Growth and prosperity

An interesting article from Spiked discusses the "paradox of prosperity", and argues it is not really something to worry about:

Contemporary critics of consumerism and popular prosperity are obsessed with what they see as a paradox. A central theme of their arguments is that economic growth does not make people happier. In their view, the pursuit of mass affluence is at best futile and is probably responsible for making humanity miserable. Often the growth sceptics argue that the pursuit of material goods is akin to a disease: they say the developed world is suffering from ‘affluenza’ or ‘luxury fever. Typically they conclude we should not attempt to become richer and often they argue for the pursuit of alternative social goals such as mental well-being.

Ben-Ami argues that:

The rise of mass affluence is an incredibly positive development. It has bolstered the quality of people’s lives enormously. But there never was any guarantee that such progress would bring happiness. One of the most positive qualities of human beings is that they often want more than they have got. They typically want the lives of their children and grandchildren to be better than their own. The growth sceptics would have us stay where we are or even retreat to living a life of lower living standards.

This is the section strikes me as particularly true:

What the growth sceptics identify as a lack of happiness can, at least in part, be more accurately described as social pessimism. There is no longer a sense that the future can be better than the present. On the contrary, potentially positive developments, such as technological or scientific advance, are routinely viewed with foreboding. Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that survey data sometimes appears to indicate that people feel miserable. The happiness pundits themselves have taken on the idea that, at least in material terms, the future cannot be better than the present.

Good reading.

Blame 9/11, I guess

Pamela Bone in The Australian today writes about the current wave of anti-religious publishing, and notes that there new titles are headed our way:

Atheist Manifesto by French philosopher Michel Onfray; Against Religion by Melbourne philosopher Tamas Pataki; Have a Nice Doomsday by American writer Nick Guyatt. The one I am most looking forward to is Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Oh great.

Being an atheist or agnostic herself, her article welcomes the new wave, and she makes some valid points (that the faithful are often their own worst advertisement for their religion being the main one.)

This paragraph deserves some comment:

Non-religious people are fed up with all the talk about the emptiness, the barrenness and lack of meaning in "secular society". It may surprise religious people to learn that our lives are not empty. Some people might need to believe in an afterlife in order to find meaning in this one; others don't. Some might need to believe in a creator in order to be awed by the majesty of nature; others don't. Some might believe in something higher than themselves and call it God; others believe in something higher than themselves and call it humanity or nature. It makes no difference to how morally they behave. Everything good in religion can be had without religion.

As I noted when talking about Dawkins before, I reckon that there is bit of hidden elitism in this, in that a good education and opportunity to indulge an interest in science or philosophy makes it easy to think you are being deep and meaningful, but such opportunity is not available or inherent in much of the world.

The problem is not that the irreligious have no "meaning" in their lives, as you could argue that anyone who more or less happily gets on with living would be able to say something gives their life meaning. The issue is more with whether what they say gives meaning is really just a diversionary interest from facing the real existential questions of life.

Such diversionary interests become more widely available the richer a society becomes, which is a counter-influence to the other idea that increased riches gives more free time to be "deep". The way that better health has made death less of an obvious reality helps hide the existential issues too, of course.

Of course I don't want people to suffer so as force them to think philosophically; I'll leave that position to the quasi-religion of the Greens.

[In my first version of this post I mentioned "low brow" diversions, which made me sound too much like David Williamson. I should have been more even handed and noted that the rich have their empty diversions too. As do the ostensibly religious. I think that the romantic versions of environmentalism, which has a strong foothold across all classes in the West, mostly avoids the issue of the deeper meaning of humanity too, by concentrating on the rest of nature.]

Anyway, as it happens I agree with Bone that it would be ideal if moral values and ethics could always be agreed upon by arguments which do not rely on revelation. (This is why I like Kant, and John Rawls also made a decent effort. But then again, Kant thought masturbation was worse than suicide.)

But these philosophical exercises are all arguments made by creatures with no complete knowledge of their own true nature (there is, for example, presently a rash of articles arguing again about whether free will even exists) or that of the universe overall. Largely for this reason, purely rational philosophical exercises are never going to reach positions on morals that are self-evident and compulsively universal, as it were. Pure rationality is always going to have a problem with ultimate motivation for being 'good' too.

I therefore think it is better to stick with the not always easy task of trying to piece together faith in revelation and reason, and that the world would be a safer place if this attitude was widespread.

[I think what I have just done is more or less a summary of the Pope's recent controversial address that mentioned Islam. I wasn't really thinking about it when I started, though.]

That UFO...

Everyone who has the vaguest interest in UFO's would have heard about the O'Hare airport case by now. For some links about it that readers may not have seen yet: the NPR audio report with the journalist involved gives a little bit more background about the story, and notes that an FOI request for radar and the control tower recordings hasn't been answered yet. (It is an odd feature that an FOI request was needed to get confirmation of the event.)

Paul Kimball is being very appropriately cautious about the case, and links to a few good sites with many rather unusual "hole in the clouds" photos.

My take: it sounds too good to be true. Still, it's great to have a bit of aerial mystery around.

About China

Early last year I linked to an article sceptical of long term prospects for China's economy, at least without political reform.

Here's another article along the same lines which is an interesting read.

Serendipity

A couple of years ago, I unsuccessfully tried to track down an article from a science magazine I had read about how you could easily build huge solar cell farms with a system of self replicating (but quite dumb) robots. I could not remember which magazine I had found it in.

[I have kept most of my old popular science magazines (starting with Omni in the late 70's and 80's, New Scientists and Discover magazine, and the occasional Scientific American.) My wife does not appreciate the hoarding of magazines that, admittedly, I rarely have cause to look at again, but there is a spare room at my office that can hold the boxes.]

Anyway, by pure chance, tonight I found someone in comments at Futurepundit has linked to the story, from 1995. (It was in Discover and is still on line.)

I love the WWW.

Get out your telescopes

This article indicates that, surprisingly, things are not as bad in one or two villages in the Sunni triangle as one might think:

For the past three years though, there has been little sign of the al Nasseris or other residents of Owja and Tikrit honoring Saddam's tribal largesse by resisting the American presence. Many, indeed, are said to work in U.S. Army bases, something that would earn them a death sentence in other Sunni towns.

"We have good working relations with Saddam's tribe," a local U.S. military spokesman confirmed. "We work on many infrastructure projects together and they support the governor."
U.S. commanders attribute the pacification of Saddam's tribal homelands to the close attention they paid to the area after the invasion. Fearing that it could become an insurgent haven, they established a large military base in Tikrit and made strenuous efforts to hunt down senior regime figures who lived there.

But the real reason for this post is this part of the article:

"Why have there been no big attacks in Owja?" one Sunni from Baghdad asked last week. "They have sold their ground to the occupation for the money, and now they are protecting them. They should feel ashamed because the Americans arrested their relative and their leader."

Such charges are denied by Owja residents, who say they grieve for Saddam as hysterically as the pilgrims flocking to his grave. One day last week, for example, the village was buzzing with claims that Saddam had appeared as the Man in the Moon the night before.

Uh oh

From The Sunday Times:

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.

Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

One good thing about such a plan, from the US point of view, is that if the nuclear "bunker busters" are actually made by Israel, this may deflect some of the blame for the attack from America.

Still, any use of nuclear weapon pre-emptively is a big step for a nation.

Those clever Japanese

From an interesting article in the IHT about how good Japan is at conserving energy:

Japan's population and economy are each about 40 percent as large as that of the United States, yet in 2004 it consumed less than a quarter as much energy as America did, according to the International Energy Agency, which is based in Paris.

On a per-capita basis, that means Japan consumed the energy equivalent of 2.8 million tons of oil per person in 2004, in contrast to 5.4 million tons per American. Germany, another energy- conscious country, used 3.2 million tons per person.

I guess the fact that the Japanese would have to have some of the smallest house/apartment sizes in the world, and live mostly in very high density urban areas, has something to do with this. Even so, it is quite cold in many parts in winter, unlike much of Australia, for example.

The other thing I did not know was that fuel cells can be purchased there (at heavy government subsidy) to generate electricity for the home:

One way has been a subsidy of about $51,000 per home fuel cell. This allowed Kimura to buy his cell last year for about $9,000, far below production cost. His cell, which generates 1 kilowatt per hour, provides just under half of his household's electricity, and has cut his electricity bill by the same amount, he said.

The device converts natural gas into hydrogen, which the fuel cell then uses to generate electricity. Heat released by the process is used to warm water.

The first two fuel cells were installed in the prime minister's residence in April 2005. Since then, 1,300 have been sold, according to the Trade and Industry Ministry. The ministry forecasts that as sales pick up, production cost will fall to about $5,000 by decade's end.

That's pretty impressive.

Can we stop talking about it yet?

It's good to see that the media is finding giving the fallout from the hanging a bit of a rest, although today many are running with the Egyptian's president's comments about Saddam becoming a "martyr".

Let's face it, he would been have treated as such by a large number of Arabs regardless of the exact circumstances of the last few minutes of his life. Denying him an (alleged) martyrdom completely, by letting him stay in a comfy European jail during the incredibly slow trial process of the international tribunal, ran the big risk that the Iraqi and Arab media would never have tired of showing him grandstanding in court and encouraging insurgency in his country. It was not a risk worth taking.

It is also interesting that the media does not make much fuss about the actual reaction in Iraq and elsewhere, in terms of violence, being rather muted in the last week. I would have predicted a surge, then a tapering off, and I guess that may still happen. But I still expect that the problems caused by his execution will not be as dire as the critics have predicted.

Shades of "A Clockwork Orange"

I missed reading this article by Richard Dawkins earlier this week. Saddam should not have been hanged, argues Dawkins, he should have been kept alive for scientific study.

Dawkins takes the anti-capital punishment line that would you expect (not that there is anything wrong with that, generally.) He generously allows this:

If President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are eventually put on trial for war crimes, I shall not be among those pressing for them to be hanged.

Dawkins goes on to write:

...the most important research in which a living Saddam Hussein could have helped is psychological. Most people can't even come close to understanding how any man could be so cruel as Hitler or Hussein, or how such transparently evil monsters could secure sufficient support to take over an entire country.

What were the formative influences on these men? Was it something in their childhood that turned them bad? In their genes? In their testosterone levels? Could the danger have been nipped in the bud by an alert psychiatrist? How would Hitler or Hussein have responded to a different style of education? We don't have a clear answer to these questions. We need to do the research.

Is Dawkins really serious here, or just seeking publicity? The objections are so obvious, but I will list them anyway:

* Most psychological research surely requires the co-operation of the subject, and who says Saddam would ever have agreed to it? If he did not agree, would it have been OK to force him to undergo brain scans, blood tests, etc. Should he just have been filmed 24 hours a day and had conversations secretly recorded? If he is true to his liberal principles, Dawkins would have to admit that if Saddam didn't co-operate, nothing useful could be done.

* Even if he did co-operate, who could believe his own version of his life and influences anyway? There is every reason to suspect that Saddam was not particularly good at reliable self assessment or insight, as are sociopaths everywhere. We don't need to study another one to tell us that.

* Dawkins' idea that everything in evil behaviour is reducible to scientific explanation leads to the idea that criminals should be "cured" rather than punished for wrongdoing. Such a view, with its de-emphasis on free will, is actually dehumanising, despite its (apparent) good intentions.

Silly uses for your robot suit

The Japan Times has an article about the creator of the HAL suit, which had some publicity a year or so ago and looks like this:


The suit, which may be commercially available sometime, is meant to give additional strength to those who need it. But its creator has another idea for its use:

....our robots can be used in the field of entertainment. For instance, by having HAL wearers also wear head-mounted displays, they can watch somebody walking through deep snow and, by having HAL put pressure on their legs, they can feel the sensation themselves. Or we can create a situation where you might be watching a movie at home with a head-mounted display and a HAL suit on, then feel your right leg suddenly being harshly pulled just as Sadako (a creepy character in the horror movie "Ring") is grabbing someone's right leg in the film!

So, for those of you who don't already jump enough at surprises in scary movies, here's a possible answer. It sure is some trivial use for expensive technology.

Of course, what all boys long to see is cyborg soldiers in battle. That would be cool.

The black hole in Ireland

New Scientist's Christmas issue ran an interesting story about a physicist who thinks that a historical report of a "ball lightning" type phenomena seen by one man in Ireland in 1868 may have actually been caused by a tiny black hole. Full access to the article is not (yet) available on line, but sometimes New Scientist drops the restriction after a couple of weeks. I had to buy the paper issue.

The report in question is intriguing, because it involved the ball lightning apparently carving a trench in the soil/peat it passed over. I have read about ball lightning before, but had never heard of this effect. The article claims that the damage alleged caused is still visible at the site.

The idea that a small primordial black hole (left over from the big bang) was at the heart of the glowing ball assumes that Hawking radiation does not exist; a point which very, very few scientists seem willing to seriously consider as a possibility. (I don't have time to provide the links right now, but go search this blog for "black holes" and you'll see what I mean.)

It seems clear that a lack of a quantum gravity theory means there is a good degree of uncertainty about the finer points of how HR would work, particularly at the end of the evaporation process. That an evaporating micro black hole may leave a remnant, the exact nature of which I have not really seen explained clearly, seems a possibility still very much up in the air.

The black hole - ball lightning theory also has to come up with some fancy footwork to explain why the ball lightning bounced along the ground, and didn't eat up the earth by now. (In fact, the article does not mention at all what the physicist thinks was the eventual fate of the black hole in question.)

Still, it is interesting and potentially relevant to the issue of possible danger from the LHC.

Gore gored

If you happen to think that Gore Vidal is a self-important bore, you will find plenty of support for your view in an article in Salon (of all places.)

Never trust a President without creases

Tigerhawk points out one of the more ridiculous recent posts in Huffington Post. It really puzzles me as to why that site has any credibility at all.

Left, right, etc

Janet Albrechtsen ends a column with this:

So I'll leave you with a larger but somewhat cheeky hypothesis. Left-wing politics is essentially an emotional, instinctive utopian kind of world peopled by romantics and dreamers. Conservatism is, on the other hand, more rational, analytical and pragmatic. That is why creative types tend to come from the Left. Right-wingers, by contrast, have real jobs.

Of course, calling it "somewhat cheeky" indicates that she's hardly likely to consider it entirely defensible. But still it attracts a lot of criticism from the left-y side.

What do I think? Well, that the modern "creative type" is much more commonly left leaning is surely true, isn't it? (Why that is so is not entirely clear to me, nor is why it seems especially true of the last 40 years or so.) I would have also thought that Marxism was clearly utopian in nature, and a matter of faith masked as science. There is surely still an element of utopianism that runs through the Left.

But the issue of the rational/emotional divide is more complicated than Janet's take. Modern social conservatives of a religious bent (like me) understand the emotional appeal of the old faith, and regret that it has less influence on society. On the other side, there is often the unreflective atheistic utilitarianism of modern ethics, which prides itself as more rational than anything that is partly based on faith and mystery.

Of course, it is not as if mainstream Christian religious ethics doesn't employ rational argument too. (Pope Benedict reminded the world of this recently.) One of the most frustrating things about arguing with the irreligous Left can be their attitude that their conclusions are self-evidently more rational than that of those who have a religious influence. In fact, the different conclusions may arise more from the varience in fundamental assumptions about human nature and reality, and these are really matters of faith (or at least unproveable) for either side.

Someone else has probably explained this better than I can...

Who reads who

Over at Andrew Norton's blog a couple of weeks ago, he mentioned how bloggers' audiences are mainly people who already agree with them. I made this comment:

Andrew, yes the “echo chamber” function of blogs is clear, but I have a theory that it is worse on the Left than the Right. This is because many on the modern Left (particularly the idealistic youth) consider opinions different from their own as both irrational and morally defective, and therefore spending much time reading such opinions in blogs is like dabbling in evil (if they believed in evil). It often just gets them so annoyed they cannot continue reading.

As evidence in support, have a look at this post at Blogocracy. Turns out Tim Dunlop and his regular band of not so merry men (he does seem to attract few female commenters) find the moderate Right opinions of Gerard Henderson so annoying they can't bear to even read him anymore. As one commenter also notes, it's quite a hoot that Dunlop calls Henderson "predictable".

Henderson's other great benefit over Dunlop is brevity.

Musical instruments with a difference

Never having been to Nepal, I had not heard before about this surprising aspect of its version of Buddhism (from a recent travel article in The Times):

Rosa had been asked to take this particular damaru back to England for some Buddhist friends, and was understandably nervous about it. The hand drum was just as she had described. It was made out of human skulls — children’s skulls, to be precise. Over the highly polished craniums was stretched a thin membrane of human skin.

“One skull is female, the other is male,” she explained. “It symbolises the union of wisdom and compassion. It’s very powerful. If you get one made out of babies’ skulls, that’s even better — something to do with the energy flowing through the opening in the fontanelles.”...

The shops around Boudhanath are full of similar objects. In one, I was shown a selection of skull offering bowls; in another, half a dozen trumpets made from women’s thigh bones. Dusting one off, the shopkeeper put the hip joint to his lips and blew, making a noise like a hunting horn.

Rather disturbing to a Western mind, especially those instruments made out of kids or babies skulls.

Henderson on the hanging

Gerard Henderson's SMH column on the reaction to the hanging of Saddam is good. The best paragraph answers those who claim it is hypocrisy for the Australian government to only sometimes diplomatically complain about death penalties:

The Prime Minister's stance ignited criticism from the civil liberties lobby. Lex Lasry, QC, said this position "compromises our international standards" since "we cannot pick and choose on the death penalty".

But there is nothing inconsistent in attempting to obtain a reprieve for an Australian convicted of a serious drug offence in, say, Singapore and declining to put pressure on a democratic government intent on executing a mass murderer whose supporters form part of an extant murderous insurgency and who had been convicted in a public trial.

Death by Mochi - 2007 edition

The annual Japanese New Year mochi toll is in:

TOKYO — Four men choked to death on Monday and Tuesday in Tokyo, Niigata and Ibaraki prefectures, and seven others in the capital became critically ill after choking on mochi rice cakes, a traditional New Year's food in Japan, police and firefighters said.

A 68-year-old man in Tokyo's Fuchu and a 76-year-old man in the capital's Sumida Ward died Tuesday after choking on the rice cakes, while a 74-year-old man in Ojiya, Niigata Prefecture, and an 80-year-old man in Chikusei, Ibaraki Prefecture, died likewise on Monday, they said. In Tokyo, a total of 16 people ranging in age from 65 to 91 were hospitalized due to choking on rice cakes on Monday and Tuesday, and two of them died and seven lost consciousness and were in a serious condition, the Tokyo Fire Department said.

A New Year's Day Miscellany

Happy New Year everyone.

There's not much obvious to post about today. The Sydney Morning Herald gets off to a bad start by running an article by Bob Ellis which, even by his standards, appears to be written after an exceptionally long night on the claret. (It's about the death of Saddam, who he seems to think went to the gallows in a noble fashion, unlike how he imagines George W would behave.) It is truly a puerile read.

As for the future, reviewing psychic predictions for the year just gone is always a laugh. Have a look at this list of reader predictions from About.com. A more comprehensive list of inaccurate prophecy may be very hard to find. I like this one:

A book will be published in 2006 that completely explains existence. By doing so it will prove the world wrong on a Copernicus (flat-world) scale. The presentation will be that which will put traditional values on the defensive using simple logic that cannot be refuted.

How about this cryptic one in the "entertainment" section:

Harry Potter strikes again and again.

And under the "surprise predictions" category:

The Elizabethan collar will come back in style along with the poofy sleeves.

On another topic, I will be looking out for the figures on this New Year's Japanese mochi chocking deaths with interest. (It's a more interesting hobby than following the media obsession with holiday road accidents in Australia.)

Finally, the British Medical Journal has a more or less serious (I think) article that contains everything you ever wanted to know about sword swallowing. (And yes, it is often medically dangerous.) This extract about you learn how to do it is particularly interesting:

Some respondents swallowed a sword easily, but mastery for most required daily practice over months or years. The gag reflex is desensitised, sometimes by repeatedly putting fingers down the throat, but other objects are used including spoons, paint brushes, knitting needles, and plastic tubes before the swallower commonly progresses to a bent wire coat hanger. The
performer must then learn to align a sword with the upper oesophageal sphincter with the neck hyperextended. The next step requires relaxation of the pharynx and oesophagus and particularly the horizontal fibres of cricopharyngeus, which are not usually under voluntary control.

The more mysterious question of why anyone still bothers to learn this is not addressed.