Attack of the Preachers

Today I was woken by loud knocking on the door. Thinking perhaps there was someone trying to deliver something or that had some proper business to be here, I rushed to get dressed enough to run downstairs and answer the door.

I was two men with Bibles. I did not even have my glasses, so I could only see blurry faces and certainly could not read anything, but I did try to be polite, as is my habit. I said, "before you say anything, I have to tell you that I am absolutely not religious and there is nothing that anyone, including Jesus himself, could do or say that will change that."

This, of course, did nothing to dissuade them. They hear that almost everywhere. The main guy (who was larger) began by saying, "we are not here to sell anything or to get you to join anything. We just want to discuss the Bible."

I sighed, of course, but allowed the conversation to progress. When asked what I thought about the events of the world, I merely answered, "I am a scientist. I observe and take notice of novel events, trends of nature, that sort of thing. I do not take comfort in anything the Bible says, unfortunately."

"So, then," one went on, "you believe in the Big Bang?"

"Not exactly. Perhaps many Big Bangs, in an infinite or at least indefinite time frame there may have been innumerable such events," I replied.

"But isn't that like a singularity, such as the 'In the Beginning, Let there be light!' verse in Genesis?"

"Not exactly...  a singularity would have to be a single, unexplainable event. In an eternal Universe, with multiple Big Bangs (or Little Bangs, what have you...) there would still be singularities, but the prime singularity would be: 'How does ANYTHING AT ALL exist, including Gods or self-igniting universes, virtual particles in a vacuum, etc.'"

I will not go on, mainly because the entire conversation seemed to go into circles, which made me doubt whether my politeness was a virtue. I listened to a few more arguments, eg. the Bible somehow refers to the expansion of space, etc. until I just said, "Well, then go ahead and believe as you wish. It will not change anything. The world will become a dystopia, our grandchildren will live in squalor, if at all, and God, the almighty creator of this mess, will do nothing about it."

I was not speaking angrily, you must know, only in a matter-of-fact manner. Eventually they realized that, although I might be the rare person that engages them in conversation, nothing was going to improve their positions. So they left. 

Thereupon I shuffled back into the house, got some coffee, sat down to my computer, meandered the Internet, read news articles (which involves so much soul crushing bad stuff it is pathetic) and then decided to write an entry about my insipid experience in this blog.  The only thing that might be valuable in this story is that some people can stimulate your thinking to such a degree that it destroys any hope that they could ever convert you.

The Death of the Death Penalty

In Norway, the Anders Breivik trial has entered a few days worth of fascist blather into the court's records, into the world's news reports, and can never result in true justice for the 77 people killed by that white supremacist psychopath. 

There are lesser men in the USA, killing only one or two people, who have gotten the death penalty and had it actually carried out. There are serial killers who have killed dozens of people who have only life terms, although sometimes their lives in prison are not long -- even criminals have limits to what behavior they can accept from their cellmates.

There are wars all around the world, mass murderers who ache to use "WMDs" of whatever kind to inflict their hatred or sense of "justice" on their enemies. The 9-11 bombings by Islamists seems little more than sheer murder when carried out against some 3000 people who had no dog in the fight. In addition to a few actual soldiers or politicians in the Pentagon, thousands of uninvolved men, women and children were mercilessly slaughtered in the "name of Allah", whatever that is supposed to mean. 

In response, in the dozen years since, as is our habit our soldiers have employed ever more deadly weapons to kill the enemy, or at least their Islamist protectors. Although I am not aware of any single attack by our own forces which has killed 3000 people at once, there have been thousands of equally innocent men, women and children killed via the massive air campaigns, artillery bombardments, machine guns, mines, and so forth, that our soldiers use to seek and destroy the "terrorists".

I am not a pacifist in the strictest sense, whereby I would rather die than lift a finger in defense of my home. That seems untenable in a world where violence has molded every creature that exists. Yet I would like to reserve warfare to those situations which truly deserve it. If there is some existential threat to our home due to hordes of maniacal religious extremists building terror weapons as fast as they can, well then by all means put them down with whatever weapons are necessary (within reason). 

I am very glad we were able to "take out" Osama Bin Laden, and only hope that many others like him are also similarly disposed. Yet I am not happy to kill children and women whom many of those like Bin Laden surround themselves with.

A person sitting in an air conditioned room at a computer terminal can pilot one or more UAVs over any place on Earth and guide highly destructive bombs into the enemy's bathroom windows. If those bombs kill innocents, as often happens, that is considered a mere side effect of combat. It is not immediately considered a crime. However that same act can be repeated time and again, where some small number of terrorists are taken out for every larger number of innocent bystanders. At some point the "mere side effect" becomes a criminal event -- certainly not of any higher morality than the tactics of a terrorist.

So, for a country who wages war on this kind of scale, as we do, then the capital punishment of our own criminals does not seem any worse, and seems even a more humane thing in comparison. Whereas we might (usually) prove the guilt of the executed prisoner, we do not always prove the guilt of those killed with rockets or bombs from UAVs. For a criminal like Anders Breivik, whose murders cannot be considered anything but ghastly, the Norwegian system of weak punishments is puzzling to those in the USA. I can understand that puzzlement.

Yet, our country is not Norway. They are the ones who decided their laws, however strange they may seem to us. If they decide that prisoners should never be executed, regardless of the heinous nature of their crimes, then so be it. Many states of the USA also refuse to use capital punishment, for the very same reasons as Norway. Yet most of our states have far more severe prison terms, such as life without parole, ninety nine years plus one day, and even multiple hundred years (just to make damn sure they don't get out, no way, no how.) 

The criminal Jeffrey Dahmer was a cannibalistic sexual predator in the USA who murdered many young men in hideous ways. Of course he was given a harsh, life-without-parole prison sentence. But not too long into that sentence he was killed by another inmate. So much for leniency or "liberal elitism". If we were truly liberal elites we would have provided round the clock guards to prevent such an outcome.

I know very little about the Norwegian prison system, nor how one is protected from violence or other barbaric events in their prisons. It could be that such a person, hated by so many in that country, would be considered some kind of celebrity amongst other inmates. I have no idea. But I'll bet that the brutality of his crimes, especially those against helpless children trapped on an island, will insure that he is kept caged like a psychopath for his entire remaining life, one way or another.

I do think that, like Norway, the USA might eventually eliminate death penalties. If my own family member were murdered in some heinous manner, then there is no way I would want such a criminal to go free, and I might wish to kill them myself in revenge. But unless the laws can give me that right, then no one should have the right. Allowing the state to merely administer some dreamy injection as a trade for brutally torturing and murdering children does not seem like equity. Nothing the state could do would ever bring justice to families whose children's lives have been snuffed. 

The USA has laws against "cruel and unusual" punishments, which conjures images of impalement, burning, mutilation, crucifixion and other horrible manners of execution. There is no "eye for an eye" justice here, unless one carries it out themselves. There are soldiers who do such things, and prison inmates that obviously do such things, and our TV and movie screens abound with cops or other agents administering such forms of justice. It seems to be a human psychological need to assure that equal measures are somehow invoked for those who are wronged.

Yet, unless you can kill somebody 77 times, there is no such equal measure, in Norway or in any other place. Like Nero, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Vlad and so many others, mass murderers can never be punished adequately. The families of those 77 in Norway can only try to live their lives some other way, and banish the memory of their loved one's murderer from their minds. If that is even possible.

LSD and Post-Utopian Delusion

I am a bright person, so everyone tells me that knows me, however I never thought I was very special as a child. I stumbled through life in a haphazard way, tripped by my completely uneducated mother, beaten by a father who never realized that booze was destroying everything in his own life.

I eventually tried a drug, LSD, at the age of 18, still in the US Navy at the time. Whereupon I could suddenly read writing on the walls (literally), I could also look into my own mind as if it were a kind of library of my life. I closed the books as soon as I opened them. The stories were not happy, the pages were covered with darkness and ignorance.

But the LSD opened up other windows into life that I'd never considered before. Maybe there really was some kind of God of the universe. Before that I was simply an atheist. Yet, logically, I knew that belief in a God of anything was merely a choice to avoid saying "I don't know."

From within my own mind there flowed a jumble of images, some hideous, some gloriously beautiful. All of them were unique to me, never seen before. The world was different from that point forward. I was living in a kind of far future science fiction world like someone from the year 10,000 AD.

It scared me, sometimes. The LSD was not always as pure as the first times. Sometimes it was not fun, nor pretty. But every time, in some way or another, it was an educational, eye opening event.

I am too old now to even consider trying that kind of drug. There are many kinds of modern replacements, and some old fashioned ones. The mushrooms and other natural forms of hallucinogens were sometimes the best, although they could also seem rather sickening. DMT was very short lived, STP (whatever that was) was very awful and long lasting. The stuff kids use today seems very dangerous, even the weed is too strong.

I miss those days, though. I miss being young enough to take LSD and go on a hike in the woods, appreciating the intricate web of nature like no other times. I would take LSD and enjoy time with a girl, sometimes enjoying things somewhat too much.

Anyway, the days of LSD are probably long behind me, except that -- if on the day I die that I could somehow know it was my last day -- and I would like to do LSD, maybe some Xanax as well. It would be a nice journey out of this amazing life to the frightening prospect of complete blankness.  

Gas Bags

Image via Wikipedia

Obviously, everything on the Earth is solid, liquid or gas. Also, such as in a candle flame or a neon sign, it consists of a tiny amount of plasma. At least these states of matter seem to exist in these forms, because that is the way energy works. Energy is another state of matter, such as what happens when antimatter meets matter -- a terribly big explosion which leaves no ash behind but rapidly fleeing photons.

Mathematically, which I will not suffer the reader to engage, these states of matter are problematic, because they are inelegant and make clunking noises. Rather than beautiful smooth transitions from the ether of space to the immensely dense solids of frozen ices, there are clunking noises -- sudden changes from one state to another. There are a few extra clunky aspects to these things as well -- such as carbon dioxide ice directly "melting" to a gas. The closest thing to liquid carbon dioxide we can view would be at the surface of Venus, yet it is still a gas. Gases in the cores of stars, where immensely high pressure reigns, are so thick as to seem like solids. 

I don't want to explain how such things happen, again not wishing to numb the reader with esoteric laws of physics and excessive mathematical exercises. It is merely an artistic observation.

Bit Blobs (Photo credit: Dr. Bleep)

Computers deal with pieces of information called bits, which are packed into blobs called bytes or integers or floating point expressions, and then strung together in larger blobs and groups of blobs, sometimes called objects or sometimes called databases, or called a variety of other names at the whim of many programmers over the decades. There seem to be too many of those names, in my opinion, however that is the nature of humans. We like to put labels on things, and if someone else has already named something A, then someone else might rather call another thing B, or whatever. The important thing is that there are such things and they have labels created by humans. We have so many languages, too, so that the very same object can share a huge number of labels.

If everything was simply a single contiguous gas-like substance, such as space itself (devoid of matter), then we could not tell one part of it from any other. It is fortunate, instead, that we have bits of things that we can group and divide and give different names, just like the computer bits. The atoms and their constituent subatomic particles are not so homogeneous as computer bits, but can serve a similar purpose for the sake of argument. At some level of reality, where the actual "bits" of reality are found, one could view them as arbitrary sets arranged in groups of eight or sixty four, or whatever.

When we actually try to do that with reality, with various kinds of quarks, leptons, bosons and so forth -- it gets way too complicated, and the mathematics becomes gnarled -- not the neat digital math of computers, but the messy, goopy math of a sort that we are not truly able to define exactly. It may turn out that mathematicians of the future actually solve that problem, yet still cannot solve the harder problem of how all this fits in the greater meta-universe.

In our local universe, at least the parts we can actually sense and map, there are tremendously massive bags of bits, and we call them things -- stars, nebula, galaxies, clouds, planets, and so forth. We can make arbitrary groupings of atoms into various shapes, pools, balloons or whatever -- and never cease making new formations, each with a new name. We can make illusions of objects from illusions of bits that only exist electronically in a phantom world. We sometimes get so wrapped up in those virtual worlds of not-really-real bits that they become the reality our consciousness prefers to inhabit.

There is also the effects of such bits, which like the gravity from a distant, invisible star, can effect things in the real world. When computer bits of a certain pattern are arranged in appropriate registers, then motors can whir or colors can be formed or sounds can be emitted, and myriad other effects can be made to occur. The imaginary world of computer bits is not really ether, but formed from little wires and bits of crystals with electrons flowing about like liquids through pipes and valves. The gravity from a distant star is also a substance, supposedly made up of gravitons by some theories, but at least it does emit photons, so that it can effect us from such a distance by one method or another.

It may wind up sometime in the far distant future (another space-like thing, time) when nothing but a vast homogeneous bag of photons (or whatever) remains -- some immense number of bits, but each belonging to no group, none having any label, none having any effect on anything else, ever again. And perhaps even all of those will, after cooling to zero temperature, cease to be differentiated -- to condense into a single unit of nothingness, to swallow even time itself.

Time Machine Ghosts

Whenever I consider the nature of Time I am confronted with all the same troubles that physicists and cosmologists have. Even speaking of Time without using embedded concepts of Time in our language and thoughts seems impossible.

There are very few concepts of Time that are purely objective. Often times the speed of light is used as a constant, from which a clock might be possible to derive. Yet a clock traveling at the speed of light would suffer a malfunction (from at least one point of view), and a clock traveling at any slower speed only suffers the malfunction in lesser degrees. This is because velocity of masses distorts the duration of Time experienced by those masses.

There are concepts such as Planck's Length, and thus Planck's Tick being the smallest unit of Time possible to measure when traveling exactly 1 Planck's Length. Planck's Length, however, is so very tiny that such a unit of space-time has nearly 0 value, composed of so many decimal places after the decimal point. Nothing so large as the atoms we are made from can deal with such tiny ticks.

Mechanically then, before dealing with issues of origin or disposition, Time is difficult enough to work with. We have radios, oscilloscopes, computer chips, lasers and many other devices that depend on timing or frequency to function, and the tinier the wavelength, the more difficult the achievement. Also, there are great dangers when working with energies and temperatures necessary to create the highest frequency radiation. We name those things super gamma x-rays and such, and any noticeable amount of such high frequency radiation effects nearly everything on this planet, including our own evolution.

So, whereas understanding Time as a modulation of frequencies, or a count of ticks (each tick having a discrete and immutable span of "Time" until the next), is almost but not quite possible for human brains to handle, even so there is still the Origin of this concept of Time to ponder.

When speaking with others about the origins of anything, whether Time, space, species or what have you, there is always the danger of sacred cows being gored. If one has a religious belief that their God was the creator of all things, including Time, then there is little good in arguing otherwise. For one thing, I can't really come up with a good substitute. Problems with the "belief" method of solving the origin of Time always involve the possibility that a God must have a preexisting span of Time in which to do all that creating.

Likewise, when the Big Bangists invoke the beginning of Time and Space simultaneously from some singularity as tiny as above mentioned Planck's Length (or even as Zero Length), there are so many unanswered questions. In this banging creation, there is in one moment nothing, and then the next moment (constituting the creation of the first passing "moment of Time") there is Everything, bursting into existence from Nothingness. The God which can create itself, or that which is beyond question -- invoked by all the kinds of theorists, whether theists, atheists, agnostics or just plain antagonists.

Notice that I must use words such as "bursting into existence" or "invoked", which in themselves imply that some kind of action takes place in Time, either in the present or in the past. "He might be going to war" is a sentence that implies a future in Time, so that the dimensions of Time are integrated into our language. We have a past, a now, and a future -- all which occupy different points in one dimension of time. Time may have other dimensions, just like space, but I am unable to portray any examples in real physics. In imaginary physics I can conjure the image of time wrapped around a pole, thus flowing in multiple directions at once. But that only makes things less clear.

So far as the creation of Time is concerned, I do not have a clever solution to such problems. Certainly in mathematics one can arbitrarily place a big fat Zero in the middle of Everything That Ever Was and Ever Will Be, and there are an almost infinite number of equations which can produce Zero. The only equation which can produce something from nothing, evidently, is that zero raised to the zero power ( 0⁰ ) = 1. So we have mathematically created something from nothing.

But I do not like tricks of mathematics, any more than defaulting to some symbol as the result of the square root of minus one, such that (-1^.5) = i. 

But a physicist will attempt to answer the enigma of Time and its spontaneous existence in the same way that certain particles can "pop" into existence, and then back out of existence -- virtual particles, thus conserving the balance of mass and energy, at least after some span of "Time". Perhaps the virtual particles bring a little packet of virtual Time with them, so that when they pop back out of existence that amount of Time is also extinguished -- all accounts have been settled.

It only makes matters worse when multiple dimensions and parallel universes are conjured. Certainly it helps to theorize how black holes can exist the way they do, with all matter sucked away into another universe, but all the gravity still effecting everything left behind in this one. But that Time would seem to be universal in such a case where events in this universe's black holes would correspond to events in the parallel universe's white holes -- synchronized like Tango dancers.

However, even Time and the rules of velocities are broken in the bizarre centers of black holes, in which the escape velocity is faster than light, yet the gravity is so intense that matter falling into one would disobey the speed limit and travel faster than light -- or travel inward to some other world's Time and Space, where such laws of physics do not exactly apply. If this is so, then it doesn't really matter to us, and any foolish nonsense imaginable is possible somewhere in the Great Ball of Universes.

Anyway, I haven't helped any. But like Alice Through The Looking Glass, it seems that scientists can only keep up with Time if they run as fast as they can, and to get anywhere at all, they must run twice as fast.

Another App Maker

Although I prefer just using the Android SDK directly (via Eclipse) for writing Android apps, regardless of the brand, the writing of iPhone apps is much different and (so far) not very impressive. So far it has cost me $25 to join the Google App store, and nothing for the development tools, since I use Linux for that.

I don't have any Apple machines to write software with, only the iPhone as a target device, but I do have lots of PCs, with lots of Microsoft running them. There is a product called DragonFireSDK which supposedly makes iPhone apps from Vs2005 written C programs, so I'll give that a try. The minimum cost so far is $250, without having written a single line of code yet.

Anyway, I have a program for my work that operates on their website directly, and then turns over stuff to the Android Web Browser (or whichever one you got installed.) I don't see a way to do that in quite the same way with iPhone yet, so that will be a puzzle.

Anyway, I've got most of the same functionality on iPhone as on Android, minus the Voice feature, and perhaps that can be arranged later, using iOS5.

Making Apps

I am doing OK, but not wonderfully, so far as my work with Android Apps is concerned. I didn't really expect too much more than that, although I was hoping I could jump in and build something unique before somebody else did. That is always a foolish hope, yet I did at least make some popular Apps (all the free ones do well).

I found a program library for Android/iPhone/WebOs/Blackberry called "PhoneGap" which purports to build apps for any environment, mostly using some Java or other lower level code in a library and HTML5 as the programming language for the designer.

This is somewhat OK, although since I know Android enough to directly code in the Java or C layers, it can be a RAD (rapid app development) tool for getting things out the door and then improving them for speed or fine touches later.

Since I only have a Droid (Droid 1, in fact, although sometimes I can use my wife's Droid X) there is not much I can do with the tools for testing in the other phones. It seems very bureaucratic to make iPhone apps, even if you have one. I can't speak for the others at all, but hopefully they would work at least as well.

To find this TOOL

Making apps with a RAD tool might work for you too.