Part 2 math –

Mariner forgot to include his own example of quantum physics versus Einsteinian physics, which he believes describes more clearly the difference in definition between the two than Schrodinger’s cat:

You are driving on an interstate highway. The highway is not busy. For the moment, you are the only car you see on the entire visible highway – in front or in back and none on the other side.

Question one: At the moment, are you the fastest car or the slowest? Yes.

Finally, a car appears down the road in front of you. Are you fastest or slowest?

Second question: About this sudden event where a car becomes part of your reality, it appeared on your highway as a definable car, at the same clock time and the same measurable distance (Einstein).

However, Quantum says, “No, not so fast”. The car just didn’t assemble itself out of nothing the moment you saw it; what events caused the car to appear at that moment?

For example, did the car turn on the highway just over the hill or has it been on the road for two days coming from New Jersey? How did the driver come to be in the car at that moment? Why is it a Subaru? Why is it on that highway? What time did it depart so that you would experience it at that moment?

Quantum’s point being that nothing exists in an absolute state, in a precisely definable moment or at an absolute distance. In other words, mass, time, and space are not finite.

The closest human realization that mariner can conjure is when you suddenly meet an old friend at a surprising place. You say “Can you imagine the odds of us meeting?” Quantum can.

Ancient Mariner

A bit of mathematics

Most phenomena lay beyond the existential reasoning of the mind. Those who want to explore this other world must learn the magic of mathematics. Here are a few samples that reveal logical conclusions beyond subconscious reasoning:

1 – Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Mathematical probability: Before any doors are opened you have a 1 in 3 chance of winning [ P= 1/3 ]. After the host opens door 3 which has a goat, the chance for winning the car with your current choice still is 1/3 because although the goat is revealed – the number of doors has not changed. The probability that the car is behind the chosen door still is 1/3 but the unopened door now has a 2/3 chance of winning because door three is known. The solution is that switching has a 2/3 chance of winning – so switch.

2 – Albert Einstein is famous for defining the universe as a relationship between mass, time and space. To the human mind, this still seems adequate (frankly it is) but the mathematics of quantum physics say space does not exist, solid subatomic particles do not exist as little billiard balls of energy and more abstractly, all subatomic activity occurs simultaneously regardless of ‘space’ – even 1 billion light-years away.

An experiment was performed a few years ago where the photons from two different stars were aimed at a device which needed two in-place photons to interact simultaneously. Using the star energy, the device acted as expected. This is tantamount to a magician letting you pull a card from his deck and it is matched simultaneously by a deck on the Sun.

The famous layman’s example is Shrodinger’s cat: A closed box is presented to you with a cat inside. Is the cat dead or alive? The answer is yes. This is kept simple by recognizing that whatever led to the state of the cat, time, space or distance, it is irrelevant to your instant experience. A time-distant event will appear instantly when the box is opened. If the cat is dead, did it die recently or a long time ago? Doesn’t matter to you; as far as you’re concerned the fact that it died happened when you opened the box because otherwise it would have been alive.

Don’t ask for the equations. Dozens of books laden with formulas have been written.

3 – This mathematical exercise will provide some relevant information for your real-time brain. Since 2018, 111 children have been murdered in the United States. Population has questionable stability in many nations including the United States. Will killing 111 children affect the future population of the US?

Yes. Using Bayesian probabilities, in 2060, there will be approximately 308 less people in the United States than if no children were murdered. [formulas in ‘the signal and the noise’ by Nate Silver, 2012 Penguin Press] basic formula:

The formulas have several sources on the internet if you want to play with them.

Ancient Mariner

Cracks in the dam

In a recent post, it was suggested that the current state of affairs, probably a global phenomenon, was a conflict between collective communities and top-down governance. The conflict occurs as differences in lifestyle or circumstance becomes confrontational. Donald’s entire public strategy has been based on the subtle disrespect of the labor class by an educated, advantaged, and socially successful society – now assigned the moniker ‘woke’.

In that recent post, two examples were offered: NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) and Native Americans, two smaller societies (collectives) who have direct conflict with the broader objectives of top-down governance. ProPublica, a highly regarded investigative news source, has provided a sense of the seriousness for the Native Americans. An excerpt is reprinted below:

“In May, Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica reported on how the federal government’s neglect of an old and struggling hatchery system had put tribal fishing rights in jeopardy. The news organizations’ analysis showed that the outlook for fish survival was so poor that the hatchery system was at risk of collapsing under the strain of climate change, unable to produce meaningful levels of fish.

The federal government has announced plans to increase funding for the Columbia River Basin’s salmon hatcheries, the often-crumbling facilities that maintain the river’s dwindling salmon populations. But tribes and state agencies say the influx of funds is only a fraction of what is needed.

The Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that’s required to pay for salmon recovery using proceeds from selling power generated by hydroelectric dams, is putting an additional $50 million toward repairs at hatcheries operated by tribes and states. The agency also plans to increase annual funding for hatchery upkeep from $500,000 to $2.7 million.”

 A good example of ProPublica’s investigative reporting forcing a top-down organization to pay attention to a collective need.

Collectives come in all sizes and shapes. Consider Puerto Rico, a financially collapsed territory of the US. Except for a few charitable organizations, the best the island has received is Trump’s toilet paper. Climate change without financial stability may make the island uninhabitable. What? More immigrants?

Consider the MAGA people, Donald’s confused army. They are belligerent, destructive, do not accept government in any form, and, after more than five decades of social disrespect defined by lack of a college degree, the deliberate shutdown of labor unions, and an income that, by the standards in 1980 means they have less spending power today than in 1980 – inflation applied – is it any wonder that open rebellion has occurred?

Consider several major religious organizations, including the Roman Catholic Church among many protestant churches from Baptist to Methodist, who are suffering splintered Christian principles because of top-down edicts forcibly describing faith, purpose and the opportunity for personal grace. Left to defend for themselves in a disruptive, socially disrespectful society, devotion has become political rather than spiritual; prejudice has become a defense of righteousness that is otherwise unavailable.

Consider the slums. Pages upon pages could be written describing permanent despair, homelessness, poor health, no collective GDP because there are no stores or industry, and violence between people that can be matched only by the collapse in the mouse population studies from the 1960s.

Yes, cracks in the dam of society. It will take time; it will take generational shifts economically, culturally and sadly, militarily. Without exception, history says there will be war.

Ancient Mariner

 

New signs

Bottom up power: [Politico] “The country’s 900 or so rural electric cooperatives serve remote rural customers and are member-driven, -owned and -controlled. Their nonprofit status has made it hard to make investments in low-carbon energy; unlike investor-owned utilities, they can’t go into debt or sell shares to pay for a solar farm. But getting them off of fossil fuels is essential to meeting climate goals.

Already five co-ops have either left or announced they will leave a major G&T (generation and transmission) called Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which covers parts of four Western states.”

This tendency is happening in Europe as well. Despite all the ‘effort’ to stop using fossil fuel, oil companies are making record profits. Even Biden is allowing a new oil-drilling operation in Alaska – talk about plutocracy!

Mariner often writes about collective cultures. Collectivism includes concepts like extended families, local government, local cooperatives, community rules for equality of life, etc. To one degree or another, terms for collectives include cooperative, clan, communist, commune, tribe and many other terms denoting a localized group. The image below captures the general spirit:

Just being a small group does not automatically grant goodness. There are many small groups bent on anything but sharing and survival of all – NIMBY is one of countless examples that demonstrate the conflict between collectivism and the imposing needs of a much larger population.

Having learned from many sources over many years, mariner knows Homo sapiens is a tribal species, along with most of its primate ancestors. In past posts, he has cited authors who said things like “The maximum number of individuals that can be familiar to a human is 150”, “The further a person gets from a direct relationship with the environment, the more abusive the relationship becomes” and recently, “I’m first if its fair for everyone”.

When he studies the development of western nations, and the unimaginable wealth that suddenly appeared on the American continents, mariner is reminded of a group of hoodlums during a riot who break into a store and steal all its goods. Such tactics work for the hoodlums if there is plenty to go around. Western Capitalism is the fastest way to reorganize wealth.

Today, however, there is not enough to go around. Capitalism has an idiosyncrasy that doesn’t work anymore: Grow or die.

Because the West has achieved such wonders and accomplishments – especially when the achievements provide convenience, collective terminology is not popular and its advantages often are discounted. It is this resistance that makes it good news to mariner that there is a breakaway of self-owned electric companies from large conglomerates. There are other appropriate concepts of management that will work better in these challenging times. Bigger may not be better.

There are many more sociological points of interest but mariner can become boring.

Ancient Mariner

Is Big Better?

The news from every quarter, whether conservative, liberal, science, democracy or dictatorship, it is the same: There isn’t enough to go around. An increasing number of nations are participating in or pontificating war as a path to sustain order. In both the East and the West, social mores are collapsing. The economies of wealthy nations are vulnerable. Hoarding behavior within plutocracies, corporatocracies, oligarchies and martial command nations prevail in global policy making. Yet the global number of homeless, starving and abused people is rising; small historical cultures are disappearing and conflict with the Earth’s biosphere grows more volatile.

Since 1980, the rate at which poor nations are collapsing has doubled, largely from the burden of climate change and the hoarding philosophy prevalent among all nations which in turn minimizes assistance.

The most frequent causes cited by public sources are unrealistic tax formulas, cultural abuse (woke, racism, Uyghurs, Moslems, on and on . . .), national cultures ignoring the needs of large populations, and antiquated judicial practices. A new one is artificial intelligence with its self-interest in managing public behavior for profit.

It occurs to mariner that the common denominator to all these dysfunctions is that they are controlled top-down. A simple contradiction would be democracy, a government that is managed by the individual citizen through local, state and federal elections – clearly a bottom-up philosophy today being managed by a plutocracy – a top-down philosophy that makes it so expensive for a local candidate to campaign that only national deep pockets can dictate who can run in local elections.

If one were to examine Earth’s evolution of every plant and animal, compressed into the instinct of every cell is a behavior that would be survival by bottom-up practices. In other words, survival of the fittest at SUSTAINING THE SPECIES. Opossums can only behave in a way that would be good for any opossum. Even the large flocks of birds, herds of cattle and swarms of fish all live in an equal but very personal state of survival: me first but only if it’s fair for the others. Of course, these creatures don’t reason this conclusion, it is in their genes.

Originally, sustaining the species was in the genes of the primates and likely still is but the thorn is the ability to reason, to perceive reality not bound by direct reality – not bound by a balance between the biosphere and physical dependence. Should we curse the first primate that conceived a tool not provided by nature? Of course not. However, should we curse the first primate who discovered how to grow more wheat than was needed and hoarded it? Perhaps, that was not an act to sustain the species.

It may be that the last structured society to sustain the evolutionary rule, ‘me first if it’s fair’, was the Chinese culture which existed around the beginning of the fifth century BCE. The period was before empire-building. It was a society of self-sufficient towns of about 250-1,000 people, likely all related in extended families. The economy was based on a collective style where everyone had a role in sustainability and no one went without.

The idea of a collective economy arose in Europe, if only briefly, with Anabaptist communism; there are remnants today in The United States and Europe but the overwhelming presence of modern commerce is too much to sustain pockets of collectivism. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were numerous attempts at collectivism, the most notable being the Commune movement in the 1960s. A few sympathizers maintain that white man forced native Americans into an independent collective economy; recent news articles have addressed the invasion of commercial interests into Indian sources of locally sourced food, e.g., salmon.

֎ If, indeed, ‘top-down’ management is the issue, could we ever return to bottom-up? Not likely. It is very difficult to imagine what world order will look like in 100-150 years. There are so many substantive forces changing at the moment that it is easy to imagine an Armageddon catastrophe. Short of that, there are many presumably unmanageable situations that politics may not be able to manage. For example:

Population. Simply said, there are far too many humans on Earth to be supported by a natural ratio to Earth’s biosphere nor by any industrial or technological solution. The following quote is from the Smithsonian:

One can speculate that, at least in the United States and Europe, the worker rebellions are the beginning of a new politic.

Uncontrolled corporatism. The last time the Federal Government knew enough to tell corporations what to do was the generation in 1982 that forced Bell to split its empire into smaller independent companies. Before that, in 1911 Standard Oil was forced to split into 34 companies. Given the political power of Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc., not to mention weaponized Plutocratic political parties, it may not be possible to restore bottom-up economy.

Instant global communication. It is a marvel for anyone to log on to the internet and instantly acquire knowledge, news and ideas from around the globe. The nature of this instantaneousness is that there is no need to stop at a national border to show a visa; there is no need to have independent corporations operating in diverse nations of the world; there is no need for anyone to be loyal (AKA collective) to local markets when one can instantaneously purchase cheaper goods in Asia – no Silk Road needed. The most common evidence of this at the local level is the demise of storefronts. A nation’s borders may not mean much as commerce becomes global and can skirt or otherwise dominate national politics.

Global Warming. This is the big change. With the flick of her weather finger, Mother Earth can cause billions of dollars in property damage, increase homelessness, and disrupt government budgets. Further, she has demonstrated how easy it is to change agriculture to desert or a pleasant valley to a lava flow. Politics are irrelevant – no nation can own her or avoid her. Ask Pakistan.

Will there be Armageddon? You’ll have to prove it to mariner.

Ancient Mariner.

 

Shazam, he’s back

Mariner’s blog has been out of service for a few weeks. The reader hasn’t needed him to know the world is the same. He read an article yesterday that drew compassion: More and more migrants are attempting to enter the United States via Canada into Vermont during the dead of winter. Many carry small children heavily wrapped in blankets, tromping through deep snow and temperatures below zero. There was a photograph of a bare footprint in the snow. The article centered on two parents and their two children frozen to death just yards from the border.

Statistically speaking, if you have time to read this blog, had a meal today and a bed tonight, consider yourself wealthy.

Now that the pandemic restrictions on rent increases and evictions is over, the rush is on as record numbers of renters are being evicted. Losing a home is one of the fastest ways for a stable family to be trashed financially, emotionally, and too often, permanently.

Mariner had the thought that, given the resistance of NIMBIES and profit-oriented investors who don’t want to build low profit housing, perhaps the United States (along with a future Congress) might emulate what Britain did after the Second World War: build whole neighborhoods of small home row houses.

The housing market today is so screwed up it will never stabilize enough to be a viable resource for homeless families.

֎ Many years ago in an old textbook, mariner read about the tectonic movement on Earth that was to split an eastern chunk of Africa away from the continent along the Rift Valley. This item has become current news today as a new crack formed. Don’t worry, though, it is moving apart at just a couple of millimeters per year.

֎ Hasn’t it been a terrible Spring? Flooding on the West Coast, Snow in the North, storms in the South. Here along the fortieth parallel, the weather remains bitter cold with an abundance of precipitation. Mariner picked a bad year to reorganize his gardens; tree and brush trimming, building new vegetable beds and suffering prolonged winter damage by rabbits has delayed his Springtime efforts.

It felt good, however, to be in the shed planting vegetable seeds under the grow lights and planting a climbing rose against the outside wall. It is time, folks, to stretch the joints, exercise the muscles with ‘real’ work and get some gumption going – or you may be older than you think!

It is good to have the blog up again but don’t expect a torrent of postings. The world hasn’t change since the last post.

Ancient Mariner