Writings on the wall

There’s been a hacking attempt, so bear with me while I clean up around here. For now the only thing seems to be the tabs just at the top of the page are screwed.

The Many worlds interpretation of quantum physics - a clever take on why it makes sense and why not much else does:

“That’s right,” Huve says, “He wouldn’t. Ponder that.”

“This is the world where my good friend Ernest formulates his Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, and in this world, the thought experiment goes: ‘Hey, suppose we have a radioactive particle that enters a superposition of decaying and not decaying. Then the particle interacts with a sensor, and the sensor goes into a superposition of going off and not going off. The sensor interacts with an explosive, that goes into a superposition of exploding and not exploding; which interacts with the cat, so the cat goes into a superposition of being alive and dead. Then a human looks at the cat,’ and at this point Schrödinger stops, and goes, ‘gee, I just can’t imagine what could happen next.’ So Schrödinger shows this to everyone else, and they’re also like ‘Wow, I got no idea what could happen at this point, what an amazing paradox’. Until finally you hear about it, and you’re like, ‘hey, maybe at that point half of the superposition just vanishes, at random, faster than light’, and everyone else is like, ‘Wow, what a great idea!’”

“That’s right,” Huve says again. “It’s got to have happened somewhere.”

“Huve, this is a world where every single physicist, and probably the whole damn human species, is too dumb to sign up for cryonics! We’re talking about the Earth where George W. Bush is President.”

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Tags: bohr , many worlds , quantum physics

Worldwide decline in deaths due to terrorism over the last 5 years

The reason this isn’t widely understood is that official figures include civilian deaths in Iraq, which is a war zone and would not normally have been included. Similar conflicts in past years, such as Sudan, have not been included. The actual figures are 20% of the numbers usually quoted as terrorist deaths, therefore.

But this, to me, is the most significant finding of the Canadian study:

“[An] extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years.”

Food prices have soared around the world, up 40% since mid 2007. There are 660 million people, equivalent to half the population of China, living on less than $2 per day. These people already spend such a large percentage of their income on food that the increase means they are either starving or in great danger of starving.

We’re already seeing the effects of this, in these poorest nations:

Food riots have rocked Haiti and impoverished Burkina Faso, gripped by a nationwide strike, is the latest African nation to face unrest over the increasing cost of basic foods. Dozens have died in other riots in Africa.

Africa, of course, is hardest hit

Forty people died during price riots in Cameroon in February. There have also been deadly troubles in Ivory Coast and Mauritania and other violent demonstrations in Senegal. Only threats from the government headed off a general strike in Egypt on Sunday.

but Asia will not be immune

Bangladesh and the Philippines, where the poor currently spend around 70 percent of their income simply on food, will be among the worst hit.

There are three main factors contributing to this situation:

1. Climate change and local droughts are partly to blame. African deserts are expanding, other countries including Australia and Khazakstan are affected by drought, and storms have damaged crops in India and Bangladesh. The poorest one sixth of the world’s people are also by and large located in regions where water shortages and ecological changes will bite deepest.
2. Meanwhile a growing middle class in China are demanding, and paying for, more meat in their diet. Each extra cow uses land and water which could otherwise grow ten times that number of calories in the form of grain.
3. In this growing crisis biofuels may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The UN’s special rapporteur on the right to fuel, Jean Ziegler, called them “a crime against humanity”.

The world is distracted by the Iraq war, the threat of terrorism, and the price of oil, but political stability is critically dependent upon food security - and that is hard enough for all sorts of reasons related to distribution, quite apart from these fundamental production problems.

discriminate |disˈkriməˌnāt|

1 recognize a distinction; differentiate : babies can discriminate between different facial expressions of emotion. See note at distinguish .

• [ trans. ] perceive or constitute the difference in or between : bats can discriminate a difference in echo delay of between 69 and 98 millionths of a second | features that discriminate this species from other gastropods.

2 make an unjust or prejudicial distinction in the treatment of different categories of people or things, esp. on the grounds of race, sex, or age : existing employment policies discriminate against women.

A short aside: Discrimination (in the first definition above) is the basis of analysis, and analysis is the basis of inference. That, in turn, is the mechanism by which we turn the basic reification of perception from a catalogue of ideas into a coherent view of the world. It feeds back into itself: the way we discriminate depends on our existing understanding, which creates interpretation reinforcing that discrimination and therefore that understanding.

Lately, in personal relationships, in the media, in politics, and online I’ve been coming across a certain attitude which has been bringing me down. The best way I can explain is by giving some examples from around here, but it could be from anywhere and by anyone.

• Anyone who says that Islam is a religion of peace is as evil as those who carry out the bombings and murders!
• We mustn’t forget that Mohammed WAS a paedophile; and a mass-murderer.
• but that is clearly beyond your ham-handed writing skills
• Same old nonsense. My time is too precious.
• but underneath the veil of lies they are scheming and multiplying faster than any other people group, in an effort to overtake the world.

This is not about whether I agree or disagree with any particular statement: actually it’s exactly the opposite. This way of talking and this way of thinking is everywhere just now. Well, it’s probably always been this way but some days I seem to come across it over and over, and it gets depressing.

Language is for communication, obviously, but the type of language and the type of thinking behind the language fundamentally affects the outcome of that communication. There are types of language which are designed to engage the listener’s emotion, and types designed to engage reason. Or both! The key word here is engage. It’s an essential part of being human and it brings people together because it works by showing people what they have in common. Wittgenstein or no, we trust that the feelings produced by the world in another are the same as the feelings produced in our own hearts. Exploring that shared experience is what makes life worthwhile, one way or another.

So what about the examples above? They play on fear, which puts up barriers between people, or else they directly push people away by attempting to make them feel bad. Perhaps it’s the election which is putting it all over the headlines. All around me, at the moment, I’m seeing divisions between people.

The problem is, I’m responding in precisely the wrong way. In my own life and especially here on Newsvine I’ve been arguing. I’ve been pointing out with logic and sometimes with ridicule exactly why I disagree with one thing or another. Naturally I think I’m right but by thinking that I’ve badly missed the point. Statements like the ones I’m talking about are not about right and wrong, because they’re not designed for engagement. Constructive language is a type of sharing, and the statements above are not about that - they’re weapons designed to separate people. That’s not because of the sentiments expressed. Naturally I’ve chosen examples I find particularly objectionable but please don’t let that distract you from the point I’m making. Politicians, for example, will often say things with that same intent of separation but in a much more subtle way.

It’s a seductive mindset. I’ve noticed myself falling into it more and more these last couple of weeks. I want to show someone they’re wrong. I want people to see that anyone holding that point of view is stupid. Is that helping anyone change their mind or is it just adding to the discrimination in the world - in the second sense of the word above? If you’ll forgive me a party political example, Obama’s “race” speech was beautiful and moving precisely because it cut through the attempts by the press to divide people and engender fear and mistrust, not by more of the same tactics but by reaching beyond that discrimination in both directions to show us why what we have in common is more important than what separates us.

Look the people in my personal life, and on television, and making those statements above on Newsvine are not bad people. We disagree! No one’s going to change my mind by being mean, so what am I afraid of? It’s not the end of the world that there are things, even important things, which we feel differently about. It’s not exactly a matter of tolerance, even. It’s about keeping things in perspective: in the end, one way or another, we’re all in this together.

Update

Discrimination is about differences, and it’s an essential part of reasoning. But if that’s all there is life is grey and flat. The juice is in realising that the differences don’t matter. Love is about not discriminating, and while discrimination is the basis of language, love is the basis of communication. So. My resolve is to give up responding to fighting words with discrimination and analysis, and to respond instead with love. Bear with me, this is going to take a little practice.

Tags: communication , language , love , politics