Simple Country Physicist

I have blogged previously on how organizations demand loyalty from their members while often showing none to them, and how this is most pronounced in military organizations because of their focus on mission. In the case of military organizations there is also the class difference between members and non-members or civilians, who are often viewed as being lower on the social ladder than pond scum.

An excellent example of this came in this morning’s feeds from the Chicago Tribune.[Link] This article starts with a description of how a truck driver’s body was shipped home without any preparation other being placed in a coffin. The man was a civilian contractor killed in Iraq and by the time his body reached home, it had decomposed substantially.

According to the article, some 770 civilian contractors have been killed in Iraq while they were actually working. Civilian contractors killed while off duty are not counted since their survivors are apparently not entitled to workmen’s compensation. Also, the article does not relate how many civil service members have been killed in Iraq.

This needs to be recognized beyond the level of insensitivity and prejudice. While it may appear so, it is not. It is simply the way the military has to act to possibly be successful. We should also recognize that of almost all nations’ military organizations, America has a better history of minimizing casualties.

One of the problems confronting large organizations is having enough Internet Protocol addresses for all of their members who have to sail the internet. Given the move to web based applications, this effectively means all of their members except the very senior and the very blue collar. The former still regard using computers as unworthy of their exalted position and have assistants who do their surfing for them; the latter are not viewed as needing internet access and their surfing is performed by a supervisor.

One of the tricks to ameliorate this short fall is to dynamically assign IP addresses. That is, when a user tries to access the internet, an IP address is assigned the user for the duration of the surf, then it is assigned to someone else. The catch 22 with this is that while the owners of the web site being visited know who owns the IP address of a visitor, it is only at the organization level and not at the individual level. To find that out, the web site owner has to get access to the organization’s logs of who that IP address was assigned to at a given time.

This is how the copyright Gestapo tracks internet violators, like those who up/download music and video from peer-to-peer sites. One of the most aggressive of these is the Recording Industry Association of America, who has taken several folks to court over this. So vehement are their activities that they have been compared to the original Nationalist Socialist Gestapo and the file sharers to Star-of-David armbanded Jews.

The RIAA’s first wave of litigations was directed at the “low hanging fruit” – the sharers with static (fixed) IP addresses. The second wave has been aimed at those who have dynamic IP addressing. The approach here has been to demand that the organization search through their logs and offer up the identities of the users that were assigned particular IP addresses at particular times. For Internet Service Providers this has preceded fairly smoothly because the ISPs don’t want to be sued themselves; also, they have scant loyalty to their users.

Now, I read in the Register feed [Link] that U Nebraska has told the RIAA that they will not track down IPs without being paid for it, nor will they prohibit peer-to-peer software. The reason for the latter is that the software is widely used for both teaching and research; for the former that they will not spend taxpayer money on the log searches.

Such an argument is not without some validity. Several Yankee government organizations have declined to search logs on the grounds that such are exempted from the Freedom of Information Act and outside the scope of their appropriated funding. The latter is supported by repeated Congressional punishment (and rhetoric) of organizations who have not fulfilled their appropriated programs.

Interestingly, there is no mention of any loyalty to the students, nor of the questionable practice of associating a particular PC with its owner. This whole thing reveals the rather disreputable nature of modern colleges. Their primary outlook is cash flow and their attitude towards students is dominated by avoiding any hint of liability. In other words, they are acting just like any other large organization.

Where does the sex come in? A recent study of the nature and density of erotic texts in the Eighteenth century indicates not only a greater than previously appreciated commonality of such but a derogatory, property attitude of men towards women.[Link] What makes these common is the opposite situation of copyright and the organizational view of juniors or outsiders.

The contrast of copyright situations is that in the Eighteenth century the only ways to copy copyrighted material was to write it out in long hand, or to own a print shop. In this environment, copyright was intended to protect against the latter; the former was too intensive to merit attention and too hard to discover. In the Twenty-first century, electronic information may be easily copied, so the issue of copyright is to protect the owner of copyright from the general copying. Clearly the environment has changed, but the thinking has only intensified in its rigidity.

Notably, in the Eighteenth century, women were largely limited to small, often ad hoc social organizations akin to students today while men were members of several larger organizations, including clubs where the literature were read aloud.

Happily beyond this point, the analogy disintegrates. We are only left with some hope that just as women have established their rights in society by changing attitudes of individual and organizations perhaps in we may be able to change restrictive attitudes on information sharing.

When I was a lad, my parents would about twice a year drag me off to a “family reunion”. As a bookish introvert, this often did entail actual dragging to get me into the automobile. Once there, no amount of pressure would force me to socialize with other children who seemed only interested in arcana such as baseball statistics (without having any idea what statistics are,) or their shul companions’ doings. But I do recall a conversation I had with my great-uncle on the porch of his farm house.

This farm house was new and had wonderful modern conveniences like indoor plumbing, hot running water that didn’t have to first pumped and then heated, and electricity through plugs in the wall. The only bad thing about this house was that it was not the one his ancestors had lived in for six generations because the Yankee revenuers (his term for any enforcement part of the Yankee government) had stolen his farm to make a lake out of. As you may have gathered this dispossession was courtesy of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

My great uncle was fond of the game of checkers and while his board was the standard press board one could buy at any five and dime store, the checkers pieces were the remains of shotgun shells. I mentioned this to him and he replied that the pieces were made from the spent shotgun shells that could not be reloaded in relative safety.

In the years since, I have observed this type of behavior in many people. The behavior has to do with a thing and that which must be added to make it function. An obvious example of this is a flashlight and its batteries, for those who do not think in terms of firearms and their ammunition (or are afraid to.) The behavior is that one spends the most one can on the thing, but the least on the addition. Hence we purchase high quality flashlights but seek sales on the batteries that make them work, or even invest in rechargeable batteries.

The same applies to electronics. Even today most people will spend a considerable sum on a radio but believe what they listen to should be free – hence the difficulties of satellite radio. My parents felt much the same way about television although my generation has grudgingly accepted the idea of cable subscriptions. My generation sees little use in text messaging and often not only declines the service, but fails to comprehend its importance to those of my daughter’s generation.

The same carries over to copyright, as I was reminded this morning by one of my colleagues Magnetic Electric Fields, who sent me the link to a good Wall Street Journal article [Link] that talks about Digital Rights Management. The opinion expressed is that the law should reflect the rights of both information producers and consumers. While I agree with that, I also have to add that whatever gets done, it has a better chance of being effective if it acts with, rather than contrary, human and organizational behavior.

If we examine books, we find that copyright was introduced to protect authors from unscrupulous printers, not from consumers. As the technology to copy came into being and became cheap enough in the Twentieth century, the matter of individual copying came into consideration. This is where the concept of fair use came into being. In a sense, fair use acts to the benefit of the author in that by allowing portions of a work to be used for the purpose of increasing human knowledge and dispersing that knowledge, demand for the work of the author was increased.

This was also consistent with the outlook of the book purchaser that the book was a thing that was owned. As such, the owner could burn the book, give it away, loan it, or incorporate it into his life. Further, since the information in the book was not differentiated from the material nature of the book, at least in the mind of the consumer, partial copying seemed inherent in ownership, the same as allowing a friend to borrow the book. Also, the legal apparatus recognized that petty instances of this practice could not in practicality be punished.

This outlook does not appear to have been modified very much. I suspect Joe Consumer sees a license as only a certification of ownership in spite of its rhetoric. Computer software privacy follows directly from the behavior to spend the least one has to on making the expensive thing (computer) work. The same goes for audio and video files. Despite all the licensing legalese, the consumer sees these as owned property, not as rented property, and probably will for generations to come.

Thus, any law that ignores such, and is open to petty, universal, and unenforceable  violation will effectively be nullified by the actions of the consumer populace. The entire effort falls into the same category as teaching horses to sing – it irritates the horse and is ultimately doomed to failure.

I see in CNET [Link] that a (modern) democratic web site builder by name of Phil DeVellis has claimed to have done the hammer Hillary video. Reportedly he has been discharged from his position for a democrat web site support firm.

Maybe. Oh, not that he has been sacked but that he did it. One still suspects this was a ploy by the former first lady to draw support away from Mr. Obama, and Mr. DeVellis’ confession is nothing more than the organizational knee jerk hang a scapegoat so the membership won’t ask any more questions.

No wonder lawyers are superstitious mystics.

One of the few, and possibly relative, advantages of living in Alibam is the politicians. Whereas those of states like Massachusetts seem to be fairly universally venial, wacky, even mentally broken, those of Alibam are generally only venal (or occasionally naive,) and mediocre. We know they will steal, either for themselves or for their corporate masters (remember, Alibam has two parties that are distinguishable only by their mascots, not by their politics,) but they don’t do it very well and can thus be fairly well abided as necessary evils so long as we can keep some form of term limits in place. Yes, extremes do seep through, both good – John Sparkman comes to mind, and ill – the former Chief Religious Fanatic on the state supreme court comes to mind, but they tend to be few.

This is not the case in our neighboring state of Tennessee. They tend to produce many very good and very bad politicians. On the good side we tend to think of Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, and Sam Houston. On the bad side we tend to think of Andrew Johnson and Al Gore. This got demonstrated yesterday when the latter individual went back to the Hill to chat with the Yankee congress on climate change.[Link] His reception was apparently sufficiently negative as to largely preclude any ameliorative legislation emerging from this session. He would have done better for the planet and the species if he had stayed how and stirred cow stercus to appreciate the aroma.

This sadly is one more datum of the damage that celebrities and wanna be celebrity politicians cause in espousing technical causes that they have neither skill nor knowledge in furthering. One does not expect scientists to be glib or persuasive; they are however knowledgeable and if reputable, able to defend their assessments and analysis on a rigorous basis.

Perhaps his cause would have been better served if the folks who made the video about the former first lady made one for him? One might hope that Ms. Clinton would loan them to Mr. Gore.

In a related matter, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has lambasted (American) Chinese food for having: too many calories; too much sodium; too much fat. No mention is made of being hungry again an hour after eating. Special example was made of General Tso chicken, perhaps revealing the popularity of chicken since it quite obviously isn’t canine meat.

Swipes were also taken at Italian and Mexican restaurants who are attributed to use excessive saturated fat.

This tends to confirm what we have suspected for a long time, that restaurant food and good health are antithetical. But we wonder if the situation would not be better if the Center for Science in the Public Interest testified to the Yankee congress and Mr. Gore talked about restaurant food?

There is a saw (n. a proverb or maxim., Tenth Oxford Concise Dictionary) related to management that “The Punishments will Continue until Morale Improves.” The morale we are talking about here is that of scientists and engineers who labor under the erroneous understanding that “truth” (Yes Virginia, I know its a religious/legal term but we are going to be talking about primary human organizations here.) is something other than slanting/ repackaging, and reporting things in such a manner as to be supportive of one’s employer’s self interest rather than the benefit of meaningless and archaic notions such as the nation, its citizenry, or the species in general.

One such area is Network Neutrality. I have blogged peripherally on this previously.[Link] [Link] [Link] [Link] but now I read a down home article about this in the Register feed.[Link] I have also commented on why I read this “furrin gibberish” for the sake of another perspective, which  may not be truly independent but at least it has to seep through a different set of censorship filters than what I get to read from the American media. Fundamentally, access to this is a matter of network neutrality and hence one of my reasons for supporting such. If we only have information that we are told by whoever decides what we shall be told, then those decision makers have also to large part controlled what we think.

This was an experiment that was almost successful many times, notably in National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Communist Soviet Union. It also seems to be occurring in the United States with the increasing domination of the print and ether wave media by corporate giants so that too many of the populace now are reduced to either gullible fools or rejectionist cynics.For example, while this is exactly the sort of thing that Lawrence Lessig [Link] has been fighting about since the Megahard monopoly case, largely unknown to the likes of Joe Consumer who only obtains information form the television news (and then primarily sports?), newspapers, and some variant on PEOPLE magazine.

Another such is the decision to close NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts.[Link] Just as the issues of Network Neutrality have been subducted by the Yankee Congress to remove them from any meaningful non corporate, non political discussion, the NASA institute has been discorporated for political reasons as well. This action clearly follows as retribution for the whistle blowing of administration censorship of scientific results under the guise of redirection of NASA mission to the openly questionable return to Luna. Unlike the Kennedy era moon race that served to confront Communism and bolster American morale, this undertaking seems to have anything to do with any tangible benefit and at best only weakly strengthens the survival probability of the species. One suspects that just as the Kennedy era program had the secondary benefit of enhancing American missile technology, this has the intended benefit of enhancing American space technology for future conflict with another communist (?) competitor.

There is another old saw that nations fall when their citizens are no longer willing to serve in the military. The United States has been skating on the edge of this for years now, intensified by my generation’s memories of Vietnam, abated somewhat by the actions, if not the threat, of socially dispossessed terrorists. May we make any parallel to the unwillingness of society to support science? Do the two share anything other than the apathy of the populace and the ambitions of the powerful?

When I was an undergraduate upperclassman and graduate student, we, my peers, my professors, and myself, used to discuss whether taking high shul physics helped or hurt. The general consensus was that if helped under two rather opposing conditions. If the high shul teacher was very good, someone who had a good education in physics and could teach well and wanted to be where he/she was, then high shul physics was beneficial. The other beneficial situation was hen the teacher was absolutely inept and the student was sufficiently brilliant to pick physics up on his/her own.

We concluded that both of these are rare events. First, none of us could name an instance of a good high shul physics teacher, mostly because almost none of them had a real physics education – at least 30 semester hours of coursework and laboratory in physics, and those who did tended not to stay about because the bureaucracy was stultifying and one could make more money doing something technical elsewhere. The second is rare because while a substantial fraction of high shul physics teachers are inept, students who can learn physics on their own are rare. Hence, the discussion over whether it was better for students to not be exposed to physics until they got to college. Of course, this just translates the discussion to the goodness of freshman physics instructors.

Now, I see that researchers at U Buckingham in England have concluded that the reason that high shul physics is in decline in England, hence prompting the demise of several college physics departments despite an increase in physics enrollment in recent years, is because of inept teachers and teaching approaches.

I have to admit that this finding supports my own analyses of the problems with our American education system. I have held for several years that once students pass a certain level, and high shul is almost definitively past that level, they should be taught technical subjects by teachers who are primarily educated as professionals of that discipline and not of education.

Going back to my undergraduate days, we used to joke about education physics majors. These were folks seeking an education degree with specialization in physics. Their total physics coursework requirement was essentially half of a “real” physics major’s. They also skimped on supporting course work, like maths, so that the courses they took had to be watered down for their consumption. These are the people who don’t know whether a kilometer or an English mile is longer, much less the basic postulates of the quantum mechanics or why Lorentz invariance is important.

Hence my argument that we should be better served if technical (as in specialized) high shul courses should be taught by people who have degrees in those disciplines, not in education! Of course, then the high shuls would be doing something other than post pubescent babysitting.

There is an interesting article in CNET this morning.[Link] It relates how notebook PCs are supposed to exceed 0.5 of PC sales by 2011. This turnover occurred in the United Staes in 2005.

The problem with PC sales, like automobile sales, is that the closer you get to having as many out there as there are people, the slower the sales become. Mathematically, this is know as the logistics equation for reasons that have never made much sense to me. That is, why its called that doesn’t make much sense, not that the equation doesn’t make sense.

The equation is really quite useful. It describes all sorts of diffusive processes, including those that involve contact between people. Thus, the equation describes things like how contact diseases spread through a population (with the wrinkle of whether folks get over the disease or not, whether by getting well or dieing,) how gossip spreads through a community, and how Firefox contends with Megahard’s Internet Nomad.

The problem when there are different types of populations is complex but not hard, but one has to wonder how the projection was made about the laptops. Too often these projections are not made in the context of a model but solely in the context of data. When this happens, the projection is almost always inaccurate. That’s because the analysts do what is called a linear projection because in the absence of a model, which will almost assuredly be nonlinear (mathematically) like the logistics equation, they see no reason to do the extra work imposed by the nonlinearity.

The primary reason that desktop PC sales have flattened is because the population of people who want/need a desktop has exceeded about 0.75 satisfaction. The sales of laptops draw from (approximately) three populations: new users (added population,) users who are replacing a desktop with a laptop, and users who are supplementing a desktop with a laptop. And yes, Virginia, there is a difference in those latter two populations. So at some point the laptop population will saturate too, and the sales of both will become stagnant.

I blogged last week on the distastefulness of insurance company commercials, in particular with “cave men”.  The same company has a mascot that is a lizard with an Australian accent. One of my colleagues has suggested that the popularity of the whole lizard-dinosaur thing is somehow rooted in those sections of the mental firmware that we inherit from our descent back from common ancestors to the dinosaurs.

At any rate, this seems a busy time for such. PHYSOR [Link] reports on the discovery of a burrow dwelling dinosaur Oryctodromeus cubicularis dated to 135-115 MYA. The relative importance of this find seems to center on this being the first evidence of burrowing dinoaurs, indicating a wider diversity than previously realized. Given the existence of the niche, one is surprised by how long it has taken to find this evidence.

One also speculates about the premiere of a new cartoon show this fall featuring Digs Dinosaur and his inept foe Elmer Fudosaurus

In China, discovery of a small gliding dinosaur has been published.[Link] No mention of when the insect eating “dragon” lived.

Meanwhile, an auction of various fossils, including a mammoth, has been announced in France.[Link]

There is probably a moral here, but I’m not at all sure I grasp what it is. Maybe something about the bankruptcy of the French that they have to sell off the treasures of the past?