You just want to explain to them that lots of people eat cheese every day, yes, even the "stinky" kinds, and many of them don't die, at least not because of the cheese.
  
• Foodie at large - the big cheese. Just a reminder that the UK produces a lot of really great cheese. Yes, it's food, and the British are good at it. Film at 11.
  
• Making the most of milk. A newspaper in Virginia profiles a local couple in the cheese business.
  

And a few of my favorite local cheesemakers, most of whom sell at local farmers' markets. If you're not in this neck of the woods, you may be out of luck, but hey. There's probably someone geographically closer to you who deserves your suport.

• Fraga Farm. I'm not going to name the particular item I'm most fond of, since I don't want to threaten my supply.
  
• Rivers Edge Chevre. Another great local goat cheese producer. Their site goes into a bit of detail about their goats. You can tell they really love their goats, which is always a big plus in my book. Besides, goats are just cool.
  
• Rogue Creamery. They're best known for a variety of blue cheeses. If you act now, you can still buy a Super Bowl gift pack off their website.
  
• WIllamette Valley Cheese. They're mostly known for their gouda and havarti, but I'm more fond of their fontina. But hey, I'm weird that way.
  
• Noris Dairy. Yes, if you want good local cheddar, and you don't want to have any dealings whatsoever with a certain coastal-based evil, litigious, predatory monopolist, you're in luck. And cheese is just part of a full range of dairy products, and they even do home delivery. With milk in glass bottles and everything. I remember having a milkman when I was little, and it was considered kind of weird and retro even then. In the 21st century, it's jaw-dropping that such a thing exists. I don't drink a lot of milk, so it's not practical for me, but if I did, I'd be all over this.
  

It's a shame that nobody in the area seems to be doing French-style triple cream soft cheeses (like Pierre Robert for example). Maybe those are still a little too decadent for local tastes, just a bit too "rich" and (some might say) "unhealthy". I'd argue that any food that makes you very, very happy is good for your mental health, and mental health is a crucial part of your overall health, therefore it's health food. It's obvious, once you think about it the correct way.