Strata Lucida

How to destroy the Earth

With apologies to Marcus over at Collision Course, I'd like to point out this extremely useful guide to destroying the Earth. The page offers dozens of methods of destroying our planet, from negating its existence via time travel, to shaking it to pieces at the planetary resonant frequency (or frequencies), to annihilating it with antimatter. The last method requires a "mere" 12 kg of antimatter, but, as one commenter on the page says, "I still think that antimatter is crazy s**t, i.e. wouldn't want it on my flapjacks." The page even has career advice to the aspiring Earth-destroyer.

Of all the methods suggested, I am most intrigued by Total Existence Failure, with its vaguely existentialist implementation of planetary suicide:

You will need: nothing

Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance, all 2*10⁴⁹ atoms making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist.

Note: the odds against this actually ever occuring are considerably greater than a googolplex (10¹⁰¹⁰⁰) to one.

Failing this, some kind of arcane (read: scientifically laughable) probability-manipulation device may be employed.

Posted by Chris at 10:23 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

Saber-rattling or slip of the tongue?

There are more worrisome blips today on the attack-Iran front. One of the possible scenarios is a strike by Israel on select Iranian targets thought to be developing nuclear capability. Of course, to attack Iran, Israel would need permission to fly over Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Iraq. Only the last is at all likely, and Israeli flyover of Iraq would imply American support for the mission. At a news conference Thursday, President Bush seemed to be of two minds on whether such an attack is imminent. Here's how it played out in the Associated Press:

Bush reaffirmed that Iran is not now in danger of a U.S. attack, despite the administration's belief that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons; Iran denies that charge. "There's more diplomacy, in my judgment, to be done," the president said.

Asked about his level of concern that Israel might attack Iran to prevent its Tehran from acquiring nuclear arms, Bush responded with an assurance to Israel of U.S. protection.

"If I was the leader of Israel and I'd listened to some of the statements by the Iranian ayatollahs that regarded the security of my country, I'd be concerned about Iran having a nuclear weapon as well," he said. "We will support Israel if her security is threatened."

Translation: "If we feel like attacking, we'll go ahead and do so, but we're going to keep a plausible distance from it by allowing Israel to do the deed for us."

The Telegraph plays the story rather differently. The article repeats the same "we will support Israel" quote, but goes on with a very different interpretation:

His comments appeared to be a departure from the administration's line that there are no plans to attack at present and that Washington backs European diplomatic efforts. The remarks may have reflected Mr Bush's personal thinking on an issue causing deep concern in Washington.

Moments later, Mr Bush was asked another question on Iran and appeared to return to his script - this time emphasising the need for a diplomatic effort.

(Hat tip: John Robb for the Telegraph piece.)

Posted by Chris at 09:18 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Goin' nuke

A Birdhouse entry on pro-nuclear Greens points to an excellent Wired article about new developments in nuclear power technology and politics. It seems prominent environmental thinkers such as James Lovelock and the founder of Greenpeace are starting to think nuclear power might not be such a bad idea after all. The basic idea being that by concentrating your environmental damage in one place -- analogous to the paving of paths in national parks -- you wind up better off in the aggregate. Fossil fuels have enormous social and environmental costs: not only does the huge amount of carbon deposited into the air cause health problems, but the geostrategic politics of fossil fuels force us into untenable positions where we are reliant on, and supportive of, extremely nasty Islamic regimes.

All this reminds me of a high school report I once did on the MHTGR, or Modular High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor. The idea behind MHTGR is to build a small (500-megawatt) reactor with an intrinsically safe design: it's meltdown-proof because of the core design, and immune to Three Mile Island-style radioactive coolant leaks because it's cooled by helium (which doesn't become radioactive). And, being modular, the MHTGR can be mass-produced.

Of course, technology has moved along in the 15 years since I did that little report, and pebble-bed reactors are the latest in safe-by-design nuclear power tech. The pebble-bed looks like a similar concept to the MHTGR, and has been used successfully in Germany. New ones are now being built in China.

If James Lovelock is thinking positively of nuclear power, it seems we may be close to unbranding one of the enviro movement's sacred cows. With more research we should be able to come up with ways to solve the waste storage problem. But if Green opposition stymies nuclear research and development before it can get started, that's unlikely to happen.

Posted by Chris at 01:23 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

All the philosophies unfit to print

Peter Edidin of the New York Times trips over his own shoes as he covers a philosophical work by Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit:

Harry G. Frankfurt, 76, is a moral philosopher of international reputation and a professor emeritus at Princeton. He is also the author of a book recently published by the Princeton University Press that is the first in the publishing house's distinguished history to carry a title most newspapers, including this one, would find unfit to print. The work is called "On Bull - - - - ."

The opening paragraph of the 67-page essay is a model of reason and composition, repeatedly disrupted by that single obscenity:

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much [bull]. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize [bull] and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry."

Frankfurt usefully distinguishes between the simple liar and the bullshitter. Because the simple liar is aware of the truth and wants to skirt it, he has a respect for truth that the bullshit artist lacks. The bullshit artist, caught in his own web of unfounded rhetoric, simply disregards truth as a criterion of sound reasoning, instead relying on persuasive ability as the measure of an argument's strength. In this the bullshitter is trapped in a closed loop of which I've written recently.

The gem in this article comes when Edidin quotes Frankfurt on the origin of his title:

"I used the title I did," he added, "because I wanted to talk about [bull] without any [bull], so I didn't use 'humbug' or 'bunkum.' "

Now that's some straight shootin'. Rather than "disrupting" his chain of reasoning, the use of the barnyard colloquialism allows Frankfurt to slice directly to the heart of his chosen topic. No bullshit.

Posted by Chris at 11:53 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

At the risk of breathing my own...

John Robb, author of the impressively expert Global Guerrillas blog, notices my post on closed OODA loops and comes up with a perfect gloss on the situation:

Another way of saying "breathing your own exhaust."

Now, it seems that the closed OODA loop -- the trap of having your orientation confirm and produce your observations and actions -- applies to more than just military organizations. I think it works at a psychological level, too, as might be seen in certain psychic states like depression or mania. I'd like to draw that out some more, but this will have to wait for another day.

Posted by Chris at 09:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Medieval wisdom

Digging around for medieval sources on brewing lore, I found this nugget of wisdom in a Danish cookbook published in 1616:

Hvorledis oc i huad maade Malt skal giøris/oc siden bryggis/kand icke lætteligen skriffuis/eller ved Bogstaffuene læris: Mand skal selff være hoss/oc selff holde en Haand der hoss. Thi huer Landskab haffuer her vdi sin besynderlig art oc maade.

Translated, it runs:

How and in what manner Malt should be made, and then brewed, cannot easily be written or be learned by letters: one should be there and have a hand in it. For each land has in this its peculiar art and manner.

So true (and not just of brewing, either).

Posted by Chris at 04:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Of interest to brewers only

I spent an inordinate amount of time over the weekend working up a comprehensive spreadsheet for calculating parti-gyle recipes. Parti-gyle is the ancient technique -- used by the Trappist monks of Belgium, among others -- of making two beers from a single mash. It's the process that resulted in Belgium's classic division of tripel, dubbel, and singel (or simple): the tripel is the first and strongest runnings, the dubbel in between, and the singel the weakest beer. I've revived the practice in the homebrew context, both because it's simpler and because it gives me a kick to brew in the medieval tradition. The spreadsheet just applies modern mathematical methods to the recipe formulation, making everything much easier on me.

Posted by Chris at 11:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Abyssal trench

Paul Farhi of the Washington Post reports that the White House is using "minders", escorts who tag along with reporters at certain official parties or other noteworthy occasions. The "minders" prevent journalists from venturing out of certain designated areas, but they are also there to keep tabs on the journalists' sources:

[T]he escorts weren't there to provide security; all of us had already been through two checkpoints and one metal detector. They weren't there to keep me away from, Heaven forbid, a Democrat or a protester; those folks were kept safely behind rings of fences and concrete barriers. Nor were the escorts there to admonish me for asking a rude question of the partying faithful, or to protect the paying customers from the prying media. ... [T]he minders weren't there to monitor me. They were there to let the guests, my sources on inaugural night, know that any complaint, any unguarded statement, any off-the-reservation political observation, might be noted.

I'm trying to remember where I've seen a precedent for this. Thinking... thinking...

Oh yes! It was in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where government minders were notorious for dogging Western journalists' steps at every turn. There, too, the system was only partially designed to constrain the scribes; its real intent was to make sure the interviewees never forgot that someone was watching and recording everything they said, and that nothing outside the party line got aired.

I think this speaks for itself. And it certainly reminds me of one of Nietzsche's most famous aphorisms (from Beyond Good and Evil):

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Posted by Chris at 01:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Closed loops, tungsten edition

This one seems to be making the rounds:

How many Bush Administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are a delusional spin from the liberal media. There is no shortage of filament. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate freedom?

(Via)

Posted by Chris at 12:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Closed loops

Chuck Spinney, writing for DNI, worries that America is about to become trapped in a closed loop of decision-making. Working from Colonel John Boyd's "OODA" schema (Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action), Spinney writes:

Observations feed into the organism's Orientation activity. Boyd showed how Orientation exhibits a shaping pressure on what is seen and on the interpretation of what is seen. Decisions and actions flow out of this two-way interplay of Observation and Orientation. He showed why the most dangerous internal state of an OODA loop occurs when the Orientation process becomes so powerful that it force fits the organism's observations into fitting a preconceived template, even when those observations threaten the relevance of that template. ... When this happens, the loop has turned inside itself. It loses its capacity to adapt to changing external circumstances, and in effect, the open far-from-equilibrium system becomes an incestuously amplifying closed system—and echo chamber amplifying its own echoes: Any tendency toward self-correction breaks down, because Observations of the results of its Actions are fed through the same non-adaptive template, over and over again. The organism becomes increasingly disconnected from reality.

The power of Boyd's intellectual achievement is that he showed why the inevitable result of such an inwardly focused OODA Loop is a build up of internal confusion and disorder (entropy). He showed why, when such loops are put under menacing pressure, the confusion and disorder naturally expands into panic and chaos, which in turn can generate overload, paralysis, and even collapse. Boyd's entire strategy of conflict centered on the idea of inducing his opponent's OODA loop to turn inside itself.

Now, of course it's tempting to observe the blogospheric tendency to become a closed loop that amplifies its own non-adaptive templates. But I don't want to dwell on that. Instead I want to open my own loop a bit by going beyond my usual group of blog references, and point to a post by Andrew Sullivan in which he considers the precarious security situation in Iraq and the difficulty of implementing a democratic government under such conditions:

I know Paul Wolfowitz has read Hobbes. Did he forget it? CPA adviser Larry Diamond hasn't: "You can't have a democratic state unless you have a state, and the fundamental, irreducible condition of a state is that it has a monopoly on the means of violence." As John Burns has written - again no sympathizer for Saddam or cynic - that simply isn't the case in Iraq. Our predicament is that you cannot have democracy without order and you cannot have a new order without democracy.

But American triumphalists from Wolfowitz to President Bush are stuck in an Orientation system that presupposes democracy as the condition of security. It's why Bush was able to say, in his inaugural speech, "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." It's why David Brooks was able to claim that the ideals are more real than reality itself. It's a framework that is exactly backwards: disconnected from the reality of the situation, it is becoming a closed, self-sustaining feedback loop. And, if Boyd is right, when you prod such a loop, it degenerates into paranoia and chaos.

Posted by Chris at 12:19 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)